The Rich Earth between Us
The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770â1840
Shelby Johnson
- 224 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
The Rich Earth between Us
The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770â1840
Shelby Johnson
About This Book
In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to placesâwhether real or imaginedâand how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these textsâwhich include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objectsâregister defiance to land removal and other forms of violence. In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itselfâits limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortalityâin a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.