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Agency and Environment in the Work of Jesmyn Ward Response to Anna Hartnell, “When Cars Become Churches”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2015

RICHARD CROWNSHAW
RICHARD CROWNSHAW*
Affiliation:
Department of English and Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

Throughout this interview, Jesmyn Ward emphasizes the humanity of her fictional and nonfictional subjects – subjects whose humanity has been eviscerated by what has been characterized as the postwar, neoliberal shift in American politics and economics. The socioeconomic and political neglect of African Americans was, of course, demonstrable in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revealing the structural racism that had often resided in the US's political unconscious. Ward's emphasis on the ideas of survival and renewal – a “savage” resilience of humanity in its most precarious state – offers a corrective to the proclivities of some critical theory deployed in the framing of Hurricane Katrina's victims and the longer history of suffering they represented. For examples, theories of biopolitics used to conceptualize the ways in which African American life has been removed from the protections of citizenship and state sovereignty do run the risk of universalization. A transhistorical version of that life, consistent from slavery to the present day, might emerge from such theory, indistinct from examples of “bare” lives rendered by states of emergency beyond the US and across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Giorgio Agamben might describe such life. In other words, theory risks a process of re-othering and a suspension of historical agency. Anna Hartnell finds in Ward's work the resonance of the jeremiad, and so narratives that are structured by the possibility of the redemption of historical experience – future-oriented narratives. These are narratives that represent the negotiation of historical conditions, not utter submission to them, and following Hartnell's reference they are aptly framed by Henry Giroux's reconceptualization of biopolitical life and the limits of American democracy.

Type
Interview and responses
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 225 - 230
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 19–21.

2 Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 254.

3 Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 203.

4 Ward, 250.

5 Anna Hartnell, Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from DuBois to Obama (London: Pluto Press, 2011), 217, 218–19.

6 Ward, 4

7 John Wills, US Environmental History: Inviting Doomsday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 168.

8 Wai Chee Dimock, “World History According to Katrina,” in Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds., States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 143–60, 148–50. For excellent histories of the deadly failures of environmental (mis)management see also John Wills and Kevin Rozario, The Culture of Calamity: Disaster and the Making of Modern America (London and Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 209–19.

9 Dimmock, 150–52, 156. See also Ross Gelbspan, “Nature Fights Back,” in South End Press Collective, ed., What Lies Beneath: Katrina, Race and the State of the Nation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007),15–27.

10 Stacey Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.

11 Ward, 255.

12 Nancy Tuana, “Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina,” in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 188–213.