Known as the poet laureate of the Negro Race, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) explores the complex relationship between African Americans and the natural world in his poetry. While lynching poetry of the black American South was directed to the white audience and concerned with the image of the black body, Dunbar accentuates the rural South as a place of binary oppositions of inspiration and threat, beauty and slave labor, solace and oppression. His nature poems emphasize the value of ecological thinking in relation to black identity. This paper argues for a rereading of Dunbar’s nature poetry that offers a more complex notion of black naturalism and eco-history of violence. It explores his artistic, cultural, and social understanding of nature, questioning the representations of the natural world and the plantation tradition. Dunbar’s poems display the connection between black people’s activity and both a hostile and empathetic environment – a geographical place of violence and racialized space. The questions this paper tends to explore are: How does Dunbar articulate the natural world as a place of inflicted pain and refuge, beauty and danger, and sympathy and antipathy? How do black people’s experiences extend to natural and geographical scenes in his poetry? And how do they impact the landscapes they inhabit via interdependent bonds? Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), including concepts like “Manichaean world” and “national consciousness,” as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness” mentioned in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are applied to Dunbar’s selected poems to comprehend his poetics of nature and how it is related to lynching and racism.
Known as the poet laureate of the Negro Race, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) explores the complex relationship between African Americans and the natural world in his poetry. While lynching poetry of the black American South was directed to the white audience and concerned with the image of the black body, Dunbar accentuates the rural South as a place of binary oppositions of inspiration and threat, beauty and slave labor, solace and oppression. His nature poems emphasize the value of ecological thinking in relation to black identity. This paper argues for a rereading of Dunbar’s nature poetry that offers a more complex notion of black naturalism and eco-history of violence. It explores his artistic, cultural, and social understanding of nature, questioning the representations of the natural world and the plantation tradition. Dunbar’s poems display the connection between black people’s activity and both a hostile and empathetic environment – a geographical place of violence and racialized space. The questions this paper tends to explore are: How does Dunbar articulate the natural world as a place of inflicted pain and refuge, beauty and danger, and sympathy and antipathy? How do black people’s experiences extend to natural and geographical scenes in his poetry? And how do they impact the landscapes they inhabit via interdependent bonds? Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), including concepts like “Manichaean world” and “national consciousness,” as well as W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness” mentioned in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are applied to Dunbar’s selected poems to comprehend his poetics of nature and how it is related to lynching and racism.