Ecological Inscription and Material Memory: Ecofeminist Philosophy and the Afterlife of Slavery in Morrison and Butler

Abstract

Drawing on ecofeminist philosophy, Black feminist ecologies, and posthuman critiques of instrumental reason, this article argues that Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) develop an environmental ethics of memory: they figure landscape, water, and the more-than-human world as archives that document slavery’s ongoing material and affective residues. Rather than treating “nature” as a neutral framework, the novels present ecological spaces as controversial venues where racial capitalism and patriarchal authority organize extraction, bodily vulnerability, and the policing of kinship. I show how both texts convert ecological imagery into a philosophical critique of domination: (1) they expose how colonial regimes render Black bodies and nonhuman life fungible; (2) they model “rememory” and temporal rupture as forms of testimony that resist epistemic erasure; and (3) they reframe care, survival, and motherhood as ecological relations shaped by coercion yet capable of counter-knowledge. Methodologically, the essay combines concept-building with close reading, using ecofeminist and critical race structures to track how material environments mediate trauma, agency, and ethical responsibility. By linking narrative form to environmental thought, the article contributes to contemporary debates in feminist environmental ethics on justice, memory, and the afterlives of colonial violence, casting testimony as ecological counter-knowledge.