Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment Advance Access originally published online on July 28, 2009
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2009 16(3):525-549; doi:10.1093/isle/isp064
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"Sprung from American Soil": The "Nature" of Africa in the Poetry of Helene Johnson
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Ecocritical definitions of ecopoetics usually involve advocacy for nature. I concur with this quite logical aim, but I would also argue that there are times when ecocritics should also consider that the focus of ecopoetics is the advocacy for the human subject, using tropes or categories of nature.1 We should reorient ecocritical expectations of what ecopoetry can or should do so that we can include voices of human subjects, which are, at this point, largely excluded from ecocritical attention. This is especially true in the case of early-twentieth-century black writers.2 Recognizing the ecopoetics of Helene Johnson, a black female poet of the Harlem Renaissance, can begin this shift of attention.3 I read selections of her poetry as ecopoetics by reading it through the filter of race and what I call ethnographic poetics. Ethnographic poetics is characterized by the poet's attention to collection and collecting of culture (in its varied meanings);