Cornell University offering course on ‘Black Ecoliterature’

Cornell University students can take a course next spring that explores the intersection of black identity and climate change activism.

According to the course description, the central contention of the course is that climate change disproportionately affects minorities.

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“Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping “clean” at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists,” the course says. “Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally.” 

The course will further consider how different people “experience nature” — specifically based on “race, gender, and location.”

“In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and ‘Nature’ itself,” the description says.

Assistant Professor Chelsea Mikael Frazier is teaching the course as part of the university’s Feminist, Gender Studies & Sexuality Studies Program.

Frazier’s work studies the “intersection of Black feminist literature and theory and the environmental humanities,” according to her bio. 

“Her scholarship, teaching, and public speaking span the fields of Black feminist literature and theory, visual culture, ecocriticism, African art and literature, political theory, science and technology studies, and Afrofuturism,” it continues.

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“Black Ecoliterature” advances the Feminist, Gender Studies & Sexuality Studies Program’s mission, which “offers students the opportunity to study a wide range of fields from the perspectives of feminist and LGBT critical analysis, in a global context and with the purpose of promoting social justice.”

Students who take the course fulfill the intersectionality requirement for Feminist, Gender Studies & Sexuality Studies majors and minors, according to the course description page.

Those majors require three “distribution areas,” which are “lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies (LGBT),” “the study of intersectionality,” and “geopolitics and transnationality.”

Campus Reform contacted Cornell University, the Feminist, Gender Studies & Sexuality Studies Program, and Chelsea Mikael Frazier for comment, asking what they hope students get from the course. Campus Reform also requested a course syllabus or reading list. This story will be updated accordingly.