Breeding Black Nationalism:

Though long considered a global and contemporary concept, sustainability emerges from an American literary tradition of agrarianism. It emerges, specifically, from the myth of U.S. agrarian utopia, the ideal of a “New World” with unparalleled agricultural and population fertility that characterizes the writings of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson. This myth projects a demographic fantasy of a prolific, well-fed population evenly distributed across extensive land and resources—the product of idyllic agricultural labor and democratic ideals of landowning and citizenship. True to sustainability’s definition in the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, this myth envisions a “New World” that “meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

If sustainability emerges from this “New World” imaginary, why do we tend to understand sustainability as exclusively global, even as it seems to have an American literary history? The answer lies in a corpus of black nationalist writing from the Civil War and postbellum eras, one that responds to a conception of sustainability that excludes the black population from representations of U.S. agrarian utopia and erases the slave labor that makes the “New World” so abundant. Epitomized in the work of Martin Delany, known as the “Father of Black Nationalism,” black nationalist writings begin to explain why sustainability appears both global and “American” at the same time. Confronting dystopian realities within the U.S., Delany’s 1852 political tract, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, upends the myth of U.S. agrarian utopia, promoting a black futurity that exists beyond U.S. borders. A foundational black nationalist text, Condition critiques, reshapes, and renders portable the idea of “New World” sustainability, the seemingly rigid and white, nation-based myth of agrarian utopia. Contending that “the idleness of the [white man] is sustained by the industry of the [black man],” Condition envisions an all-black agrarian future beyond the U.S. and articulates the extra-national scope of a seemingly nation-based sustainability (66). Depicting the U.S. as a racially toxic environment, promoting mass exodus as a way to preserve the race, black emigrationist writings such as Delany’s facilitate the global dispersal of a nascent concept of American sustainability: an agrarian utopia of rural, reproductive vigor, and well-bred future generations.