This chapter turns to antebellum African American pamphlets, a part of the African American writing tradition generally understudied in comparison with the fugitive slave narrative. Considering the ways in which black pamphleteers dealt with the pressing task of tackling stereotypes and racialisms that sought to exclude the black body “biologically,” I demonstrate how their strategies of writing against this “biological exclusion” could also become a means for expressing environmental knowledge. While including seminal texts like David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829), this chapter primarily focuses on lesser-known pamphlets by Hosea Easton, John Lewis, and William Whipper. The readings draw attention to alternative lines within the pamphlet tradition and suggest its relevance for ecocriticism.

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To define the concept of environmental knowledge and illustrate its potential for ecocritical readings of nineteenth-century African American literature, this chapter turns to two texts about Niagara Falls, a handwritten note by Frederick Douglass (1843) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short story “The Passing of Grandison” (1899). While Douglass’s note exemplifies how black writers could transform dominant aesthetic modes such as the sublime to utter social critique through expressing epistemological and ethical relations to non-human nature, Chesnutt’s story demonstrates a strategic subversiveness characteristic of African American environmental knowledge. My readings highlight how Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature employs a Foucauldian ecocritical concept of environmental knowledge to trace places and patterns of an African American ecoliterary tradition.

This chapter proposes an alternative ecocritical angle on two of Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies, Up from Slavery (1901) and Working with the Hands (1904), to show how this writer’s post-Emancipation vision rests on revised forms of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge interacts with contemporary evolutionary thought. Washington transforms the strategic pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative and introduces, especially in Working with the Hands, an African American georgic that seeks to root black life and culture in dignified and communal forms of labor. Washington’s pastoral and georgic environmental knowledge thereby becomes both part of his own evolutionism and a means of criticizing racist ideas of U.S. evolutionary thought.

This chapter looks at Charlotte Forten’s journals and William W. Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) as indicating a post-Emancipation reconfiguration of literary space in African American writing that offered new ways for expressing environmental knowledge. One significant effect of this reconfiguration was that articulations of environmental knowledge shifted from “loopholes” like the slave narrative’s literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad into broader literary spaces of education and home. Forten uses a host of such spaces in her picturesque depictions of houses and schools to create an alternative discourse of nature as a multifaceted refuge and to condemn slavery and racism. Brown’s text is a subversive trickster narrative that expresses a post-Emancipation form of black agrarianism while negotiating the ambivalent relationship of African Americans to the South.