A Theory of the Bottom: Black Ecofeminism as Politics

A Theory of the BottomBlack Ecofeminism as Politics Jennifer C. James (bio) “It is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom.” Toni Morrison, Sula In 1997, the postcolonial scholar Ariel Salleh offered her groundbreaking environmental intervention into Marxism, Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx and the Postmodern. There, she argues that eco-socialists’ theory of the intersection of labor and environmental destruction has failed to account for the experiences of women, who constitute the “global labour majority” if we acknowledge the unpaid “gift” of biological and social reproductive labor alongside their industrial labor.1 She posits that the “unlivable exploitations” women endure resulting from performing that labor under patriarchal forms of capitalism have profound environmental consequences. 2 For Salleh, “ecofeminism” is an elastic term that can unify “socialism, ecology, feminism, and postcolonial struggle” into an overarching framework that merges these interconnected struggles into a single politics.3 As expansive and persuasive as her idea of ecofeminism is, I am thinking through what happens when we un-submerge race—an absent term—and Blackness specifically, from Salleh’s analytic. I am not invested in critiquing what might be missing from Salleh; instead, I want to consider what a Black, anti-capitalist, intersectional ecofeminism might produce. When I first began teaching and writing about Black ecofeminism, I was invested in how the historical fungibility of Black women’s “flesh” within property relations—a history of being owned, mapped and mined, bestialized and bartered, commodified and consumed—has imprinted [End Page 46] Black women writers’ perspectives on the nonhuman natural world. In other words, as the title of my in-progress book Captive Ecologies: The Environmental Afterlives of Slavery announces, I was interested slavery’s ecological aftermaths. Black women’s literature is filled with examples. There are, for example, Black women literary figures women haunted by slavery, such as Pilate from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, who refuses the material trappings of capitalism and who becomes, to use Stefanie Dunning’s term, a “natural woman.”4 We can turn to Janie Starks from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, who learns the language of love and sex from flies, bees, and a pear tree; who rejects her formerly enslaved grandmother’s admonishment to take refuge in the protection of a “decent,” respectable marriage; and who retrieves her original vision of relation laboring with a man named Woods in the muck.5 We can turn to Esch in Jesmyn Ward’s Katrina novel Salvage the Bones who lives in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi—a geographical legacy of slavery—and who learns transspecies identification as a form of emotional and physical survival. If we consider the Black women writers themselves, we have bell hooks who claims that Black migration, the move away from Southern soil, caused a mind/body rupture in Black people that can only be remedied by relearning the earth and who, herself, returned to Kentucky from her academic sojourn north. We have Lucille Clifton who famously wrote: “being property once myself/I have a feeling for it,/that’s why i can talk about environment”;6 or Alice Walker who looks at a beautiful horse in her essay “Am I Blue”—a single, lonely horse who has been violently deprived of his mate—and sees grief in his eyes, sees slavery in his condition, sees herself, and spits out the meat she is served for dinner; or we can read the writer Alexis Pauline Gumbs who gleans Black feminist lessons, as she writes, from marine animals. It’s there. Once you look for the ways Black women claim a connection with the earth and non-human life through identification, it’s everywhere. But increasingly, I have started reading Black women’s environmental literature for content foregrounding the intersection of race, gender, the environment, and political economy. I am interested in the way Black ecofeminism asks us to rethink how racial capitalism operates at the same time it provides a way of conceptualizing relation disruptive to capitalism’s machinery. To return to Salleh, Ecofeminism as Politics argues that capitalist [End Page 47] patriarchy forces “women to live out their lives right at...