Paul Outka’s Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance (2008) brings together Afro-American literary studies, eco-criticism, and ordeal studies. In his preface, he invents this interdisciplinary nexus in a colorful chiasmus: “by trying to see green in black and white, we might eventually come to see black and white in green” (9). Outka’s historical scope parallel to Smith’s is of crossing the colonial pastoral in Crevecoeur’s eighteenth-century travel writings and Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). While Myers and Smith introduce and outline the interconnection of race and nature, Outka theorizes it by arguing that the upsetting experiences of Afro-Americans diverges from the uplifting of
