Work

(Re)Worlding the Plantation: Vulnerability and Regeneration in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones and Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Through a comparative analysis of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (2011) and Lois-Ann Yamanaka's Blu's Hanging (1997), this article examines how the ecological and sociological destruction rooted in the plantation era continues to render marginalized communities disproportionately vulnerable to climate change. These novels serve as critical texts for exploring how the plantation—both ideologically and materially—is reproduced across different temporal and spatial contexts. Although set in distinct locations and time periods, both narratives reveal how plantation logics persist, shaping the characters’ daily lives through enduring structures of racial stratification and inequity. I argue that the environmental harms and socioeconomic injustices depicted in these works trace back to the plantation's normalization of land exploitation and the racialization of labor. Yet Ward and Yamanaka also envision alternative ways of living, foregrounding resistance through communal care, regenerative agriculture, and kinship that extends beyond the human—offering pathways toward the transformational change needed to unsettle the plantation order's ideology of domination and division.

Source: MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States

DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlaf029

Author: Maya Iming Richards

Institution: University of California San Diego

Language: English

Topic: Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Climate action

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $2,328