B rian M c C ammack . Landscapes of Hope

Brian McCammack’s Landscapes of Hope is a welcome addition to scholarship that explores how marginalized people knew nature through leisure. The focus on leisure takes us beyond an environmental justice framework that often foregrounds victimization and opens the door to exploring the complicated ways that the disadvantaged creatively used nature for place-making and community building. When southern blacks moved north to Chicago during and after World War I, they did not leave nature behind. In fact, according to McCammack, nature was central to black modernity. Certainly, migrants found reprieve from harsh industrial jobs and run-down tenements by enjoying commercialized amusements. But just as often, they escaped to urban and peri-urban green spaces, which McCammack calls “landscapes of hope.” He argues that migrants transplanted southern culture to these landscapes of leisure, which sometimes reminded them of their former southern homes. In chapter 1, McCammack explores Jazz Age urban green spaces. None was more important than Washington Park, a Frederick Law Olmsted landscape that came to be called Booker T. Washington Park. Here, migrants could “reconnect to the texture, flow, and sensory experience of lives and folkways they had left behind in the South” (19). But black access to Washington Park as well as to neighborhood playgrounds and the nearby Lake Michigan shore was often barred by city officials and nearby working-class whites, who often drew the color line across nature. Infamously, the 1919 race riot began when whites drowned a black teenager after he drifted too close to a white beach. Black leadership responded by simultaneously fighting for equal access to white parks and beaches and demanding more green space within underserved and segregated black neighborhoods. At the same time, they tried to reform the behavior of migrants, whose southern mannerisms in parks and elsewhere often embarrassed old settlers.

Chemistry · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies