Abstract
Examining Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), this chapter looks at how this novel represents notions of vulnerability and precarity across species lines, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and longstanding racial dispossession. The chapter unpacks the knotty world of multispecies life, first through the novel’s obvious comparisons between people and nonhuman animals, and then through the character Skeetah, who is close to his pit bull. Ending with a consideration of the “flesh,” as articulated by the novel and Black studies, the chapter shows how, embroiled in the non/human world of the US South, Salvage the Bones configures corporeal legacies in creaturely ways.
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Notes
- 1.
Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2008), 80–81, 81, 83.
- 2.
Ibid., 85 (original emphasis).
- 3.
Dave Eggers, Zeitoun (London: Penguin, 2010), 193.
- 4.
Big Freedia and Nicole Balin, Big Freedia: God Save the Queen Diva! (New York: Gallery Books, 2015), 151.
- 5.
See: Glenn Jellenik, “Re-shaping the Narrative,” in Ten Years After Katrina (2015), 222; and Bernie Cook, Flood of Images (2015), 46–49.
- 6.
Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15.
- 7.
Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 11.
- 8.
Christopher Lloyd, Rooting Memory, Rooting Place (2015), 53–84. Though, as we saw in Chap. 3, the Agamben’s figuration of homo sacer is perhaps lacking when it comes to racialization.
- 9.
Anna Hartnell, “When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward’s Disenchanted America. An Interview,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 1 (2016): 208.
- 10.
Colleen Glenney Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 27.
- 11.
Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik, “Introduction: Reading Hurricane Katrina,” in Ten Years After Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s Effect on American Culture and Identity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), x, ix.
- 12.
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 213. Quoted in the text from here on.
- 13.
Christopher W. Clark, “What Comes to the Surface: Storms, Bodies and Community in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones,” Mississippi Quarterly 68, no. 3–4 (2015): 342.
- 14.
Hartnell , “When,” 206.
- 15.
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 255.
- 16.
Butler’s notion here differs from other discourses and narratives of precarious life, which tend to focus on economic framings of contemporary existence. Butler, instead, focuses more on the corporeal and its links to political and ethical modes of living.
- 17.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), 20.
- 18.
James Stanescu, “Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2012): 575.
- 19.
Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” QLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, vol. 2–3 (2015): 193.
- 20.
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 33, 67.
- 21.
Ibid., 21.
- 22.
Stanescu, “Species,” 571.
- 23.
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 19.
- 24.
Stanescu, “Species,” 576.
- 25.
Pieter Vermeulen and Virginia Richter, “Introduction: Creaturely Constellations,” European Journal of English Studies 19, no. 1 (2015): 1, 2, 3.
- 26.
Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xix, 12, 26.
- 27.
Vermeulen and Richter, “Introduction,” 6.
- 28.
Boggs, Animalia Americana, 2, 4.
- 29.
Ibid., 3, 5, 10, 11, 38.
- 30.
Ibid., 28.
- 31.
Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd edition (London: Pimlico, 1995), 6.
- 32.
Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 106, 5, 6.
- 33.
Ibid., 8.
- 34.
Erin C. Tarver, “The Dangerous Individual(’s) Dog: Criminality and the ‘Pit Bull,’” Culture, Theory and Critique 55, no. 3 (2014): 273–274.
- 35.
Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6.
- 36.
Rick Crownshaw, “A Natural History of Testimony?” in The Future of Testimony: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Witnessing, ed. By Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 162, 164.
- 37.
Ibid., 161.
- 38.
Hartnell , “When,” 218.
- 39.
Ward’s memoir Men We Reaped: A Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) also contains numerous animal comparisons: Ward imagines herself, as an infant, “open like a frog on the operating table”; and as she grows up, scared of the outside world, she states: “I was an animal seeking shelter” (43). In a similar lexis, her friend Rog (who dies) disappears “like an animal down its secret hole” (130).
- 40.
Crownshaw, “A Natural,” 160–161.
- 41.
Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.
- 42.
Clark, “What,” 352.
- 43.
Deborah P. Britzman, Melanie Klein: Early Analysis, Play, and the Question of Freedom (Cham: Springer, 2016), 59–60.
- 44.
The use of “holding” here echoes the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s emphases on maternal holding during infancy and childhood. In more general terms, Esch is literally sustaining her own psyche and soma.
- 45.
Clark, “What,” 352.
- 46.
Ibid., 353.
- 47.
Crownshaw, “A Natural,” 161.
- 48.
Erica R. Edwards, “Sex after the Black Normal,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26, no. 1 (2015): 157.
- 49.
Alice A. Kuzinar, Melancholia’s Dog: Reflections on Our Animal Kinship (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), 1, 2, 3.
- 50.
The “whiteness” of China is frequently identified in Salvage, and a racialized reading of this cannot be overlooked. Yet, it is not immediately clear whether China embodies white culture generally or whether she figures as a specter of whiteness that ultimately cannot survive in this “black” southern landscape (she is swept away at the novel’s end). For a further discussion of China’s color, see Clark (2015).
- 51.
Though, it should be pointed out, the stereotypes about pit bulls and aggressiveness have almost no basis in fact.
- 52.
Yaeger, Dirt, 67.
- 53.
That pit bulls are usually fought in “pits” underscores further the Batistes’ creaturely and violently charged dwelling (“The Pit”).
- 54.
As in the above footnote, the racialization of China has interesting ramifications in regard to this fight between white and red flesh. It is not within the scope of this chapter to unpack this dynamic further.
- 55.
Mary Ruth Marotte, “Pregnancies, Storms, and Legacies of Loss in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones,” in Ten Years After Katrina, 209.
- 56.
Brigitte Nicole Fielder, “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 65, no. 3 (2013): 488. (Fielder’s article is also interesting for its comments on the post-Katrina feelings of sympathy for abandoned dogs, rather than abandoned black people. Her essay carefully traces processes of kinship and sympathy across species and racial lines).
- 57.
Yaeger, Dirt, 121.
- 58.
See: Bronwen Dickey, Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon (London: Random House, 2016) for an engaging history of the dog.
- 59.
Tarver, “The Dangerous,” 282.
- 60.
See: Erin C. Tarver’s essay for a further analysis of this.
- 61.
Harlan Weaver, “The Tracks of My Tears: Trans* Affects, Resonance, and Pit Bulls and Parolees,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 347.
- 62.
Michael B. Jordan, qtd. in Harlan Weaver, “Pit Bull Promises: Inhuman Intimacies and Queer Kinships in an Animal Shelter,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2–3 (2015): 345.
- 63.
Weaver, “Pit Bull,” 345.
- 64.
“Jesmyn Ward in Conversation with William Jelani Cobb and Khalil Gibran Muhammad,” New York Public Library, September 30, 2013, http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2013/09/30/jesmyn-ward.
- 65.
Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 16, 17.
- 66.
Boggs, Animalia, 65.
- 67.
Edwards , “Sex,” 160.
- 68.
Cary Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xxiv (original emphasis).
- 69.
Pick, Creaturely, 5.
- 70.
Butler, Precarious, 29.
- 71.
Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 50
- 72.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67.
- 73.
Edwards , “Sex,” 158; Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2014), 39, 39–40, 158.
- 74.
Elizabeth Hoover, “Jesmyn Ward on Salvage the Bones,” The Paris Review, August 30, 2011, http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones.
- 75.
Ward, Men We Reaped, 250.
- 76.
Sinéad Moynihan, “From Disposability to Recycling: William Faulkner and the New Politics of Rewriting in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones,” Studies in the Novel 47, no. 4 (2015): 565.
- 77.
Raymond Malewitz, “Climate-Change Infrastructure and the Volatizing of American Regionalism,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 61, no. 4 (2015): 717.
- 78.
Ward, Men, 9, 21.
- 79.
“Jesmyn Ward.”
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Lloyd, C. (2018). “Everything Deserve to Live”: Salvage the Bones, Hurricane Katrina, and Animals. In: Corporeal Legacies in the US South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96205-4_5
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