Visions of the Land: Science, Literature and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology Book

Tate examines domestic fiction produced by Black US women writers in the 1890s. She politicizes the depictions of the domestic as ideals that represented the political desires of the works' first readers. She reconstructs the political milieu to demonstrate the plausibility of her reading of the desires of the works' first readers. While her political context is well-written, she also excels in her close readings of the texts. One particularly enjoyable chapter compared the gendered relationship between marriage and freedom in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and Richard Wright's Black Boy . Using these more contemporary texts as lenses, Tate explains why the earlier writings she examines appear as apolitical to the contemporary reader, and why such a reading of the texts as apolitical is itself ahistorical. Her argument, that black Americans viewed marriage in the post-reconstruction period as akin to voting as a political right granted by citizenship and the end of slavery, is particularly effective in politicizing the unrealistic romantic plots she analyzes. I also very much enjoyed the comparative reading of Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig. These two chapters provided the antecedents and progeny of the ideas, ideals, and desires expressed in 1890s novels central to her argument.

The heart of Tate's study focuses on 11 domestic fiction novels written by black women in the post-reconstruction period. She succeeds at documenting the ways in which the novels used similar methods of politicizing the tropes of sentimental literature to forge differing ideological positions. Moreover she successfully demonstrates the shift over time in the domestic representations she considers.

It is often hard to enjoy literary criticism of texts which one has not yet read. Yet Tate succeeded in bringing such texts alive. I find myself with a new list of literature I would like to read starting with Angelina Weld Grimke's play Rachel.

I read Claudia Tate's book immediately after Amy Kaplan's Anarchy of Empire. Both books were suggested as useful models in engaging the politics of domestic representations in US fiction. Tate's book was most successful in reminding me of the importance of linking ideas lifted from models to the time of their production. While I could muster the textual evidence to apply some of her ideas directly to the texts I am most concerned with these days, to do so would be historically inconsistent. Yet Tate's point that whether marriage is considered to limit or further the ability of the individual to contribute to social justice seems applicable even to a different group and different circumstances. How is citizenship imagined in a certain moment? What are the responsibilities and duties of a citizen? How are the responsibilities, duties, and outcome of marriage related to those responsibilities, and duties of citizenship? What kind of citizenship is marriage modeling?

Although I appreciated Tate's focus on first readership, this is the least applicable to my project. If anything, it highlighted to me how little audience matters to the discursive traditions I am documenting. Indeed, several of the works I engage were never published during their day.

Although I found Tate's work thoroughly engaging, if you don't care must for literary criticism, you may not be as intrigued.