Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- 9 Feminist Theory, Feminist Criticism, and the Sex/Gender Distinction
- 10 Reading Bodies and Textual Materialities
- 11 How to Read Disabled Bodies in History
- 12 How to Read Disabled Bodies Now
- 13 Health Humanities, Illness, and the Body in American Literature
- 14 The Indigenous Body in American Literature
- 15 The Black Body and the Reading of Race
- 16 Ecocriticism and the Body
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
16 - Ecocriticism and the Body
from Part II - Critical Methodologies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Genres
- Part II Critical Methodologies
- 9 Feminist Theory, Feminist Criticism, and the Sex/Gender Distinction
- 10 Reading Bodies and Textual Materialities
- 11 How to Read Disabled Bodies in History
- 12 How to Read Disabled Bodies Now
- 13 Health Humanities, Illness, and the Body in American Literature
- 14 The Indigenous Body in American Literature
- 15 The Black Body and the Reading of Race
- 16 Ecocriticism and the Body
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
“Bodies tell stories.”1 So begins the fifth chapter of Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 novel of Hurricane Katrina’s racialized landscapes. The story follows fifteen-year-old Esch Batiste, a Black teenager living in rural poverty with her family along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the days leading up to the 2005 storm. Pregnant and caught between emerging desires as an adolescent woman and compounding responsibilities as an expectant mother, Esch utters these words as she rushes into the family’s bathroom, bursting to pee, and sees her older brother Skeetah softly touching wounds on his stomach. Esch alludes to the stories revealed by her own pregnant belly and those inscribed on her brother’s torso, which tell of the ravaging of his body in exchange for resources. Ward weaves these corporeal stories into a broader narrative of racialized embodiment, structural abandonment, and environmental vulnerability as they inextricably entangle in the southern United States.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body , pp. 242 - 258Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022