This proposed special session on trees and plants in Black literary and visual culture consists of four presentations: two by junior faculty and two by senior scholars. Two of the four presenters use “she” pronouns, and three of the four panelists are scholars of color. The panel contains presenters from flagship R1 public institutions and one from a private, small liberal arts college.

Each presenter will be strictly limited to thirteen minutes. With three to five minutes of wiggle room for overages, there will be no less than eighteen minutes remaining for unstructured discussion. As all of the panelists are currently working on book projects related to the subject matter of the session, the discussion portion of the panel will be a vital and highly prioritized element.

The organizing premise of this session is that Black authors, across the African Diaspora and throughout time, have turned to trees, not merely or primarily, even, as a scene of antiblack violence, but in order to cultivate emancipatory aesthetic interventions and critiques of racial capitalism. While not losing sight of, for example, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Haunted Oak,” a poem that narrates a lynching from an oak tree’s point of view, or Billie Holiday’s iconic “Strange Fruit,” this panel insists there is more to be seen (and read) on the leaves and roots of trees than Black blood and death.

The session features poetry, short stories, historical fiction, and visual art as each presenter close reads a set of objects that illuminates a different aspect of what Black creatives have used trees to represent, critique, or become. This topic is especially germane in a moment of renewed fervor for extraction, demonstrated, not least of all, by the current administration’s plans to open up national parks for mining and logging. More importantly, the environmental humanities and Black Studies are experiencing an exciting moment defined by an influx of scholarship that regards race, gender, slavery, and colonialism as not only relevant to but historically constitutive of the problems of environmental degradation. The panel builds on that work in the specific direction of the arboreal humanities.

Wallace’s and Xu’s papers each emphasize the idea of Black “becoming” as it concerns plant life and its emancipatory potential. Parrish’s and Alston’s papers sit in a productive tension with these, as they each emphasize the ways Black creatives turn to plant life to critique commodification and enclosure, respectively.

Xu explores how practices of botanical and racial classification overlap in the Caribbean. She juxtaposes the colonial modes of racialization that conflate vegetal and human skins through the genre of natural history, demonstrated by Edward Long’s History of Jamaica (1774), against Erna Brodber’s The Rainmaker’s Mistake (2007), which challenges colonial scripts by reimagining plant and human skins as porous, mobile accessories. How, she asks, is skin—a common symbol of biological essentialism—refashioned in Brodber’s historical fiction as a symbol of lability and mobility?

Foregrounding two Langston Hughes poems—one obscure (“Little Green Tree”), the other iconic (“Dream Variations”)—Wallace maps what he calls “Black arboreal desire” in the poetry of Lucille Clifton and Ed Roberson. He argues for the anti-colonial politics of human-tree desire and co-becoming across African American poetry of the twentieth century.

Parrish tracks the historical significance and legacy of the mid-nineteenth century Boston-based Afro-Canadian visual artist, Edward M. Bannister, whose landscape paintings featured trees as a central part of their drama. Focusing on a key subset of his (post -1856) paintings, in which Bannister captured the deforestation of New England, Parrish emphasizes the importance of reckoning with the trees at the center of his vision as museums prepare to honor the artist’s 200^th birthday in 2028. What meanings, she asks, did Bannister make out of the woods and their commodification? How did he visually associate two major forms of racial capitalist extraction: wood from diminishing forests and labor from African Americans?

Alston’s paper takes up two short stories that make up Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899). Tracing two person-to-plant transformations made possible through conjure – the joining of an enslaved man’s life force with that of a grapevine (both of which eventually die) in “The Goophered Grapevine,” and the transformation of another enslaved character into a tree that is eventually harvested for its wood and sent to a saw mill in “Po’ Sandy” – Alston argues for Chesnutt’s signifciation on an ecological critique of primitive accumulation first given voice in Frederick Douglass’s writing about gardens and poplar trees in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).