In Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, author
Stefanie K. Dunning considers both popular and literary texts that range
from Beyoncé's Lemonade to Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones. These key
works restage Black women in relation to nature. Dunning argues that
depictions of protagonists who return to pastoral settings contest the
violent and racist history that incentivized Black disavowal of the
natural world. Dunning offers an original theoretical paradigm for
thinking through race and nature by showing that diverse constructions
of nature in these texts are deployed as a means of rescrambling the
teleology of the Western progress narrative. In a series of fascinating
close readings of contemporary Black texts, she reveals how a range of
artists evoke nature to suggest that interbeing with nature signals a
call for what Jared Sexton calls "the dream of Black
Studies"--abolition.
Black to Nature thus offers nuanced readings that advance an emerging
body of critical and creative work at the nexus of Blackness, gender,
and nature. Written in a clear, approachable, and multilayered style
that aims to be as poignant as nature itself, the volume offers a unique
combination of theoretical breadth, narrative beauty, and broader
perspective that suggests it will be a foundational text in a new
critical turn towards framing nature within a cultural studies context.
