Waking To Nature With Thoreau And Benjamin

Waking to Nature with Thoreau and Benjamin

What do two white men born in the century before last have to say that could possibly be of any use or value in the current conjuncture of climate collapse, the end of the age of fossil fuels and much life on earth, and the recent re-rise of reactionary forces against progressive politics? Turns out, a lot, especially for waking to nature, place, life, social injustice, environmental destruction, industrial capitalism and its technologies. Henry David Thoreau – an inspiration for William Melvin Kelley's writing on 'staying woke' – and Walter Benjamin suggest sensory means for waking the consumer asleep under the “phony spell” of the “putrid magic” of the commodity; provide tools of theory and critique for waking to sexism, racism, and placism; empower the weak with a robust vocabulary for telling the stories of people and places; create resources of hope and limit the prospect of despair about the future; and point to pathways for being at home with the living earth. These are all vital facets of psychopolitical ecology. Waking to Nature with Thoreau and Benjamin discusses topics both writers share in common, such as memory, dreaming, waking, walking, water, swamps, lakes, the body, and the senses, and highlights convergences and divergences between them. It is the first book of psychopolitical ecology and the first to bring together these two timely thinkers and writers for whom life is the union of materiality and spirituality.

Walking

Awakening to Race

The election of America’s first black president has led many to believe that race is no longer a real obstacle to success and that remaining racial inequality stems largely from the failure of minority groups to take personal responsibility for seeking out opportunities. Often this argument is made in the name of the long tradition of self-reliance and American individualism. In Awakening to Race, Jack Turner upends this view, arguing that it expresses not a deep commitment to the values of individualism, but a narrow understanding of them. Drawing on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, Turner offers an original reconstruction of democratic individualism in American thought. All these thinkers, he shows, held that personal responsibility entails a refusal to be complicit in injustice and a duty to combat the conditions and structures that support it. At a time when individualism is invoked as a reason for inaction, Turner makes the individualist tradition the basis of a bold and impassioned case for race consciousness—consciousness of the ways that race continues to constrain opportunity in America. Turner’s “new individualism” becomes the grounds for concerted public action against racial injustice.