Our Share of Summers: Tending the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Black American Poetry
Date of Award
Spring 1-1-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Iheka, Cajetan
Abstract
Our Share of Summers: Tending the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Black American Poetry is a project rooted in the pleasure of Black American nature encounters. This dissertation challenges the predominant focus on trauma in Black ecocriticism, positing a broader understanding of Black environmental thought that includes joy, pleasure, and care. Additionally, this project reintroduces neglected poets and their contributions to American ecopoetics, highlighting their use of figurative language to advocate for liberation and ecological belonging. By introducing and employing a method of "literary tending," this study prioritizes the emotional and affective dimensions of these poems, exploring how water, soil, plants, and animals serve as agents of connection and resistance. Ultimately, this work highlights how these poets envisioned alternative worlds and modes of Black being. The first chapter opens a discussion about the use of figurative language in the Black American literary tradition, and how said figurative language, when paired with aquatic imagery, legitimates these poets' imaginations of Black liberation that seemed impossible on land. The second chapter narrows its focus to consider one specific rhyme pairing repeatedly employed by Black American poets in the nineteenth: "soil" and "toil." As the poets in this chapter insist and re-insist on their belonging on and with the land, they use rhyme to prompt readers' minds to reinforce this sense of belonging in a nation that legally and profusely denied it. Chapter Three treats figurative language as a connective tissue that promoted an ecopoetics of care work and built loving relationships between Black folks and their environments. I couple various poetic devices with various forms of vegetation to investigate what plant life can teach us about Black life in the nineteenth century. The fourth chapter focuses on animals and animality in nineteenth-century Black American poetry. I am interested in the ways poets played with syntax and animal figures to renegotiate power through their work. The project ends with a rumination on air and atmosphere as they pertain to Black survival in the twenty-first century. Taken together, these chapters tell the story of a people who are exceedingly capable of loving the planet and those who inhabit it. Black American poetry of the nineteenth century is often dismissed as uninspired and, with the exception of a few poems, too apolitical for Black studies and too Black for green studies. Our Share of Summers seeks to remind readers of the treasure trove of works in this archive, bring forgotten names to the fore, and break the essentialist link between Black folks, nature, and trauma that pervades Black ecocriticism. Additionally, this dissertation champions tenderness, advocating for a softer approach to poetic analysis that does not repeat patterns of exploitation and extraction by digging through poems and poets for ores that enrich our own agendas. Rather, I claim that these poems should be accepted whole for all they have to offer not only to scholarship, but also to our lives as we learn how best to relate to each other and to the earth in an age of climate catastrophe and societal collapse.
Recommended Citation
Jones, Kassidi Shuron, "Our Share of Summers: Tending the Environment in Nineteenth-Century Black American Poetry" (2025). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1746.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1746