Journal of American Studies,  (), , –

© Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 
doi:./S First published online  April 

Figuring Giorgio Agamben’s “Bare

Life” in the Post-Katrina Works of
Jesmyn Ward and Kara Walker
HOLLY CADE BROWN

This article explores how Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker’s visual essay
After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben’s “bare life” in order to
explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political signifi-
cance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer
lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider
debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents
that are connected to structural forms of persecution.

On the surface, Hurricane Katrina was a natural disaster. Yet the failure of a
succession of American governments to properly maintain the levees that
would prevent the flooding of economically dilapidated sections of the city
after a hurricane hit made it a catastrophe that was also caused by the
state. The initial media coverage of Katrina revealed what had previously
been a hidden population in the neoliberal order, a predominantly African
American community living in abject poverty on the outskirts of New
Orleans. The disposability of this population within the American national
framework was brutally revealed by the federal government’s inadequate and
delayed response in its efforts to rescue the inhabitants of New Orleans,
which left thousands stranded with scarce supplies inside the Louisiana
Superdome. While the state in contemporary democratic societies is often
portrayed as a force of protection, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina demon-
strates that the power of the modern state rests on a process of exclusion that
can leave bodies to be rendered dispensable at any time.

Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University. Email: holly.brown@ugent.be.


Sharon Monteith, “Hurricane Katrina: Five Years after: Introduction,” Journal of American
Studies, ,  (), –.

Henry A. Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO:

Paradigm Publishers, ), . Ibid., .

Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
), .

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  Holly Cade Brown
In their respective artistic responses to the events following Katrina, Kara
Walker and Jesmyn Ward chose to represent African American subjects –
like those left in the Superdome – that have been positioned outside the
boundaries of state protection. After the Deluge is a visual essay that combines
Walker’s own provocative silhouettes of life in the antebellum American
South with American artworks from the nineteenth century lifted from collec-
tions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she curated a show with the
same content in . In keeping with her broader body of work, Walker’s
silhouettes of racial stereotypes explore the deep-rooted visual vocabulary that
continues to shape contemporary race relations in the USA. In the epigraph to
After the Deluge, Walker resists the codification of Katrina into easily manage-
able sound bites such as “security failures” or “the question of race and
poverty,” a codification which elides the horror of witnessing the radical pre-
cariousness of a “frightened and helpless populace” neglected by their govern-
ment. While this collection was planned long before Katrina occurred,
Walker’s combination of contemporary and historical images representing
African American life exemplifies her desire to explore the “subconscious nar-
ratives at work when we talk about such an event.” Jesmyn Ward similarly
links the creation of her  novel Salvage the Bones to a broader questioning
of the ways in which the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina has been represented.
Ward’s novel is told from the perspective of Esch Batiste, a pregnant African
American teenager who lives out in the “black heart of Bois Sauvage” in rural
Louisiana. The community that Esch inhabits, all male save for her brother
Skeetah’s prize pit bull terrier China, is a space radically disconnected from
the protections associated with the American nation as a central power in
the Western world. Having experienced the impact of the storm herself,
Ward claims that the novel was driven by a dissatisfaction with the way “it
had receded from public consciousness,” a withdrawal which has been seen
to stand in direct opposition to the proliferation of / novels with their em-
phasis on the domestic dramas of traumatized wealthy white Manhattanites.
Globally resonant events such as Katrina, which bring into lurid detail the
sheer power that contemporary states have in determining which of its citizens
should live or die, have sustained the popularity of Giorgio Agamben’s engage-
ment with biopolitics. Agamben’s oeuvre can be seen as part of a wider


Roberta Smith, “Kara Walker Makes Contrast in Silhouette in Her Own Met Show,”
New York Times,  March , available at www.nytimes.com////arts/
design/walk.html, accessed  Jan. .

Kara Walker, After the Deluge: A Visual Essay (New York: Rizzoli, ), .  Ibid., .

Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (London: Bloomsbury, ), .

A. G. Keeble, “Katrina Time,” in Ten Years after Katrina: Critical Perspectives of the Storm’s
Effect on American Culture and Identity (London: Lexington Books, ), –, .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
“political turn” within the humanities, the flourishing of an academic dis-
course which seeks to engage with the enduring significance of our corporeality
to global political situations in spite of our increasing reliance on technologies
that dematerialize our experience of the world around us. A number of scho-
lars have embraced his ongoing examination of the liminal spaces between
meaningful and superfluous life in their exploration of the political circum-
stances that led to the state’s abandonment of African American communities
in the aftermath of Katrina. Yet Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” a lucid
outlining of the philosophical mechanisms by which bodies are stripped of
their political significance, has been overlooked in examinations of the cultural
responses to Hurricane Katrina. Using Agamben’s concept of “bare life” as a
theoretical framework, this essay aims to explore the intricate means by which
the post-Katrina works of Kara Walker and Jesmyn Ward consider the con-
tinuing relevance of the relationship between representation and biopolitical
disposability, the way in which narratives fundamentally influence, mediate
and express the material conditions of our existence. Salvage the Bones and
After the Deluge explore this affiliation through an engagement with a
longer genealogy of representation of the black body from slavery onwards, im-
ploring us to trace the heterogeneous trails that led to the abdication of gov-
ernmental responsibility during Katrina.
Ward’s and Walker’s depictions of racialized bodies in the wake of
Hurricane Katrina strongly resonate with specific aspects of Agamben’s por-
trayal of biological forms that have been stripped of the privileges that identifi-
cation with the category of “the human” entails. First, both artists engage with
the way in which the line between man and animal in Western culture has
been exploited to mark racialized bodies as nonhuman, a concept discussed
in Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine. By projecting animality
onto socially subjugated groups, these individuals are framed as neither animal
nor human life, but bare life. Second, Agamben, Ward and Walker all engage a
genealogical approach to their work which embraces a malleable employment
of history. However, this genealogical method prompts reflection about the
ethics of representing the relationship between current and historical forms
of politically expendable life. While the chronological flexibility of bare life
allows it to adhere to the genealogical rendition of African American bodies
in After the Deluge and Salvage the Bones in stimulating ways, these texts
can be seen to diverge from Agambenian models of thought through their


Peter Boxall, Twenty-First Century American Fiction: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ), .

In particular see Donald Pease’s The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, ); and Giroux. Boxall, .

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  Holly Cade Brown
engagement with the material experiences of nonwhite subjects. This discus-
sion therefore participates in a wider discourse regarding the way in which
the Eurocentric, psychoanalytic frameworks of trauma and Agambenian bio-
politics cannot account for the ways in which enduring legacies of racism
operate. Probing the intertextual connections that are created between Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved () and the silhouette form, which elucidate
the relationship between blackness and nonexceptional modes of violence,
we can witness how these artists rupture what can be perceived as an artificial
distinction between transgenerational biopolitical vulnerability and the experi-
ence of continuous forms of concealed trauma. In prompting their audiences
to see Katrina in relation to a protracted narrative of exclusion, these artists
can be seen to open up a wider debate about the conceptual structures that
we use in order to describe shattering incidents such as Katrina that are never-
theless connected to structural forms of persecution.

AGAMBEN AND THE HUMAN–ANIMAL BINARY

In order to understand Agamben’s ideas regarding how subjects are barred
from the category of the human within the modern political sphere, it is ne-
cessary to trace the development of his conception of bare life. In his 
book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben engages in a
similar line of critical genealogy to that of Michel Foucault in his desire to
trace how modern politics utilizes invisible power as opposed to visible subju-
gation to control and manipulate populations. In opposition to Foucault’s
distinction between antiquity and modernity, Agamben constructs a version
of history that identifies a perpetual lack of definition between the categories
of zoē (the physiological existence common to all living beings) and bios (the
qualified, political form of life proper to an individual or group). He illus-
trates this historical continuity through the persistence of the sovereign and
the homo sacer as figures that demonstrate the gaps between the categories
of bios and zoē. The “inclusive exclusion” of the sovereign within the polis is
matched by the ancient figure of the homo sacer, a sacred man who could be
condemned to death by law but who could not be sacrificed due to the
removal of his political life. For Agamben, the homo sacer is the originary
figure of “bare life,” the object of sovereign violence who is decreed expendable
due to his exclusion from the political realm. The ability of the sovereign to
produce a state of exception in which the normal rule of law is suspended and


Alex Murray, Giorgio Agamben (London: Routledge, ), .

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
 
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, ), . Ibid., . Ibid.

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
through which bare life is produced represents the hidden foundation on
which the entire political system is based. Using selected historical exam-
ples, Agamben traces how modern biopolitical states have utilized the state
of exception that causes the production of bare life in order to justify the
abandonment and potential destruction of those individuals subject to
their control.
In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben can be seen to further nuance and
develop his thought with regard to how bare life is produced. In this book,
Agamben outlines the concept of the “anthropological machine” as a collec-
tion of symbolic discourses operating within the history of Western thought
that aim to construct human and animal in opposition to one another.
These discourses declare that the elevation to human status is predicated on
“destroying one’s own animality.” Yet Agamben argues that the inability
of these discourses to effectively define what is fundamentally unique about
the human inevitably leads to the collapse of the distinctions between the
human and the nonhuman. The term Homo sapiens therefore does not re-
present a clearly defined species or even an identifiable substance, but rather
represents an optical machine through which the human viewer sees his or
her own image reflected “always already deformed in the features of an
ape.” As such man is only an “anthropomorphous” animal whose humanity
cannot be recognized as distinct from the ape, hence man “must recognize
himself in a non-man in order to be human.” The anthropological
machine therefore works as a continual rearticulation of the divisions
between human and animal; this process can then be employed to mark
specific individuals out as being nonhuman by attempting to isolate the
animal within them. Foraying into history, Agamben identifies the slave,
the barbarian, the Holocaust victim and the foreigner as examples of
members of society who have been seen to retain their animality in human
form and are accordingly examples of bare life. Agamben’s notion of bare
life therefore engages with a specific branch of posthumanist thought that
encourages the blurring between humans and their others (be it material,
technological or animal) in order to probe the very category of the human
itself. In his denotation of the figures that have retained animality,
Agamben alludes to the way in which the differentiation between human

 
Ibid., . Murray, .

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford
 
University Press, ), . Agamben, The Open, . Ibid., –.
  
Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid.

Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist
Theory (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), .

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  Holly Cade Brown
beings and animals is one of the fundamental ways in which biopolitics exerts
itself.
Kara Walker extensively explores the volatility of the line between human
and animal in After the Deluge. In an untitled piece from  (Figure ),
one of Walker’s silhouettes depicts a woman holding what appears to be a
cross between an African American child and a crocodile. As Lisa Saltzman
notes in her analysis of Walker’s work, the medium of the silhouette
renders all figures black, thereby completing “a perverse visual enactment of
the ‘one drop rule’” which also “implicates the viewer in the social semiotics
of reading and (re)producing racial difference.” Walker mimics specific visual
features of racist stereotypes in order to induce a racialized reading of her
images. The exaggerated lips of the female figure, combined with the fact
that she holds the child roughly by a lock of curly, braided hair, prompts
the viewer to assume that the two female characters are African American
due to use of visual markers which contrast to cultural depictions of whiteness.
The smaller, male, figure, to whom the female figure is apparently holding up
the crocodile child for inspection, is more difficult to read visually. Walker pro-
vides more detail to the male figure’s clothes: hints of blue shading provide a
sartorial elegance that stands in contrast to the ragged edges of the female
figure’s dress. The difference in economic status that the contrast between
the male and female figures denotes, alongside the indelicate manner in
which the female figure holds the monstrous child, indicates that the child
is being held up in order to be inspected by a fully human form. Walker’s
image of the gaze of the man upon the blurred human–animal can be seen
as a playful depiction of the workings of Agamben’s anthropological
machine. In depicting a human form staring at a blurred human–animal
hybrid, Walker’s image indicates how the politics of the distinction between
the human and the animal that Agamben describes have historically been uti-
lized and exploited in order to exclude and marginalize racialized subjects.
While Walker presents us with a visual depiction of the way in which the
anthropological machine creates forms of dominated and dehumanized life,
Ward’s engagement with the elasticity between species, however, can be
seen to jar the internal logic of the anthropological machine. Within the
hyper-local setting of Salvage the Bones, Esch, her father and her brothers
Randall, Skeetah and Junior are figured almost statically around “the Pit” –
a hollow trench outside the family’s property whose form shifts with the


Colleen Glenney Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical
Subjectivity (New York: Columbia Press, ), .

Lisa Saltzman, Making Images Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, ), .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 

Figure . Kara Walker, untitled, . Cut paper, watercolour and graphite on paper mounted
on canvas, ½″ × ″ (· cm × · cm), private collection. Kara Walker, After the Deluge:
A Visual Essay (New York: Rizzoli, ), . Reproduced with permission from Sikkema
Jenkins & Co. on behalf of the artist and copyright holder Kara Walker.

changing seasons. Esch’s family is joined by a small ensemble of characters

from the surrounding community, including Manny, the father of Esch’s
baby. These individuals appear radically isolated and disengaged from
broader national or political contexts, and from the communities that sur-
round them. The trappings of the modern world are absent; Ward only pro-
vides us with momentary glimpses of the institutional interaction that typically
structures North American existence. When the hand of Esch’s father is
ripped off in a brutal accident as the family prepares for the arrival of
Katrina, the scene in the hospital is a fleeting moment of contact with the
outside world before we return to the confines of the Pit. If most novels
are structured horizontally, skimming gracefully between the experiences of

 
Ward, Salvage the Bones, –. Ibid., .

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  Holly Cade Brown
different sentient human characters, then Ward’s novel takes a radically
different approach. The Pit is its central character, and Esch’s perspective
plunges from the insects crawling on the ground to the birds swirling in the
air in her lush, swampland setting. Ward’s stylistic tendency to include
aspects of the natural world normally excluded from the literary picture is
best exemplified by the chapter in which Esch and her brothers leave “the
black heart of Bois Sauvage” for the “pale arteries” where they steal medicine
for China from a white farmer. In the chase between adolescents and farmer
that follows their detection, Ward utilizes a litany of animalistic metaphors to
initiate a blurring between the animal and human forms that make up the
passage. While an inquisitive egret pecks at Esch’s feet, she describes how
the urine building up inside her pregnant body is “a tadpole grown to the
confines of its egg.” Big Henry in turn is a “startled bear,” the farmer’s
dog is “leaping like a doe,” and the farmer himself “waves his hands at the
dog as if he is casting out a fishing net.”
This chase scene is certainly indicative of the all-encompassing vision of the
natural landscape that Ward creates and sustains throughout the novel, as
animal and human forms are fluid and interchangeable. Yet, moving away
from a purely metaphorical level, Salvage the Bones also demands that we en-
vision specific animals in noninstrumental terms. When Skeetah asserts at the
beginning of the novel, “some people understand that between man and dog is
a relationship … Equal,” Ward can be seen to engage with a literary discourse
also employed in Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf in which we are called on to
resist inscribed hierarchies between canines and humans, and to evaluate
human and nonhuman characters alike in the present narration of their nov-
elistic context. Ward’s multilayered pairing of Esch and China resists the
social allegory in which comparing a human to a dog inherently reduces the
former’s status. Agamben’s concept of the distorted reflection, the process
by which humans determine their unique status, is subverted by Ward in
Salvage the Bones. As Esch’s pregnancy develops, she demonstrates the desire
to witness the changing state of her body as it appears to the outside world.
Since the only “big mirror” within the house hangs in the living room, Esch
is deprived of seeing her transforming body as she tries to keep the growing
baby secret from her family. Instead of seeing herself in the mirror, Esch
recognizes herself in the pregnant China. From the very beginning of her preg-
nancy, Esch associates her own body with China’s, even claiming that “maybe
it’s China that made me get it” with regard to the initial recognition that she is

  
Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., , .

Ibid., ; and Jeanne-Marie Jackson, “Going to the Dogs: Enduring Isolation in Marlene

van Niekerk’s Triomf,” Studies in the Novel, ,  () –, . Ward, .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
pregnant. Ward plays further with the indistinctions between the human
and animal forms in her visceral descriptions of China coupled with Esch’s
memory of her mother giving birth to Junior. In the opening scene of the
book Esch recalls her mother, claiming “I can see her, chin to chest, straining
to push Junior out” directly before “China tenses … she seems to be turning
herself inside out.” Ward depicts a literary universe in which the antagonistic
relationship between humans and animals is subverted through an optical
transcendence of the species line. Unlike Walker’s crocodile girl, who is
lifted up and dangled powerless in front of the human gaze, the fluidity of
the boundary between species in this novel demonstrates the contingency of
our present moment by undermining the power of differentiation between
human beings and animals. We can perceive, therefore, that Walker and
Ward in different ways both expose the processes by which forms of life are
positioned as disposable through the manipulation of the human–animal
binary, a concept which Agamben is also invested in.

A GENEALOGY OF EXPENDABILITY: SLAVERY AND KATRINA

It is the centrality of one of Agamben’s figures who is marked by this human–
animal distinction, the slave, to Kara Walker’s oeuvre which initiates a con-
sideration of the ethics of representing and engaging with a convoluted,
fragmented lineage of African American vulnerability under the mechanisms
of state power. Walker’s focus on the slave body opens up probing questions
about how to portray the relationship between individuals from historically
distinct periods who are nevertheless united by their liminal position within
the political realm. For Agamben, the body of the slave is an “anthropophor-
ous animal … [an] unresolved remnant that idealism leaves as an inheritance
to thought, and the aporias of the philosophy of our time coincide with the
aporias of this body that is irreducibly drawn and divided between animality
and humanity.” Inclusion within Agamben’s highly selective genealogy
places the slave onto the “monstrous continuum” of bare life, connecting
the slave body to other temporally and contextually distinct examples of ex-
pendable corporealities such as the concentration camp victim and the
barbarian.
Walker’s engagement with slavery takes a similar genealogical approach to
Agambenian thought. After the Deluge engages with the slave body not only

  
Ibid., . Ibid., . Boggs, Animalia Americana, .

Agamben, The Open, .

Miguel Vatter, “In Odradek’s World: Bare Life and Historical Materialism in Agamben and
Benjamin,” diacritics, ,  (Fall ), –, .

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  Holly Cade Brown
through Walker’s creation of the fantastical silhouettes of antebellum life, but
also in her juxtaposition of canonical representations of slavery with the events
following Hurricane Katrina. The only image taken directly from Hurricane
Katrina accompanies Walker’s ruminations in the opening section entitled
“Muck.” The photograph (Figure ) depicts an African American woman
swimming in oil-drenched waters. Unlike Walker’s silhouettes, which engulf
the viewer’s gaze with their scatological and grotesque behavior, the
unnamed, swimming individual who faces away from us has a sense of
dignity. In the text on the opposite page, Walker outlines a key theme in
her artwork: “the idea that a Black subject in the present tense is a container
for specific pathologies from the past and is continually growing and feeding
off these maladies.” On turning the page, we are confronted with a
double-page spread of what is typically referred to as J. M. W. Turner’s
Slave Ship (Figure ), though the painting’s official name is Slavers
Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On. The sharp-
ness and cool colors and the apparent placidity of the photograph contrast dra-
matically with the expressionistic, fiery style of Turner’s painting, where tens
of tiny black hands can be picked out reaching up from the turbulent waters.
In both the photograph and the painting, the bodies in the water are rendered
disposable, suggesting their expendable position between the Middle Passage
and the present day.
The opening to Henry Giroux’s Stormy Weather, in which he uses an
Agambenian model of bare life in order to explore the events of Hurricane
Katrina, however, illuminates some of the ethical implications of the temporal
collapse that Walker’s previously discussed pairing of images seems to suggest.
Using the bloated, waterlogged body of Emmett Till (an African American
teenager killed by white supremacists in ) as a counterpoint to the
bodies left floating in the wake of the hurricane, Giroux warns against creating
a transhistorical image of the African American body excluded from the pol-
itical sphere. He asserts that though the fate of Emmett Till and the responses
to Katrina both revealed to the wider world a “vulnerable and destitute
segment of the nation’s citizenry,” the lack of help provided to the largely
African American population after Katrina was the result of the class and
racial bias of the biopolitical agenda of the Bush administration. In stressing
the historical specificity of the government’s response, Giroux resists the inter-
pretation of the fate of the victims as unavoidable.

  
Walker, After the Deluge, . Ibid. Ibid., .

Michael P. Bibler, “The Flood Last Time: ‘Muck’ and the Uses of History in Kara Walker’s
“Rumination” on Katrina,” Journal of American Studies,   (August ), –, .
 
Giroux, Stormy Weather, –. Ibid., .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 

Figure . PA Images/Bill Haber, in Walker, After the Deluge, . Reproduced with permission
from PA Photos Limited.

The ethical imperative to represent events within their historical bounds has
also been used to critique the very composition of Agamben’s bare life. In a
cutting analysis, Dominick LaCapra claims that many of Agamben’s theoretical
assessments are flawed by the way in which he “construes history as a source of
illustrations or signs, a repository of incommensurable particularities or singular-
ities.” LaCapra also critiques Agamben’s notion that harmony within a post-
metaphysical society can only come about when we stop the functioning of the
anthropological machine and stop registering the division between animal and


Dominick LaCapra, History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (New York: Cornell
University Press, ), .

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  Holly Cade Brown

Figure . Joseph Mallord Wiliam Turner (–), Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing
Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), . Oil on canvas, ¾″ × ¼″,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in Walker, After the Deluge, –. Reproduced with permission
from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

human. Agamben’s peculiar notion of the “emptiness … the suspension of

the suspension” that will occur when we render the machine inoperative is,
in LaCapra’s analysis, an “insufficiently situated version of transhistorical,
structural, or existential trauma” which elides the agency that humans possess
in committing acts of torture, genocide and other forms of victimization.
The way in which Agamben skips over the specificity of historical circumstance
to produce a transhistorical vision of the way in which bare life is produced is
seen as deficient “in the attempt to reduce or eliminate the problematic or
contestable dimensions of certain human practices.”
Giroux and LaCapra are representative of a model of thinking which stres-
ses the need to engage with the historical specificity of Katrina. However, their
focus on the event itself can be seen as obscuring Katrina’s place in the context
of ongoing social and political exclusion, and as preventing us from seeing what
Walker describes as the “subconscious narratives at work” when processing the
hurricane. In particular, engaging with LaCapra’s critique of Agamben eluci-
dates the way in which canonical models of psychoanalytic trauma, in which a
punctual event ruptures a coherent sense of self, is incompatible with describ-
ing the experiences of individuals from communities who experience structural

  
Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
forms of oppression. As Stef Craps has noted, LaCapra’s strict distinction
between historical and structural trauma is particularly unsuited to deal
with the traumatic impact of racism. LaCapra formulates his model of
trauma around loss (the consequence of particular historical events) that can
be worked through and absence (structural trauma which is transhistorical
in nature) that must be “lived with.” However, as Craps observes, racism
does not fit neatly into either of LaCapra’s categories. Both envisioning
racism as being tied to a discrete historical event that can be worked through –
thereby ignoring the multifarious and insidious ways in which it continues to
exist in the present – and viewing it as a transhistorical phenomenon that
simply must be lived with seem thoroughly problematic.
The notion of “insidious trauma,” popularized by Laura Brown, is a useful
conceptual tool for recognizing the limitations of the event-based model. In
her capacity as a psychotherapist, Brown is critical of the way in which the
official definition of trauma, which stipulates that a traumatic event must be
“outside the range of human experience,” is incapable of registering the real-
ities of everyday life for marginalized groups. In particular she highlights
the enduring structural subjugation of nonwhite and female sections of the
population who experience “the traumatogenic effects of oppression that are
not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the
given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit.” Pressingly for
this enquiry, Pieter Vermeulen uses Brown’s concept in order to describe
the overlap between questions of biopolitical vulnerability and the traumatic,
insisting that “insidious trauma … conjures biopolitics’ capillary and invisible
mode of operation.” Thus Vermeulen draws out the parallels between
Brown’s notion of trauma, which reflects on ongoing, concealed forms of deni-
gration, and a biopolitical situation of legal vulnerability. This discussion ges-
tures to the need for a transhistorical, structural vision when exploring the
intersection between pathologies of racism and an exposed position within
contemporary sociopolitical relations.
In this light, Hurricane Katrina and slavery can therefore be seen as dramatic
revelations of the sustained and ongoing positions of liminality that African


Pieter Vermeulen, “The Biopolitics of Trauma,” in Gert Buelens, Samuel Durrant and Robert
Eaglestone, eds., The Future of Trauma Theory (London: Routledge, ), –, .

Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, ), .

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins

University Press, ), , . Craps, .

Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,”
in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, ), –, .  Ibid., , and Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing, .

Vermeulen, .

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  Holly Cade Brown
American bodies hold within the political realm, in Devon W. Carbado’s
words “outside and inside the borders of the American body, not quite not
American.” In his temporally flexible formulation of bare life, Agamben
can be seen to encourage a perspective of history that registers enduring
forms of oppression. The very composition of Walker’s visual essay and
Ward’s novel can also be seen to mirror bare life’s elasticity. While Walker
gives us a table of contents in After the Deluge, the “Muck” section of the
visual essay and the index of artworks are the only sections of the book that
are clearly identified for the reader due to the absence of page numbers.
Given the fact that from the table of contents the reader is unable to see
which pieces fall into categories such as “Chocolate City” or “Superdome,”
Walker’s list poses a challenge to a linear account of African American history.
Ward’s book, too, engages with this complication of history. Corresponding
to Ward’s hyper-local setting, the novel is narrated over a compressed period
of twelve days, with Hurricane Katrina occurring only on the eleventh. The
high-intensity, dramatic action that takes place as the hurricane hits contrasts
with the previous leisurely pace of Ward’s prose. The reader is treated to stir-
ring, visceral depictions of Esch fighting against the natural elements with
puppies in hand: “my head bobs above the water but the hand of the hurricane
pushes it down, down again.” Despite the intense exploits of the eleventh
day, the change in tone and feel in the following section, “Alive,” represent
a return to Ward’s usual form. Aside from the disappearance of China, the
death of her puppies and the physical destruction of the characters’ homes,
Ward renders the human components of Esch’s community as intact. It is
telling, therefore, that the stylistic change that depicted Ward’s portrayal of
the hurricane is recovered so quickly. The hurricane is not an aberration, a
break or betrayal of sovereign protection, but rather exists for Esch and her
family as another episode in a longer history of abandonment, thereby gestur-
ing towards the capillary form of biopolitical power. In both Ward’s and
Walker’s works, therefore, we can see how the depiction of Hurricane
Katrina challenges our sense of the hurricane as a discrete, punctual event sep-
arate from deeper configurations of subjugation.

BLACKNESS, BELOVED, AND THE SILHOUETTE FORM

Viewing Ward’s and Walker’s post-Katrina texts through Agamben’s concep-
tual framework demonstrates the need for a generative conception of the past
when attempting to engage with events which are connected to a longer


Devon W. Carbado, “Racial Naturalization,” American Quarterly, ,  (Sept. ),
 
–, . Walker, After the Deluge, . Ward, Salvage the Bones, .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
history of exclusion rooted in race, a process which cannot be accounted for in
models of thought rooted in Eurocentric, psychoanalytic frameworks of trauma.
However, the construction of bare life itself can also be seen to dismiss the
experiences of racialized bodies through its lack of engagement with the legacies
of colonialism. While it has been brought to the forefront of the previous dis-
cussion about temporality, the body of the slave is discussed only in passing as
part of a collection of secondary figures subordinated to more detailed discus-
sions of the Holocaust. Building upon the foundations of Achille Mbembe’s
necropolitics, Alexander Weheliye has called for a reorientation to place racial
slavery at the centre of our thinking about biopolitics. Weheliye questions
the Eurocentrism of Agamben’s thought, asking why he views the concentration
camp as the “epitome of modern sovereignty” given the sustained global reality
that nonwhite subjects are more likely to occupy the liminal position of inclusive
exclusion that bare life engages with. For Weheliye, the uninterrupted nature
of the psychic and physical violence that has been exerted on black subjects
renders black suffering in “the domain of the mundane … it refuses the
idiom of exception.” While the politically exploitative uses of determining
the human have consistently absorbed Agamben’s thought, his Eurocentric
focus effectively excludes racialized subjects from a broader conception of hu-
manity by refusing to see their suffering as exceptional. It is this process of
the marginalization of black subjects, which can be perceived both in the treat-
ment of African Americans during Hurricane Katrina and more broadly in the
lack of attention paid to racialized subjects within biopolitical discourse, that
Walker and Ward address.
The nuances of the dual processes of marginalization of African American
subjects, both in political terms and in ensuing conceptual frameworks, can be
brought out through an examination of the significance of Toni Morrison’s
novel Beloved to the wider framing of both Ward’s and Walker’s work.
Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw has elucidated some of the connections between
Beloved and Walker’s silhouettes in their cultural working through of the dis-
remembered events of slavery. Walker’s silhouettes or “icons of death” are
resurrected from our collective psyche to haunt the living, a resurrection
which mirrors the way in which Morrison’s protagonist Sethe is haunted by


Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist
Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), .
 
Ibid., . Ibid., .

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “The ‘Rememory’: Kara Walker’s The End of Uncle Tom and
the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven,” in Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg, eds.,
Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Dartmouth, NH: Dartmouth College Press, ),
–, .

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  Holly Cade Brown
Beloved, the daughter that she murdered in an attempt to release her from the
bonds of slavery.
While Walker’s portrayal of African American history has been linked by
critics to Beloved, Salvage the Bones explicitly invokes Morrison’s text as a cul-
tural marker. Describing her dead mother’s peculiar use of language, the cre-
ation of her own linguistic world, Esch uses her mother’s word “belove” to
describe “when Manny was curling pleasure from me with his fingers in
mid-swim at the Pit.” Referencing her deep appreciation for Greek myths,
Esch also recalls that before falling in love with Manny, “I was Psyche or
Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved.” What Ward establishes, therefore, is
a link between encounters with Manny’s body and the rememory of slavery.
The endurance and relevance of the slave past is therefore gestured to in
Ward’s and Walker’s texts, demanding a mode of ethical thinking which
acknowledges its relevance even, in Sethe’s words, for “you who never was
there.”
It seems significant, therefore, that Manny’s body, a symbol that is inter-
twined with Beloved’s visceral rendition of the mark that slavery has made
upon African American identity, is represented in Salvage the Bones in a
way that echoes the silhouette form. In a disturbing scene in which the char-
acters administer medicine to China, Ward depicts how Esch becomes dis-
armed by Manny’s face in the darkness of the Pit:
All I can see is the shadow of him and the white of his smile. It feels wrong to not be
able to see his face, seems wrong that he is as dark as me now, that he would be washed
dark by the sun behind him like ink set to bleeding over waterlogged paper.
In her  piece Middle Passages, Walker depicts an uncannily similar figure
to the one that Ward describes (Figure ). Perhaps even more grotesque than
some of Walker’s other silhouettes, this naked figure’s gleaming white smile is
depicted as more deformed due to his bulbous head.
Alan Gibbs’s reading of Beloved helps us to elucidate a new perspective on
the way in which Ward’s and Walker’s use of the silhouette form signals the
presence of enduring biopolitical structures of exclusion that exist from slavery
onwards. Gibbs’s interpretation draws out the subtleties of Morrison’s narra-
tion that disrupt Shaw’s Caruthian analysis. Shaw connects Beloved’s spectral
presence to Cathy Caruth’s notion of “unclaimed experience,” claiming that a
failure to experience the traumatic event of slavery leads it to belatedly intrude
into society’s current consciousness in a visual, hallucinatory form which
echoes the disturbing imposition of Walker’s silhouettes for their viewers.

  
Ibid., . Ward, . Ibid., .
 
Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin, ), . Ward, .

Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Caruth, Trauma, –, –.

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 

Figure . Kara Walker, Middle Passages, . Gouache, cut paper and collage on board, one
from a series of ·″ × ″, collection of Marc and Lisa Mills, in Walker, After the Deluge, ,
. Reproduced with permission from Sikkema Jenkins & Co. on behalf of the artist and
copyright holder Kara Walker.

However, Gibbs contends that due to Morrison’s portrayal of Sethe’s con-

sciousness of the memory process, Beloved represents the gradual recitation
of a consciously repressed memory that previously she had actively refused
to recount. The insistent presence rather than the violent, occasional intru-
sion of Sethe’s past leads Gibbs to reject the punctual, visual model of trauma
which Shaw advocates in her reading and to turn again to Brown’s concept of
insidious trauma. For Gibbs, Sethe’s “perpetual consciousness of trauma may
be linked to the fact that for [her] it has consisted of an accumulation of inci-
dents of abuse rather than a single, sudden event ‘outside the range of normal
experience.’”
Viewing Gibbs’s critical intervention through the previous exploration of
the way in which biopolitical violence and insidious trauma are related


Alan Gibbs, Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

), . Ibid.

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  Holly Cade Brown
therefore prompts us to reflect upon the way in which the silhouette form is
used within Ward’s and Walker’s work to express a legacy of political expend-
ability. We can perceive a formal replication between the silhouette and the
erasure of the human form in Agamben’s biopolitical model. In its creation
of the void of the human, the silhouette form bears an eerie similitude to
bare life due to its portrayal of the semblance of a human who has been
detached from the communities and institutions, the proper, political life
which allows us to resist the mechanisms of sovereign violence. More crucially,
in their construction of these stripped surfaces these artists engage with the
material conditions of racism by portraying figures that are defined entirely
by their colour. Ward and Walker engage with the way in which, in
Weheliye’s words, blackness “designates a changing system of unequal
power structures that apportion and delimit which humans can lay claim to
full human status and which humans cannot” in the American context
from slavery onwards. Furthermore, Carbado has contended that we
should conceive of blackness itself as a form of bare life in that it has been
included in the juridical order “solely in the form of its exclusion.”
Through the obscured features of Ward’s depiction of Manny and the
opaque flatness of Walker’s silhouettes, we can therefore see portrayals of
black figures whose corporealities bear the spiritual and structural violence
that characterizes insidious trauma.
Scrutinizing the genealogical uncovering of representations of African
American existence, we can perceive how both Ward and Walker position
Katrina against ongoing forms of violence and exclusion enacted on this com-
munity. In particular, these artistic responses to Katrina gesture to the contem-
porary political resonance of “blackness” as a determining factor through
which bodies are constructed as bare life in the contemporary American
context, rupturing what can be seen as the artificial distinction between con-
ditions of biopolitical vulnerability and the experience of trauma. Viewed from
this perspective, it is difficult not to see Ward’s and Walker’s construction of
African American history as one shrouded in pathos, the events of Katrina his-
torically determined from some distant point by the inseparable conjoining of
a legacy of European colonial slavery and race. Yet while Ward and Walker
engage with the historical event of slavery, they do so in a way that is highly
mediated. The post-Katrina texts associate the artificial form of the silhouette
with Morrison’s fictional Beloved, itself a contemporary reflection about the


Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, .

Carbado, “Racial Naturalization,” .

Stephen J. Best, “On Failing to Make the Past Present,” Modern Language Quarterly, , 
(Sept. ), –, .

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 Figuring Agamben’s “Bare Life” 
opaqueness of the past. While these texts, viewed through the contours and
complexities of Agambenian biopolitics, implore us to recognize the structural
importance of race as a means for political exclusion, they also highlight the
fragility, the constructed nature, of our forms of expression. Through the
intertextual and wider critical conjoining of the manufactured silhouette
with the stylized literary design of Beloved, we can perceive a refusal to natur-
alize the nexus between the historical occurrence of slavery and contemporary
biopolitical vulnerability. The genealogical approach that Ward and Walker
take in their examination of African American life in these post-Katrina
texts at once does not ignore the material effects of racism, and demonstrates
the way in which we can make these contingencies and legacies thinkable,
thereby leaving our political and cultural present open to remaking.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Holly Brown is currently reading for a PhD in American literature at Ghent University. The
author would like to thank Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw for their generous support in pre-
paring this article.


Boxall, Twenty-First Century Fiction, .

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-
First Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ), .

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021875816000566 Published online by Cambridge University Press