This special session consists of three presentations that will be limited to 15 minutes and one 7-10 minute response. Panelists are all of color, three of the four use she/her pronouns. In addition to one tenured and two assistant professors, one panelist is both a doctoral candidate and creative writer.

United as examples of what Chelsea Frazier calls “Black Feminist Ecological Thought,” the panel offers three distinct and yet intertwined models of literature-based Black Ecofeminist interventions. It combines an attention to ecopoetics in the work of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer from a paradigmatically literary (poetics-focused) paper, a politics of regeneration in the work of George Washington Carver at Tuskegee from a more materially (soil-structure) oriented paper, and a close-reading of the ecocritical writing of Black queer and trans authors in a contemporary theory-based paper. This combination is meant to serve as a three-pronged approach to Black Ecofeminism in the context of 20^th century African American thought. This is an exciting nexus where a lot of innovative work is currently being done. As such, the panel seeks to build on important scholarship in the field such as Kimberly Ruffin’s Black On Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions (2010) or more recently, Sharon Holland’s an other: a black feminist consideration of animal life (2023).

Rachael Uwada Clifford’s paper begins with the response of critic H. L. Mencken, who wrote of Anne Spencer in 1919, “Tell that woman to put beginnings and ends to her poems; I can’t make heads or tails of them—but they’re good.” Reading Mencken’s critique of Spencer’s poetic structure against the grain, Clifford shows that the poet’s formal choices constitute significant revisions to American modernist literature’s treatment of the relationship between race, gender, class, and nature. Clifford argues that Spencer’s Black Feminist ecopoetics disrupts a key feature of American modernism: the subordination of space and the external world to the individual’s internal processes. The paper demonstrates that through her structural and aesthetic decisions—lineation and length, sound and image, and her overall ecological emphasis—Spencer defines internal and external worlds in a rich, precarious relation to one another rather than through binary opposition.

Mia Alfaireet’s paper starts with a 1910 bulletin by George Washington Carver titled, “Possibilities of the Sweet Potato.” While Carver insists that a racial future be cultivated “up from the soil,” the paper shows that the details of “Possibilities” and other bulletins from his experiment station at Tuskegee repeatedly emphasize the shortcomings of the “worn-out” and “diseased” soils of the South. The paper highlights that Carver’s insistence that there is “no better climate or soil” on which to build a racial future, is not a proclamation of the inherent richness of Southern soil, but a testament to the potential to rehabilitate exploited land. Alfaireet reads this as a material and soil-based politics of developing microclimates of possibility within an overarching climate of anti-Blackness as she argues that Tuskegee’s insistence on the potential rehabilitation of Southern soil should be considered in relation to contemporary Black climate optimism and practices of Black futurity.

Jennifer James, an expert in the field, builds on contemporary developments in Black Feminist theory as she takes up Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism (2022) alongside select 20^th century nature poetry by Black trans, queer and nonbinary writers in her paper. James close-reads Bey’s idea that “trans/figuration” works against the pessimism that “nothing can be done” and is, instead, a way “to perform a future” that has not been realized yet. The paper culminates in James’ endeavor to limn a Black, anti-extractionist, anti-dominion ecological theory that works against the hegemonic logics and grammars of the transitive property. James argues that this genre of transness strives to undo the “trans” of commodification: the transmutation of the Black human and by extension, the earth, into property.

Alex Alston will give a brief response of 7 to 10 minutes to be adjusted as needed to allow more than the required 15 minutes of open discussion. As the organizer and moderator of the panel, he will comment on the overlap, continuities, and entanglements between the papers, briefly teasing these out for a larger audience including the many exceptional papers that couldn’t be included.