Plotting a New Course for Environmental Humanities: Provision Grounds, Race, and the Future

Abstract

This article suggests that the notion of “the plot” has methodological and epistemological value for the environmental humanities. Conceptualized in the work of Sylvia Wynter, the plot—as material site and narrative mode crucial to the novel form—offers a heuristic for analyzing the conjuncture of political economy, social-cultural aesthetics, and power. The plot names places that have been created through improvisational forms of world-making against racial and socioecological domination. The plot also names an insurgent scheme that is staged from peripheralized places and that is crucial to maintaining these spaces of insurgent living. Plotting is presented as an analytical mode that offers scholars in the environmental humanities: a framework for place-specific historical-geographical and ecological study; a critical cartographical praxis; and an approach for examining the logics and affective relations of place production. Environmental humanities scholarship that engages with Black ecocriticism along these lines is well positioned to examine the geographies of the past, present, and future with attention to the racial politics of human embodiment. Such scholarship would be characterized by more careful use of spatial metaphors, ensuring that ecocriticism and broader environmental humanities work considers the material and physical racial ecologies alongside the discursive and representational environments.

Introduction

Environmental humanities scholars insist on new understandings of environmental temporality, a refashioning of human being-ness, and consequently a reformulation of ethics of human relationality and responsibility to nonhuman beings as we approach futures beyond ecological apocalypse. “Yet the future is not only about what is to come or even about present imaginings. Futures also have histories.”¹ These histories can recuperate some of the very dualisms and ontological presumptions that the environmental humanities seek to unsettle. How the future comes into being, and the ways in which it is not always liberatory or redemptive, are also sometimes not interrogated. The political positions from which the future is imagined, what imagined futures envision as possible, and who is involved in futurity all highlight how futures are contestable and contingent. This insight is an injunction against environmental futurities that flatten categories of difference and relations of power. By interrogating the limits of the future, critics have made openings for the environmental humanities to contend with the production of futurities. In this article, I want to focus on Black environmentalism as a form of place-making that reflects deep meditations on the production of the future grounded in confrontations of power and difference. Black world-making against apocalypse, and the ways in which these practices are rendered visible or invisible in futurisms, illuminate how epistemologies of the human, racialized discourses, and the geography of power are entangled.² Work in Black geographies and Black ecologies (which I read as Black ecocriticism) offers insights for responding to the vexing questions of how to make futures that neither replicate social inequalities nor evade relations of human difference. I read the spatial refusal of plot-making and plot-life as Black spatial-ecological work against institutional and economic enclosure. To be seen, such refusals require plotting as a mode of ethical reading.

The Promise of Environmental Humanities: Place, Ecocriticism, and the Future

In their editorial introducing Environmental Humanities as a journal, Deborah Bird Rose and coeditors noted that, with the future at stake, the environmental humanities presents an approach to “enrich environmental research with a more extensive conceptual vocabulary, whilst at the same time vitalizing the humanities by rethinking the ontological exceptionality of the human.” By bringing traditions of source text criticism, semiotics, hermeneutics, and philosophy to bear on environmental issues, environmental humanists have sought to “articulate a ‘thicker’ notion of humanity, one that rejects reductionist accounts of self-contained, rational, decision making subjects. Rather, the environmental humanities positions us as participants in lively ecologies of meaning and value, entangled within rich patterns of cultural and historical diversity that shape who we are and the ways in which we are able to ‘become with’ others.” Rose and collaborators invite us “to inhabit a difficult space of simultaneous critique and action . . . [and] re-imagine the proper questions and approaches of our fields.”³ The social politics that shape the experience of human difference is one consideration that unsettles the dominant narratives of the environmental humanities and its orientation to the future. However, this is not entirely spelled out in that editorial.

Feminist theorists; queer, Black, Indigenous, Chicana, and Global South creative writers and scholars; disabled people; and people who experience the world as subalterns have attended to just that kind of work.⁴ Their work offers rich genealogies of how power and difference shape embodiment and show how the present is related to futures that were conjured in the past, often from narrow imaginations that accepted racist, sexist, ableist, classist, and other forms of inequality and exclusion as teleological, normal, natural, or unproblematic. In differently instructive ways, such work shows that the spaces from which we arrive at futures must be critically appraised. A perfect example of this is the “Anthropocene.” Axelle Karera observes, for example, “Apocalyptic sensibilities which have significantly monopolized Anthropocenean discourses are powerful in disavowing and erasing racial antagonisms. They foreclose ‘proper political framings’ while, simultaneously, they continue to construct and maintain growing numbers of both new and old enemies along racial lines.”⁵ Such observations point to core challenges that remain for the environmental humanities: how to examine and talk about place, race, and power without reinscribing racialized difference or avoiding it; how to avoid essentializing place; and how to not naturalize relationships of power. Black geographies and Black ecologies have been attending to such challenges. This scholarship offers tools for environmental humanists interested in both the politics of the production of place and the racialization of space, and what this means for human-environmental scholarship.⁶

Black geographies and ecologies problematize the prioritization and normalization of whiteness, white aesthetics, and white geographical-ecological issues when race and racializing practices are not explicitly centered in ecocriticism and geohistorical analyses. Challenging the discounting of Black thought and place-making, this scholarship valorizes Black environmentalism and prioritizes Black futures.⁷ Practitioners of Black ecocriticism challenge reductionist conceptualization of Black life as defined by death, racism, slavery, and exposure to violence. They question the foreclosures on Black communities when Black knowledge and poetics are seen as parochial and show how denials of or lack of attention to Black geographies flow from historiographies that only account for Black peoples’ space as uninhabitable, desolated, or otherwise unfit for humans. Black ecocriticism, therefore, illuminates the limits of traditional (white) socio-spatial and political ecological scholarship and demonstrates the value of methodologies attuned to Black life.⁸ As Katherine McKittrick notes, “The geographies of slavery, postslavery, and black dispossession provide opportunities to notice that the right to be human carries in it a history of racial encounters and innovative black diaspora practices that, in fact, spatialize acts of survival.”⁹ Such spatial-ecological criticism has provided entirely new accounts of Black livingness, offered deeper landscape histories (especially of the Black Atlantic world), and valorized the adeptness of Black epistemologies. The plot has been a crucial analytic notion in this scholarship.¹⁰

I track the plot through its explicit mobilization and subaltern itinerary. As Sylvia Wynter has been a central theorist of the plot and its prospects for Black studies, I will devote space to elucidating her arguments. I see this elucidation of Wynter’s argument as a component of a radical citational praxis of acknowledging intellectual genealogies.¹¹ In giving Wynter and her interlocutors space, my interest is in providing a primer that contextualizes my argument and encourages further engagement. In Black geographies and ecologies, the plot is used to center Black spatial agency, environmental labors, and epistemologies. This usage of the plot symbolically and geographically maps Black lifeworlds to counter depictions of Black people as ungeographic. I expand on this use by suggesting that the plot affords consideration of other subordinated people’s historical geographies, especially Indigenous people of the “New World” from whose world’s enslaved peoples’ plots were created. I propose that more explicit consideration of the nonhuman can bolster the plot’s value for exploring the diversity of life at the edge of dominant geographies.

In the next section I outline Wynter’s notion of the plot. Following this I consider how the plot has been deployed in Black geographies and ecologies. I center key engagements with Wynter’s conceptualization that exemplify the plot’s appearance in Black ecocriticism. Then I show conceptualizations akin to the plot that appear in wider Black studies and propose that such homologous figurations of the plot reflect a tradition of analysis that accompanies spatial metaphors with “deep maps.”¹² These deep mappings are produced through careful attention to the material architectures of racialized places, the historical geographies of racialized vulnerability and risk, as well as the poetics of place and practices of resistance that create countergeographies. Next I outline three modes of using the plot as an analytical tool that might constitute a framework of plotting. My intention is to note the distinct value of each mode to amplify the overall value of an epistemological and methodological approach that works through the plot. Such plot-work helps us map fugitivity, insurgent environmental knowledge, and abolitionist space-making as an archipelago of the plot’s itinerary.¹³

Plotting and plot-work do not require the use of metaphor. Instead, my suggestion is that critical scholars should approach storytelling, the mapping of the future, and the political geography of subaltern life with keen attention to the place-epistemologies and relations of communities that are forging worlds through plots against apocalypse. Plot-work is attentive to how places are practiced, and the futures such practices anticipate. Plot-work is ecocriticism that heeds the call to suspend damage, death, and dying, which offer bad futures.¹⁴

Beyond Plantation History: Sylvia Wynter’s Plot to Decolonize Environmental Discourse

The current mobilizations of the plot in Black ecocriticism are derived from the work of Sylvia Wynter.¹⁵ In a 1971 article Wynter discussed the relationship between the provision grounds of the enslaved—the plot—where food for domestic consumption was grown, and the monocrop plantation where food production was oriented toward export.¹⁶ Her analysis positioned the plot as a countercapitalist site of communality and Black social reproduction taking place alongside and in opposition to the plantation production system. For Wynter, the dialectic between the plot and the plantation paralleled the relationship between the novel and official historical writings. The plot and novel had shared structures of values vis-à-vis the plantation and History, which were presented as invincible and objective truth, respectively.¹⁷ Capitalist production and rights of property guided white investments in the plantation, while cooperative cultivation for uplift informed Black people’s investments in the plot. “The plantation system was the superstructure of civilization; and the plot was the roots of culture. But there was a rupture between them, the superstructure was not related to its base, did not respond to the needs of the base, but rather to the demands of external shareholders and the metropolitan market.”¹⁸

Against alienation and cultural erasure, the plot enabled Black food provisioning and developed into a physical space where African food and social cultures were reconstituted in the Americas. The plot was, therefore, a symbolic ground on which Africans were indigenized to the Americas as their creative and physical labors created a world for them to live in. A folk culture developed “around the growing of yam, of food for survival.”¹⁹ The yam is the root of culture and an allegorical device. As a place where yam grows, the plot of the enslaved is connected to Africa; it was created in the image of African ecologies. The yam reflects agrarian histories, foodways, and labor that are not contained neatly by the plot. Yams grow underground with little tending, developing in a niche in the food forest, to be unearthed with the investment of hard labor.²⁰ Provisions like yam foreground Black agrarian experiments and social interactions, and place-based ecological knowledge and agency. Anticipating Wynter, John Parry, two decades prior, had opined that, for Caribbean people, “their history must explain primarily their own experiences. Their economic history should be the story of yams, cassava, and salt fish, no less than of sugar and tobacco.”²¹ The yam—and other plot crops—suggests epistemologies and ontologies that are denied or obscured in transatlantic histories centering the plantation.²² The plot highlights these epistemological and ontological ruptures and their potential for Caribbean historiography of the past and futures. If “the plot too has its own history,” “a secretive history,” then excavation is needed to clarify these histories and make sense of them through the poetics of plot-dwellers.²³

The plot anticipates the postcolonial nation; the nation is built out of the politics of the plot. To make this point, Wynter discusses H. G. deLisser’s Revenge, V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, Vic Reid’s New Day, James Ngugi’s Weep Not Child, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Robert Serumaga’s Return to the Shadows. By reading these novels from and about Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, Trinidad, and Uganda, Wynter maps colonial ecology and social geography, not through proximity but through attempts to readdress colonial and capitalist systems of domination through places like the provision grounds. Wynter’s analysis focuses on how each novel’s storyline (narrative plot) disclosed the histories and futures of Black and Brown people. Wynter probes how alienation is negotiated, examines the racialized affordances and limitations of literary worlds, and explores the relationship between modes of writing (about political economy, environmental change, and social justice) in the postcolonial reality and social memory. She asks us to consider how the plots—storylines and places mapped through the works of fiction—expose the farce of histories propping up the plantations and capitalism’s socioecological relations. This opens possibilities to abandon inherited colonial and capitalist hierarchies that limit postcolonial futures.²⁴ Wynter’s approach serves as a model that can allow the environmental humanities to better engage with how futures can emerge from human engagements with the nonhuman world in landscapes of racialized power.

There are two related notions from Wynter’s oeuvre that relate to the plot: demonic grounds, or demonic perspective; and decipherment. She uses the concept of demonic perspective to designate a Black feminist point of view that resides outside spaces of dominant understandings of who is assumed to be human and what is taken as knowledge. As with the plot, the demonic ground is a space of alterity and liminality. Observing the world from the demonic grounds provides an analytical distance that allows the “premise of supraculturalism” of the discourses in the humanities and social sciences to come into sharp relief. Wynter cautions that “canons are never the mere formulae. . . . Nor can the present battle over the canons which is a battle about the hierarchies of race and class, a battle over the definition of the ‘us’ be resolved by the purely operational theory of meaning. . . . For canons do. Literary texts and meanings too.”²⁵ Canons acculturate and institutionalize, reproducing dominant paradigms of aesthetics and knowledge.

Wynter invokes deciphering practice as the mode of cultural analysis that is concerned with how signifying practices establish systems of value that organize aesthetic sensibilities. As such, decipherment goes beyond cultural criticism, in that it seeks to uncover not simply the meaning of the text, film, or object but the systems that come to govern, and therefore formalize, culture-specific meanings and imaginaries. This practice of decipherment is crucial to cultural revolutions against dominant imaginaries since it clarifies what is alterable about the systems of meaning by which our cultural imaginaries are instituted. “A deciphering practice is, therefore, part of the attempt to move beyond our present ‘human sciences’ to that of a new science of human ‘forms of life’ and their correlated modes of the aesthetic.”²⁶

Wynter advances an understanding of the plot in terms of world-making and as a methodology for scripting new futures. This methodological itinerary of the plot follows from Wynter’s reminder that humans are a storytelling species, Homo narrans.²⁷ Following Frantz Fanon’s notion of the human as constituted of skins and masks (or respectively, phylogeny/ontogeny and sociogeny), Wynter argues for an understanding of the human as bios (biological beings) and logos or mythos (storytelling beings). This very storytelling ability—a capacity to craft origin stories and myths—is what underlies the novel. It is “the dynamic interaction between our genetic and nongenetic codes”—which Wynter describes, respectively, as “our first set of instructions and our second set of instructions”—that render us hybridly humans.²⁸ Therefore “humanness is no longer a noun. Being human is a praxis.”²⁹ Given the role of these instructions, which function as “laws of hybrid human auto-speciation, thereby of autopoiesis,” Wynter argues that they should “no longer [be] allowed to function outside our conscious awareness.” For this to happen, “we must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it.”³⁰

Wynter opens a way to reevaluate our understanding of what it means to be human by challenging the overrepresentation of one genre of the human as if it were isomorphic with the human species itself.³¹ This reimagination promises better environmental futures, since ecological degradation and destruction of the natural world are direct effects of the cultural hegemony of one genre of the human.³² A future beyond the narrow conceptions of the human will be a future of better ecological realities.

Diverse Plots: Mapping the Spatializations of Black Life

Black geographies and Black ecologies scholars have argued for new epistemological and methodological approaches that clarify the intersections of race, nature, and space and that do not fix the Black body and Black spaces in positions of inescapable degradation. The plot has been a crucial analytic in this scholarship. Across the conceptual iterations and formulations of the plot (and its analytical kin) in Black ecocriticism, we can identify a consonance of methodological and epistemological insights that lend themselves to the environmental humanities. Scholars have shown how the demonic space functions as a geography of escape enabling the evasion of racial-sexual gazes and accompanying violence. The demonic ground serves as the last place imagined as affording escape.³³ It can debilitate, because it is a confined space, making it a paradoxical space. The demonic grounds, as McKittrick shows, ruptures plantation time-space by taking up a location at the center of the plantation but outside its surveillance regime, discounted by and unknowable through plantation logics. These spaces have their own secretive histories and relations of Black mobilities.³⁴ McKittrick shows how focus on these spaces occupied by Black people, particularly women, and the spatial effects of Black women’s negotiation and production of space, allows different plots—storylines—to come into view. These illustrate how Black women have always plotted—made plans and schemes—and affected (as well as effectuated) human geographies. This itinerary of the plot shows it as a framework for examining the perspectival understandings and concrete spatial realities that provide Black people a cognitive spatial schema or “a Black sense of place” for “materially and imaginatively situating historical and contemporary struggles against practices of domination and the difficult entanglements of racial encounter.”³⁵

Other engagements with plot invest new meaning in Black burial plots, traditional fishing grounds, and farms—a Black commons—as memorializing Black ecological stewardship.³⁶ J. T. Roane uses the plot to clarify the sociogeographical relations between Black commons and urban modernity. The plot becomes a dark agora, the space of insurgent Black cultural and political movements, erotic sovereignty and unorthodox spirituality, and a fugitive sociality. The plot-space moves across spaces of anti-Blackness through Black place-making as a counterterritorializing project.³⁷ The plots as dark agoras or Black commons constitute an emergent ecology reflecting how Black communities make life against toxification, pollution, and uneven vulnerability to environmental disaster.³⁸

For McKittrick, Wynter’s 1971 essay “suggests that plantation futures can go two ways at once: first, where the basic system is left untouched and we are left to defend and justify it and, second, where the awareness of the workings of the system are engendered in a (creative and geographic) plot-life and, at the same time, challenge this long-standing logic.”³⁹ In this way the plot offers a trajectory beyond the coloniality of the Anthropocene, both in the way the future can be imagined and enacted and in the way it historicizes struggles against coloniality. The plot instantiates “relational modes of being, multiple forms of kinship, and non-binary ways of engaging the world that foster ethics of care, equity, resilience, creativity, and sustainability. It is crucial to recognize that the ethics of the plot are forged in and articulated through grounded racial-political struggles.”⁴⁰ The plot is migratory; it comes into the present and anticipates futures. In refusing hegemonic practices of capturing land, the plot locates the reproduction of Black life through illegalized settlements that constitute refusals of placelessness and propertylessness.⁴¹ By understanding the provision grounds as a spatial refusal of dispossession that is reproduced by acts of countercapture, Black ecocritical work traces the plot’s reproduction into contemporary urban geographies. This approach suggests how postcolonial place-making against exclusionary regimes of property as well as contemporary managerial ontologies fixated on efficiency and labor flexibility are the afterlives of the plantation. This thinking with the plot highlights how the labor of making and maintaining plots is often criminalized.⁴²

The plot and plot-like spatial frameworks in Black ecocriticism counter deference to colonially inscribed racialized differences and socioecological borders. Tiffany King, for example, suggests that the shoal, an offshore ridge or bank of unconsolidated material, is a demonic space. The shoal obstructs movement and presents a challenge to cartographers because of its nature as a phenomenon that shifts, accretes, and erodes. Like the plot, the Black shoal is a symbolic and material geography for thinking about the interrelatedness of place geographies and geographies of place-making, colonization of space, and racialized mobilities. “As an in-between, ecotonal, unexpected, and shifting space, the shoal requires new footing, different chords of embodied rhythms, and new conceptual tools to navigate its terrain.”⁴³ With the shoal, King refuses histories of colonial conquest that are overdetermined by metaphors of Indigenous territoriality and land dispossession, on the one hand, and Black rootlessness on the other.

Édouard Glissant also uses plot-like spatial metaphors. Wynter draws on him in her own theorization.⁴⁴ Glissant maps the Caribbean Archipelago as a site of racialized encounter and connivances, which counters the symbolic and material fragmentation of the region by colonial regimes. I see Glissant as offering a wider vocabulary for naming plot-like places and plot-like analytics. The archipelago Glissant names at the end of Poetics of Relation offers us a constellation of political ecologies and geographies to think through the global architectures of race, place, and nature. This spans “plantations of the world, lonely places of isolation, unnatural enclosures” as well as “mangos, bayous, lagoons, muskegs, ice floes. Ghettos, suburbs. Volga beaches, barrios, crossroads, hamlets, sand trails, river bights. Villages being abandoned, ploughed fields given over to roads, houses shut up against their surroundings.”⁴⁵ This archipelago offers sites from which to understand the production of space and politics of encounter that inform landscape poetics. Glissant’s assertion that these places exist as unnatural enclosures suggests geographical separation or distinctions while also provoking us to notice their interconnections. These spaces of otherness provide a vocabulary for plot-work attentive to terrestrial and aquatic, urban and rural, liminal, and ephemeral cultural geographies, and ecologies.

In mapping the mangos (mangrove), bayous, lagoons, muskegs, and ice floes in relation to the ghettos, suburbs, barrios, and hamlets, Glissant is challenging the imagining of the first set of places as empty or peopleless. Like Wynter’s plot, Glissant urges us to notice how “our landscape is its own monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside. It is all history.”⁴⁶ Glissant’s multivalent itineraries of the plot provide frames for linking spatial metaphors and mnemonics with place-relations and place-making practices. The plot and constellation of lonely places of isolation demand interdisciplinary understanding of race, nature, and place-making that do not reinscribe naturalizations of race and metaphorization of space and spatial violence. As Black geographers and Black ecologists have insisted, such understandings of place are realized by a praxis of refusal that unsettles reading Black people and their spaces only as otherness based on normative white perspectives.

Plots and Plot-Work: A Framework for the Environmental Humanities

The plot is a site for staging emancipation. Emancipatory acts reproduce the plot. As Bedour Alagraa notes, “Wynter’s work(s) retain an understanding that there is in fact a way out of our most dire predicaments, without falling into the trap of historical inevitability that undergirds dialectical thinking,” and this offers “a way to betray the dialectic, teleological time, and the problem of inevitability in certain methodological approaches.”⁴⁷ A framework like Wynter’s allows us to grapple with the racial politics of the figuration of the human, the construction of nature, and politics of futurity. Following Wynter in these regards is crucial for environmental humanities scholarship beyond apocalypse. By suggesting an engagement with Wynter, then, I am proposing environmental humanities that reenacts a heresy against systems of thinking that gave rise to the Studia Humanitatis (studies of humanity).⁴⁸ Heresies question existing absolutes. The original heresy of the humanities lay in the questioning of religio-theological explanations and a turn toward secular epistemologies. This was a rewriting of history that centered on the socio-human reproduction of the world and the pursuit of human knowledge instead of resignation to the orthodoxy of religio-theological explanations. The environmental humanities must be reinvented to better account for the place-based knowledge and histories of places reproduced as the outside. The outside places of plots, habitation of those places, the making of those places, and knowledge emergent from making and inhabiting those places all challenge us to notice diverse human geographies and geographies of the human.

The plot and plot-like places are related not by their function as metaphors, allegories, or analogies but by the forms of violence, articulations of racial capitalism, concrete infrastructural realities and spatial politics, and relations of belonging that they remark on.⁴⁹ Scholars in the tradition of Wynter are engaged in plot-work, such nature-society scholarship that charts the dynamics of anti-Black spatial realities, ecocide, the means of their reproduction, and how Black place-making and spatial epistemologies index complex relationships between Black people, geographic thought, and the more-than-human environment. Building on the plot as subject of analysis and making the plot a methodology—plotting or plot-work—holds the promise of enriching the environmental humanities. Here I propose three interconnected analytical modes of plotting or plot-work:

(1) Keeping close to the groove of plotting exemplified in Black ecocriticism, scholars in the environmental humanities can benefit from thinking with space as crucibles for epistemologies of plot-life. Thinking with the plot as method foregrounds plot-occupying peoples’ relationship to spatial and ecological knowledge, racialized production of space, and cartographical imagination and representation. This kind of plot-work centers on the poetics of lonely places of isolation, showing how place-poetics and place-practices escape regimes of discursive, material, and symbolic enclosure. As such, plot-work identifies the ecologies of racialized violence but shows how plots and plot-relations are not reducible to explanations overdetermined by those systems of violence. A methodology of plotting thereby centers the literary and material infrastructures of care (plot-kinships), resistance (strategic plots), and the spatial and ecological knowledge (plot-affects, epistemologies, and aesthetics) that shape diverse antiracist place-making projects. Since the unnatural enclosures exist in relation to the plantations of the world, this practice in the environmental humanities offers a framework for thinking through encounters and politics of encounter that have shaped (literary and physical) plots as spaces of struggle for competing geographical, social, economic, and ecological visions. Importantly, then, unlike in biogeographical research where plot level analysis serves as the basis of comparative research centered around replication and variance, plot-work challenges facile generalizations that purport to explain the trajectories of minoritized peoples’ relationships to space and their place-based environmental movements. Plot-work counters teleological narratives, showing how the regimes of domination touch down or are articulated through space. If Wynter’s proposition that the experience of being humans is crucially tied to our being a storytelling species, then the politics of storytelling are about not just how we relate the stories of plot-working people but the meanings of these stories’ origins and endings as well as the possibilities emergent from alternative vocabularies within our stories. The unstoried and unstoryable emerge not as historical-geographical problems or limitations but the very possibilities from which emancipatory futures might emerge.⁵⁰

(2) Plotting or plot-work serves as a geographical-ecological case study approach that not only examines space but thinks with the plot to show how place, place-making, and senses of place subvert geographies and ecologies of domination. To be sure, such an approach already informs work in the environmental humanities. Thinking explicitly with the plot would extend such work by highlighting the concrete historical geographies of spaces of improvisation, countermemorialization, stewardship, and agrarianism alongside literary geographies and environmental philosophies. Additionally, thinking with the plot would mean clarifying not just how spaces (physical plots) and environmental histories (narrative plots) have been subordinated in environmental literatures and representation but also how plotting these places, place-histories, and embodied place-making practices into environmental histories changes those histories. Just as importantly, such a methodological practice would keep the material stakes of racialized nature central to ecocriticism. Since the racialization of nature, the naturalization of those racialized ecologies, and the very production of nature evince systems of power and knowledge that structure aesthetic value and definitions of the human, this kind of plotting practice offers environmental humanists a framework for decentering the axiomatic and racially color-blind explanations of how race and space are constituted. Recalling Glissant, the plot-spaces of unnatural enclosure also place ethical demands on scholars in the environmental humanities to address the more-than-human, the human, and the nonhuman interactions and intimacies that have characterized plot living. In so doing, plot-work shows how the work of maintaining plots, or making life in lonely places of isolation, unsettle society-nature dichotomies and ontologies without depoliticizing the ways in which racially marked people and the environment have been positioned in similar grids of intelligibility by racist ecological discourse.

(3) Plotting and plot-work offers environmental humanities a critical cartographical praxis; a framework for ethical spatial representation. Wynter’s plot highlights how antiracist, feminist, and historically nuanced spatial imagination is needed to glimpse the secretive histories of the lonely places. Plot-work is, therefore, necessarily about countering spatial representations and mappings that work through deficit models that account for nondominant spaces only in terms of their otherness to traditional geographies and political ecologies.⁵¹ As such, plot-work invokes the cartographical and Cartesian connotations of plotting—placing a point on the coordinate plane, transcribing data on maps or navigational charts—but is about producing countercartographies. This, of course, also relies on the sense of plotting as scheming. Plot-work is about strategic cartographic disclosures, it is about making cartography a site of struggle.⁵² Because deference to maps and cartographic representations can depoliticize space, rendering it transparent, maps can encourage ecocriticism that treat space as a blank canvas where race is lived. The discursive and material production of space is, however, connected to racialization. The spatialization of race and the racialization of space are central to the politics of place and place-making. Cartographical plotting as a methodology of environmental humanities challenges this by interrogating the environmental and racial systems served by erasures of plot-spaces. Research that strives only to validate subordinated or denigrated cartographic archives remains beholden to the very hegemonic cartographic systems that produce such denials to begin with. Through plot-work scholars in the environmental humanities would, therefore, not only affirm subordinated spaces but examine how unmappable spaces create openings for countermaps and counternarratives. These countermaps and narratives would help mark the limits of dominant geographical and ecological thought, showing how subordinated, invisibilized, absented, or erased geographies spanning unnatural enclosures strain against normative orderings of race, territory, and nature in ways that challenge how space might be imagined and imaged. Such plot-work remarks on the uses of cartography as a tool of dispossession, while pursuing liberatory cartographic practices and abolitionist vocabularies for not just ecocriticism but world-building.

Conclusion: The Plot Thickens

The plot as Black counterhegemonic space of flourishing, communal ecological stewardship, and creative place-making underlies Black geographies and Black ecologies scholarship. Drawing on this scholarship—thinking with the plot—offers a coherent analytical framework for analyzing the geographies at the convergence of race, territory, and nature. To theorize from the plot is not to index peripheralized space, spatial agency, or spatial epistemologies always and only in relation to oppression, marginalization, or spatializations and social formations that privilege racial, class, or gender supremacy or normativity. Rather, recuperating the plot as being primarily the instantiation of radical countercultural social life and human affirming environmental relations that rest on kinship with the nonhuman world allows us to think with the plot in the present and read backward through dominant ecological and geographical histories of minoritized and subordinated peoples. Such a reading challenges the overdetermination of the plot in relationship to the plantation and the Americas, and only in relation to Black embodiment. Working with the plot as method places responsibilities on the scholar/critic to problematize systems of oppression, dispossession, ecological degradation, and racialization while explaining the insurgent flourishing, abolition, ecological care, communal place-making, and decolonizing knowledge that counter such systems. In this way, plotting brings counterhegemonic spaces to the center and makes space for understanding the epistemological purchase of those spaces. Plotting provides a framework for scholars in the environmental humanities to ground examinations of space and nature in material geographies and ecologies attentive to the ways in which space is racialized and race is spatialized.

While I have proposed a three-tenet framework of plotting in this article, Wynter’s project offers a wellspring of ontological and epistemological challenges as well as methodological demands for examining Black life. I want to situate those contributions as bringing us to a point of departure. Wynter and the other Black ecocritical scholars I have called on in this essay have not necessarily focused on questions of the other-than-human actors caught up in the world-making of a hegemonic genre of the human-as-white. Indeed, these scholars have made the case for an injunction against posthumanist ontological and epistemological moves that jump over the politics of the human on the way to multispecies lifeworlds. As they show, such an “analytical logic can only ‘end’ with Black death, which, interestingly, reifies the very colonial structures that research on racial violence is (seemingly) working against.”⁵³ Keeping these insights in mind, scholars in the environmental humanities can meaningfully contribute to plot-work as well as use plotting as a framework. For example, while increasingly addressed in Black ecocriticism, questions that remain underexamined include the following: How are plants and nonhuman animals brought into the worlds we inhabit and create, and toward what ends? How are animals and animality enrolled in racial encounters? What are the materials implicated in the future? What are the affordances for invasive species realized through insurgent human plot-making? How do ecologies work, biophysically, to create what humans experience as affordances for plot-life? What are the diverse other-than-human worlds being staged on the plot, and how might these be storied? Environmental humanities scholars are especially adept at pursuing these kinds of questions. And pursuing these questions with the plot as a method of Black ecocriticism can avoid the reification of nonwhite inhumanities. Just as importantly, the reality that human and nonhuman animal encounters have entailed terror and death is an important reminder of the material differences that must still intercept discourses of multispecies kinship.⁵⁴

The environmental humanities can, therefore, enrich plot-work through discussion of nonhuman animals and nature by providing perspective on the political ecology of human attitudes toward nonhuman animals and nature. This includes insights on the racial discourse of animality. Such discourse works through a vocabulary that codes human behavior through references to nonhuman animals, usually suggesting what constitutes proper human behavior and reading deviance as animality. This discourse also codes human worth in relation to the killability of nonhuman animals. The racial discourse of animality shows how nonhuman animals and more-than-human grammars attend human racial encounters, even when not explicit.⁵⁵ Environmental humanities as critical plot-work can newly attend to the ways in which discourses of animality have shaped dominant Western conceptions of the human and justified dominations of nonhuman nature and nonhuman animals. It can do this without falling back on “the Other” simply as the imagined beast. Such work from the environmental humanities can contribute to and extend Wynter’s discussions of the ways in which nonhuman animals and biophysical environment—as the realm of nature—is framed as the realm into which nonwhite peoples risk slipping if they do not adulate and replicate the normative model of the human-as-white. Environmental humanities can help to deepen our understanding of the ethical and moral implications of anthropomorphizing nonhuman animals and mobilizing animals in the reproduction of racialized human hierarchies. What can nonhuman animals say about the plot? How can we hear what the environment is saying? These are questions that environmental humanities scholars have attended to, though not always with attention to the dangers of deracialized posthumanism or postracialism in discussions of human-nature relationalities.

Incorporating Black ecocriticism into how these questions are asked and answered, the environmental humanities can help us ask what the poetics of nonhuman animals are.⁵⁶ The “unparalleled catastrophe for our species” is also a crisis for other species, species that have aided nonwhite human world-making.⁵⁷ We can take up Wynter’s idea of “being human as praxis” as a way of being-in-relation to nonhuman others, in environmental humanities concerned with the decipherment of material political ecologies instead of just cultural, political, and aesthetic ones. One of the lessons of Black ecocriticism is that the strange is familiar for people who have existed outside what the West normalized as being human.

Often the strangeness was a charge related to nonwhite peoples’ communion with the more-than-human. A decipherment of the stories we tell about the other-than-human world might allow us to move beyond the frameworks and vernacular of Western scientific epistemologies that now inform scholarship in the environmental humanities about nonhuman animals and nature. The promise of plot-work enriched by environmental humanities would include discussion of the ecological infrastructure of the plot and the insurgent nature of invasive forms of nonhuman life.⁵⁸ Ice floes are telling a story about climate change. Garbage patches in the ocean, with novel bacteria evolved to eat plastic, tell a story about not just plastic pollution but colonial land relations and a Western ontology of nature as plastic.⁵⁹ We can examine these aquatic plots through an environmental humanities that grapples with the fact that waterscapes have been graves, spaces of forced disappearance, and spaces where nonwhite people are unrescued. The future of the world from an ice floe or a muskeg might be the future of our collective survival. We need plot futures instead of plantation-centric futures.

Acknowledgments

Generative comments from Asha Best, LaToya Eaves, Dylan Harris, Levi Van Sant, W. Jamaal Wright, and Brian Williams on various drafts of this article were extremely helpful. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers and editors of Environmental Humanities for their insightful critiques and suggestions.

Notes

References