African American literature—very little of which is read as climate fiction—has long articulated the intersections between plantation slavery’s environmental and racial regimes and, more recently, traced the plantation’s ecological and social histories directly to the climate crisis. This essay looks to the slave narrative and the contemporary neo-slave narrative to trace the long history of the Plantationocene as well as the alternative ecologies of resistance and repair this literature encodes.

Teresa Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Selling Anti-Slavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America and Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation.

Zoom link: https://uoregon.zoom.us/j/96477704328

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