ENVS 059. Fugitive Landscapes: Swamps, Mountains, Cities, Plantations

This course investigates various landscapes of the African Diaspora that formed a staging ground for spatial imaginaries & practices of liberation. Examples include the swamps and mountains of the Caribbean / subtropical Atlantic that offered zones of habitation for integrated Black-Indigenous maroon communities and the creek beds, woodlands, and urban corridors navigated by fugitive African Americans on their Underground Railroad passage to freedom. This course also attends to the site of the plantation, an originating locus of oppression within the geography of racial capitalism that enslaved folks remapped into a clandestine plot of hope and subterfuge through their ecological engagement with the land and other forms of terrestrial life.

Through a foundation of Black ecological theoretical and methodological frameworks combined with three local case studies, this course conceives critical concepts such as sustainability, conservationism and habitat diversity holistically, and approaches Black Diasporic communities - including their oral histories, folklore, and sacred myths - as interdependent upon the topographies and built environments within which they make their abode, and equally vulnerable to amplifying pressures of catastrophic climate change.
This course counts as an Environmental humanities for the ENVS major/minor.
1 credit.
Eligible for BLST.
Catalog chapter: Environmental Studies
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/environmental-studies

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