Out of the Woodwork: U.S. Forests and Black Cultures, 1800-1940
Until the early 1900s, Americans lived in an Age of Wood. Vast forests in the eastern half of the U.S. and the Pacific Northwest were converted into railroad ties, carts and carriages, houses and buildings, barrels for conveying goods, and charcoal to power emergent industries. Historians have told us a great deal about the Euro-Americans who either took part in this process of deforestation and development or who warned about its recklessness. And we know of Euro-American artists, like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church, who made the forests into national symbols, even as they disappeared. Historians have had less to say about the African Americans, especially—but not exclusively—in the Southeast, who were integral to the Age of Wood.
In this talk, Susan Scott Parrish will discuss the role Black laborers and artisans played in the transformation of eastern forests into built wood environments and infrastructural systems. She will also look at the roles that Black artists—painters of woodlands and wood domestic interiors as well as writers of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—played in representing and interpreting what standing trees and woodwork meant in American life. Parrish will focus in particular on two individuals who lived at the beginning and end of this period: first, John Hemmings, the enslaved joiner and furniture maker at Monticello whose letters and extant woodwork allow us to imagine what it might have meant to him to materialize the neoclassical designs of Thomas Jefferson, and second, Horace Pippin, the self-taught modernist artist who inscribed his vision of American history and Black domestic life into wood.
This is the Avery Distinguished Fellow Lecture.
Edward Mitchell Bannister, Untitled (Walking Through a Field) [detail], ca. 1870s, oil on canvas, 22 x 42 1/4 in. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
About the Speaker
Susan Scott Parish is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Since the 1990s, she has been researching and teaching about the intertwined history of environmental transformation and racial formation in North America, with an ongoing focus on the southern plantation complex. In her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), she analyzed how English colonials, Native Americans, and captive Africans responded to their environmental dislocations in the Americas, and to colonization and slavery, through their interactions with—and knowledge about—the natural world. Her next book continued to examine how American environments and racialized experiences were mutually constituted. The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017) investigated how a massive infrastructural catastrophe in the Lower Mississippi Valley unfolded, and took on divergent meanings, as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides, and across the color line. More recently, she has edited The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Environment and the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Prompted by contemporary Black artists now reimagining historical Black experiences in U.S. woodlands, she is researching her next book: The Talking Woods: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials. She has received support from the American Antiquarian Society, the NEH, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and UM’s Institute for the Humanities.