Abstract
AbstractThis chapter proposes an alternative ecocritical angle on two of Booker T. Washington’s autobiographies,Up from Slavery(1901) andWorking with the Hands(1904), to show how this writer’s post-Emancipation vision rests on revised forms of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge interacts with contemporary evolutionary thought. Washington transforms the strategic pastoral of the fugitive slave narrative and introduces, especially inWorking with the Hands, an African American georgic that seeks to root black life and culture in dignified and communal forms of labor. Washington’s pastoral and georgic environmental knowledge thereby becomes both part of his own evolutionism and a means of criticizing racist ideas of U.S. evolutionary thought.
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
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