Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature, by Sonya Posmentier

摘要

In Cultivation and Catastrophe, Sonya Posmentier explores the nexus of natureand black diasporic culture, contending that the environment and its disastersplayed a central role in the development of black modernity in the twentieth century by mirroring the disruptive experience of plantation slavery andits aftermath. Through a broad literary analysis across six chapters that examines key figures in black poetry writ large—Claude McKay, Bessie Smith, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, Lloyd Lovindeer, and M. NourbeSe Philip—Posmentier incisively describes what she calls the “lyric ecologies”—or environmental poetics—of the lived black experience. Rather than focusing solelyon “nature” as the subject of lyrical poetry, Posmentier concerns herself withthe way poetry approximated ecological processes and vice versa. She thus proposes the terms “cultivation” and “catastrophe” as metaphors to describe howblack individuals were able to grow in the face of adversity, as well as a way tohark back to the devastating societal effects wrought by the slave plantationsystem.