Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders

Abstract

Moving beyond ecocriticism, this essay argues that an ecosocial reading of narratives of the Atlanta child murders (1979–81) is better able to examine the sometimes functional, sometimes broken interactions between sociocultural circumstances and particular urban ecologies. Far from latching onto an idealized, utopian sense of a restorative natural world, the ecosocial approach introduced here focuses critical attention on the traumatized and traumatic social and cultural histories that play out in particular natural as well as built environments. In various ways, child-murders narratives by Toni Cade Bambara, Tayari Jones, and others bear the conflicting burdens of memory and forgetting, of old and new and never–changing and ever–changing Souths. They do so in large part by acknowledging ecosocial dysfunctions as one way of moving, however provisionally and problematically, toward a more grounded, more communal idea and practice of interrelatedness.