Bodies Tell Stories: Race, Animality, and Climate Change in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

This chapter explores Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones as an enactment of what Claire Jean Kim calls an ethics of avowal of race and animality—in which racialized violence is not conflated with violence toward animals, but rather understood as mutually constitutive and inseparably linked. Ward’s novel takes place over twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina and the day after. Drawing from critical race studies, animal studies, feminist science studies, and Black feminist critique, this chapter analyzes Ward’s novel within a climate of anti-Blackness and a climate-changed world. Ward’s novel enacts a kind of noticing of what Katherine McKittrick terms Black livingness that is inextricable from more-than-human aliveness. Through this lens, Salvage the Bones is a different kind of companion species manifesto—a manifesto-novel, a declaration of survival, and a site of resistance—one that tells a complex and contradictory story of co-constitutive relationships between bodies in a world that is always already more-than-human. This chapter examines the current confluence of global crises as a time to turn toward the animal and animalized bodies (both human and more-than-human) and reclaim power, as the vast majority of people and beings on this planet have been excluded from, and exploited by, Western-white-male-humanity.