On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in Conjure Women 209 Studies in American Fiction 50.1–2 (2023): 209–228 © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press On Ruination, Slavery, and the American Landscape in Conjure Women Madelyn Walsh University of Liverpool The rot remains with us, the men are gone. Derek Walcott, “Ruins of a Great House”1 I n an ecogothic reading, Afia Atakora’s novel Conjure Women (2020) narrates the relationship between the American landscape as an ecological space and the horrors of transatlantic slavery for freed communities that continue to reside on the site of their enslavement.2 In the transatlantic trade of enslaved African people, we can identify a socioecological catastrophe that altered the human relationship with the land through the use of unfree and dehumanized labor as part of agricultural practice. As Margo DeMello asserts, “a system of racial inequality emerged to justify a system of economic greed, and to reconcile the practice of inequality alongside of a philosophy of equality for all.”3 The American plantation landscape became a site of slavery the enslaved were bound to, creating a perverse intimacy between the enslaved community and the land. The devastating impact enslavement had on the African American relationship with nature is best explored by Kimberly K. Smith. She asserts that transatlantic slavery provides an ambivalent legacy for African Americans when they are negotiating a relationship with nature, because “the slave system forced slaves into an intimacy with the natural environment but also tended to alienate them from it.”4 Thus, a seemingly binding paradox emerges, whereby the African American relationship with the natural environment is defined by the slave system. The plantation setting acts as a microcosm through which to understand the ecological relationship between humans and nature as shaped by this system. This study therefore examines the socioecological relationship between the en- 210 Studies in American Fiction slaved community and the natural environment in the plantation landscape in Conjure by analyzing ruins in the novel. Through this examination, we might begin to conceive of what Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin describe as a “burgeoning alliance” between postcolonial studies and environmental studies by drawing together and analyzing the relationship between the enslaved and the land to which they were bound through an ecogothic lens.5 This is a notable move away from the stereotypical association of ecology and ecocriticism with “pastoral and romantic representations of certain kinds of nature: the distant, pristine, and revered pastures and forests, rather than the urban rivers, the farm factories, or the cityscapes.”6 It is at this point of division from classic ecocriticism that the ecogothic provides the lens needed to analyze this phenomenon. The ecogothic offers a nuanced approach to the identification and analysis of ruins in Conjure because it proffers a tool that can be used to circumvent the boundaries of ecocriticism and the gothic. The ecogothic, as defined by Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils, occupies “the intersection of environmental writing and the gothic, and it typically presupposes some kind of ecocritical lens.”7 As Amanda Stuckey identifies, it also provides a means of overcoming the complications and boundaries of each critical framework. In their application of the ecogothic, Stuckey analyzes the ways in which gothic tropes “expose the material horrors of slavery as they played out on the surface of the Earth and of the human body.”8 Stuckey therefore sets a precedent for using the ecogothic to re-examine gothic tropes and to explore the relationship between the earth and the human body in relation to slavery. Indeed, the advantage of applying an ecogothic lens lies in the fact that it “illuminates the fear, anxiety, and dread that often pervade [the cultural relationships of humans to the nonhuman world]: it orients us, in short, to the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies .”9 I build on this development by using the ecogothic to identify the forms of ruins that remain on American plantations, including bodily ruins. I apply the ecogothic lens as a tool to resituate the gothic motif of ruins to include human bodies and the trauma they carry and inherit by living on geographical sites...

论《召唤女性》中的毁灭、奴隶制和美国景观 209 美国小说研究 50.1–2 (2023): 209–228 © 2024 约翰·霍普金斯大学出版社 论《召唤女性》中的毁灭、奴隶制和美国景观 马德琳·沃尔什大学利物浦 腐败依然存在，男人们都走了。德里克·沃尔科特（Derek Walcott），《大房子的废墟》1 在生态哥特式读物中，阿菲亚·阿塔科拉（Afia Atakora）的小说《召唤女性》（2020）讲述了作为生态空间的美国景观与继续居住在美国的自由社区的跨大西洋奴隶制的恐怖之间的关系。 2 在被奴役的非洲人民的跨大西洋贸易中，我们可以发现一场社会生态灾难，通过使用不自由和非人性化的劳动力作为农业实践的一部分，改变了人类与土地的关系。正如玛戈·德梅洛所言，“种族不平等制度的出现是为了证明经济贪婪制度的合理性，并调和不平等的做法与人人平等的哲学。”3美国种植园景观成为奴隶制的场所，被奴役的人被奴役。束缚，在被奴役的社区和土地之间创造了一种不正当的亲密关系。金伯利·K·史密斯 (Kimberly K. Smith) 最好地探讨了奴役对非裔美国人与自然的关系所造成的毁灭性影响。她断言，跨大西洋奴隶制为非裔美国人在与自然谈判关系时提供了一种矛盾的遗产，因为“奴隶制度迫使奴隶与自然环境保持亲密关系，但也往往使他们疏远自然环境。”4因此，看似出现了具有约束力的悖论，即非洲裔美国人与自然环境的关系是由奴隶制度决定的。种植园环境充当了一个缩影，通过它可以了解该系统塑造的人类与自然之间的生态关系。因此，本研究通过分析小说中的废墟来考察 en-210 美国小说研究中奴隶社区与《魔法》中种植园景观中的自然环境之间的社会生态关系。通过这一审视，我们可能会开始构想格雷厄姆·哈根和海伦·蒂芬所描述的后殖民研究和环境研究之间的“新兴联盟”，通过聚集和分析被奴役者与他们通过生态哥特式束缚的土地之间的关系。 5 这是一个显着的转变，它摆脱了生态学和生态批评与“某些自然的田园和浪漫表现”的刻板印象：遥远的、原始的、受人尊敬的牧场和森林，而不是城市河流、农场工厂、或城市景观。”6正是在与经典生态批评的这一点上，生态哥特式提供了分析这一现象所需的镜头。生态哥特式为《招魂》中的废墟识别和分析提供了一种细致入微的方法，因为它提供了一种可以用来规避生态批评和哥特式界限的工具。道恩·基特利 (Dawn Keetley) 和马修·韦恩·西维尔斯 (Matthew Wynn Sivils) 定义的生态哥特式占据了“环境写作与哥特式的交叉点，它通常以某种生态批评视角为前提。”7 正如阿曼达·斯塔基 (Amanda Stuckey) 所指出的，它还提供了一种克服复杂性的方法。以及每个关键框架的边界。在生态哥特式的应用中，斯塔基分析了哥特式比喻“揭露了奴隶制在地球表面和人体上所表现出的物质恐怖。”8因此，斯塔基开创了使用生态哥特式来描述奴隶制的先例。重新审视哥特式比喻并探索地球与人体与奴隶制的关系。事实上，应用生态哥特透镜的优势在于它“阐明了经常弥漫在[人类与非人类世界的文化关系]中的恐惧、焦虑和恐惧：简而言之，它引导我们面对更令人不安的事物。”以及我们与非人类生态相互作用中令人不安的方面。”9我在此基础上利用生态哥特式来识别美国种植园中残留的废墟的形式，包括身体废墟。我应用生态哥特式镜头作为工具来重新定位废墟的哥特式主题，以包括人体以及他们因生活在地理地点而承受和继承的创伤......