Catastrophe and Hope: Martyn Bone’s The Writings of Jesmyn Ward

Martyn Bone’s The Writings of Jesmyn Ward offers a much-needed analysis of the work of one of America’s most lauded contemporary writers, treating her fiction and non-fiction as a cohesive project. Bone, an associate professor of English Literature at the University of Copenhagen, considers Ward’s writing from early-career short fiction to non-fiction, memoirs, speeches, essays, as well as her historical novel Let Us Descend (2023). Despite the "veritable flood" of essays and chapters about Ward, Bone offers his book as the first monograph devoted entirely to her writing (3). With this cross-genre study, Bone underscores the centrality of racial capitalism in Ward’s overarching body of work.¹Ward agrees that her work is driven to show the inner workings of racial capitalism. Her MacArthur Foundation profile states that she explores “the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.” This throughline continues in Ward's collection of essays, On Witness and Respair (2026). 

Since the publication of his second monograph, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (2005), Martyn Bone’s scholarship has broadly centered depictions of the environment and climate catastrophe in contemporary American literature. Writing from England, Australia, Copenhagen, and Oxford, Mississippi, Bone’s publications deploy transnational, economic, and environmental approaches particularly attuned to the ways literature can illuminate the injustices of living precariously amid climate catastrophe. In The Postsouthern Sense of Place, he proposes that transnational critical perspectives that challenge the long shadow of neo-Agrarianism allow us to “reconfigure ‘the South’ in radical, and even hopeful, ways.”²Martyn Bone, The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Baton Rouge, LA: 2005): 252. His study considers Ward’s work as refusing “conventional models of ‘regionalism’ or ‘southern literature’: it scales up to the national and global scope of racism, capitalism, and environmental crisis” (10). This could prove to be a challenging distance for longtime readers of Ward’s fiction, who are often drawn to the ways Ward writes about the particularities of the Gulf and Mississippi with what she describes as “all its attendant traumas and hardships and joys, all the things that make life worth living here.”³“Something Beautiful Out of the Darkness,” an interview with Jesmyn Ward by Regina N. Bradley, Southern Cultures 29, no. 4 (Winter 2023): 13. For Bone, local particularities evince broader, systemic, and global connections, positioning Ward as a writer casting her vision outward to the world. 

Bone traces how Ward’s renditions of working-class families, and her attention to the environmentally threatened Gulf South’s facing extractive capitalism,  point toward global interactions of racial capitalism. This perspective can veer away from questioning how global systems shape the ways cultures and regions are imagined. Ward’s depictions of Hurricane Katrina, the prison industrial complex, and Gulf South poverty touched by extraction and petrochemical industries are, in Bone’s analysis, outward-facing violences that reveal truths about global precarity. Still, Jesmyn Ward, writes Bone, encourages readers to “apprehend at human, familial, communal, and local scales, and in affective as well as intellectual terms, the complex interrelations between the legacies of slavery, the neoliberal turn, and environmental crises” (27). These tensions—between the local and global, and between the particularity of racial capitalism in the Gulf South next to conversations about how regions are imagined by a writer often deemed an inheritor of “southern literature”—complicate positioning her as a writer-made-seer of global precarity.   

To situate the throughlines in Ward’s work, Bone explicates five themes across her writing: intertext, race, human-animal relations, neoliberal neglect, and environmental catastrophe. First, Bone contends that Ward engages with other authors who depict the African American experience. Hurston, Faulkner, and Morrison are writers she “recycles,” “negotiates,” or “evades” (4-5). Next, he traces the consistent emphasis in Ward’s work on Black social death and Afropessimist constructions of racist US legal and social systems through the legacies of plantation slavery.⁴Bone evaluates the ways Ward’s characters bear out the social trajectories laid out by Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Bone then tracks the complicated depictions of the animal world and cross-species relationships in Ward’s writing, which he argues both illustrate and counter renderings of Blackness as animalistic. Connecting the other themes, Bone shows how Ward tackles questions of neoliberal economic neglect. He considers environmental crises, climate catastrophes, “extractive logics,” and natural disasters as parts of Ward’s vision (138). Additionally, Bone traces ongoing conversations between Ward’s work and Black Studies, including those about environmental futurity, legacies of slavery, and subjectivity.  
 
Bone’s opening chapter, “Local and Global Scales of Racial Neoliberalism: Where the Line Bleeds,” was originally published in the 2023 collection Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays. Introducing the economies central to the families in Ward’s first novel, Bone argues that Where the Line Bleeds (2008) depicts the crises of "neoliberal neglect" that Ward's Bois Sauvage families will continue to face in books to come.⁵Bone attributes putting “neoliberal neglect” in conversation with environmental infrastructure to Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, which cites Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane Katrina and the Color of Disaster. Neglect and racial violence engender states of grim precarity for characters such as Christophe, Joshua, and Sandman. Drawing upon sociologists and political theorists in Africana Studies, Bone examines how the biopolitics of disposability and necropolitical history manifest in Ward’s characters wasting, wasted, or in waste.⁶Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, Henry Giroux’s Stormy Weather, and historian Sadiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother inform Bone’s analysis of waste and detritus in Ward’s work to political realities of disposability.  

In considering Ward’s nonfiction, memoirs, and personal essays, Bone questions how Ward’s writing renders grief and mourning both personal and collective. Using Men We Reaped (2013), a memoir organized around the deaths of five men that Ward’s Mississippi community experienced in just four years, Bone explores the conventions most often discussed in Ward scholarship: the hauntings, ghosts, conjuring, and afterlives that powerfully resonate with readers of her fiction. While the hauntings in Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend show some of the clearest intertextual connections with an African American literary tradition, Bone primarily situates his study of hauntings and ghosts in her nonfiction, showing that Ward’s work “asserts continued presence against the exigencies of a history that attempts both spatial and temporal erasure of Black life” (134). Bone traces a throughline of collectivity in Ward’s writing about violent deaths and grief, demonstrating that all of Ward’s work centers how haunting it is to become a witness in the many wakes of environmental, racist, and economic violence.⁷Bone points to final chapter of Men We Reaped, which is called “We Are Here,” and Ward’s personal essay published in Oxford American, “We Do Not Swim in Our Cemeteries.” 

In a chapter that takes the environment as its primary theme—in particular, the “chronotopic link” between the penitentiary/neoplantation and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster of 2010—Bone builds on the theoretical work of The Postsouthern Sense of Place. Extending the trauma of petro-capitalist extraction from its imprints on one family and one site to a global scale, Bone connects the ghosts and hauntings of the “Plantationocene” and Deep Water Horizon in Sing, Unburied, Sing, to Toni Morrison's Beloved demonstrating that Ward's environmental vision is cyclican and resonant.

Bone contends that Ward draws attention to the global legacies of racism and capitalism, and that her work makes visible how these legacies “continue to shape Black life and death” (10). To this end, Bone’s analysis of gender and labor—which are not treated as standalone themes, but as categories that shape each of the five themes in his study—emphasize the connectedness her characters share with global dispossession and environmental destruction. Ward’s own comments about “her South” challenge critical evaluations that deny the particularity of her experience. In an essay “My True South: Why I Decided to Return Home,” published in Time in 2018 and re-published as the third essay in On Witness and Respair, Ward urges that the racism and violence that marks Mississippi is “the same belief that put in place the economic and social caste systems that allowed America to become America.”⁸Jesmyn Ward, “My True South: Why I Decided to Return Home,” Time, July 26, 2018, https://time.com/5349517/jesmyn-ward-my-true-south/ In Ward’s autobiographical writing, descriptions of Mississippi manifesting global social and economic systems are then followed with ruminations on her particular experience.⁹In “My True South,” Mississippi is, for Ward, family, “pots and pots of shrimp,” the corner store, a “blooming Mississippi night," among others, and each “Flush with joy.”⁹  

Bone is careful not to dismiss Ward’s descriptions of the ways she negotiates place. After pointing to the ways she describes her work as a continuation of an ancestry of Black southern women, he notes: “I do not mean here to elevate Ward’s Black southern subject position or subject matter at the expense of her links to a larger African American literary tradition, or her representation of Black experience at the scale of the nation” (7). Given the varieties of southern regions and experiences, this can be a difficulty balance, but Bone acknowledges the fragile proximities to violence and ecological destruction that Ward’s Mississippi characters live while resisting classifications of "subnational" Othering. "The Black southern particularity of Ward's writing,” he insists, enables reflection on the ‘aesthetic manifestations’ of ‘social causes’ that should concern us all” (35). This can diverge from Ward’s tendencies toward place, which often negotiate the particularities of the local, regional, and national in conversation.¹⁰In an interview on the southern gothic for Southern Cultures, Ward says, “For me it always goes back to the beginnings for us as Black southern people. It always goes back to enslavement, and in relation to white southern writers, for me, that’s the dark heart of everything. I think they tend to write around it. I feel like Black writers,specifically Black southern writers, write more towards it. Maybe because we had less. There was no avoiding it for us. We have always lived with the real ramifications of slavery for hundreds of years.”

Explicating major themes poses several challenges for Bone in The Writings of Jesmyn Ward, as the interconnections requires chapters that cover enormous territory.  Each of his five themes has been discussed in articles and chapters about Ward. Tracing environmental catastrophe and economic neglect risks ignoring criticism that speaks to each of these phenomena in discrete ways—such as the growing body of work on “carceral ecologies,” which permeate her fiction and could be considered a theme, too.¹¹Cydney Phillip’s chapter in Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, “Carceral Ecologies: Incarceration and Hydrological Haunting in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing,” and Savannah DiGregorio’s “Martial Meteorology: Carceral Ecology in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing,” in Épistémocritique both outline how carceral ecologies shape Ward’s fictional landscapes. Bone favors social and economic theorists while gesturing at other literary analyses, a strategy that can leave out valuable existing scholarship—especially on literary themes he highlights in diasporic and postcolonial criticism. For instance, Robin Brooks’ Class Interruptions: Inequality and Division in African Diasporic Women’s Fiction (2022) traces how contemporary diasporic African, Caribbean, and African American women writers depict cross-class relationships to confront neoliberal structural ideologies in fiction. While Brooks doesn’t discuss Ward’s writing, she makes a clear case for neoliberal economic neglect as a major theme in contemporary fiction by diasporic and African American women writers. Joshua Bennett’s study of animals in Black fiction, Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man (2020), evaluates the ways animality challenges violent de-personhood in African American literature. To these ends, Bone could better justify why explicating the five themes he has chosen warrant study over others and how his work complements existing literary analyses. In the same vein, he could broach how a growing body of Ward scholarship fits or ignores his schema.      

Readers of the essays in Ward’s On Witness and Respair will benefit from Bone’s expansive  contextualization of the political, environmental, and economic forces that shape her writing. Situating the global contexts of the precarity and violences of the geographies she depicts, alongside Ward’s renditions of what Bone terms “matters of Black southern life and death” (10), certainly encourages readers to trace how Ward’s writing more broadly fits in contemporary global literature. Still, Bone’s attention to her many literary inheritances, and her depictions of these globalities first through a "prism of Black southernness” (7), encourages further exploration into Ward's "South." As Imani Perry puts it in her profile of Ward for The New York Times Magazine after the publication of Let Us Descend:     

"There are many Souths. Ward’s version, made up of the towns dotting the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was submerged until she dredged it for us. Even within Mississippi, this region is often opaque: It is not the storied Delta, where cotton was king […] The Gulf Coast is the United States’ mouth to the Americas, at once vast and small."    

The major contribution of Martyn Bone’s The Writings of Jesmyn Ward is to position her work as a body of writing cohesively and politically committed to “sing for and about the living and the dead” (183). In order to find “fresh hope” or “recovery from despair,” Bone notes in his epilogue, Ward bears witness to global violences in an effort to salvage what is “respirational” (172). Considering Ward's major throughlines enables readers to identify where and how they emerge in On Witness and Respair, as well as in her eagerly anticipated future fiction.

About the Author

Rachel Bryan is a postdoctoral fellow in the Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center and teaching assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her essay on grief and adult daughters in Eudora Welty’s and Jesmyn Ward’s fiction appeared in The Eudora Welty Review in 2025. She has served as the Vice President of the Flannery O’Connor Society since 2023. 

• fAfrican American History
• fAfrican American Studies
• fDisaster and Relief
• fEnvironmental Studies
• fGeography
• fLiterary Criticism
• fMemory and Memorial Cultures
• fRace Relations
• fRegional Studies