‘Black Environmental Thought’

Yale Environmental Humanities was launched in 2018 as a platform to highlight and support the emerging interdisciplinary conversation, across departments and schools, about environmental problems and human connections to the natural world. 

Today, environmental themes are deeply intertwined with the humanities across a broad range of courses at Yale — including the one featured here. Read an overview and explore other course features. 

Olaudah Equiano was an 18th-century African writer who left behind what is thought to be the only firsthand account of the transatlantic slave trade from the perspective of an enslaved person. Students in this graduate class, cross-listed in English and Black studies, recently pondered a passage from Equiano’s autobiography in which he describes arriving as a captive at the seaside location where the slave ship awaits. 

Both the sea and the ship “filled me with astonishment,” Equiano wrote, “which was soon converted into terror when I was carried on board.”

For this course, Jonathan Howard, an assistant professor of English and Black studies in FAS, found inspiration in the work of Lawrence Buell, a Harvard professor whose 1996 book, “The Environmental Imagination,” argued that behind the environmental crisis lies a crisis of imagination, and a need for new ways to understand humanity’s relation to nature. From Howard’s perspective, “a particularly fecund area” for seeking out alternative images for the human and nature relationship is Black literature.

“Black literature is important to study because Black people historically in this country and throughout the African diaspora maintain a complex relationship to the non-human natural world,” Howard, whose new book, “Inhabitants of the Deep: The Blueness of Blackness” (Duke University Press), explores the Black relationship to and experience of the sea, said. “Their fraught relationship to the human, and alignment throughout history with the category of the non-human, gives Black culture and Black expressive culture a unique perspective.”

As the class discussed Equiano’s nearly simultaneous emotions of astonishment and terror — the first a reaction to seeing the ocean, the second a response to his human kidnappers — Howard was reminded of his own first encounter with the sea.

Growing up in inner-city Philadelphia, he didn’t have an opportunity to go to the beach until the age of 16, he told the class. Walking onto the beach for the first time at the New Jersey Shore, he recalled, “I was ontologically smacked in the face. I had never seen anything that vast.”