We Are Here: Jesmyn Ward’s Black Feminist Poethics of Place in Men We Reaped

Abstract

This essay explores how, in her memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward confronts Mississippi’s pervasively anti-Black landscape and maps an oppositional geography that documents Black life in the landscape while also accounting for the constant movement brought on by slavery’s afterlives. Throughout the work, Ward engages in what the author terms Black feminist reaping, which operates as a cartographic practice that makes visible Black subjects situated at the margins of places that are designed to suppress and confine them. Through Black feminist reaping, Ward enacts a Black gathering—a countermobilization against the ways the plantation and its politics continue to reemerge in Mississippi’s geography and US geographies more broadly. In the process, Ward produces new geographic knowledges that highlight a Black viability, which undergirds sustainable communities and complex Black subjectivities.