The Rich Earth between Us

In this theory-rich study, Shelby Johnson analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World, examining how their literary production informs "modes of being" that confronted violent colonial times. Johnson particularly assesses how these authors connected to placeswhether real or imaginedand how those connections enabled them to make worlds in spite of the violence of slavery and settler colonialism. Johnson engages with works written in a period engulfed by the extraordinary political and social upheavals of the Age of Revolution and Indian Removal, and these textswhich include not only sermons, life writing, and periodicals but also descriptions of embodied and oral knowledge, as well as material objectsregister defiance to land removal and other forms of violence. In studying writers of color during this era, Johnson probes the histories of their lived environment and of the earth itselfits limits, its finite resources, and its metaphoric mortalityin a way that offers new insights on what it means to imagine sustainable connections to the ground on which we walk.