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Weathering the Storm: Black Maternal Mortality, Resistance, and Power in Richard Wright’s “Down by The Riverside,” Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

Representations of natural disasters in Black Southern literature identify social location as the greatest indicator of risk vulnerability. Moreover, they can expose the precarious subjectivity of the Black female reproductive body, as addressed through characters Lulu in Richard Wright’s “Down by the Riverside,” Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Jesmyn Ward’s Esch in Salvage the Bones. Together, these female characters share a legacy of social marginalization and Black female resistance that is (re)shaped through their experiences with ecological catastrophe. This thesis considers these three texts together as an ongoing testimony and as a means to bear witness to a socio-historical record of disaster oppression and Black female resistance.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:uno.edu/oai:scholarworks.uno.edu:td-3874
Date20 December 2019
Creatorsvincent, renee
PublisherScholarWorks@UNO
Source SetsUniversity of New Orleans
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceUniversity of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

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