Introduction: African American Environmental Knowledge at Niagara

Abstract

To define the concept of environmental knowledge and illustrate its potential for ecocritical readings of nineteenth-century African American literature, this chapter turns to two texts about Niagara Falls, a handwritten note by Frederick Douglass (1843) and Charles W. Chesnutt’s short story “The Passing of Grandison” (1899). While Douglass’s note exemplifies how black writers could transform dominant aesthetic modes such as the sublime to utter social critique through expressing epistemological and ethical relations to non-human nature, Chesnutt’s story demonstrates a strategic subversiveness characteristic of African American environmental knowledge. My readings highlight how Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature employs a Foucauldian ecocritical concept of environmental knowledge to trace places and patterns of an African American ecoliterary tradition.