Captive Ecologies

The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery

Jennifer C. James

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781478038924
  9781478033400
• eBook ISBN:
  9781478062547
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Captive Ecologies makes a case for the ecological significance of slavery's afterlife, tracing the complex entanglements between racial capitalism and Black ecological freedom. Attending to the ways that racial capitalism implicates both captive bodies and captive land, Jennifer C. James brings into relief the harm that racial capitalism does to Black people as well as the human and non-human worlds they inhabit. James looks to a range of case studies and media from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, including Black music, ecopoetics, literature, social history, biography, and Black feminist and queer art, tracing the various ways that the environmental stakes of racial capitalism have shaped the Black ecological imagination. In these works, the concept of captivity signals not only slavery but also Black life in the "wake": carceral spaces and enclosures, exploitative economic systems, sacrifice zones, and more. James offers novel concepts and frameworks to generate new modes of ecocriticism that are equipped to grapple with the unique demands and stakes of captive ecologies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Environmental Afterlives
• Chapter One. Ecomelancholia: Life, Land, and Unrenewable Loss
• Chapter Two. “Buried in Guano”: Race, Labor, and Sustainability
• Chapter Three. Dyspossession: Abolitionist Ecology and the Black Commons
• Chapter Four. Souls on Ice: Matthew Henson’s Arctic Modernities
• Chapter Five. A Theory of the Bottom: Black Ecofeminism as Politics
• Conclusion: Toward a Black Trans*ecology
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index