Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance

Winner of the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Prize for ''Best Book of Ecocriticism,'' Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance examines a neglected but centrally important issue in critical race studies and ecocriticism: the issue of environmental racism. Paul Outka asks how natural experience became racialized in America from the antebellum period through the early twentieth-century and draws compelling new conclusions. Using theories of sublimity and trauma, the book offers a critical and cultural history of the racial fault line in American environmentalism that to this day divides largely white wilderness preservation groups and the minority environmental justice movement.