Ecowomanism and Literature

Dear Colleagues, 

This year, 2023, marks the 44^th birthday of womanism. The term “womanist” was first used by Alice Walker in her short story “Coming Apart” in 1979. Since then, the seed of womanism has germinated and grown into a lush intellectual landscape through the care and tending of writers, theologians, artists, activists, and scholars. In 2006, about a quarter century after the first use of “womanist” in literature, Layli Maparyan (then Layli Phillips) published her groundbreaking anthology The Womanist Reader. The reader traces the genealogy of womanism to three origins: Alice Walker’s definition of womanism, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi’s African womanism, and Clenora Hudson-Weems's Africana womanism. Each distinctive, the three origins of womanism took root in the rich soil of literature, with Walker’s corpus of creative writing, Ogunyemi’s literary criticism Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women, and Hudson-Weems's Africana Womanist Literary Theory. Together, these works paint a literary–political landscape from the 1970s to the turn of the twenty-first century, addressing entangled questions of black feminism, the civil rights movement, black nationalism, decolonization of the African continent, and the African and black diasporic identity.

Ecowomanism was not named explicitly by early womanist writers and scholars, although ecological sensitivity is inherent in their works even before Alice Walker herself used the word “womanist.” In her 1973 poetry collection Revolutionary Petunias, she potently named one of her poems “The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom”, linking race and gender with nature. The triangulation of race, gender, and nature continues to undergird her later works such as Meridian (1976), The Temple of My Familiar (1989), Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (2004), and Hard Times Require Furious Dancing (2010). Her fiction and poetry explore themes as diverse as indigenous concepts of nature, food, and health, women’s self-liberation through the exploration of sexual expressions and immersion in the natural world, collective socio-ecological–spiritual healing, and more.

Besides Alice Walker, countless African American women writers address interconnected issues of nature and its intersection with race, gender, sexuality, and environmental crises.  For example, Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction Parable of the Sower (2000) addresses these intersections, as do  Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2002) edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savory, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009) edited by Camille T. Dungy, and A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (2023) edited by Erin Sharkey, just to name a few.  Although these writers may not claim “womanist” for themselves or their works, they provide fertile literary landscape and inspirational sources for third-generation womanist scholars to conceptualize ecowomanism through the lenses of literature and literary criticism.

Literature and literary criticism may be seen as one origin stream to the main water course of ecowomanism.  While the term ecofeminism coined by the French feminist Françoise d'Eaubonne in 1974 can be singularly located, the conceptual frameworks of ecowomanism has “multiple mothers” or origin points. As such, ecowomanism at its early stage of development grew just beyond its sister garden of ecofeminism. The first time the term ecowomanism appeared in a publication is in “Ecology is a sistah's issue too: the politics of emergent Afrocentric ecowomanism” by Shamara Shantu Riley. This essay was collected in the book Ecofeminism and the Sacred edited by Carol J. Adams and published in 1993.

Chandra Taylor Smith is credited with bringing conceptual shape and vision to ecowomanism in the field of theology and ethics. Her dissertation, Earth Blood and Earthling Existence: A Methodological Study of Black Women’s Writings and Their Implications for A Womanist Ecological Theology published by UMI Dissertation Services in 2001, introduced an interdisciplinary method and approach to explore black women’s theoethical perspectives on ecology and religion. Expanding some of the categories familiar to womanist theology and ethics, and seeking to draw upon the strong intellectual tradition of black liberation theology, Dianne D. Glave, first explored the term “black environmental liberation theology” while signaling the importance of black women’s participation in constructing environmentally safe, ethical, and communal spaces historically aligned with the black Church in To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Since justice is such a central theme in womanist theology and ethics, and attention to environmental health in black communities is key to exploring the work of building ethical frames for wholeness in the work of theology, ecowomanism can be said to be a potent strand of DNA in the genes of womanism. From this vantage point, it is destined to later grow into a freestanding tree, like a new aspen tree from the parent tree in an aspen grove. 

Ecowomanism continues to grow and draw interest in the twenty-first century in the midst of the increasing climate crisis and social unrest. In 2016, the Special Issue Ecowomanism, Religion and Ecology edited by Melanie Harris was published in the Journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology. In her introduction to the Special Issue, Harris illuminates three hallmarks of ecowomanism; its methodology is intersectional. It examines how race, class, gender, and other social categories of difference interlock to shape environmental injustice; its scope is global. There is an emerging global link in the African and Asian diasporas around the environmental crisis, and its imperative is Ejustice. Earth-honoring faiths, including African and Native American cosmologies, play an important role in creating Earth justice. The Special Issue was followed by Harris’s monograph Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths, which was published as part of the Ecology and Justice Series of Orbis Books in 2017. This book further lays out the methodology, significance, and application of ecowomanism.

One thread in the tapestry of 21^st century ecowomanism is interwoven with Chinese and Tibetan ecospiritual traditions, through the works by Xiumei Pu, in essays such as “Turning Weapons into Flowers: Ecospiritual Poetics and Politics of Bön and Ecowomanism” published in the Special Issue Ecowomanism, Religion and Ecology edited by Melanie Harris, and “Nature, Sexuality, and Spirituality: A Womanist Reading of Di Mu (Earth Mother) and Di Mu Jing (Songs of Earth Mother) in China”, collected in the book Ain’t I a Womanist Too?:Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought edited by Monica Coleman. Drawing on the old literature of The Twelve Deeds: A Brief Life Story of Tonpa Shenrab, the Founder of the Bon Religion and Di Mu Jing, respectively, these publications bring forth the synergy between nature-based indigenous Asian spiritual traditions and ecowomanism to bear on the global Earth healing praxis.

The year 2023 is also the Year of the Water Rabbit. In the spirit of water, an essential element that brings change, the editors of this Special Issue Xiumei Pu and Melanie Harris invite interdisciplinary, intersectional, inter-cultural, and interreligious essays engaging ecowomanist literature. Questions include, but are not limited to, what new light can ecowomanism help shed on the challenges and possibilities of the unfolding Anthropocene and or what Joanna Macy calls “The Great Turning” in the 21^st century?  How can ecowomanist literary imagination help envision paths forward to a more livable and just future?

Abstract deadline: 31 December 2023, Full manuscript deadline: 1 June 2024

We look forward to receiving your contributions. 

Dr. Xiumei Pu
Prof. Dr. Melanie L. Harris
Guest Editors

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• ecowomanism
• earth justice
• literature
• religion
• ecology
• climate change
• anthropocene