'Improbable Metaphor': Jesmyn Ward's Asymmetrical Anthropocene. (5th June 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Ivry, Henry
• Editors: Pellicer-Ortín, Silvia; Sarikaya-Şen, Merve
• Is Part Of: European review. Volume 29:Number 3(2021)
• Page Start: 383
• Page End: 396
• Publication Date: 2021-06-05
• Subjects: Learned institutions and societies -- Europe -- Periodicals; 940
• DOI: 10.1017/S1062798720000708
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1062-7987

Abstract

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.