Meditations on The Black Garden

Special Issue of African American Review, 2027

Guest-edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge); Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin); Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin)

Abstracts due to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com by May 1, 2026.

Call for Abstracts:

African American Review invites proposals for an upcoming special issue entitled Meditations on the Black Garden, guest edited by Brandy Underwood (California State University, Northridge), Mia Alafaireet (The University of Texas at Austin), and Samantha Pinto (The University of Texas at Austin).

In the 1974 essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Alice Walker meditates on her mother’s garden as an exercise in recovering “the creative spark, the seed of the flower” that Black women artists have handed down through generations. To date, most scholarship on the Black garden has echoed Walker by applying feminist methodologies to writer-gardeners like Anne Spencer and Jamaica Kincaid, often interpreting their gardens as metaphors for the challenges of Black womanhood. The emerging field of Black Ecologies–along with a new wave of African American gardening literature by writers like Camille Dungy and Ross Gay–suggest  that the time has come for a more expansive investigation of the garden’s significance in African

American literature and culture. Responding to such ecocritical turns in the critical and literary

landscape, this special issue serves as an expansion of the search Walker called for in her essay and a long-overdue retheorization of the Black garden that includes and expands on– as

well as challenges– its Black feminist interpretation in scholarship.

Black-authored narratives have long featured references to nature and the environment,

especially within the context of plantation life during the era of enslavement as well as slavery’s

afterlives. Indeed, Black Americans have experienced a contentious relationship with the natural

environment, as well as a productive connection to the land that has provided much needed

economic and nutritional sustenance through gardening and crop cultivation. Such complex

relationships to the natural world imbue Black American literature. As we work to expand existing discourse on the Black garden, we especially seek work that attends to the garden’s dual entanglement with the liberative spirit of the provision ground and colonial legacies that have seeded a long history of environmental racism in the United States.

In addition to works that address the garden in holistic terms, possible topics include soil, plants, roots, germination, historical methods of cultivation, health humanities in relation to gardens, eco-poetry, tensions within and across urban, rural, and regional imaginings of the garden, reimagining growing spaces in slavery’s afterlives, and class issues that explore the economics of gardens. We welcome papers dealing with Black-authored literature from any time period that utilize a wide range of methodologies that shed light on how contemporary articulations of ecocriticism might be applied to African American literary scholarship. We also welcome submissions on ecocriticism that grapple with the following topics in relation to gardens: plant studies, animal studies, speculative climate fiction, and digital humanities.

Lines of inquiry may include but are not limited to the following:

• How does African American literature expand or challenge mainstream conceptions of the garden, and to what end? In what ways might the practice of gardening extend to mediums beyond the soil?

• What is the garden’s role in illuminating, perpetuating, and/or disrupting environmental racism? 

• What does it mean to garden or to represent gardening in an anti-Black climate?

• What kinds of knowledge production does African American gardening culture produce?

• What role(s) might gardens play in Black Studies’ emerging conversations about interspecies intimacy and the human-animal divide?

• How might renewed attention to the garden enrich the developing field of Black Ecologies?

• What is the garden’s aesthetic role in Black environmental literature and culture? How is that role impacted by issues of class and gender?

Preliminary abstracts of no more than 500 words are due May 1, 2026 to AARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com.

Selected authors should be prepared to submit full manuscripts for review byAugust 15 of 2026, with an expected publication date of December of 2027. 

We are happy to answer queries about the special issue via email. Please direct questions toAARBlackgardensSI@gmail.com.