Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781478033400 Academic Inspection Copy

Captive Ecologies

The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery
Description
Author
Biography
Google
Preview
Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery's afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but Black life in the "wake": carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to affect new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.
Jennifer C. James is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at The George Washington University and author of A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II.
Google Preview content