‘Improbable Metaphor’: Jesmyn Ward’s Asymmetrical Anthropocene

Henry Ivry

European Review, 2021, vol. 29, issue 3, 383-396

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.

Date: 2021
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