Converging Stories : Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature

"Jeffrey Myers's new study broadens the fields of race and ecology by looking at writings from the nineteenth century - an era of renewed violence and oppression against people of color and of unprecedented environmental destruction on a continental scale. Myers focuses particularly on works that engage the notion that white racism and alienation from nature sprang from a common source." "Myers first discusses the paradox of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision, by which ideas espoused in his Notes on the State of Virginia can support either environmental destruction or conservation, a democratic or a racist society. Next, by looking race-critically at Thoreau's Walden and The Maine Woods, then ecocritically at Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories, Myers traces the development of resistance to racial and ecological hegemony. He concludes by discussing how the antiracist, egalitarian ecocentricity in these earlier writers can be seen in contemporary writer Eddy L. Harris's Mississippi Solo. Myers's discussion encompasses other authors as well, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Willa Cather."--BOOK JACKET.

Jeffrey Myers is an assistant professor of English at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York.