W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright: Toward an Ecocriticism of Color

Such a transformation entails exploring and theorizing not just African American fictional and nonfictional narratives, but also African American critical and theoretical works that undergird and explicate other forms of cultural production. Not only must ecocritics reread the fiction of African Americans ecocritically; they must also reread African American critics and thinkers ecocritically, so that all might begin to reformulate the questions and revise the assumptions that undergird the field. Consequently, an ecocritical analysis of Washington's Up From Slavery (1901) and Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) offers a means of deepening critical understanding of their relationship to environmental awareness, in that such consciousness participates in ecocritically reimagining subsequent African American texts. In so doing, it asks critics to be conscious of various environments (urban, rural, and suburban, and the miscegenation and marginalization therein) as well as be attuned to the political ramifications of social justice, justice not just for the clichéd redwoods and spotted owls, but for communities and cultures as well. Said John Elder at the 1995 conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, "Just as the largely white wilderness movement is called upon today to address the condition of our cities, and to enter into closer collaboration with Americans of color, so too the nature writing so closely associated with it must be defined more inclusively" qtd. If ecocriticism limits itself to the study of one genre-the personal narratives of the Anglo-American nature writing tradition-or to one physical landscape-the ostensibly untrammeled American wilderness-it risks seriously misrepresenting the significance of multiple natural and built environments to writers with other ethnic, national, or racial affiliations.