11. ‘Life had promised me something when I was younger’: Biopolitics and the Rags to Riches Narrative in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Contributors viii
4. Introduction: The Restless Social Vision of Jesmyn Ward 1
5. 1. Bois Sauvage as Biotope in the Novels of Jesmyn Ward 13
6. 2. Wayward Kinship and Malleable Intimacies 27
7. 3. Determination in the Wake of Dispossession: Jesmyn Ward’s Literary Depiction of Black Resistance to Outmigration 43
8. 4. Local and Global Scales of Racial Neoliberalism in Where the Line Bleeds 63
9. 5. Mapping the ‘Ungeographic’ in Jesmyn Ward’s Where the Line Bleeds 79
10. 6. Salvaging Vulnerabilities: Climate Crisis and Marginalised Bodies in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 95
11. 7. ‘We are left to seed another year’: Nature and Neglect in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 110
12. 8. The Weather and the Wake: Maternal Embodiment and Peril in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 125
13. 9. ‘Something to save’: Rewriting Black Teenage Motherhood in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones 141
14. 10. Being Touched by Cloth: Imprints on Community, Body and Self 154
15. 11. ‘Life had promised me something when I was younger’: Biopolitics and the Rags to Riches Narrative in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped 169
16. 12. Releasing the Heavy Repercussions of Black Death in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped 189
17. 13. A Prophetic Tension: Bearing Witness Against Black Nihilism in Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped 207
18. 14. ‘Something like praying’: Syncretic Spirituality and Racial Justice in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 223
19. 15. Ghosts in Mississippi: Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 240
20. 16. Experiencing the Environment from the Car: Human and More-than-Human Road Trippers in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 254
21. 17. Reclaiming the Ghosts of Trauma’s Past: Witnessing and Testimony as Healing in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 274
22. 18. Carceral Ecologies: Incarceration and Hydrological Haunting in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing 289
23. 19. Pilgrimages to the Past in Jesmyn Ward and Toni Morrison 304
24. 20. ‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied, Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption 319
25. Afterword. ‘The most beautiful song’: Jesmyn Ward and Diasporic Recognition 337
26. Index 345