Chapter 24 - Hurricane Alley

Summary

“Hurricane Alley” ponders what happens when we define the literature of the coastal American South (Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas), as shaped by the paths, threats, and aftermaths of hurricanes. It explores what shifts in our understanding of the field if we consider Southern literature not solely in terms of plantation and Creolization, but also around a geography of vulnerability. It argues that coastal southern literature (and its resonances with the Caribbean) provides an apt example to reflect on the Anthropocene, climate change, and environmental racism. With a nineteenth- to twenty-first-century corpus featuring fiction, poetry, theater, visual arts, and cinema by George Washington Cable, Lafcadio Hearn, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams, Edwidge Danticat, Spike Lee, Patricia Smith, Kara Walker, Benh Zeitlin, Natasha Trethewey, Tiphanie Yanique, and Jesmyn Ward, the chapter expands the limits – generic, geographical, ethnic, generational, gendered, sexualized -- of southern literature.