‘Improbable Metaphor’: Jesmyn Ward’s Asymmetrical Anthropocene

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.