CfP for a Special Issue of the Journal Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (ZAA)

“African American Environmental Narratives in the Anthropocene: Vulnerability, Resilience, Resistance”

Edited by: Matthias Klestil & Claudia J. Ford

The last two decades have seen a significant increase in environmentally oriented research on African American literature and culture. Although “eco-criticism, as it historically unfolded, did so without regard for the particular ways that nature and the environment figured in nonwhite contexts” (Dunning 7), studies in the field have by now explored a variety of traditions from the nineteenth-century to the present day, thereby laying the groundwork for continued readings of African American eco-literary traditions, modes, and genres (e.g. Outka 2008; Ruffin 2010; Smith 2007). At the same time, there are growing fields of Black Geographies and Black Ecologies (e.g. Hawthorne 2024; Moulton/Salo 2022; Roane 2023; Rusert 2010). Environmental concerns have also received heightened attention in African American/Africana Studies, renegotiating concepts ranging from post-humanism (Johnson 2018) to pastoralism (Dunning 2021), and environmental justice scholarship continues to explore new African American contexts. Overall, this research on African American literature and culture has tended to emanate from a variety of disciplines and critical traditions and has introduced a multiplicity of perspectives, concepts, and narratives. However, while adding distinct perspectives to the study of African American environmental thought, such research has to some extent remained disconnected with respect to a more comprehensive understanding of African American environmental narratives in the Anthropocene.

The proposed special issue seeks to interlink and expand such scholarship through a focus on African American environmental narratives that spotlights their potentials as critical interventions in Anthropocene discourse. African American environmental narratives can be understood in a broad sense as individual works of literature and art, but also as visible across single texts and media, as part of cultural discourses and practices and/or as lived responses to the Anthropocene’s environmental disasters and injustices. Even as the Anthropocene has been rejected by the IUGS as a geological epoch it retains relevance as a philosophical concept and critical socio-political discourse within the humanities. As Fressoz points out, “Its main strength is not scientific: It is primarily aesthetic.” (288) The Anthropocene, as a discourse in the humanities, has often come in the form of a search for new ways of representing environmental relationships through narrative (e.g. Heise 2019; James 2022). At the same time, it has also been rejected as an evasive concept by Indigenous and Black theorists for describing too narrow an idea of the origins, impacts, and consequences of environmental challenges. We are interested in curating a special issue that explores how African American environmental narratives relate to and challenge the Anthropocene.

Contact: Claudia J. Ford cjford2@buffalo.edu and Matthias Klestil matthias.klestil@uibk.ac.at