Cookie Consent by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
JAAAS logo

Special Issue Articles

Vol. 4 No. 1 (2022): American Studies as Vulnerability Studies

African American Literature, Racial Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene: Reading W .E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece in the Twenty-First Century

Submitted
January 19, 2022
Published
2022-12-30

Abstract

This article discusses W. E. B. Du Bois's first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), in the context of the broader debate on the role of race in the Anthropocene and in relation to Judith Butler's theory on corporeal vulnerability. Specifically, this article spotlights three particular ways in which rereading African American literature may enhance a more race-conscious Anthropocene discourse. Initially, this article demonstrates how Du Bois's text gives opportunity to trace African American vulnerabilities through various scales from the local to the planetary. A genealogy of African American racial vulnerability, I argue, can be vital for better understanding and acting against continuing forms of racism in the Anthropocene. This article continues by turning to Du Bois's representation of vulnerabilities as part of power relations, showing how African American epistemologies of resistance negotiate racial vulnerability. Lastly, this article examines how the novel plays with generic conventions to engage racial vulnerabilities, evincing an African American aesthetics of resistance and suggesting alternative forms of storytelling.

References

  1. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.
  2. Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of British Individualism from 1719-1900. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
  3. Beilfuss, Michael J. "Ironic Pastorals and Beautiful Swamps: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Troubled Landscapes of the American South." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 22, no. 3 (2015): 485-506. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isv025.
  4. Benson, Alex. "Gossypoglossia: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Pragmatics of Dialogue." Narrative 27, no. 2 (2019): 201-220. https://doi.org/10.1353/nar.2019.0012.
  5. Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. London: Verso Books, 2016.
  6. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
  7. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Malden: Blackwell, 2005.
  8. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso Books, 2009.
  9. Butler, Judith. "Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 12-27. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  10. Butler, Judith, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. "Introduction." In Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay, 1-11. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
  11. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Anthropocene 1." In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 39-42. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
  12. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Climate of History: Four Theses." Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197-222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640.
  13. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
  14. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "The Human Condition in the Anthropocene: The Tanner Lectures in Human Values." Yale University, 2015. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-/c/Chakrabarty%20manuscript.pdf.
  15. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable." New Literary History 47, nos. 2–3 (2016): 377-97. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2016.0019.
  16. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. "Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change." New Literary History 43, no. 1 (2012): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2012.0007.
  17. Child, Benjamin. "The Plantation Countermelodies of Dunbar and Du Bois: Writing Agropolitical Subjecthood in the Nadir." American Literature 91, no. 3 (2019): 557-86. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-7722128.
  18. Claborn, John. Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.
  19. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, and Lowell Duckert. "Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements." In Elemental Ecocriticism, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert, 1-26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
  20. Davis, Janae, Alex A. Moulton, Levi Van Sant, and Brian Williams. "Anthropocene, Capitalocene,... Plantationocene? A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises." Geography Compass 13, no. 5 (2019): e12438. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12438.
  21. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.
  22. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  23. Elder, Arlene. "Swamp Versus Plantation: Symbolic Structure in W. E. B. Du Bois' The Quest of the Silver Fleece." Phylon 34, no. 4 (1973): 358-67. https://doi.org/10.2307/274251.
  24. Fabi, M. Giulia. "To Fashion the Wonderful Garment: W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Nella Larsen's Quicksand." In Extravagances: Habits of Being 4, edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Paula Rabinowitz, 243-61. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
  25. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.
  26. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
  27. Hainze, Emily. "'Wayward and Untrained Years': Reforming the 'Wayward Girl' in The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Jennie Gerhardt." Studies in American Fiction 46, no. 2 (2019): 341-72. https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2019.0015.
  28. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.
  29. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
  30. Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: Norton, 2019.
  31. Heise, Ursula K. "Science Fiction and the Time Scales of the Anthropocene." ELH 86, no. 2 (2019): 275-304. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2019.0015.
  32. Hicks, Scott. "W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color." Callaloo 29, no. 1 (2006): 202-222. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2006.0054.
  33. Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: New York University Press, 2020.
  34. Johnson, Lindgren. Race Matters, Animal Matters: Fugitive Humanism in African America, 1838-1934. London: Taylor and Francis, 2018.
  35. Knadler, Stephen. "Narrating Slow Violence: Post-Reconstruction's Necropolitics and Speculating Beyond Liberal Antirace Fiction." J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5, no. 1 (2017): 21-50. https://doi.org/10.1353/jnc.2017.0003.
  36. Koivunen, Anu, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg. "Vulnerability as a Political Language." In The Power of Vulnerability, edited by. Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Ryberg, 1-26. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
  37. Lin, Ann Chih, and David R. Harris. "Why is American Poverty Still Colored in the Twenty-First Century?" In The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist, edited by Ann Chih Lin and David R. Harris (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2008), 4.
  38. McKay, Nellie. "W .E. B. Du Bois: The Black Women in His Writing—Selected Fictional and Autobiographical Portraits." In Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, edited by William L. Andrews, 230-52. Boston: Hall, 1985.
  39. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
  40. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. "It's Not the Anthropocene, It's the White Supremacy Scene; Or, the Geological Color Line." In After Extinction, edited by Richard Grusin, 123-50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
  41. Moore, Jason W. "The Rise of Cheap Nature." In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78-115. Oakland: PM Press, 2016.
  42. Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
  43. Nixon, Rob. "Anthropocene 2." In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, edited by Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 43-46. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
  44. Pulido, Laura. "Racism and the Anthropocene." In Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, 116-28. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
  45. Pulkkinen, Tuija. "Vulnerability and the Human in Judith Butler's and Adriana Cavarero's Feminist Thought: A Politics of Philosophy Point of View." Redescriptions 23, no. 2 (2020): 151-64. https://doi.org/10.33134/rds.342.
  46. Raine, Anne. "Du Bois's Ambient Poetics: Rethinking Environmental Imagination in The Souls of Black Folk." Callaloo 36, no. 2 (2013): 322-41. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2013.0129.
  47. Rampersad, Arnold. "W. E. B. Du Bois as a Man of Literature." American Literature 51, no. 1 (1979): 50-68. https://doi.org/10.2307/2924919.
  48. Rossetti, Gina M. "Turning the Corner: Romance as Economic Critique in Norris's Trilogy of Wheat and Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece." Studies in American Naturalism 7, no. 1 (2012): 39-49. https://doi.org/10.1353/san.2012.0000.
  49. Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
  50. Taylor, Jesse Oak. "The Novel After Nature, Nature After the Novel: Richard Jefferies's Anthropocene Romance." Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (2018): 108-133. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn.2018.0006.
  51. Taylor-Wisemen, Rebekah. "Reading Cane in the Anthropocene: Toomer on Race, Power, and Nature." Mississippi Quarterly 70/71, no. 3 (2017/2018): 271-93. https://doi.org/10.1353/mss.2017.0018.
  52. Trexler, Adam. Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
  53. Tuana, Nancy. "Climate Apartheid: The Forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene." Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 2 (2019): 1-31. https://doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.7.1.0001.
  54. West, Cornel. "Conversation with Bell Hooks." In The Cornel West Reader, edited by Cornel West, 541-48. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999.
  55. Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Similar Articles

21-30 of 112

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.