There has been a strong tendency in scholarship on African America to associate rural southern nature, and the folk cultures which emerged in close response to such a nature, as evolutionarily prior to northern, urban meccas of cultural maturation. By contrast, as Zora Neale Hurston traveled off and on from 1927 to 1937 in the part-southern, part-Caribbean quasi-frontier wilderness of early twentieth-century Florida, she came to see rural life as by no means quaint and unchanging, but rather, mercurial, violent, and temporary. Hurston saw diasporic African culture in the Americas as existing primarily in the convulsive tropical and semi-tropical zones of the hurricane. She saw the hubris of engineering projects such as the draining of the Everglades and the diking of Okeechobee; she saw too how the devastating effects of this hubris particularly affected black communities–in the catastrophic 1928 Okeechobee flood, but also in other rural environments that put working blacks closer to the flash points where extractive and agrarian technologies contested with a volatile nature. In her most famous work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, she uses this hurricane and flood to draw a circle around a “real” historical symptom of an environment, and a history, of disturbance. As such, Hurston would have demurred from the new theory of nature as a self- stabilizing and well-programmed ecosystem developed in the 1940s by the father of modern ecology, Eugene P. Odum.

Susan Scott Parrish is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World, was published in 2006. Her current projects involve thinking through the conjunction of environmental history, racial experience, and scientific epistemologies in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf Coast.