Coda: Prospects for an Antiracist Ecological Sublime

Abstract

To call attention to the specific historical ways that sublime experience functioned in the formation of race is not the same as declaring such a reading exhaustive. It would be more than merely reductive to dismiss the natural sublime or wilderness experience as simply a white cover-up. To swing from an uncritical white masculinist Romanticism, to a reflexive sort of demystification of the sublime that insists on a total retextualization of nature helps neither racial politics nor the planet. Nor does it begin to do justice to the fundamentally contradictory sorts of experiences and possibilities named by the sublime. Within ecocriticism, such a binary oscillation between true belief and demystification replicates the sort of theoretical tail-chasing we see in the seemingly endless debates over whether nature is really a transcendent Real or just another ideological construction, and what the right ratio between construction and transcendence is, and how to tell the difference, and so forth.