Du Bois’s seminal collection has long been considered a landmark publication. Balancing claims to cultural distinction and cosmopolitan affiliation, it conceptualizes Black American identity and proclaims the color line as the defining feature of American identity. Sedlmeier’s talk takes the mostly overlooked subtitle as a starting point to reflect on the affordances of genres, specifically the sketch, related to a comprehensive environmental imagination. Rewriting the tropes of Romanticist nature and travel writing, Du Bois develops a multifaceted conception of environments that balances cultural, media, psychological, physical, and social environments. If genres are “fields of knowledge” (Dimock 2007), Du Bois’s aesthetic practice of drawing and redrawing lines in his sketches theorizes a relational notion of various fields of knowledge. As it relays various environments and surroundings, it also speaks to the political challenges of the 21st century.

Florian Sedlmeier is Professor of North American Culture and Literature at the University of Hamburg. He is the author of The Postethnic Literary: Reading Paratexts and Transpositions around 2000 (de Gruyter, 2014). His second book project on William Dean Howells and the literary field ca. 1900 has been funded by the DFG. He has published widely on literary genres, literature and institutions, and publication media, focusing on writers like Mark Twain, Ida B. Wells, and Gertrude Stein.