Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective

by ANISSA J. WARDI

“This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film; it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism.”—Yvonne Atkinson, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society While there is no lack of scholarship on the trans-Atlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture.
           
In  Water and African American Memory , Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site.
           
Using the trans-Atlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deeply into the environmental dimension of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theoretical map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging and original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmon.  

192 pages, Hardcover

First published October 13, 2011

Reviews

[Patricia Coloma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Wardi´s undertake on the relationship between water, memory and African American identity. She connects geograohy and identity in splendid ways. I loved the way in which she dig into the South, how she talks about the Spanish moss. But I wish she had taken one chapter to examine more deeply spirituality and water and in another one explored water and trauma.

[Lee Rozelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Instrumental for Morrison scholars, ecocritics, and readers curious about the relationship between nature and the Black experience in America.