Article ID: CBB701445137

Breathing Free: Environmental Violence and the Plantation Ecology in Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (2020)

unapi

This essay presents an ecocritical analysis of Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative, the 1850s manuscript novel by a formerly-enslaved African American woman that was recovered by Henry Louis Gates in 2001. Examining Crafts's extensive engagement with Charles Dickens's Bleak House, it argues that Crafts's fictionalized narrative of enslavement and self-emancipation re-imagines a Victorian politics of environmental health as a critique of environmental racism. Showing how Crafts presents the material ecology of the plantation South as a site and vector of violence, it reads The Bondwoman's Narrative as resisting nineteenth-century scientific discourses of racialized immunity that sought to legitimize the systemic neglect of enslaved people in the antebellum United States.

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Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB701445137/

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Authors & Contributors
Knight, R. J.
Mooney, Katherine C.
Grossi, Élodie
Claborn, John
Hollander, Rachel
Badolato, Elizabeth
Concepts
Science and literature
African Americans
African Americans and science
Mental disorders and diseases
Racism
Slavery and slaves
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Southern states (U.S.)
Great Britain
United States
Atlantic world
England
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