Dissertation: "Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941"

Certified Fall 2011

John Claborn defended his dissertation, "Ecology of the Color Line: Race and Nature in American Literature, 1895-1941" in Fall 2011. His project contributes to recent scholarly trends in understanding African-American writing as politically and aesthetically pluralist. Employing methods of environmental historicism, archival research, and intersectional analysis, "Ecology of the Color Line" argues not only that intertwining racial and ecological problems erupted along the color line, but also that these problems play a crucial role in our thinking about race and politics in twentieth-century American literature. The dissertation thus reimagines many literary genres and critical disputes traditionally focalized through problematics of race and politics: the Washington—Du Bois debates on racial uplift, 1920s New Negro aesthetic, the Great Migration narrative, black radicalism, and proletarian literature. His project also opens up new perspectives on African-American literary history by recovering such marginalized texts as Booker T. Washington’s Working with the Hands, Colonel Charles Young’s 1903 report on Sequoia National Forest, and Effie Lee Newsome’s anti-eugenics writings for children. Claborn’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, ISLE, The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, English Language Notes, and the Unit for Criticism’s blog Kritik.