Jesmyn Ward

Sheri-Marie Harrison is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, where she researches and teaches Contemporary literature and mass culture of the African Diaspora and directs the Individualized Degrees program. She is the author of Negotiating Sovereignty in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature (2014). Among her ongoing projects is an author study of Marlon James, a monograph on genre in Contemporary Black fiction. She is also a co-editor for the Routledge Companion to the Novel (forthcoming 2024). Arin Keeble is a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland. His research interests include the literary and cultural representation of terrorism, crisis, neoliberalism and systemic violence. He is co-editor of Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays (2023) and is the author of Narratives of Hurricane Katrina in Context (2019), and his writing appears in journals such as Critique, Journal of American Studies, Post45, Parallax, Punk and Post-Punk, and TLS. Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo is a trade union organiser based in Edinburgh, Scotland. She received her PhD from Edinburgh University in 2021. Her dissertation focused on contemporary American women’s autobiographies and posthumanism

This brilliant and timely collection covers a startling range of approaches to Jesmyn Ward’s work – from ecocriticism to abolitionism to Afropessimism, and beyond. Harrison, Keeble and Torres-Quevedo’s constellation of essays deftly guides us through and bears witness to Ward’s powerful portraits of Black life and death, Black pasts and futures, and Black despair and hope.

• Contributors Introduction: The Restless Social Vision of Jesmyn WardSheri-Marie Harrison, Arin Keeble and Maria ElenaTorres-Quevedo1. Bois Sauvage as Biotope in the Novels of Jesmyn WardWendy McMahon2. Wayward Kinship and Malleable IntimaciesJay N. Shelat3. Determination in the Wake of Dispossession: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Depiction of Black Resistance to OutmigrationDonald Brown4. Local and Global Scales of Racial Neoliberalism in Wherethe Line Bleeds Martyn Bone5. Mapping the ‘Ungeographic’ in Jesmyn Ward’s Where theLine Bleeds Beth Beatrice Smith6. Salvaging Vulnerabilities: Climate Crisis and Marginalised Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Leah Van Dyk7. ‘We are left to seed another year’: Nature and Neglect in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Devon Anderson8. The Weather and the Wake: Maternal Embodiment and Peril in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka9. ‘Something to save’: Rewriting Black Teenage Motherhood in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones Chiara Margiotta10. Being Touched by Cloth: Imprints on Community, Body and SelfMelanie Petch11. ‘Life had promised me something when I was younger’: Biopolitics and the Rags to Riches Narrative in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Maria Elena Torres-Quevedo12. Releasing the Heavy Repercussions of Black Death in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Candice N. Hale13. A Prophetic Tension: Bearing Witness Against Black Nihilism in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped Mary McCampbell14. ‘Something like praying’: Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Lucy Arnold15. Ghosts in Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Christopher Lloyd16. Experiencing the Environment from the Car: Human and More-than-Human Road Trippers in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Michelle Stork17. Reclaiming the Ghosts of Trauma’s Past: Witnessing and Testimony as Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Apryl Lewis18. Carceral Ecologies: Incarceration and Hydrological Haunting in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Cydney Phillip19. Pilgrimages to the Past in Jesmyn Ward and Toni MorrisonLara Narcisi20. ‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied, Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of RedemptionMarco PetrelliAfterword. ‘The most beautiful song’: Jesmyn Ward and Diasporic RecognitionSheri-Marie HarrisonIndex