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Chesnutt, Turpentine, and the Political Ecology of White Supremacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2021

Abstract

Charles Chesnutt's fiction describes the forests of North Carolina not as the unspoiled wildernesses of the popular imagination but instead as an integral part of the extractive economy of the South. In the postbellum decades, many northerners visited the state's forests for health tourism even as the turpentine and lumber industries were decimating the local pine. By drawing on his readers’ familiarity with turpentine, a pine product that was both a household staple and a global commodity, Chesnutt shows his readers how the pine woods were anything but bucolic. Chesnutt's ecological vision disrupts the centrality of cotton in the environmental imaginary of the plantation and postplantation South. By linking the rise of conservation efforts to the logic of preserving white health, Chesnutt reveals that both deforestation and conservation were driven by the operations of white supremacy.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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