I am currently working on my first book manuscript, tentatively titled “Vital Necessity: Ecological Thinking in Contemporary Black Poetry.” The project looks at ecopoetic practices in the works of selected contemporary African American (and, occasionally, Caribbean) poets; more specifically, it examines how these authors engage Afro-diasporic traditions of ecological thinking to explore Black eco-humanist alternatives to the inherently anti-Black, ecocidal world order of racial capitalism. My approach is grounded in the following assertions: (1) that there is a diverse yet distinct tradition of what I term Black Atlantic ecological thinking that revises and challenges the historically dominant Euro-American ideological approaches to larger-than- human nature; (2) that there exists an ecopoetic tradition in African American literature whose aesthetic and epistemic genealogy departs from the Euro-American lineage of environmental and nature writing; and (3) that an in-depth understanding and appreciation of such ecopoetics can be facilitated by a (post)humanist ecocritical approach grounded in the tradition of Black Atlantic ecological thinking. A culturally-relevant, historically-informed analysis of contemporary Black ecopoetics indicates that it embraces much of the ethics, epistemes, and cosmologies that have guided Black diasporic practices of material survival and cultural expression such as religious syncretism, pursuit of literacy, marronage, provision gardening, conjuration, or ritualistic performance. The presence of these elements as themes, structures, or epistemic and political guidelines in an evolving body of contemporary Black poetry indicates that they constitute a prominent yet understudied tradition that anticipates many of the eco- and post-humanist developments in contemporary academic theory and offers an archive of valuable models for living and being “otherwise.” As such, it responds to the oft-repeated call of eco-humanities for “new” ways of being human in a larger-than-human world.

The authors I discuss include Lucille Clifton, Patricia Smith, Harryette Mullen, Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Mendi+Keith Obadike, and M. NourbeSe Philip. What all these poets share across their diverse work is an engagement with the Black Atlantic tradition of ecological thinking

through their pronounced interest in reimagining and renegotiating the interrelations between humans and larger-than-human world, and with how Blackness – political, cultural, and embodied – has been and still remains fundamental to how the very category of the human has been codified in the dominant philosophical, legal, and imaginative orders of global Western modernity. In their works, they respond to the inherently exploitative and extractive “nature” of racial capitalism from the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery and plantation monocultures to the “new Jim Crow” of brutal policing, racial profiling, and prison-industrial complex accompanied by escalating environmental injustice and looming global climate catastrophe. Their ecopoetic explorations of (Black) humanity in larger-than-human terms are marked by an ecological consciousness that has always been present, although not always in explicit ways, in African American – and, more broadly, Black diasporic – vernacular and intellectual traditions of skepticism towards the liberal humanist subject of Western modernity. In this, contemporary Black ecopoetics is both an aesthetic practice and a mode of theorizing humanism, the human, and larger-than-human nature that offers valuable contributions and correctives to contemporary academic discourses of ecological thinking, posthumanism, and new materialism.

Keywords: African American, ecopoetics, ecocriticism, Black Atlantic, ecological thinking