John Claborn's Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941 and Sonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature stake their claims in a still-expanding field, that of African diasporic and African American literature and ecocriticism. Both books seek to show how black literature engages, thematizes, and symbolizes environmental and ecological consciousness; both are cognizant of the import of their work on a planet where climate change will exacerbate inequity between (over)developed and developing societies. While I very much wanted the former to live up to the promises it makes (summarized below), I found the latter to convey much more than the sum of its parts, “cultivation” and “catastrophe,” as it presents an enriching and well-wrought multivocal and multisensory meditation on diasporic black life and generative environmental experience.

In Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, Claborn surveys fiction and nonfiction by Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Effie Lee Newsome, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Attaway to assert that “an emergent sense of environmental justice was there from the beginning of the civil rights movement after the failure of Reconstruction in 1877 … civil rights has always been environmental” (11). Chapter 1 seeks to put Washington's Working with the Hands (1904) in environmental-historical contexts so as to claim its “visionary” significance, while chapter 2 turns to Du Bois's Darkwater (1920) and explores his “juxtaposition of visits to national parks such as the Grand Canyon with his anecdotes about life under Jim Crow, bringing double consciousness to bear on the history of conservation” (15). Chapter 3 synthesizes The Crisis, Newsome's understudied literary output therein published, and the contested intersections of racism and nature thus thematized. Claborn's survey of the civil rights advocacy organization's official journal from 1910 to 1935 “reveals the magazine's ongoing engagement with conservation, natural history, natural sciences (e.g., biology), pastoralism, and primitivism” (82), with the result that, on the one hand, “natural history and conservation become more overtly racialized and politicized when they resonate in the pages of The Crisis; on the obverse, this encourages racial reading of otherwise white-dominated scientific fields and political movements” (82–83). The book's final chapters turn to Hurston's figuration of swamps in Mules and Men (1935) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) for their promises of liberation and their realities of suppression and violence and to Attaway's revelation of the “biotic violence” of industrial capitalism, with “ecological crisis” an undeniable feature of the color line (162–63). In his conclusion, Claborn contends that this book

Where Claborn's monograph seeks to document how civil rights and nature intersect, Sonya Posmentier's Cultivation and Catastrophe focusses “less on how black literature takes up ‘nature’ as its subject and more on how black writing yields theories of environmental relation rooted in the particularities of black history, black experience, and black aesthetics” (4). Thus Posmentier juxtaposes cultivation and catastrophe as polarities between and with which “black writers in the twentieth century have responded to environmental alienation resulting from the vexed legacy of the plantation, urbanization, and various forced and free migrations” (2). In her monograph, “cultivation” refers to the black stewardship of land and life, under and despite repressive social, historical, and economic slaveries that “provision” resilience and creativity across the African diaspora, whereas “catastrophe” denotes ruptures across black experience that effect devastation as well as generation. The “provision grounds” of black modernity and lyric ecology, Posmentier contends, take root in poetry such as that of Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, and Derek Walcott, and in anthologies such as Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925), Phylon, the Barbados-based BIM, and the Jamaican-based Savacou, and these are the writers and venues that comprise the first half of her book, focussed on cultivation. In Part Two, Posmentier turns to catastrophe, in terms of destruction as well as conception. She surveys the diverse literary and musical engagements of Kamau Brathwaite, Sterling Brown, Hurston, Lloyd Lovindeer, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Bessie Smith (among others) with flood and hurricane, finding in their work the capacity and significance of “lyric poetry, as a visual and aural medium, [to encompass] both continuous and disjunctive cultural and environmental histories, creating a place in the poetic imagination of the future capacious enough for the ‘scatta archives’ of land and language alike” (212). Indeed, her conclusion testifies that she has more than made good on her contention at the outset, that the “key terms” of her study “do not oppose one another, but intersect: in the United States and the Caribbean, cultivation in the form of enforced agricultural labor has been a social catastrophe in and of itself; environmental catastrophes in turn have yielded rich traditions of art, music, and poetry” (3).

Of the important writers and texts Claborn's book explores, it is his study of Newsome that contributes most to articulating a renewed understanding of civil rights, race, and nature. In “The Crisis, the Politics of Nature, and the Harlem Renaissance: Effie Lee Newsome's Eco-poetics,” Claborn mines The Crisis as a venue for ecological and environmental engagement, noting explicit references (such as a quotation of Henry David Thoreau that appears on a 1915 cover) and pervasive intertextuality (such as the interplay in the periodical between nature-focussed fiction, prose, and creative nonfiction and reporting on racial violence, discrimination, and politics). What's more, this chapter puts Newsome's ecoliterary production in conversation with that of Mabel Osgood Wright, whose popular field guides addressed and privileged whites and stereotyped and demeaned African Americans, thus underscoring the originality and significance of Newsome's work. The chapter ends by exploring themes of nature and racial equality in the works of other Harlem Renaissance writers, emphasizing the significance of putting “these histories and discourses into the unlikely context of The Crisis and its civil rights agenda,” linking “problems of segregation and the naturalizing of racial difference[, and] … challeng[ing] these problems with the pedagogical aims of her writing” (110). This is a compelling chapter in ways that the book's other chapters are not. For one thing, its engagement of civil rights (as a concept and as a movement) is clear, thanks to its focus on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's official publication, The Crisis. For another, it engages environmental literary contexts (the work of Wright and Harlem Renaissance poets). The book's other chapters, by contrast, function by perceiving the authors on which they focus as explicitly engaged in civil rights (logical enough for Washington and Du Bois, less so for Hurston and Attaway) and subordinating environmental literary criticism to environmental history. Put simply, the book's drive to prove historically that “civil rights have always been environmental,” exacerbated by its marginalization of environmental justice as a historical phenomenon and analytical framework to three paragraphs in the introduction, gets in the way of its revealing the environmentalism of African American literature.

Posmentier's monograph excites the reader from start to finish, exuding appreciation for the writers, publications, and collectives she studies and the insights and critiques they offer literary studies. What's more, the book deftly interweaves Posmentier's analysis and criticism with that of leading figures in the field, such as Homi K. Bhabha, Brent Hayes Edwards, Edouard Glissant, Fred Moten, Jahan Ramazami, and Sylvia Wynter, presenting others’ critical contributions, revealing convergences with her own line of argument, and clarifying divergences and dissent in clear, first-person prose. Much appreciated is the generous catholicity of her critical apparatus, grounded as it is in African diasporic criticism and theory, and her assertive, straightforward, and generous discussion of her project's debts as well as challenges to and resituations of the critical paradigms that have come before her. It is the continuity of critical voices in concurrence as well as dissent and critique that contributes most to the richness of the book as a whole, that the full range of African diasporic criticism and interpretation can be melded together to embrace an incredible range of sources within and outside literary studies – and to encompass this range in a way that creates a profound depth of knowledge and vision. Posmentier's handling of Hurston is emblematic and exemplary: not only do readers engage specific contexts, such as her dream of a “Negro art colony” in southeastern Florida; they also discover new concepts, such as musical and auditory archives (and their critical utility and general applicability) that give sound and shape to environmental experience in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In Cultivation and Catastrophe, the lyric is multidimensional, transtemporal, encompassing, and creative, adaptive and adaptable at the blurred edges of nature and culture, a perspective the reader senses throughout given the range of writers, critics, and texts Posmentier considers.

In sum, it is a pleasure to welcome these books to the field of African American literature and ecocriticism. Claborn's asks us to historicize civil rights and environmentalism in ways that can expose urgent meanings in African American literature, and although its chapters do not uniformly make good on this opportunity, it compels us to appreciate understudied contributors like Newsome. Posmentier's scintillates, as Cultivation and Catastrophe stretches our perspection to new shores – geographical and conceptual alike – by imagining a malleable and nuanced “lyric ecology” that melds writers, artists, musicians, composers, critics, and societies in creating, enacting, and embedding profound environmental experience.