Paul Outka | University of Kansas (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Outka

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

When the first European settlers confronted the huge eastern forest of the Atlantic coast that st... more When the first European settlers confronted the huge eastern forest of the Atlantic coast that stretched unbroken from Maine to Georgia, they saw a landscape belated rather than primordial, a nature that had fallen away, in every sense, from an originary divine pastoral. What might well seem to contemporary Americans, at least in their imagination, as a breathtaking view back to an untouched, uncreated natural beauty, was something quite different to most of these early settlers.1 Rather than an originary pristine landscape, they saw an unredeemed in-between state, predated by a biblical origin story for the wilds before them. This vision of European-style civilization and a “tamed” neo-Edenic continent—with them having Adamically “subdued the earth” and taken “dominion over the animals and the beasts of the field”—served as its ecological telos.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Far from empowering the black subject, the conflation of blackness and nonhuman nature served as ... more Far from empowering the black subject, the conflation of blackness and nonhuman nature served as the principal “justification” for chattel slavery in antebellum America, a conflation that persists at the heart of most subsequent American racist ideologies. For antebellum African Americans, moments of instability between self-identity and the natural world were often violently reductive. The trauma inflicted on the caged slave in Crevecoeur’s passage literally reduces him, peck-by-peck, back to the pastoral landscape: caged like an animal, sightless, almost dumb, his face half-eaten, his humanity degraded to suffering meat that wants only the loss of consciousness that death by poison would bring. His body becomes no longer individual but representative, forced to manifest white terrorism to other slaves, and serving as an object of moral and physical horror for Crevecoeur and presumably his contemporary white readers.1

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Writers like Page and Harris construct the plantation pastoral by transforming the temporal struc... more Writers like Page and Harris construct the plantation pastoral by transforming the temporal structure and experiential content of slavery’s trauma into the nostalgia of the Lost Cause, the always-receding fantasy-history of an antebellum Southern Garden where white authority over black slaves was literally natural—coextensive with white stewardship of a pastoral landscape that both entirely subsumed black identity and was symbolized by it. The transformation was never complete, however, never permanent. It required constant repetition, largely because it was, in fact, a secondary effect of slavery’s antebellum trauma and not the pastoral origin it claimed to be. That repetition was an echo of the latency that structures all traumatic experience, a nostalgic landscape always at risk of being overrun by the terrible history it so strenuously attempted to keep at bay.

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2013

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2010

For much too long, ecocriticism and the environmental movement paid little attention to race and ... more For much too long, ecocriticism and the environmental movement paid little attention to race and how it might both shape natural experience and be shaped by it. Scholars in the field, almost overwhelmingly white, often assumed that nature was a racially neutral repository of value and largely ignored the homogeneity of their numbers and their scholarly interests. This situation has started to change, both with greater diversity in the practitioners of ecocriticism and in a number of recent works in the field—including Jeffrey Myers’s groundbreaking 2005 study, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature, Kimberly K. Smith’s 2007 work, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, and my own 2008 Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance—that seek to analyze how profoundly imbricated racial and natural experience have been throughout history. Ian Finseth’s Shades of Green adds to this rapidly growing body of scholarship and should prove an invaluable resource, particularly for those interested in the early American and antebellum periods.

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014

Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 2005

... Indeed, occupying this liminal position between land and text is, for Whitman, the central ro... more ... Indeed, occupying this liminal position between land and text is, for Whitman, the central role of the poet. ... modernist knowledge, nor in more traditional Romantic terms as a special sensitivity to natural beauty, but rather in his ability to communicate, in language, a preexisting ...

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often shar... more Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.

Journal of American Studies, Aug 1, 2002

Dear Friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself-& yourself also. You must not construct such a... more Dear Friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself-& yourself also. You must not construct such an unauthorized & imaginary ideal Figure, & call it W. W. and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it. The actual W. W. is a very plain personage, & entirely unworthy of such devotion. Whitman to Anne Gilchrist, " Whitman's insistence on '' absorbing his country, '' and his extraordinary success in translating his social context into poetry, has produced a rich tradition of biographical and historical criticism,# a tradition rejuvenated in recent years by the popularity of cultural studies.$ Indeed, Ed Folsom, the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, notes in the introduction to his own cultural study of Whitman's work, a '' critical consensus '' that '' Whitman is best understood contextually, as a writer who reabsorbed many aspects of his culture into his work, a writer we best read by moving from the poetry out into the world that the work was woven from, a writer best understood in juxtaposition to just about any aspect of the culture we can name '' (Native Representations, ix). This tradition of scholarship is rich because it is, of course, broadly right in asserting a

Contemporary Literature, 1997

... became bodily action, sex, a baby. It is this perilous boundary between desire andmateriality... more ... became bodily action, sex, a baby. It is this perilous boundary between desire andmateriality, a boundary "not delin-eated in space" (8), that the aunt crosses, and that the book, from the start, effaces. And it is this effaced boundary ...

American literary realism, 2016

Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west o... more Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west of a given white observer. from the first farms and villages to the antebellum period, European American settlement pushed against a range of frontiers—not only west, but also north and south, from coastal plains into mountains and forests and swamps, from the urban / pastoral/“civilized” to wherever native peoples still retained their numbers, rights, and culture. Postbellum, as countless writers have discussed, the West became the privileged site of a nature at once wild and national, a place both ahuman and the literal and figurative ground of white American masculinity. The reasons for this identification of “West” and “nature” can, of course, be readily explained by simple facts of geography and settlement: in the second half of the nineteenth century the East was much more thoroughly developed than the West, had a far greater human population density, had killed or exiled much of the native population, had much less recognizably wild land; the West, in turn, was far less populated and developed, and incorporated a stunningly beautiful variety of landscapes and creatures, readily available for both admiration and exploitation. Those simple facts and the straightforward explanation they offer in turn yield a simple and straightforward, and wrong, superimposition of a geographical transition onto a historical one. in this conflation, the physical movement from East to West becomes the unresolved contradictory assertion that going west is at once a movement from old to new—from the overcivilized East burdened by history, to the new frontier—and from new to old—from the technologically enthralled East ruled by perpetual change, to a place of natural origin and renewal. for (at least) white men,

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

In 1991, an umbrella organization of environmental justice activists sent a sharply critical open... more In 1991, an umbrella organization of environmental justice activists sent a sharply critical open letter to ten of the largest environmental organizations in the United States, accusing them of “environmental racism.” The letter charged that the groups focused monothematically on wilderness preservation, paid scant attention to the vastly unequal exposure of minority communities to toxic waste, diesel particulates, agricultural pesticides, and lead contamination, and were indifferent to the almost entirely white composition of their workforce. Most of the groups that received the letter (particularly Greenpeace and the Sierra Club) responded positively, subsequently paying greater attention to environmental justice concerns and recruiting people of color to serve on their professional staffs. Still, the letter exposed a much deeper racial fault line in American environmentalism than could be mended by shifting priorities and altering hiring practices.1 As the black liberation theologian James Cone laments, Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African American community. “Blacks don’t care about the environment” is a typical comment by white ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. “White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation’s cities” is a well-founded belief in the African American community. (138)

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 17, 2022

To call attention to the specific historical ways that sublime experience functioned in the forma... more To call attention to the specific historical ways that sublime experience functioned in the formation of race is not the same as declaring such a reading exhaustive. It would be more than merely reductive to dismiss the natural sublime or wilderness experience as simply a white cover-up. To swing from an uncritical white masculinist Romanticism, to a reflexive sort of demystification of the sublime that insists on a total retextualization of nature helps neither racial politics nor the planet. Nor does it begin to do justice to the fundamentally contradictory sorts of experiences and possibilities named by the sublime. Within ecocriticism, such a binary oscillation between true belief and demystification replicates the sort of theoretical tail-chasing we see in the seemingly endless debates over whether nature is really a transcendent Real or just another ideological construction, and what the right ratio between construction and transcendence is, and how to tell the difference, and so forth.

American Literary Realism, 2016

Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west o... more Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west of a given white observer. from the first farms and villages to the antebellum period, European American settlement pushed against a range of frontiers—not only west, but also north and south, from coastal plains into mountains and forests and swamps, from the urban / pastoral/“civilized” to wherever native peoples still retained their numbers, rights, and culture. Postbellum, as countless writers have discussed, the West became the privileged site of a nature at once wild and national, a place both ahuman and the literal and figurative ground of white American masculinity. The reasons for this identification of “West” and “nature” can, of course, be readily explained by simple facts of geography and settlement: in the second half of the nineteenth century the East was much more thoroughly developed than the West, had a far greater human population density, had killed or exiled much of the native population, had much less recognizably wild land; the West, in turn, was far less populated and developed, and incorporated a stunningly beautiful variety of landscapes and creatures, readily available for both admiration and exploitation. Those simple facts and the straightforward explanation they offer in turn yield a simple and straightforward, and wrong, superimposition of a geographical transition onto a historical one. in this conflation, the physical movement from East to West becomes the unresolved contradictory assertion that going west is at once a movement from old to new—from the overcivilized East burdened by history, to the new frontier—and from new to old—from the technologically enthralled East ruled by perpetual change, to a place of natural origin and renewal. for (at least) white men,

Landscapes the Journal of the International Centre For Landscape and Language, 2013

Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Palgrave Macmillan), won the 20... more Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Palgrave Macmillan), won the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) biennial award for the best theoretical book written on literature and the environment published in 2007 and 2008. This interview took place during the summer of 2010 in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. A Spanish version of this interview was published in Kanatari, the main cultural journal of the Peruvian Amazon basin at Florida State University.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

When the first European settlers confronted the huge eastern forest of the Atlantic coast that st... more When the first European settlers confronted the huge eastern forest of the Atlantic coast that stretched unbroken from Maine to Georgia, they saw a landscape belated rather than primordial, a nature that had fallen away, in every sense, from an originary divine pastoral. What might well seem to contemporary Americans, at least in their imagination, as a breathtaking view back to an untouched, uncreated natural beauty, was something quite different to most of these early settlers.1 Rather than an originary pristine landscape, they saw an unredeemed in-between state, predated by a biblical origin story for the wilds before them. This vision of European-style civilization and a “tamed” neo-Edenic continent—with them having Adamically “subdued the earth” and taken “dominion over the animals and the beasts of the field”—served as its ecological telos.

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Far from empowering the black subject, the conflation of blackness and nonhuman nature served as ... more Far from empowering the black subject, the conflation of blackness and nonhuman nature served as the principal “justification” for chattel slavery in antebellum America, a conflation that persists at the heart of most subsequent American racist ideologies. For antebellum African Americans, moments of instability between self-identity and the natural world were often violently reductive. The trauma inflicted on the caged slave in Crevecoeur’s passage literally reduces him, peck-by-peck, back to the pastoral landscape: caged like an animal, sightless, almost dumb, his face half-eaten, his humanity degraded to suffering meat that wants only the loss of consciousness that death by poison would bring. His body becomes no longer individual but representative, forced to manifest white terrorism to other slaves, and serving as an object of moral and physical horror for Crevecoeur and presumably his contemporary white readers.1

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Writers like Page and Harris construct the plantation pastoral by transforming the temporal struc... more Writers like Page and Harris construct the plantation pastoral by transforming the temporal structure and experiential content of slavery’s trauma into the nostalgia of the Lost Cause, the always-receding fantasy-history of an antebellum Southern Garden where white authority over black slaves was literally natural—coextensive with white stewardship of a pastoral landscape that both entirely subsumed black identity and was symbolized by it. The transformation was never complete, however, never permanent. It required constant repetition, largely because it was, in fact, a secondary effect of slavery’s antebellum trauma and not the pastoral origin it claimed to be. That repetition was an echo of the latency that structures all traumatic experience, a nostalgic landscape always at risk of being overrun by the terrible history it so strenuously attempted to keep at bay.

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 2013

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2010

For much too long, ecocriticism and the environmental movement paid little attention to race and ... more For much too long, ecocriticism and the environmental movement paid little attention to race and how it might both shape natural experience and be shaped by it. Scholars in the field, almost overwhelmingly white, often assumed that nature was a racially neutral repository of value and largely ignored the homogeneity of their numbers and their scholarly interests. This situation has started to change, both with greater diversity in the practitioners of ecocriticism and in a number of recent works in the field—including Jeffrey Myers’s groundbreaking 2005 study, Converging Stories: Race, Ecology, and Environmental Justice in American Literature, Kimberly K. Smith’s 2007 work, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations, and my own 2008 Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance—that seek to analyze how profoundly imbricated racial and natural experience have been throughout history. Ian Finseth’s Shades of Green adds to this rapidly growing body of scholarship and should prove an invaluable resource, particularly for those interested in the early American and antebellum periods.

Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2014

Interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, 2005

... Indeed, occupying this liminal position between land and text is, for Whitman, the central ro... more ... Indeed, occupying this liminal position between land and text is, for Whitman, the central role of the poet. ... modernist knowledge, nor in more traditional Romantic terms as a special sensitivity to natural beauty, but rather in his ability to communicate, in language, a preexisting ...

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often shar... more Drawing on theories of sublimity, trauma, and ecocriticism, this book examines how the often sharp division between European American and African American experiences of the natural world developed in American culture and history, and how those natural experiences, in turn, shaped the construction of race.

Journal of American Studies, Aug 1, 2002

Dear Friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself-& yourself also. You must not construct such a... more Dear Friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself-& yourself also. You must not construct such an unauthorized & imaginary ideal Figure, & call it W. W. and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it. The actual W. W. is a very plain personage, & entirely unworthy of such devotion. Whitman to Anne Gilchrist, " Whitman's insistence on '' absorbing his country, '' and his extraordinary success in translating his social context into poetry, has produced a rich tradition of biographical and historical criticism,# a tradition rejuvenated in recent years by the popularity of cultural studies.$ Indeed, Ed Folsom, the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, notes in the introduction to his own cultural study of Whitman's work, a '' critical consensus '' that '' Whitman is best understood contextually, as a writer who reabsorbed many aspects of his culture into his work, a writer we best read by moving from the poetry out into the world that the work was woven from, a writer best understood in juxtaposition to just about any aspect of the culture we can name '' (Native Representations, ix). This tradition of scholarship is rich because it is, of course, broadly right in asserting a

Contemporary Literature, 1997

... became bodily action, sex, a baby. It is this perilous boundary between desire andmateriality... more ... became bodily action, sex, a baby. It is this perilous boundary between desire andmateriality, a boundary "not delin-eated in space" (8), that the aunt crosses, and that the book, from the start, effaces. And it is this effaced boundary ...

American literary realism, 2016

Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west o... more Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west of a given white observer. from the first farms and villages to the antebellum period, European American settlement pushed against a range of frontiers—not only west, but also north and south, from coastal plains into mountains and forests and swamps, from the urban / pastoral/“civilized” to wherever native peoples still retained their numbers, rights, and culture. Postbellum, as countless writers have discussed, the West became the privileged site of a nature at once wild and national, a place both ahuman and the literal and figurative ground of white American masculinity. The reasons for this identification of “West” and “nature” can, of course, be readily explained by simple facts of geography and settlement: in the second half of the nineteenth century the East was much more thoroughly developed than the West, had a far greater human population density, had killed or exiled much of the native population, had much less recognizably wild land; the West, in turn, was far less populated and developed, and incorporated a stunningly beautiful variety of landscapes and creatures, readily available for both admiration and exploitation. Those simple facts and the straightforward explanation they offer in turn yield a simple and straightforward, and wrong, superimposition of a geographical transition onto a historical one. in this conflation, the physical movement from East to West becomes the unresolved contradictory assertion that going west is at once a movement from old to new—from the overcivilized East burdened by history, to the new frontier—and from new to old—from the technologically enthralled East ruled by perpetual change, to a place of natural origin and renewal. for (at least) white men,

Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2008

In 1991, an umbrella organization of environmental justice activists sent a sharply critical open... more In 1991, an umbrella organization of environmental justice activists sent a sharply critical open letter to ten of the largest environmental organizations in the United States, accusing them of “environmental racism.” The letter charged that the groups focused monothematically on wilderness preservation, paid scant attention to the vastly unequal exposure of minority communities to toxic waste, diesel particulates, agricultural pesticides, and lead contamination, and were indifferent to the almost entirely white composition of their workforce. Most of the groups that received the letter (particularly Greenpeace and the Sierra Club) responded positively, subsequently paying greater attention to environmental justice concerns and recruiting people of color to serve on their professional staffs. Still, the letter exposed a much deeper racial fault line in American environmentalism than could be mended by shifting priorities and altering hiring practices.1 As the black liberation theologian James Cone laments, Until recently, the ecological crisis has not been a major theme in the liberation movements in the African American community. “Blacks don’t care about the environment” is a typical comment by white ecologists. Racial and economic justice has been at best only a marginal concern in the mainstream environmental movement. “White people care more about the endangered whale and the spotted owl than they do about the survival of young blacks in our nation’s cities” is a well-founded belief in the African American community. (138)

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Mar 17, 2022

To call attention to the specific historical ways that sublime experience functioned in the forma... more To call attention to the specific historical ways that sublime experience functioned in the formation of race is not the same as declaring such a reading exhaustive. It would be more than merely reductive to dismiss the natural sublime or wilderness experience as simply a white cover-up. To swing from an uncritical white masculinist Romanticism, to a reflexive sort of demystification of the sublime that insists on a total retextualization of nature helps neither racial politics nor the planet. Nor does it begin to do justice to the fundamentally contradictory sorts of experiences and possibilities named by the sublime. Within ecocriticism, such a binary oscillation between true belief and demystification replicates the sort of theoretical tail-chasing we see in the seemingly endless debates over whether nature is really a transcendent Real or just another ideological construction, and what the right ratio between construction and transcendence is, and how to tell the difference, and so forth.

American Literary Realism, 2016

Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west o... more Since at least the Civil War, wild American nature has, in general, been located somewhere west of a given white observer. from the first farms and villages to the antebellum period, European American settlement pushed against a range of frontiers—not only west, but also north and south, from coastal plains into mountains and forests and swamps, from the urban / pastoral/“civilized” to wherever native peoples still retained their numbers, rights, and culture. Postbellum, as countless writers have discussed, the West became the privileged site of a nature at once wild and national, a place both ahuman and the literal and figurative ground of white American masculinity. The reasons for this identification of “West” and “nature” can, of course, be readily explained by simple facts of geography and settlement: in the second half of the nineteenth century the East was much more thoroughly developed than the West, had a far greater human population density, had killed or exiled much of the native population, had much less recognizably wild land; the West, in turn, was far less populated and developed, and incorporated a stunningly beautiful variety of landscapes and creatures, readily available for both admiration and exploitation. Those simple facts and the straightforward explanation they offer in turn yield a simple and straightforward, and wrong, superimposition of a geographical transition onto a historical one. in this conflation, the physical movement from East to West becomes the unresolved contradictory assertion that going west is at once a movement from old to new—from the overcivilized East burdened by history, to the new frontier—and from new to old—from the technologically enthralled East ruled by perpetual change, to a place of natural origin and renewal. for (at least) white men,

Landscapes the Journal of the International Centre For Landscape and Language, 2013

Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Palgrave Macmillan), won the 20... more Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (Palgrave Macmillan), won the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) biennial award for the best theoretical book written on literature and the environment published in 2007 and 2008. This interview took place during the summer of 2010 in Tallahassee, Florida, USA. A Spanish version of this interview was published in Kanatari, the main cultural journal of the Peruvian Amazon basin at Florida State University.