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‘Improbable Metaphor’: Jesmyn Ward’s Asymmetrical Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2020

Henry Ivry
Henry Ivry*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Toronto, 170 St. George St., Toronto, ON, M5R 2M8Canada. Email: henry.ivry@mail.utoronto.ca
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Abstract

This article traces the ways in which the Anthropocene has led us to rethink what we mean by crisis. Crisis in the Anthropocene is no longer about a threat to a sovereign self but signals a dissolution of the sovereignty of the planet. In order to trace the shifting scales of crisis, this article reads Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 Hurricane Katrina novel, Salvage the Bones. Katrina, I argue, offers a site at which to think through how crisis in the Anthropocene is both natural and human, epistemological and ontological. Ward’s novel, I contend, offers a glimpse of the ecological interdependency of life in the Anthropocene. Ward’s novel also offers an environmental account of racism and a racialized account of environmentalism. In this way, Ward’s novel works through the divergent scales of crisis of life in the Anthropocene.

Type
Articles
Information
European Review , Volume 29 , Issue 3: Literature in Times of Crisis and Vulnerability , June 2021 , pp. 383 - 396
Copyright
© 2020 Academia Europaea

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