Black Literature, Social Justice, and the Environment

This book theorizes the slave ship as a unique site for the imaginative and material convergence of abolitionism and environmental justice. In pairing twentieth- and twenty-first century works of black literature with multimedia texts from the environmental justice and abolitionist movements, the slave ship emerges as a matrix of ecological relations and resource regulations that continues to discipline populations into the present. While both sailors and slaves lived in common conditions of precarity during the transatlantic trade, sailors systematically manipulated access to natural resources to increase the suffering of slaves while ensuring their own survival. Consequently, the ability to access and control such resources became a symbol of white racial authority. Each chapter thus adopts the slave ship as a heuristic for understanding the racialization of environmental precarity across the modern era. By situating environmental justice within the longer tradition of international abolitionism, Leong examines how the legacies of slavery have shaped our understandings of what it means to be free in an environmentally just world.