BIPOC Ecologies Reading List
Our BIPOC Ecologies reading list was formed in response to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020. The list is open-ended and generative, we plan to continue adding to and revising the entries. We would love your input! If you have read a text that you would like to see here, please email info@grdn.la
The entries comprise a wide range of topics and literary forms. Each entry links to a PDF or publisher where available.
Essays
Bayo Akomolafe, 2019, “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us.” The Emergence Network. LINK
Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2009, “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2. LINK
Chelsea M. Frazier, 2016, “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies Vol. 2 No. 1. LINK
Ramachandra Guha, 1989, “Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation.” Environmental Ethics Vol. 11 No. 1. LINK
Nathan Hare, 1970, “Black Ecology.” The Black Scholar Vol. 1 No. 6. LINK
Britt M. Rusert, 2010, “Black Nature: The Question of Race in the Age of Ecology.” Polygraph 22. LINK
Zoe Todd, 2015, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 242-254.” LINK
Kyle Powys Whyte, 2018, “Indigenous science (fiction)for the Anthropocene:Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises.” LINK
Fiction
Octavia E. Butler, 1993, “Parable of the Sower.” LINK
Zora Neale Hurston, 1937, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” LINK
Toni Morrison, 1973, “Sula.” LINK
Ntozake Shange, 1982, “Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo.” LINK
Nonfiction
(ed) Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, 2017, “Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet.” LINK
Rasheed Araeen, 2010, “Art Beyond Art: Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century.” LINK
Joshua Bennett, 2020, “Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man.” LINK
Mel Y. Chen, 2012, “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 212).” LINK
John Claborn, 2017, “Civil Rights and the Environment in African American Literature, 1895-1941. Environmental Culture Series. Ed. Greg Garrard & Richard Kerridge. New York: Bloomsbury Academic,.” LINK
Nick Estes, 2019, “Our History is the Future.” LINK
Carolyn Finney, 2014, “Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors.” LINK
Masanobu Fukuoka, 1975, “The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming.” LINK
Dina Gilio-Whitaker, 2019, “As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock.” LINK
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, 2020, “Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.” LINK
Robin Wall Kimmerer, 2013, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” LINK
Tiffany Lethabo King, 2019, “The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.” LINK
Eduardo Kohn, 2013, “How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.” LINK
Paul Outka, 2008, “Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance.New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008..” LINK
Leah Penniman, 2018, “Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land.” LINK
Kimberly N. Ruffin, 2010, “Black on Earth: African American Ecoliterary Traditions.” LINK
Kohei Saito, 2017, “Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy.” LINK
Lauret Savoy, 2016, “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape.” LINK
Vandana Shiva, 1997, “Biodiversity and People’s Knowledge,” Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press, 1997.” LINK
Kimberly K. Smith, 2007, “African American Environmental Thought: Foundations.” LINK
Zoe Todd, 2015, “Indigenizing the Anthropocene,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 242-254.” LINK
Anna Tsing, 2015, “The Mushroom at the End of the World.” LINK
Kathryn Yusoff, 2019, “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.” LINK
Poetry
Dylan A.T. Miner, 2020, “Aanikoobijigan // Waawaashkeshi.” LINK