A transformative literary history of black environmental writing.

Winner, William Sanders Scarborough Prize by the Modern Language Association

At the intersection of social and environmental history there has emerged a rich body of Black literary response to natural and agricultural experiences, whether the legacy of enforced agricultural labor or the destruction and displacement brought about by a hurricane. In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier uncovers a vivid diasporic tradition of Black environmental writing that responds to the aftermath of plantation slavery, urbanization, and free and forced migrations. While humanist discourses of African American and postcolonial studies often sustain a line between nature and culture, this book instead emphasizes the relationship between them, offering an innovative environmental history of modern black literature.

A transformative literary history of black environmental writing.

About the Author

Sonya Posmentier is an associate professor of English at New York University.

Reviews
The black optimism that animates Posmentier's writing is also a prominent feature of the poems, songs, and works of visual art that she takes up as her primary objects of concern. Yet there is also, alongside this optimism, the ever-present specter of the end of the world-one that operates, always, right alongside the countless new worlds that black art necessarily engenders-which demands our attention.
-Syndicate
Sonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe feels urgent and contemporary even as its turn to black lyric asks readers to pause, sound out, and reflect on a long history of poetic engagement with ecological catastrophe, forced migration, and the afterlife of the plantation.
-Britt Rusert, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Syndicate
There is much to admire in this wide-ranging and carefully researched study. In particular, its close attention to poetic form represents a valuable contribution to postcolonial ecocriticism, which has tended to focus more on narrative genres.
-Review of English Studies
Posmentier's monograph is a much-needed contribution to both the new lyric studies and ecopoetics, two fields that, until recently, have focused more often than not on the writings and methods of white European and American poets and critics.
-Contemporary Literature
The capaciousness with which Posmentier approaches the lyric is generative, especially in light of environmental criticism's recent wave of poetry scholarship . . . groundbreaking.
-Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment


Awards
Winner of William Sanders Scarborough Prize 2018 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9781421437934
Author Sonya Posmentier
Format Paperback
Page Count 304
Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press
Weight(grams) 499g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 19mm