This panel explores figurations of the garden, gardener, and gardening in Black literature. In spite of the widespread belief that Black people do not belong in or care about the natural environment, they have always turned to nature to reflect on their oppression as well as their freedom dreams. Writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Fanny Lou Hamer, and many others reflect a long and vibrant feminist tradition of ecological writing. While there is an important, emerging body of critical work on Black geographies (McKittrick, McKittrick and Woods), the Black outside/outdoors (Carter and Cervenak, Hartman, Moten), and Black ecologies (Hare, Roane and Hosbey, Ferrari, Frazier, King), there is relatively little scholarship about the representation of gardens in African American literature.

Building on this scholarship, this panel seeks to examine the garden and farm as spaces for cultivating Black life and aliveness. How does gardening position Black people in relation to the environment? What does it mean to express the fraught nature of this relationship through the imaginaries of the garden? “Gardening in Black Literature” views the ecological, cultural, and geographic potential of gardening through, respectively, the lens of aliveness, empowerment, and breathwork. Each paper attends to Black gardening as a practice of relationality and of possibility, while at the same time interrogating the garden as a site of danger and trauma.

In “Bad Mothers and Beautiful Gardens in Black Feminist Speculative Fiction,” Dorottya Mozes analyzes the mother-gardener figures in Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Song of Solomon (1977) and Tina McElroy Ansa’s 1993 popular fiction novel Ugly Ways. While both novels have been considered to be significant contributions to Black feminist fiction, the literary criticism on them ignores the significance of the representation of Black women’s gardening. Mozes considers the ways in which the women’s gardens represent their escape from their loveless marriages and domineering husbands, as well as intersectional violences. She also shows how gardening for Ruth and Mudear expresses strategies for liveliness, resistance, and sustenance. However, Mozes also considers the ways in which their gardens are entangled with the effects of the plantatiocene. Henceforth, Mozes argues that the turn to the speculative in these gardening novels envisions Black life in its imbrication with environmental destruction and possibility.

In “Ghetto Agrarianism in Paul Beatty’s The Sellout,” Anna Pochmara analyzes the meanings of inner-city farming, a central trope in Paul Beatty’s surreally satirical novel. Pochmara claims that Beatty’s “inner-city Afro-agrarian” venture intervenes in a number of cultural discourses and exposes their racialized politics; most explicitly, by destabilizing the dichotomy between the rural and the urban, it problematizes the notion of criminal urban blackness, a key ideological cluster of post-racial racism. Additionally, Pochmara traces how Bonbon’s engagement in agricultural activities enters a dialogue with the pastoral ideal. In contrast to the traditional images of pastoral bliss, Black representations of agriculture and the country have been traditionally haunted by the traumas experienced by slaves, sharecroppers, and victims of lynchings. In conclusion, Beatty’s novel signifies on this problematic relationship between African American experience and farming, while also acknowledging the tenets of environmental justice and forging a surreal yet empowering representation of Black agrarianism.

Mia Alafaireet in ““Making it Easier for Us to Breathe”: Black Gardening and the Poetics of Breath Work” analyzes poet-gardener Ross Gay’s homage to Eric Garner’s final breaths in his 2015 poem “A Small Needful Fact.” She examines Gay’s portrayal of Garner’s time working for the city’s horticultural department, and shows how this portrayal eschews direct depictions of Garner’s suffocation as the NYPD ignored his refrain of “I can’t breathe.” Drawing on similar sentiments in “Worms,” a meditation on the worm species’ ability to breathe through barriers of skin and soil, Alafaireet suggests that Camille Dungy gives thanks for the life made possible in her garden and “the workers who make such life possible.” Placing Gay’s and Dungy’s tropes of respiration and oxygenation in conversation with Christina Sharpe’s theorization of “aspiration,” her paper explores Black gardening poetry’s unique potential to push against the asphyxiating confines of anti-Black racism. As she examines the aesthetic and literal cultivations of breath these poets relate in their work, she ultimately argues for a re-reading of the Black poet-gardener as a breathworker whose craft answers the now-ubiquitous call of “I can’t breathe.”

Each presentation will be 15 minutes, followed by the respondent’s 10-minute response, and a twenty-minute discussion. While the individual presentations offer readings of particular gardening texts, the respondent’s presentation weaves together the operation of gardening tropes within and across the Black literary tradition.