Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A
Black Feminist Ecological Thought: A
Page 1 of 12 Manifesto Despite having many aligned priorities, there’s an alarming lack of diversity within ecocriticism. In her manifesto, Dr. Chelsea Mikael Frazier breaks down why this lack of representation has made it challenging for Black Feminist Thought and ecocriticism to find a collaborative rhythm—and how Black, African-descended women have cared about the natural environment and sustainability all along. In mainstream films, books, and political discourse exists the erroneous notion that Black women and their communities do not care about the natural environment, sustainability, or their own health loom large. To add insult to stereotype-informed injury, Black feminist voices have often been seemingly absent from mainstream environmentalism and the intellectual movement that sprang forth from it in the early 1990s. But Black Feminist Ecological Thought has been present and continues to evolve alongside an ecocriticism that often fails to recognize its existence and its intellectual and creative authority. Ecocriticism is the study of the relationship between literature, art, and the environment. It is an intellectual movement that began to formally cohere in the early 1990s. Its aims included drawing attention to 1. everything being connected—especially nature and culture, 2. our definitions of humanity being rooted in our cultural norms and languages, and 3. a commitment to the health, well-being, and sustainability of our natural environments. From its inception, the movement announced itself as being universally relevant to and concerned about “all” people, but suffered from a very obvious lack of racial, ethnic, economic, and gender diversity. Page 2 of 12 Part of the reason why ecocriticism suffered from a lack of diversity, is because of its tendency to primarily highlight texts produced by intellectuals that were white (and often male) who had access to leisure time, land ownership, and financial capital. Their ideas implicitly privileged white, Western values over all others and has been very slow to perceive the existence and/or necessity of alternative strands of ecological thought—such as Black Feminist Ecological Thought. Black feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social, political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the experiences of Black women. As a Black feminist scholar, when I picked up the mantle of ecocritcism, I couldn’t help but immediately notice this characteristic of the movement myself. Ecocriticism’s alarming lack of diversity made it difficult for fields like Black Feminist Thought to find a collaborative rhythm, despite having many aligned priorities. Black feminism is an umbrella term that describes a range of social, political practices and theories that are historically rooted in and extrapolated from the experiences of Black women. Because of this, it is a field that has always been interested in breaking the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. Additionally, Black, African-descended women across the Diaspora are routinely the first to confront and lead the fight against some of the most intense harmful effects of environmental degradation. Initially, as a Black Feminist scholar, bathed in the knowledge that 1. African-descended women across the African Diaspora routinely confront some of the more intense harmful effects of environmental degradation, 2. that there were several examples of Black women environmental justice advocates and organizers leading the fight against those effects and 3. that artists and thinkers of various mediums had been doing the work of creatively documenting the first two ideas, I was generally bothered by what I perceived to be an exclusion from ecocriticism. Page 3 of 12 But I was also emboldened in my writing and activism—or writing as activism—to draw attention to the ways that these two intellectual movements, Black Feminist Thought and Ecocriticism, could and should benefit each other. Especially because both movements claimed to be committed to demystifying the structural imbalances that lead to an unfair distribution of material resources. The origins and initial purpose of Black Feminist Ecological Thought then came as a result of recognizing the ways that our dismissive and stereotypical beliefs about Black, African-descended women were also limiting the transformative potential of our environmental movements across many fields. I realized that I would have to make clear what the movement was missing out on: the foundational knowledge that Black, African-descended women were not environmental justice leaders by coincidence and it wasn’t just a result of their suffering at the hands of ecological violence. The consistency of the messages in Black women’s art suggested something deeper: it suggested that Black women’s ecological inclinations were rooted in a ecological world-sense completely alternative to what readily comes to mind when we think about the environment. The ecological harms of misogynoir and anti-Indigeneity affect Black women extremely intensely, and those effects also guarantee a despairing destruction for all directly responsible and/or indirectly complicit. The late Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy provides a representative example of this world-sense. A Mercy zooms in on America’s infancy and locates that infancy in the interwoven narratives of an American family in the 1690s. We meet Florens, a sixteen year old enslaved African girl laboring and living on a farm in rural New York, Jacob Vaark, the Dutch slave owner that purchases Florens and owns the farm where she works, his London-born, English wife Rebekka Vaark, and an enslaved Native American woman named Lina who also lives and works on the Vaark farm. Throughout the novel, the farm itself—with its structures, people, flora, and fauna—also functions as a character, sometimes victim of the whims of its characters, other times the impartial container of the characters, but also the central environment that frames the happenings that shape their lives.