Converging stories: Race and ecology in American literature, 1785--1902

In this study, I explore the treatment of race and ecology as interrelated themes of American literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Drawing on contemporary race theory and ecocriticism, I argue first that the ethnocentric outlook that constructed "whiteness" over and against the alterity of other racial categories is the same perspective that constructed the anthropocentric paradigm at the root of environmental destruction. By looking at writings about nature by two major theorists of Euroamerican thought---Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836)---I demonstrate that white racism and alienation from nature come from the same source. Second, I demonstrate that an ecological consciousness emerging in the works of certain mid-to-late nineteenth and turn-of-the-century American writers undermines the theoretical foundations on which that racism and alienation from nature depend. Moreover, these writers establish a site on which the essentialist construction of race and the human separation from nature dissolve, while leaving differences in culture to thrive and, indeed, even to reinforce a more deeply ecological relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world.;Among white writers, I locate in the later writings of Henry David Thoreau an ecocentricity that forms a continuum with his thinking on anti-racist social reform. I then go on to show how Charles W. Chesnutt and Zitkala-Sa, two writers of color late in the century, imagine a wholly ecological vision of people and the land, without which the environmental visions of white writers such as John Muir, Willa Cather, and even Thoreau remain incomplete. Revealing as false the paradigm that imagines humanity as separate from and superior to nature, their ecological view of the human species as on an equal plane with the rest of the natural world reveals racial hierarchies to be equally spurious. In this study, I show how Thoreau, Chesnutt, and Zitkala-Sa envision a new resistance to a racial and ecological hegemony that threatened and continues to threaten people and other beings in the natural world.