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We Are Here: Jesmyn Ward's Survival Narratives Response to Anna Hartnell, “When Cars Become Churches”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2015

MOLLY TRAVIS
MOLLY TRAVIS*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Tulane University. Email: [email protected].
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Extract

Anna Hartnell's “When Cars Become Churches” begins by establishing a helpful context for understanding and fully appreciating the most recent gift to readers from Jesmyn Ward, her 2013 memoir titled Men We Reaped. In the wake of the tragedies of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, John Crawford III, and Eric Gordon, Ward's memoir is a critically important addition to our understanding of the fragility of the lives of young black men. These are lives that matter deeply to Ward and to the community of DeLisle, Mississippi – and because of Ward's fearless, honest, and emotionally searing story, they are lives that matter to her readers. She realizes one of the great achievements of literature: the transformation of the reader who looks at the other from a distance into a reader who sees with the other. As such, her work – especially Salvage the Bones and Men We Reaped – helps to enhance affective and cognitive understanding of others and cultivate moral imagination.

Type
Interview and responses
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 219 - 224
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 In order to test their hypotheses that reading literary fiction improves performance on tests of affective and cognitive theory of mind, David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano used recent National Book Award winners, including Salvage the Bones. Their results proved that reading complex, literary fiction at least temporarily enhances the ability to understand the mental states of others. See Kidd, David Comer and Castano, Emanuele, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Science, 18 (Oct. 2013), 377–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Anna Hartnell, “When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward's Disenchanted America,” above in this issue.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 In Men We Reaped, Ward claims that the young male characters in her first novel, Where the Line Bleeds, “weren't as raw as they could be, weren't real . . . I couldn't figure out how to love my characters less. How to look squarely at what was happening to the young Black people I knew in the south, and to write honestly about that.” Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 70; Ward, Where the Line Bleeds (Chicago: Bolden Books, 2008).

7 Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 17.

8 Ed Lavandera, “Ignored by Literary World, Jesmyn West Wins National Book Award,” at http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/18/author-wins-prestigious-award-for-book-ignored-by-literary-world, accessed 16 Feb. 2015.

9 See bell hooks's scathing review of the film, “No Love in the Wild,” New Black Man (blog), 5 Sept. 2012, at http://newblackman.blogspot.com/2012/09/bell-hooks-no-love-in-wild.html, accessed 17 Feb. 2015, in which she details its “pornographies of violence” and its use of sexist and racist stereotypes.

10 Hartnell.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 See David Bromwich's history of the concept of moral imagination in “Moral Imagination,” Raritan, 27, 4 (2007), 4–33.

14 Hartnell.

15 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012).

16 Ibid.

17 Ward, Men We Reaped, 108.

18 Ibid., 248–49.