Restoring the Connection to the Natural World. Essays on the African American Environmental Imagination. Ed. Sylvia Mayer (Forecaast, 10).

• Walter Göbel

The representation of nature as an ideal has not been characteristic of African American culture and literature. There are three main reasons for this:
(a) The pastoral and idyllic projections of idealized simpler forms of life belong to a white Western tradition which in the US generally excluded Native Americans and African Americans.
(b) The romanticized versions of the noble savage, when applied to African Americans, were usually overdetermined by stereotypical racist projections of childishness and naïveté (e.g. in the Sambo-figure), provoking reactions against such binary mechanisms of defining the other.
(c) The migration north, which traditionally meant a journey to freedom, was generally a movement away from the country (and from slavery) to the city. Thus the pastoral country-city-opposition was inverted in African American culture.

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