Frei May

By only situating Black bodies within such environments, Ụzọchukwu invites reflection on the historical marginalisation

of people of colour from narratives of the natural world. In the Western imagination, territories such as ‘the frontier’ and ‘the wilderness’ have been sites of exploration or exploitation; virgin territory waiting to be conquered by settlers and adventurers. Black people, Brown people, indigenous peoples existed to be subjugated, enslaved or made extinct. Within fifty years of Christopher Columbus arrival in the New World in 1492, the Taino people of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and Dominican Republic), who may have numbered up to eight million in population, had been virtually wiped out by diseases brought by Europeans such as smallpox, measles and