Rich Earth between Us

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "e;modes of being"e; that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to places-whether real or imagined-and how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these texts-which include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objects-register defiance to land removal and other forms of violence.In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itself-its limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortality-in a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.