Literary Feminist Ecologies of American and Caribbean Expansionism

Errand into the Wilderness

Christine M. Battista, Melissa R. Sande

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032230115
• eBook ISBN: 9781000914023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Historical Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book synthesizes ecofeminist theory, American studies, and postcolonial theory to interrogate what New Americanist William V. Spanos articulates as the "errand into the wilderness": the ethic of Puritanical expansionism at the heart of the U.S. empire that moved westward under Manifest Destiny to colonize Native Americans, non-whites, women, and the land.

The project explores how the legacy of the errand has been articulated by women writers, from the slave narrative to contemporary fiction. Uniting texts across geographical and temporal boundaries, the book constructs a theoretical approach for reading and understanding how women authors craft counter-narratives at the intersection of metaphorical and literal landscapes of colonization. It focuses on literature from the United States and the Caribbean, including the slave narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet E. Wilson, and Harriet Jacobs, and contemporary work by Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, Edwidge Danticat, and Native American writer Linda Hogan. It charts the contrast between America's earliest idyllic visions and the subsequent reality: an era of unprecedented violence against women of color and the environment.

This study of many canonical writers presents an important and illuminating analysis of American mythologies that continue to impact the cultural landscape today. It will be a significant discussion text for students, scholars, and researchers in environmental humanities, ecofeminism, and postcolonial studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Ecologies of Exception: Gender, Race, and the Eco-Imperial Imaginary in the Caribbean and American Literature and Culture
• 2 Ecologies of Racism: A Genealogy of Black Feminisms in American Slavery
• 3 Nomadic Ecologies, Race, and Female Masculinities: Willa Cather’s Conflicted Land Ethics and Civilizing Science in O Pioneers!
• 4 Errand of American Expansionism: The Intersections of Violence, Women’s Bodies, and Natural Space in the Novels of Edwidge Danticat
• 5 “Pecola and the Unyielding Earth”: Exclusionary Cartographies, Transgenerational Trauma, and Racialized Dispossession in The Bluest Eye
• 6 “A Hurricane Ravaging the Island”: An Examination of Blackness, Witchcraft, and Feminist Alterity in Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
• 7 Mapping the Counter-Errand: Feminist Agential Ecologies in Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms
• 8 Conclusion
• Index