Overview

Anne Spencer’s identity as an artist grew from her relationship to the natural world. During the New Negro Renaissance with which she is primarily associated, critics dismissed her writings on nature as apolitical and deracinated. Do Not Separate Her from Her Garden corrects that misconception, showing how Spencer used the natural world in innovative ways to express her Black womanhood, feminist politics, spirituality, and singular worldview. Employing ecopoetics as an analytical frame, Carlyn Ferrari recenters Spencer’s archive of ephemeral writings to cut to the core of her artistic ethos. Drawing primarily on unpublished, undated poetry and prose, this book represents a long overdue reassessment of an underappreciated literary figure. Not only does it resituate Spencer in the pantheon of American women of letters, but it uses her environmental credo to analyze works by Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dionne Brand, positioning ecocritical readings as a new site of analysis of Black women’s writings.

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9780813948768

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Reviews

A major contribution to studies of Anne Spencer specifically and to American literary and cultural criticism more broadly. Ferrari has engaged carefully with all the extant critical work in the field and pushed the level of scholarship to new heights. This book will prove of immense value to readers with an interest in the Harlem Renaissance and civil rights movements and to poetry readers, social historians, and cultural critics alike. --Aldon Lynn Nielsen, The Pennsylvania State University, author of The Inside Songs of Amiri Baraka

Author Information

Carlyn Ena Ferrari is Assistant Professor of English at Seattle University.

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