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When Cars Become Churches: Jesmyn Ward's Disenchanted America. An Interview

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 December 2015

ANNA HARTNELL
ANNA HARTNELL*
Affiliation:
Department of English and Humanities, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.

Type
Interview and responses
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 205 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2015 

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References

1 See Barbara Eckstein, Sustaining New Orleans: Literature, Local Memory, and the Fate of a City (New York: Routledge, 2006).

2 See Donald Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

3 Richard Gray, After the Fall: American Literature after 9/11 (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2011); Rothenberg, Michael, “A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A Response to Richard Gray,” American Literary History, 21, 1 (2009), 152–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Kamila Shamsie, “The Storytellers of Empire,” Guernica, 1 Feb. 2012, at www.guernicamag.com/features/shamsie_02_01_2012, accessed 25 July 2014.

5 See Fritz Breithaupt, “Rituals of Trauma: How the Media Fabricated September 11,” in Steven Chermak, Frankie Y. Bailey, and Michelle Brown, eds., Media Representations of September 11 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 67–81.

6 Jesmyn Ward, Where the Line Bleeds (Chicago: Bolden Books, 2008), 238.

7 See Linda Robertson, “How Shall We Remember New Orleans? Comparing News Coverage of Post-Katrina New Orleans and the 2008 Midwest Floods,” in Cedric Johnson, ed., Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 269–99.

8 Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 130.

9 See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

10 Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 24.

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

12 Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 9.

13 See David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

14 Ward, Men We Reaped, 250.