Salvage Watery Memory: Water and Memory in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

2023/09/01 by Masslich, Hanna
#Hurricane Katrina #Materiality #Memory #Water #the Anthropocene #the Middle Passage

paper · doi:10.5283/copas.382

Abstract

In this article, I will investigate the entanglement of water and memory in Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011). To analyze the multiplicity of literal and figurative references to water, I will refer to posthumanist and new materialist water scholarship as well as Black Studies. I argue that the narrated water scales up the time and space of the story and thereby situates Hurricane Katrina in the history of transatlantic slavery and the Middle Passage. By functioning as a keeper of memory and archive in the novel, water evolves as a substance that enables the concurrent examination of racialized histories and contemporary environmental disasters.

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