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Figuring Giorgio Agamben's “Bare Life” in the Post-Katrina Works of Jesmyn Ward and Kara Walker

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2016

HOLLY CADE BROWN
HOLLY CADE BROWN*
Affiliation:
Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article explores how Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker's visual essay After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben's “bare life” in order to explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political significance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents that are connected to structural forms of persecution.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 1 - 19
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2016 

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References

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3 Ibid., 5.

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6 Kara Walker, After the Deluge: A Visual Essay (New York: Rizzoli, 2007), 1.

7 Ibid., 9.

8 Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 97.

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14 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1.

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16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 9.

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21 Ibid., 26–27.

22 Ibid., 27.

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24 Ibid.

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49 Ibid., 159.

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61 Ibid., 34.

62 Ibid., 11.

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64 Ibid., 46.

65 Ward, 25.

66 Ibid., 16.

67 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, 2000), 34.

68 Ward, 100.

69 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Caruth, Trauma, 3–13, 4–5.

70 Alan Gibbs, Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86.

71 Ibid.

72 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3.

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