Transforming Space: Nature, Education, and Home in Charlotte Forten and William Wells Brown

Abstract

This chapter looks at Charlotte Forten’s journals and William W. Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) as indicating a post-Emancipation reconfiguration of literary space in African American writing that offered new ways for expressing environmental knowledge. One significant effect of this reconfiguration was that articulations of environmental knowledge shifted from “loopholes” like the slave narrative’s literary heterotopia of the Underground Railroad into broader literary spaces of education and home. Forten uses a host of such spaces in her picturesque depictions of houses and schools to create an alternative discourse of nature as a multifaceted refuge and to condemn slavery and racism. Brown’s text is a subversive trickster narrative that expresses a post-Emancipation form of black agrarianism while negotiating the ambivalent relationship of African Americans to the South.