Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities

Abstract

This article suggests that the notion of “the plot” has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot—as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form—offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making against racial and socioecological domination. The plot also names an insurgent scheme that is staged from peripheralized places and that is crucial to maintaining these spaces of insurgent living. Plotting is presented as an analytical mode that offers scholars in the environmental humanities: a framework for place-specific historical-geographical and ecological study; a critical cartographical praxis; and an approach for examining the logics and affective relations of place production. Environmental humanities scholarship that engages with Black ecocriticism along these lines is well positioned to examine the geographies of the past, present, and future with attention to the racial politics of human embodiment. Such scholarship would be characterized by more careful use of spatial metaphors, ensuring that ecocriticism and broader environmental humanities work considers the material and physical racial ecologies alongside the discursive and representational environments.