Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on the Cover Image
- Introduction
- Part I Environmental Histories
- Part II Environmental Genres and Media
- Chapter 6 The Heat of Modernity: The Great Gatsby as Petrofiction
- Chapter 7 Children in Transit / Children in Peril: The Contemporary US Novel in a Time of Climate Crisis
- Chapter 8 Meta-Critical Climate Change Fiction: Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus
- Chapter 9 Junk Food for Thought: Decolonizing Diets in Tommy Pico’s Poetry
- Chapter 10 Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey
- Part III Environmental Spaces, Environmental Methods
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Chapter 10 - Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey
from Part II - Environmental Genres and Media
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on the Cover Image
- Introduction
- Part I Environmental Histories
- Part II Environmental Genres and Media
- Chapter 6 The Heat of Modernity: The Great Gatsby as Petrofiction
- Chapter 7 Children in Transit / Children in Peril: The Contemporary US Novel in a Time of Climate Crisis
- Chapter 8 Meta-Critical Climate Change Fiction: Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus
- Chapter 9 Junk Food for Thought: Decolonizing Diets in Tommy Pico’s Poetry
- Chapter 10 Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey
- Part III Environmental Spaces, Environmental Methods
- Notes
- Index
- Cambridge Companions to …
Summary
For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022