Environmental Histories of Slavery and Freedom
Seminar Questions
- What connections are historians drawing between slavery and environmental history?
- How did enslavers and enslaved interpret or ‘live’ the environment differently?
- How might natural or built environmental features become tools of resistance?
- How might the sources used by environmental historians help shed light on enslaved lives?
Readings - choose 1-2:
- Oscar de la Torre, The People of the River: Nature and Identity in Black Amazonia, 1835-1945 (UNC Press, 2018), chapter 2, "Killing the Big Snake: Myth and History in the Trombetas River" (and the intro for context if you can)
- Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil. ch 5, "Fleeing into Slavery."
- Kevin Dawson, Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), Introduction (or whichever chapters take your interest)
- David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An environmental history of Slavery in the American South (OUP 2022), Introduction
Further reading
- Reinaldo Funes, From Rainforest to Canefield: An Environmental history of Cuba since 1492
- Louis Perez, Jr. Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba
- Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia, 2018.
- Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom, chapter 8, "The Carceral Landscape"
- Sherry Johnson Climate and Catastrophe in the Atlantic World in the Age of Revolution (UNC Press, 2014)