Political Economies of Wood in Early American Literature

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Oil is often taken to be the material base for the development of transatlantic capitalist modernity, yet my project argues that extractivist political economies of wood were instead fundamental in shaping both new world colonialism and representations of Indigenous and settler identities in early American literature. I explore the material commodification of wood and brutal enclosure and expropriation of Indigenous land through current discourses in the ecological and energy humanities, political economy, decolonisation, Indigenous studies, new materialism, and eighteenth and nineteenth century American literature. Reading against the settler-colonial narratives of authors such as Fenimore Cooper or Brockden Brown, I analyse how Native American writers Samson Occom and William Apess, women writers Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgwick, and Henry David Thoreau, offer decolonial and anti-capitalist counternarratives to open radical modes of coexistence within forest ecologies.