Blackness and the Anthropocene Sublime in Jesmyn Ward’s Fiction

Abstract

This article focuses on the potentials of African American literature to analyze and rethink interlinkages of race, the sublime, and the Anthropocene. Specifically, it discusses two of Jesmyn Ward’s novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Let Us Descend (2023), through a focus on Blackness and the notion of the Anthropocene sublime. My readings show that Ward mobilizes traditions of the sublime through an African American environmental perspective, thus highlighting the racial dimensions of the Anthropocene sublime and often suggesting alternative forms of thinking about the human. After introducing the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of my analysis this article focuses on two strategies through which Ward negotiates questions of Blackness and the Anthropocene sublime: playing with collapsing temporalities (Salvage the Bones) and with figures that I interpret as “elemental ghosts” (Let Us Descend). It argues that Ward’s Katrina-novel Salvage the Bones speaks to the Anthropocene sublime by representing “civilizational collapse” as part of the present (not a far-off future), by showing the effects of traditions of anti-Blackness on the present, and by collapsing human and more-than-human temporalities through a discourse of motherhood. Let Us Descend, on the other hand, a historical fiction set in the antebellum period, addresses Blackness and the Anthropocene sublime by representing the racial sublime of slavery through the figures of “elemental ghosts.” Through perspectives developed in African American studies, my readings of the novels demonstrate how Ward strategically deploys established traditions of the sublime in ways that resonate with the Anthropocene and contribute to a more race-sensitive conceptualization of the Anthropocene sublime.