Scarlett Croft

About Scarlett’s Research:

Environmental literary history has rarely considered the significance of African American eco-poetry to the formation of environmental poetry. My PhD intervenes in this literary history, arguing that post-war African American eco-poetry collectively radicalised the parameters of what constitutes environmental concern and devastation, desanitizing both the poetics and politics of ecology. As Black radicalism began to intersect with Black Ecologies, these poets increasingly wrote with movement building in mind, ensuring the conditions of Black precarity was materialised in spoken word settings and at rallies. In turn, ecology was made relevant within broader call to Black liberation. Indeed, the poetry of Lucille Clifton, Jayne Cortez, Robert Hayden, Gil Scot-Heron and June Jordan all interrogate the prevailing construction of freedom, as unending capital accumulation and racial subjection, and contrast it with the possibility of Black freedom dreams.