on Agrotopias

Lisa Bognenko (LB): How did you arrive at the project of Agrotopias?

Abby Goode (AG): This is a question that could have many different responses, many different stories, and I am going to tell you just one of those stories. In my early days of graduate school, I wanted to work on reproduction in American literature. After learning about Foucauldian biopolitics, I pursued a nineteenth-century Americanist project focused on population fertility and agriculture, and I kept coming back to a couple of key texts. One was Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, a weird, wild text that combines natural history, population discourse, agrarianism, early racial science, and all kinds of other things. The other text was Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Crux. Well, The Crux doesn't really make it into the book but it did bring me to Gilman's other writings, including her utopian novel, Herland. Jefferson's writings and Gilman's writings became touchstones as I was finishing my comprehensive exams and writing my dissertation prospectus. I started to realize that these writers were interested in similar questions. Jefferson is known for his agrarian vision of a nation of small farmers. But Notes on the State of Virginia is also deeply interested in population—not just the quantity of the population, but also the quality of the population. Meanwhile, Gilman is lauded as this great feminist writer, and Herland is seen as this text of population perfection and women’s empowerment. But there's also something strangely Jeffersonian and agrarian about her vision.

In some ways, thinking about those two texts together jump-started a larger question for me: what's going on with the many literary adaptations of Jefferson's vision throughout the long nineteenth century? There's an anxiety that's driving these many adaptations of Jefferson’s agrarian dream. Sustainability as a term is incredibly murky, right? But sustainability rhetoric follows a particular pattern. It is a response to the threat of becoming unsustainable. How do writers depict those threats in particularly racialized or sexualized ways? What do those threats look like in this strain of sustainability discourse? What is Jefferson anxious about when he puts forth this agrarian vision? In some ways, his anxiety is right there on the page, but in other ways it reverberates across centuries and through other texts. And I think some of that anxiety is playing out in the early twentieth-century conservationist and preservationist discourses. We see environmental racism embedded in contemporary forms of eco-fascism and eco-nativism, but we don't often recognize the strangely agrarian character of these discourses.

LB: It’s so interesting that you bring up Foucault and biopolitics, because when we were preparing for the interview, Emma said that she felt a kind of Foucauldian influence in the text, yet Foucault is not explicitly referenced in the book.

Emma Zumbro (EZ): Yes, already got us going with this line of thought on Foucault and biopolitics, but we were wondering which scholars influenced your thinking, both past and present, as this project developed.

AG: All of my graduate mentors and teachers have influenced my thinking. For instance, on the Transnational and Hemispheric turn in American studies : Caroline Levander and Robert Levine. With respect to ecocriticism, biopolitics, and the posthuman turn: Timothy Morton and Cary Wolfe. Cary Wolfe’s graduate seminar helped me to understand not just Foucault but also the larger corpus of biopolitical theory. So, there are two major schools of thought that influence my work. On the one hand, we have American studies, and on the other hand, we have ecocriticism and posthumanism. Amazing things happen when we bring those two schools together. Foucault influenced my thinking, but he doesn’t enter into the book explicitly. In some ways, this project is not directly about the state and biopolitical control. It's about literary and imaginative antecedents to and justifications for biopolitical forms of management, particularly eugenics.  (But it’s not as if Foucauldian biopolitics doesn’t apply to the nineteenth-century U.S. Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s Racial Indigestion and Lora Romero’s Home Fronts have both shown otherwise.)

I'm now writing about climate and race in the Americas. I just finished a piece on Poe, the Gothic, and climate. Teresa Goddu's Gothic America was especially influential in that research. In terms of climate, I am looking beyond nineteenth-century American literary studies. I am looking at Christina Sharpe's concept of the climate of anti-Blackness. I am looking at Jesse Oak Taylor's The Sky of Our Manufacture and the idea of literary atmospheres –the idea that climate is not just about weather, but also about cultural norms, literary settings, and tone. The piece I'm working on now is about climate and domesticity. With respect to that piece, Koritha Mitchell's concept of homemade citizenship (From Slave Cabins to the White House) has shaped my thinking. Derek McCormack's Atmospheric Things has also influenced my understanding of atmosphere more broadly.

EZ: Fascinating. I feel like I have a whole reading list now.

LB: Yes, thank you so much for the reading list! Going back to Agrotopias, the book is organized to expand geographically over the various chapters, and this organizational approach mirrors what you call the expansionist impulses of Agrotopian imaginaries. You said the texts came first,  but can you talk more about your organizational structure and the expansion-oriented organizational approach of the chapters? 

AG: The book starts in the 1840s with Melville's Pierre, and not with Jefferson, so the chapters are not organized chronologically. Chapter one is the first chapter that I wrote, and that's where the thesis emerged. It's important that I didn't start with Jefferson's writings and reproduce Jefferson as the origin of this story. On the one hand, Jefferson looms really large in this book, but on the other hand, I wanted to de-center Jefferson in this literary history.

Melville's Pierre is an agrarian fantasy turned inside-out and upside-down. In starting with this text, I wanted to showcase the anxieties about agrarian decline. I wanted to start with that anxiety—that sense of threat. Pierre is a book about racial anxiety, unruly populations, and the loss of the agrarian dream. I struggled to demonstrate the dovetailing of racial and agrarian anxieties, but once I decided to start with Pierre and agrarian decline, then I found it easier to show what drives this early sustainability rhetoric.

From there, the chapters become increasingly expansionist, but also increasingly eugenic. We start out with these images of threat and dystopia in the first two chapters, and in chapters three, four, and five, we get the agrotopian solutions to those dilemmas. These solutions are focused much more on reproductive order and agrarian perfection, solving the problem of agrarian decline. So on the one hand, the chapter organization is increasingly expansionist (moving increasingly beyond U.S. borders). But on the other hand, it’s also increasingly isolated. The organization of the chapters expands in terms of the geopolitical scope, but the chapters also contract and get smaller in a lot of ways. Herland is hyper-isolated; the Whitman chapter is wildly expansive, but it's also about erasing difference. The expansionist and eugenic impulses are present across the chapters to varying degrees. The same thing happens with utopia and dystopia; you can't truly decouple those things.

You'll notice this, too, when you think about chapter organization more broadly; when you experiment with different chapter orders, you see how the progression actually changes the argument. So I asked myself: why does Charlotte Perkins Gilman get the last word in this book? The chapter about African Agrotopias could get the last word in this book, because it is really powerful. But it made sense in the middle, because it's a “both-and” chapter. It’s both within and beyond the nation, both dystopian and utopian, in very clear ways. These thinkers are grappling with the contradictions and limitations of agrotopian thinking. So as I was writing the book, I became really committed to a particular kind of story that started with dystopia and dislodged the chronology a bit.

EZ: That's fascinating. You've started to talk about this point already, but in your introduction, you note that there is a longstanding division between U.S. environmental and racial histories. Why has this gap persisted so long, and how do you see your work filling this division? 

AG: I think I would put a big asterisk next to the word environmental. A particular strain of environmentalism has ignored the country's racist history. We have rich traditions of environmentalisms and environmental justice discourses that have long seen ecological consciousness as deeply intertwined with social and racial justice. But even in my graduate training, I remember reading ecocriticism that posited these kinds of interests as competing. And what I mean is: I read texts that suggested that climate change trumps all other social liberation struggles : « Climate change is the biggest struggle. We need to solve that first. » I think it is Naomi Klein who writes that environmentalists have it wrong when they suggest that « first we need to solve the climate and the planet. This is the biggest issue. Then we'll solve police brutality, and then we'll solve colonialism… » Actually, all of those things are intertwined.  So I noticed a tendency in some early ecocriticism to see social and environmental causes as competing.

This tendency is connected to a trend in mainstream environmentalism to view people as the enemy. People-less landscapes and people-less places become the ultimate eco-fantasy. Erasure of people. People are invaders. Yes, it's true that human forces like industrialism and extractivism have destroyed the planet. However, we also have traditions of people who live with and among the environment in ways that are ecologically resilient. I think it's important not to ignore that people live within nature. This gets to my point in the epilogue: we should bê wary of environmentalisms that focus on fantasizing elsewheres rather than thinking through the here and now, the communities that we call home. Anti-colonial movements have been doing just that for many, many years. They've been fighting to protect their home against extraction, against colonialism, against oil pipelines. So that's a tradition that we should be looking to.

Jefferson's bifurcated legacy is just one example of this broader division between U.S. environmental and racial histories. We also need to ask ourselves why certain strains of environmentalism lend themselves so readily to elitism, racism, sexism, and eugenics, because I'm not the first person to write a book about environmentalism and racism, or environmentalism and eugenics, or environmentalism and xenophobia. Why is the environmentalist cause so attractive to people like Theodore Roosevelt and other eugenicists? Is there something baked into a particular brand of environmentalism that makes this partnership so common? And what enables racist environmentalism to masquerade as benevolence? Timothy Morton writes about the beautiful soul. Many environmentalists want so badly to feel like they're good people that they struggle with these entanglements. Sometimes when I give public talks, people come up to me and ask « am I a eugenicist? » That's not for me to tell them, but in asking that question, they're struggling with their own values. They want to feel like a good person, and they just found out that something they subscribe to is deeply problematic.

LB: Thank you. I don't want to erase your own thoughts in the book, but it was so interesting to read in the first chapter about this idea of environmentalism being fundamentally racist. And then to come upon the third chapter, which is such a great chapter, such a powerful chapter, as you said. In this chapter, you prove that Black Americans are developing their own agrotopic visions beyond the American nation state. Yet, as you note, many scholars note that Black Americans have a particular aversion to agriculture at this time because of the dark history of the Middle Passage and the plantation system. Why is there a misconception that Black Americans eschewed agricultural traditions during the mid to late 19th century? And where does this misconception come from?

AG: Is it a misconception? Maybe I would call it a tension--a tension between racism and violence on the one hand and freedom and autonomy on the other. To be sure, the wilderness, the countryside, and the rural South were spaces fraught with racial terror and violence. But many Black writers and thinkers, including those featured in Agrotopias, grappled with and refigured these very sites as places of creative resistance and autonomy. Agrotopian thinking exemplifies one of the avenues for doing so. After the Civil War, free Black communities fought very hard for rights to the land that they nurtured and cultivated. At times, they drew on Jeffersonian principles of small landowning to argue for those rights. Martin Delany did just that as he imagined Black agrotopias elsewhere. Though he’s known as an emigrationist, he also thought deeply about U.S. national identity. He asked: How can we think about Black autonomy elsewhere? What kinds of national principles do we want to adapt in building these agrotopias? What kinds of U.S. principles are tinged with violence? With my reading of Sutton Griggs--and I think Frederick Douglass looms large here as well--there's also a question of: « can we establish agrotopian communities within the U.S.? Why should we have to leave? » These works are grappling with whether or not Jeffersonian principles can be imported into visions of Black independence. In particular, Griggs' Imperium in Imperio contemplates the tension between Black autonomy and Jeffersonian principles tinged with violence. Do Black agrotopian visions need Jeffersonian agrarianism or can they do away with it? What happens when they do away with it? What might that world look like?

One of the things I wanted to do with this chapter was center Delany and Griggs as Black agrarian thinkers in the conversation about African-American writing writ large. Delany, in particular, is an agrarian thinker who tells a very different story about the agricultural origins of the U.S. I can't remember the exact phrase, but he uses the word « sustain. » He states that Black Americans sustained the U.S. and that slavery was an extraction of that sustaining labor, a capturing of that sustaining labor. So he tells a different story that turns the agrarian myth on its head. He suggests that the original yeoman farmer was always the enslaved Black individual. And post-emancipation, there's really an opportunity for free people to thrive in their own communities. Well, how do they go about doing that? So it's just a question of: is there room to adapt Jeffersonian agrarianism, or does it need to be done away with altogether? So it's not a misconception. It's a tension that writers and thinkers grapple with.

EZ: It's really interesting, this framing as a tension rather than a misconception. Shifting gears a little bit here. We wanted to talk a little bit about your pedagogy. How has teaching sustainability courses influenced your thinking and writing, especially as it appears in agrotopias? And how do you find your research has structured your choices in teaching sustainability?

AB: In terms of how teaching has affected my writing, it has broadened the scope of my research. When I was working on this book project at first, I was hyper-focused on agrarianism and hyper-focused on the term sustainability. And then when I first started as an assistant professor, I was asked to teach a course called Wilderness Literature. As an ecocritic, I thought: « oh, wilderness, that's this other thing over here. That doesn't have to do with agrarianism and sustainability and what I'm talking about. That's this other paradigm. » Well, it turned out that I designed a class that asked questions like : « who owns the wilderness? What are the politics of wilderness? » A lot of the texts from that syllabus ended up making it into Agrotopias. In fact, the epilogue discusses the wilderness preservation movement, and I made those connections through teaching that class.

LB: Thank you. Yeah, I guess the question goes back to what do we do now, and what's the solution? Because in the epilogue to Agrotopias, you ask what it would look like to fully rethink agrotopias to better serve the here and now. I know you want the question to be answered by students, but how might we answer that question today?

AB: Be really careful about fantasizing spaces that are utopian elsewheres. On the one hand, I don't want to shut that down because I think dreaming is a good thing. But on the other hand, we have to examine what it is we're escaping and what or who we're leaving behind when we daydream about future elsewheres. There's this fantastic book--Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing--and she has a chapter (I think it's the second chapter) that is about ecotopian and intentional communities. There's a great critique in there about how these communities have turned their back on social justice struggles in order to go off and have their own ideal world. That was the real payoff of writing this book. There's an escapism in a lot of the discourses that I'm analyzing. And so, what I would encourage students and readers to think about is: what can be done in our own communities and backyards to cultivate utopia here? Or if it's not utopia, is it something different? Is it about ecological commons? Is it about multi-species communities? Is it getting away from your screen and getting to know your neighbor? Just simple things like that.

I recently gave a talk called “Rethinking the National Parks.” In it, I discuss how National Parks tourism contributes to the hotel, restaurant, and gas industries. In other words, National Parks tourism contributes to a fossil fuel economy that's endangering the National Parks themselves, including their namesakes. The glaciers in Glacier National Park will be gone in, what, a decade? This is not to say « oh, don't travel to National Parks. » It's to say that going to a National Park is not the environmentalist act that many thought it was. It's not the environmentalist act that Theodore Roosevelt, for instance, would have lauded it as. It's become something quite different.

The other thing that my students and I end up talking about is this prospect of colonizing Mars. In Wilderness Lit, we talk about the film The Martian, where an astronaut tries to cultivate potatoes on Mars. I would say that I started my graduate career thinking about the transnational, hemispheric, and global turn in American studies. My graduate training was focused on thinking comparatively across nations and geopolitical borders. Now, I'm thinking more about: how do we look at the tree that's outside the window in our apartment as just as important as the tree that's on top of a mountain? How do we see those things as important? William Cronon wrote about this in “The Trouble with Wilderness” decades ago. That's his central thesis: don’t over-idealize a pure utopian elsewhere and abandon the here and now, the communities that are under threat. It's not just National Parks, although those are incredibly climate-sensitive regions and should be protected. It's also Standing Rock. It's also Flint, Michigan.

EZ: I was interested in hearing you talk about the epilogue a little bit, about the text you chose to highlight in the epilogue as you were moving from the main part of the book into the epilogue. So I was wondering, how did you go about selecting those texts from more current decades to pair with 19th- and early 20th-century texts that you're reading primarily in most of the chapters?

AB: I came across this coffee table book by reading other scholarship and looking at texts to assign in my Wilderness Lit class. It's a really wild book: Ansel Adams’s beautiful images of National Parks and wilderness spaces. And it's exactly what you would expect, right? It's lauding these American spaces. But the poem that accompanies these images draws on colonial ideology and population anxiety in ways that mirror agrotopian thinking. I had read Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb when I was thinking through my project early on. I was thinking, how do I connect this Earth-Day-population-bomb moment and the wilderness preservation moment? The cool thing about epilogues is you can get a little weird. You can say: OK, this is just one legacy over here that's weird. This is this other legacy over here that's weird. And I'm just going to touch on them. I will leave them out on the table for you to dissect. I will open up further questions for exploration here. I can't remember how I stumbled upon Michelle Obama's coffee table book. I don't know if it was out on a table somewhere in a bookstore or something. But as I was working on this project over time, I would just look for Jefferson in books everywhere. It would keep coming up. And the pattern got thicker and richer. Then I went to her book, and it was about planting seeds from the Jefferson’s estate in the White House kitchen garden. I thought: « this is wild. » I mean, really, if you look at this, people think I'm crazy, but specific species of Jefferson's vegetables are emphasized in this book. I'm thinking, what's going on with Jefferson's vegetables in Michelle Obama's garden? Now, obviously, she has a publicist and a team that's working to articulate her particular agenda through a presidential tradition of sustainable farming and eating and farmer's markets. But to me, it was this really clear articulation of the Jefferson paradox. How is it that it's so easy to decouple these Jeffersons, the agrarian Jefferson and the racist eugenicist Jefferson, so much so that Michelle Obama can import him into this coffee table book? That was just wild to me. Of course, it's not a critique of Michelle Obama's agenda because she is working to craft a nonthreatening First Lady image. Of course, it ended up being threatening nevertheless. This is where I think Koritha Mitchell's work is brilliant with “know your place aggression.” When you get interested in a project, you start to look for things in bookstores and libraries and on shelves. Or you see key figures cited, or people mention titles. And then you say, this is something. And then if you look at it closer, you think, this is exactly something that I need to look into further. I'm going to tell this story. And it comes together in that way. The epilogue is a fun piece to write.