Stefanie Dunning on Black to Nature: Pastoral Return in African American Culture

A conversation with Stefanie Dunning, Professor of English at Miami University in Ohio, about her book Black to Nature: Pastoral Return in African American Culture, published in 2021 by University of Mississippi Press.

Show Notes

John E. Drabinski hosts a conversation with Stefanie Dunning, Professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The author of numerous essays on African American literature and culture, Stefanie has authored two books: Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture, published by Indiana University Press in 2009 and Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, published by University of Mississippi Press in 2021 and the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the origins of the book, the importance of nature and plant life in thinking about African American literature and cultural production, and the complexities of afropessimism for theorizing the end of the world, the terms of beginning again, and the possibilities for imagining a different future.

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.