Foreword

Summary

I remain hopeful as scholars like Mukul Sharma add a critical perspective to environmental scholarship, specifically race, ethnicity, and class. His analysis of Dalits, untouchables, the lowest caste in India is traced throughout Dalit Ecologies: Caste and Environmental Justice. Sharma is part of growing and critical international scholarship and literature that focuses on marginalized persons of colour and the environment. The value of Sharma's work rests on secondary sources and primary sources with the primacy of voices of people who are both depressed and creative. Dalits tell their own stories and create ecologies. The oppressors are just that – oppressors – and not central to the narrative.

Sharma's intriguing book takes me back to my days as a PhD student in history in the 1990s. During that time, I was excited and afraid, quickly learning there was very little diversity in environmental history. With my dissertation proposal, I did the opposite of what dissertation advisors advise: write your dissertation based on an established area and just get it done. Willfully, I ignored the advice and plunged into the unknown of nascent African American environmental history. I did not know if archival sources, critical to writing such a history, would be fruitful. Little or racist mention of African Americans and the environment stood between my research and completion of my dissertation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, many white scholars marginalized and objectified Native Americans and African Americans. Some environmental historians focused on the tensions and comparisons between Native Americans and white voices. Still the narratives of whites and their voices remained at the fore, essentially ecological imperialism, what was done by whites to Native Americans, including spreading disease from Europe to the Americas and Caribbean. Agricultural history seemed a logical path, particularly the scholarship of the American South. Yet African Americans were objects and not the voices from primary sources. Theirs were supporting and cameo roles in relationship to whites and agricultural equipment.

Early in my academic career, I often found myself alone and in environmental history circles the subject matter of African American environmental history was objectified, rejected, or sidelined.