Writing the Grotesque in Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones"

In her work, Jesmyn Ward has revitalized the Southern Gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of Black American life in the 21st century. This essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in Ward's sophomore novel, Salvage the Bones, which follows an impoverished Black family in Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. In contrast to her literary predecessors, Ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on Black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. As such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by Southern writers like William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. Instead, Ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable.

6. Creative words

‘Creative words’ studies how the American South became the home to a vital cultural explosion, seen in such modernist writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty. Their themes of agrarian life, the memory of the Old South and the Civil War, religious values, the tensions of the biracial society, and the modernization of society connected their literary achievements with southern life itself. Early nineteenth-century writers generally became defenders of slavery against abolitionist attacks. By the 1920s, southern writers were incorporating aspects of modernism into their works. After 1980, a new term, “post-southernism,” became a descriptor for writers living in the most economically prosperous and racially integrated South ever.

Southern Republic of Letters

This chapter analyzes the emergence of a decidedly modern “literary” sensibility in southern writing during the latter half of the civil war period (1814–1820) that reflects the transformations of the republican state in Haiti under Pétion. A first part establishes the contours of Pétion’s “new” republicanism, which he elaborated within the Atlantic world transformations of the mid-1810s. Next, it analyzes the new republican publications that resulted from the North/South paper war, paying specific attention to southern writers’ efforts to define their intellectual production according to the emergent concepts of literature and criticism. In a second part, the chapter traces how this nascent notion of literary writing, forged in the crucible of civil war, gained hegemony under Jean-Pierre Boyer’s reunified republican state after the fall of Henry Christophe in 1820. Here, it performs a close analysis of the southern republican writer Hérard Dumesle’s Voyage dans le Nord d’Hayti, ou Révélations des lieux et des monuments historiques (1824), arguing that his piece of early domestic Haitian travel writing fixes the terms of the previous paper war between North and South from the position of southern republican hegemony.

Fred Chappell

Poet, fiction writer, essayist, and educator Fred Chappell was reared on his grandparents’ farm in Canton, North Carolina. He began writing poems when he was fifteen. While attending Duke University (receiving his AB in 1961 and his MA in 1964), he became friends with southern writers Reynolds Price, Anne Tyler, and James Applewhite. Chappell taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1964 until 2004 and was poet laureate of North Carolina from 1997 until 2002. Although claimed by the southern literary canon, Chappell considers himself an Appalachian author, believing that Appalachian literature is distinct from its southern cousin....

Jesse Stuart

Jesse Stuart was born in northeastern Kentucky’s Greenup County. His parents, hard-working tenant farmers, instilled in him and his four siblings a drive for education, a poignant emphasis given his father’s illiteracy and his mother’s second-grade education. Stuart graduated from Lincoln Memorial University with a BA in 1929, making friends while there with Don West and James Still. At Vanderbilt University, where he attended graduate school in 1931–1932, Stuart studied with influential southern writers and critics such as Donald Davidson, who also taught Appalachian authors Mildred Haun and Jim Wayne Miller. After graduate school, Stuart returned to Greenup to work as an educator and author....

Writers of the Republic of Vietnam

This chapter is about literary and artistic achievements under the Republic of Vietnam from 1955 to 1975. It first discusses the persecution of writers, scholars, and journalists during the Vietnam War. The chapter then turns to the generations of writers moved by the socio-political climate in South Vietnam after the end of the First Indochina War. From 1955 to 1960, during the first five years of the First Republic when the whole South still enjoyed peace and stability, Southern writers embarked on an auspicious journey. However, as the chapter shows, their most spectacular achievements appeared only during the troubled Second Republic period.

Poverty Politics

Representations of southern poor whites have long shifted between romanticization and demonization. At worst, poor southern whites are aligned with racism, bigotry, and right-wing extremism, and at best, regarded as the passive victims of wider, socio-economic policies. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing pushes beyond these stereotypes and explores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. The book examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel-writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism that crosses the boundaries of the US South and regionalism, moving past ideas about the culture of poverty to examine the economics of poverty. Included are critical examinations of the writings of southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim McLaurin, Toni Morrison, and Ann Pancake. Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing includes critical engagement with identity politics as well as reflecting on issues including Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and mountaintop removal. It interrogates the presumed opposition between the Global North and the Global South and engages with micro-regions through case studies on Appalachian photo-narratives and eco-literature. Importantly, it focuses not merely on representations of southern poor whites, but also on writing that calls for alternative ways of re-conceptualizing not just the poor, but societal measures of time, value, and worth.

“Culture Springs from the Actions of People in a Landscape”: Poor Whites and Environmentalism

This chapter examines the varying strains of environmentalism and/or activism that run throughout the work of southern writers including Janisse Ray, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, Mary Hood, Ann Pancake, Silas House, and Denise Giardina. It explores the relationship between environmentalism and poverty as it discusses waste, throw-away culture, recycling and sustainability. It argues for a move from regionalism/nationalism to localism/globalism and questions the false dichotomy between the Global North and Global South. The chapter turns to Appalachia to consider the impact of Mountaintop removal mining (MTR), and it interrogates both the economics that often drive the poor to undertake environmentally destructive jobs and the activism that exists within poor communities.

Isabel GÓMEZ SOBRINO, «Jesse Graves, cuatro poemas inéditos»

Los cuatro poemas inéditos presentados a continuación pertenecen al poeta norteamericano Jesse Graves. Jesse Graves nació en Knoxville, Tennessee en 1973. Pasó su infancia en Sharps Chapel, lugar que cobrará gran importancia en el paisaje retratado en muchos de sus poemas. Recibió su doctorado en la Universidad de Tennessee y fue lector en la Universidad de Nueva Orleans durante un año. Actualmente imparte clases de literatura y creación literaria en East Tennessee State University donde hemos colaborado juntos en un recital bilingüe sobre su poesía en nuestro centro de enseñanza. Él mismo me ha proporcionado estos poemas que he traducido para su difusión internacional puesto que su voz está adquiriendo cada vez más renombre en los círculos intelectuales norteamericanos. La poesía de Jesse Graves ha sido reconocida a lo largo de su carrera con varios premios. En el 2014 recibió el Phillip H. Freund Award de escritura creativa de la Universidad de Cornell. En el 2015 la organización Fellowship of Southern Writers le concedió el James Still Award en su apartado denominado Writing about the Appalachian South (Escritura sobre el Sur de los Apalaches). Su primer libro de poemas, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine (2011), ganó el premio Weatherford Award in Poetry otorgado por el Berea College y el reconocimiento como Libro del Año por la Asociación de Escritores de los Apalaches. Su segundo libro, Basin Ghosts (2014), también recibió el premio Weatherford Award in Poetry en el 2015. En la poesía de estos dos libros el paisaje es de gran importancia, ya sea el del sur de los EE. UU., así como otros lugares de la geografía norteamericana. El paisaje se presenta en diálogo con recuerdos del pasado pero sin obviar emociones más personales que rezuman en los poemas. En el proceso traducción se ha intentado mantener el tono de cada poema original. Esto se puede observar en la diferencia entre el tono un tanto trivial con el que comienza el poema «Deuda» y la intensidad de «Alepo» o la carga emocional en «Recuerdo de un niño a quien nunca conocí» y la universalidad poética de «Hombre maldiciendo la noche». Así bien, en las presentes traducciones, se ha mantenido la voz poética original del autor ajustándonos a la lengua en traducción, en este caso, el español. Todos los poemas aquí traducidos son inéditos. En la bibliografía se pueden consultar los datos de libros de poemas publicados por Jesse Graves.

Southern Comfort

Southern writers Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor present the collusion of the American welfare state and a consumer economy as a source of existential alienation. This chapter considers their objections to the social-democratic institutions created during the New Deal era. Percy and O’Connor present versions of Christian existentialism as an alternative to bureaucratic politics. In addition to joining the concert of intellectual challenges to the legacy of reform established during the New Deal, their related responses represent the splintering of American existentialism in the 1960s. The political vocabulary of the New Left represents a competing faction of American politics informed by existentialism. These differing responses share a common valorization of private judgments of value. Both responses are related to another phenomenon, which political scientists call the rise of an “independence regime,” or partisan disaffiliation, in the American electorate.