Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance

**Winner of the 2009 Biennial Prize for Ecocriticism from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment!** Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance examines a neglected but centrally important issue in critical race studies and ecocriticism: how natural experience became racialized in America from the antebellum period through the early twentieth-century. Drawing on 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 largely minority environmental justice movement. Outka offers a detailed exploration of the historically fraught relation between the construction of natural experience and of white and black racial identity. In denaturalizing race and racializing nature, the book bridges race theory and ecocriticism in a way vitally important to both disciplines.