Description:
Anne Spencer's identity as an artist grew from her relationship to the natural world. During the New Negro Renaissance with which she is primarily associated, critics dismissed her writings on nature as apolitical and deracinated. Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden corrects that misconception, showing how Spencer used the natural world in innovative ways to express her Black womanhood, feminist politics, spirituality, and singular worldview. Employing ecopoetics as an analytical frame, Carlyn Ferrari recenters Spencer's archive of ephemeral writings to cut to the core of her artistic ethos. Drawing primarily on unpublished, undated poetry and prose, this book represents a long overdue reassessment of an underappreciated literary figure. Not only does it resituate Spencer in the pantheon of American women of letters, but it uses her environmental credo to analyze works by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dionne Brand, positioning ecocritical readings as a new site of analysis of Black women's writings.
Review Quotes:
Drawing on extensive archival research, Ferrari's well-crafted study takes on the task to examine this 'audaciously untypical woman' (p. 82) as an 'unsung cultural theorist and early environmentalist' (p. 59) . . . The study's greatest strength lies in its exploration of 'unconventional archives' (p. 122) . . . [Ferrari] shows how an ecocritical lens can help attending to alternative modes of archiving, thus multiplying historical perspectives and bringing to light stories that institutional archives may obscure. This invitation to consider the richness of nontraditional archives seems particularly vital at a time when pressures to create singular, exclusionary narratives of American history threaten to marginalize the very perspectives such archives make visible.
--Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture