Series numbering inferred from series list in book. Includes bibliographical references (pages 191-222) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: diminishment -- partial readings in the casualties of natural history -- 1. Sketching American species: birds, weeds, and trees in Audubon, Cooper, and Pokagon -- 2. "Because I see---New Englandly---": Emily Dickinson and the specificity of disjunction -- 3. Coral of life: James McCune Smith and the diasporic structure of racial uplift -- 4. Thoreau's dispersion: writing a natural history of casualties -- Afterword: &.
Summary:
"American cultural technologies of the early nineteenth century shaped Nature and the synonymous "native" in contradictory ways: celebrating the wilderness but then transforming it by cultivation, mourning lost "natives" (both people and species) while also naturalizing the succession of new Euro-American settlers. Settler colonial geopolitics understood its own territorial claims in association with the retreats, migrations, and expansions of select species populations: cattle replacing American bison or Euro-Americans replacing Indians on the western frontier. In this way, Euro-American descendants of settlers who then considered themselves "natives" could be the natural stewards to "preserve" or "reform" wild remnants of nature while also identifying against the encroachment of the Old World. Technological arts as varied as moving panoramas and picturesque sketches depicted and enacted civilization overtaking the wild frontier through visual tours. This chapter explores how the sketch fits into technologies of seeing accompanying American settler colonialism and points to moments when it suggests ecological processes of ongoing passage rather than terminal extinction or succession"-- Provided by publisher.
Series:
Cambridge studies in American literature and culture ; 187
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