This paper has been presented on an undergraduate panel at the 2018 South Atlantic Modern Language Association and will be submitted as my English Literature Senior Seminar project. Below is the abstract, but the full paper can be seen upon request. 

Camille Dungy, in her memoir Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, traces her experience of traveling as a poet-lecturer with her young daughter, reflecting on the ways that blackness and motherhood deeply inform her impressions of place. Through investigations of both ecological and built spaces, Dungy reconsiders the boundaries of her own body and explores how collective memories of place influence her feeling of security. Similarly, bell hooks searches for her sense of personal belonging through memory in her memoir Bone Black: Memories of a Girlhood. Through the construction of generational memory from fragments of experience, hooks documents her search for belonging within herself. I argue that these two women, writing about landscapes littered with legacies of both trauma and healing, craft their memories in vastly different ways, yet both share tales of creating a sense of place in these frequently hostile environments. Dungy and hooks, through their brilliant explorations of place and constructions of memory, revise the dominant narrative of ecological life writing and inscribe new veins of cultural memory in a field that often excludes their voices. By examining these together, I hope to include these women’s experiences more prominently within ecocriticism and explore how these ecofeminist texts fight against the ecological othering of black women.