test Temporal Wounds and Racial Ruins: |Dia-noesis: A Journal of Philosophy

Temporal Wounds and Racial Ruins: Structural Racism, Traumatic Latency, and Familial Disintegration in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones

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Published: Nov 23, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/dia.43392
Keywords:
Jesmyn Ward Trauma Structural Racism Black Family Traumatic Latency Post-Katrina Literature
Asma Aijaz
Ph.D., Scholar in English, Department of Humanities, Social Sciences & Management, Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, India
Jaya Shrivastava
Ph.D., Assistant Professor & Head, Department of Humanities NIT Srinagar, Hazratbal, Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, India
Abstract

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011) reimagines Hurricane Katrina not as an isolated natural disaster but as the culmination of systemic neglect and racialized precarity in the American South. This paper examines how structural racism, manifest in housing, healthcare, and economic disenfranchisement, functions as slow, cumulative trauma that destabilizes Black familial life. Drawing on Lawrence and Keleher’s theory of structural racism and Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, the study argues that the novel depicts trauma as temporally dispersed rather than event-based. Esch’s fractured narration, the father’s survivalist compulsions, and Skeetah’s obsessive care for China emerge as expressions of psychic dislocation and deferred affect. Ultimately, the novel reconfigures the disaster narrative by exposing how racial violence persists through affective and infrastructural absences. Ward critiques the myth of a post-racial America, revealing how trauma is encoded into the very systems that purport to safeguard marginalized communities.

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