Winner of the 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Biennial Prize for 'Best Book of Ecocriticism,' Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance examines a neglected but centrally important issue in critical race studies and ecocriticism: the issue of environmental racism. Paul Outka asks how natural experience became racialized in America from the antebellum period through the early twentieth-century and draws compelling new conclusions. Using theories of sublimity and trauma, the book offers a critical and cultural history of the racial fault line in American environmentalism that to this day divides largely white wilderness preservation groups and the minority environmental justice movement.