The working title for my next book is Land and Word: a Cross-Cultural Study of Memory, Theology, and the Environment in American Women’s Writing, and it is a project that has grown out of one of my classes, “Memory, Haunting, and Migration in Contemporary American Novels by Women.” It is a wide-ranging project, reading literary renditions of the natural world through a lens informed by Biblical and literary hermeneutics, postcolonial and feminist ecocriticism, and ethnic studies. Thus situated, Land and Word constitutes “environmentalism” as an object of humanistic inquiry, an inquiry that stands to be broadened by the inclusion of the experiences of people of color.
Even though the book makes forays into literary and visual texts by a variety of artists, including Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Cade Bambara, and Afro-Cuban performance artist Ana Mendieta, the center of this book is in its analysis of three texts, Linda Hogan’s The Woman Who Watches Over the World, Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. With this combination, Land and Word brings questions of gender and ethnicity to the long history of critiquing the role of religion in American nature writing, while also bringing that tradition, newly reformed, to the growing field of environmental studies.
In its final form, the book will work as a series of essays that read philosophical engagements with language and religion alongside a variety of narratives by women of color in the Americas. Despite the differences between the traditions they are writing out of, Japanese-Canadian, Native American, and African-American, the central authors in this study present remembering as an environmental practice, a practice described in a fundamentally theological language made comprehensible through its foundation in the natural world. These theologies are also, however, often startlingly secular, in fact offering alternative systems of meaning and recognition for individuals or communities who have found ways to replace historical notions of God-as-father with themselves, with the world, and with each other.
Much as any contemporary concern with the survival of the natural world might as easily be understood as a return to a kind of understanding as it is indicative of something new, coming to see how people have survived terrible histories in the Americas-without recourse to contemporary discourses regarding notions of rights, harm, and repair-offers a new way of understanding some of the strategies through which people make their own futures possible. Whereas my first book, Haunting and Displacement focused on the persistence of the past in the present, Land and Word considers memory as a utopian concern, and instead focuses on the persistence of the future in the present.