Contribution short abstract

This study examines Richard Powers’ novel "The Overstory" through a Black geographies lens to examine how the book fails to attend to dynamics of race and Blackness in the EJ movement and ignores the importance of Black environmental labor and landlessness in the conversations about land justice.

Contribution long abstract

Richard Powers’ "The Overstory" follows nine characters through their intersecting journeys with environmental justice; they forge connections to trees and dedicate their lives to fighting deforestation in the context of their unique lived histories. Considered by some a modern Anthropocene novel of environmental justice, "The Overstory" has attracted some critical analysis of its contribution to the EJ movement. Papers have examined the book from an Ecocritical perspective (Safina, 2021; Shakir, 2024; Thomas, 2024), reading material by addressing the impactful and connected interactions between human and natural worlds. However, the literature has not conflated race and Blackness with environmental justice movements in "The Overstory". The book has no Black characters and fails to acknowledge Black communities’ role in the origin of the EJ movement (McGurty, 2007). Given this exclusion, I ask how Powers represents the racial dynamics of the EJ movement, how the white characters navigate their EJ worlds in the absence of Blackness, and how "The Overstory" may have changed if Blackness was part of the story. To fill this gap, I conduct a literary analysis of "The Overstory" centering a Black geographies lens (McKittrick & Woods, 2007), attending to how Black senses of place have always influenced EJ yet are continually excluded from its narrative. I argue that Powers fails to attend to notions of Black environmental labor, plantation logics, and landlessness in his portrayal of twentieth-century EJ, and that the inclusion of Blackness would alter the way characters in the novel relate to land, environment, and community justice.