This dissertation centers around the impact that geology and its ideas had on nineteenth writers just as it was defining itself from other natural sciences. Geological questions about how rocks and dirt were formed, where they came from, and what kinds of forces act on them are at the heart of the texts I engage here: the writings of Orra White Hitchcock in her travel journals, Emily Dickinson, Edmund Ruffin, and Charles W. Chesnutt; along with the stories told about spirits who inhabit bodies of water in South Carolina, and the illustrations and paintings of Orra Hitchcock. The central concept that the dissertation explores is geopoetics: the modelling of literary and artistic form on geologic processes. In its formal strategies, geopoetic writing aims to establish relationships, explicitly or implicitly, between many changing conditions and across many different temporal moments, all at once. As geologists and average people alike struggled to understand the place of the human in developing theories of how the planet was formed and reformed, the writers I engage here used these theories in their own texts as models for thinking about a series of relationships, both between persons and between humans and the nonhuman world. Though informed by geological research and ideas, geopoetics are not the static transposition of geology’s theories onto the texts I engage with here. Instead, these texts are the means by which their writers explore geologic ideas and the longue dureé natural processes that shape them. Geopoetics occur when an author’s writing strategy recalls the connections between natural and human-made networks in its form, by creating an interplay of literary or poetic structure and geologic imagery. What I mean by this is that the majority of these texts don’t simply feature allusions to geologic features, but, as I show, fundamentally engage with understandings of geological processes in their formal composition. If a volcano in a Dickinson poem, for example, is the vehicle of a metaphor, the volcano doesn’t simply take on the meanings which the metaphor aims to convey. It also causes Dickinson to write in ways that are particularly volcanic – through expansive, oozing analogies that ingest the external world. Hitchcock, Ruffin and Chesnutt, along with believers in bisimbi all make use of the ecosystemic layers that are embodied by rock formations in their writings. For Chesnutt, this looks like the gradual accumulation of conjure stories in his imagination which, though heard when he was a child, come back to retell their stories in his writing as though they had possessed him. In his narratives, conjure stays imbedded in locations throughout his landscapes, catching characters off-guard and radically changing them, sometimes with no clear origin point or conjurer to attribute the spells to. As the above paragraph suggests, Chesnutt, Dickinson, Hitchcock, Ruffin, and tellers of simbi stories each have specific geopoetic strategies with which they explore geologic theories. Subsequently, they each create the interplay of geologic allusion and literary form I describe above in their own, particular ways.

Ambivalent Ecologies: Representations of the Nonhuman in African American Literature, 1830-1940, argues that nonhuman animals and ecological phenomena are central to the projects undertaken by African American authors from the antebellum slave narrative through the interwar period. In four chapters that focus on the Anglophone literature of nineteenth century abolition, the late nineteenth-century conjure tales of Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I contend that there are as many differences in how these authors marshal the nonhuman as there are similarities. Following this insight, I tease out the unevenness and tensions in these representations across the tradition. Tracing the influence of literary genre and historical developments on representations of the nonhuman, I contend that these mark a site or perhaps a vector of profound ambivalence. Pushing beyond paradigms that reflexively position the work of black creative intellectuals as always already critical of Western liberal humanism, I offer a more nuanced set of close-readings that stay with the trouble of what I theorize as the ecological ambivalence that animates African American literature’s relationship toward the colonial categories the Human, or Man. Drawing on the work of Sylvia Wynter, Zakiyyah Jackson, Frantz Fanon, and others, I position this ambivalence as a key feature of the ecology of African American life.