The article reviews the book "Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions" by Kimberly N. Ruffin

Hicks, Scott

NC DOCKS at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke

English

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

casket for your son: priceless" {Priceless # / , 2004)—are aU producdvely examined byJackson, who reminds us that, "In the end, Thomas's work is about bearing witness,making the wounds of capitaUsm visible" (76). The recent Adidas "shackle" sneakersare an important reminder of just how significant Jackson's work reaUy is. By teachingus how to read images as complex cultural constructs -with dynamic histories, Jacksonmoves us beyond idendty poUdcs and asks us to consider what we can do with suchimages.Kimberly N. Ruf fin. Black on Earth: African American EcoUterary Traditions.Athens: U of Georgia P, 2010.192 pp. $22.95.Reviewed by Scott Hicks, University of North Carolina-PembrokeKimberly N. Ruffin's Black on Earth: African American Uterary Traditions rangesacross history, genre, and geography in exploring African American reladon-ships with, in, and despite nature. The study's thesis centers on what Ruffin caUs"an 'ecological burden-and-beauty paradox' " (2). As Robert BuUard, David PeUow,and others have shown, African Americans bear a dispropordonate share ofen-vironmental burdens, forced by social, poUdcal, and economic discriminadon toUve and work amid toxic waste dumps, heavUy poUuting factories, and concentratedanimal-feeding operadons and slaughterhouses. At the same time, however, they drawon heretofore underappreciated and understudied perspecdves of natural beauty andbelonging that rebuff the malevolence of racism, a point made by Helaine Selin'scoUecdon Nature across Cultures: Views of Nature and the Environment in Non-WesternCultures (2003), Kimberly K. Smith's Afiican American Environmental Thought: Foundations(2007), and others. Ruffin's gift in Black on Earth consists in her abiUty to meld theandpodes of this profound paradox across not only two centuries of AfricanAmerican history and culture, but borders of genre and space as weU. Given thisconsiderable accompUshment, Ruffin's book could have provided even more insightinto the complex reladonship between race and the environment had it grappleddirecdy with recent ecocridcism of African American Uterature.Sandwiched between her recoundng of the violent faUout over a "white tree"in Jena, Louisiana, and her narradve of a beaudful parade of people and plantssponsored by Bates CoUege in 2006, Ruffin's analysis delineates and focuses on theinterfaces that disdnguish African American environmentaUty: "work, cidzenship,enslavement, ancestry, reUgion, region, myth, and music" (21). In chapter one,Ruffin closely reads selecdons of slave narradve, antebeUum poetry, and oral tesdmonyto caU attendon to African American survivaUst knowledge and agrarian nostalgiaculdvated despite the effects of enslavement and violence to deny African Americansroots in the landscape. Chapter two explores recent poedc reinvendons of importantAfrican American forebears: Frank X Walker on York, William Clark's enslavedbody servant; Quraysh AU Lansana on Harriet Tubman; and MarUyn Nelson onGeorge Washington Carver. Ruffin's purpose in interpredng reinvendons of thesefigures, and not their primary texts, seems explained by her conclusion that "[t]heirwork allows readers to claim the historical figures as ecological ancestors" (85).Again in this spirit of idendfying models, Ruffin proposes in chapter three thatOctavia Buder and AUce Walker serve as "ecotheologians" (93), whUe chapter fourturns to the power of mythmakers: Henry Dumas, who creates ecological "beauty. . . out of the ashes of trauma" (116), and Percival Everett, who sadrizes the racistmyth of the U. S. West in order to nurture new narradves of belonging. FinaUy,chapter five uses the blues as a phUosophy for confrondng ecocrisis and turns toAfrican American ReWew45.3 (Fall 2012): 485-487 ^© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University 4 o DJayne Cortez's poetry as a tool for resistance. The blues, Ruffin explains, privüegethe disadvantaged, celebrate coUective expetience, and "[dweU] in reaUty no matterhow stark" (142), among other quaUdes—aU crucial to grappUng with die onslaughtof imminent global ecocatastrophe. With wide-ranging quotations from Cortez'ssearing work and nuanced interpretadons of those citadons, Ruffin underscores thecomplexity of the poet's ecovision: "Those who are in ecological crisis may find inCortez's poetry artful acknowledgement and advocacy," she writes. "Those shelteredfrom ecological crisis may find their buffer eroding from her acidic vision" (150).Such muldpUcity comes in handy when confronting a disaster the scale and scope ofHurricane Katrina—the immediacy and immensity of which force Ruffin to leavefor a future project a ñül consideradon of its import. Despite the terror and traumaof Katrina, Ruffin closes Black on Earth with the affkming images of diverse peopleunited in their celebration of earth and art—making real Ruffin's caU to "act andshape human systems in aUgnment with our soundest ecological deskes" (175).Despite its comprehensive overview of Aftican American texts and compeUingnarrafive of African vVmerican environmental engagement. Black on Earth does notengage ecocrifical theory in a direct, sustained way, as if African American envkon-mentaUty and the ecoctidcal perspecdve though which the envkonmentaUt)' of Uteraryarfifacts is interpreted are passing trains gUding on separate tracks. Exemplary ofthis lack of connection is Ruffin's insistence on a "theoredcal foundafion" buUt onthe termkiology of "ecology"—^without any mendon of the bombasfic compUcafionof the term by Dana Phillips in his provocadve The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture,and Uterature in America (Oxford UP, 2003). PhilUps derides ecocrifics for clinging toromandcized understand^ings of ecological science and bUthely borrowing its terms inUterary analysis, an argument that roUed conferences of the Associadon for Study ofLiterature & Envkonment for j'ears after its pubUcadon. Excavating the populatizadonof ecology as a Utopian discourse in the 1960s, PhüUps avers that "[f]or ecoctidcismto be of substance as an interdisciplinary field, it needs to reaUze that ecology is not aslush fund of fact, value, and metaphor, but a less than fuUy coherent field with a verycheckered past and a fakly uncertain future" (45). In this Ught, Ruffin's preference for"ecology," what she defines as "the study of the ofien overlapping experience of relationshipsamong humans and among human and nonhuman nature' (18; emphasis in otiginal), suggestsa sense of underdevelopment. Love it or loathe it, PhiUips's book is a "caU" thatdemands Ruffin's "response," even if brief and dismissive.To my mind, such theoredcal shortcoming is significant because it perpetuatesthe akeady idendfied problem of African American invisibüity in ecocriticism andforegoes die opportunity to compUcate and critique the development of ecocridcalapproaches to African American texts that has unfolded in the wake of this recog-nition. Ruffin righdy quotes Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. WaUace's course-correcting and often cited observadon in 2001 that "[i]f ecoctidcism Umits itself tothe study of one genre . . . or to one physical landscape . . . it risks seriously misrep-resenting the significance of muldple natural and built environments to writers withother ethnic, nadonal, or racial affiUadons" (qtd. in 13). Since Armbruster and WaUace'sBeyond Nature Writing: Expanding the Boundaries of Nature Writing appeared in 2001,a bevy of ecocridcal studies of Aftican American Uterature has appeared, includingJeffery Myers's Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in AmericanUterature (2005), Patü Outka's R^ce andNaturefrom Transcendentalism to the HarlemRenaissance (2008), and Ian Finseth's Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Uteratureof American Slavery, 1770-1860 (2009). In Black on Earth, however, Myers, Outka, andFinseth get the barest of mendons—a sentence for the former, a footnote for thelatter two. The eUsion is significant, for the field remakis contenfious. For example,Outka—^whose monograph won ASLE's book ptize in 2009—takes issue with Myers,arguing that his predecessor's view of ecocentticity as anddote to racism is ahistoticaland that his eUsion of marked differences in African American and Euroamericanreladonships to nature is naïve. Had Ruffin weighed in on such instances of4 8 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEWtheoretícal dissensus, she could have reshaped how we critícs interpret the veryAfrican American "ecoHterature" she catalogs and expHcates in Black on Earth.In sum, it is a pleasure to recommend Black on Earth for its exploratíon ofunderstudied African American texts and its resituatíon of those texts within vitalconversatíons of envkonmentaHsm, environmental justíce, social Hberatíon, andcultural reimaginatíon. I applaud Ruffin for reminding us of earHer works, Hke MaudCuney-Hare's The Message of the Trees: An Anthology of Leaves and Branches (1918) andHaki R. Madhubutí's Glaiming Earth: Rjzce, Rage, Rape, Redemption—Blacks Seeking aGulture of Enlightened Empowerment (1994), and pointing us to new ones Hke WangariMaathai's Unbowed: A Memoir (2006) and Camille Dungy's Black Nature: Four Genturiesof African American Nature Poetry (2009). As Black on Earth makes clear, the importantwork of recovery and reinterpretatíon goes on—and so Hkewise does the work oftheorizatíon. I hope Ruffin wül weigh in on the theoretícal debates that are unfoldingin ecocritícism, and I look forward to her future contributíons to the field.Erica R. Edwards. Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, 2012. 288 pp. $25.00.Reviewed by Bryan Wagner, University of California at BerkeleyCharisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership interprets the topos of charismatícleadership as it has appeared in African American poHtícs and culture. Acrossthe book, Edwards candidly assesses the popular investment in singular and magnetícmale leaders, such as Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, Marcus Garvey,Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcokn X, and Barack Obama, whose eloquence and per-sonal vision are thought to be indispensable to the struggle for freedom. According toEdwards, there are three costs associated with this cult of personaHty. Fkst, it equatesleadership with normatíve masculinit)», downplaying in partíciüar women's role inpoHtícal liistory Second, it reduces the heterogeneity of" movement poHtícs, under-estímating the importance of everyday resistance to mass mobüizatíon. Third, itintroduces antídemocratíc tendencies into poHtícal organizatíon, promoting obediencerather than deHberatíve actíon.Edwards brings these claims to bear not only on the problems of poHtícal repre-sentatíon and poHtícal organizatíon but also on a variety of fascinatíng cases fromAfrican American Hterature and performance. As Edwards demonstrates, these worksare staged in relatíon to the problem of charisma in black poHtícs, supplying a skep-tícal and sometímes satkical commentary on the most common settíngs and tropesassociated with the pubHc performance of racial leadership.The book is a remarkable work of synthesis. Historical coverage is convincingand substantíal, demonstrating how the scenario of poHtícal leadership was changed,yet also left unchanged, by emancipatíon, disfranchisement, urbanizatíon, migratíon,and civü-rights legisíatíon. The book features close analysis of a remarkably diversecoHectíon of texts and performances: speeches (from Frederick Douglass's addressat the Haytían Pavüion at the 1893 Columbian World Expositíon to Oprah Winfrey's2007 Obama endorsement), pageants and protests (from UNIA parades and street-corner preaching in the 1920s to the MiHion Man and MüHons More marches in the1990s), novels (from Dark Princess to White Boy Shuffle), cinema (from The Man to theBarbershop films), and histories (from C. L. R. James's Toussaint to Taylor Branch's MLK).Sometímes ambitíous surveys, even useful ones, sacrifice attentíon to detaü inorder to place works in a general framework. That is not the case here. Edwardstreats her examples in a way that makes them intelHgible within the larger story sheAfrican American Reweiv45.3 (Fall 2012): 487-488 . _ _© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University 487Copyright of African American Review is the property of African American Review and itscontent may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without thecopyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or emailarticles for individual use.

Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

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Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions

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