CREATURELY, THROWAWAY LIFE AFTER KATRINA: Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the

Southern Wild
Author(s): CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
Source: South: A Scholarly Journal , Vol. 48, No. 2 (SPRING 2016), pp. 246-264
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26233565

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 C hriSto Pher l loy d

creaturely, throwaway
life after katrina
Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the Southern Wild

Rereading Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire on the

tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I am struck
(again) by her contention that in southern culture, The
“the foundation or basis for this world is made
biopoliticization
out of repudiated, throwaway bodies that mire the
earth . . . the disposable bodies denied by white cul- of southern
ture” (15). The throwaway bodies of the South were
life, particularly
horrifyingly present in Katrina’s fl oodwaters as the
failed levee systems of New Orleans, and the precar- after Katrina,
ious infrastructure of the Gulf, buckled. As has been evinces
widely documented, bodies (mainly black) were left
for dead, simply abandoned in the storm’s wake. a kind of
Seen as throwaway, the South’s largely black inhab- creatureliness
itants were revealed, by Katrina and its aft ermath,
to be as discardable as in the region’s past. Black that is
southern life in the wake of the storm, as in mem- literalized in
ory, was precarious and vulnerable.
This article will explore a number of ways that the connections
we can understand this southern corporeality as it between
is registered and represented in contemporary cul-
ture. More particularly, I will explore two texts that humans and
foreground not only human but also nonhuman ani- animals.
mal life aft er Katrina: Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage
the Bones (2011) and Benh Zeitlin’s fi lm Beasts of the
Southern Wild (2012). In Ward’s novel, a poor African
American family reside in a Mississippi woodland
clearing called “The Pit.” As Katrina approaches, the
characters struggle to survive. Intimately connected
to the natural world around them and the pit bulls
that the protagonist’s brother keeps for fi ghting,
Ward’s southerners are deeply connected to other
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forms of life in the South even while their own are rendered precarious.
In Zeitlin’s film, a young black girl lives in the bayous of Louisiana with
her neglectful father; there, they survive in homes cobbled together
from trash, foraging food from the surrounding environment. When a
Katrina-like flood wipes out much of their world, the protagonists strug-
gle against a watery landscape, all the while stalked by historical crea-
tures called the Aurochs. It is a southern world filled with human and
nonhuman beasts.
Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik suggest that post-Katrina texts
mainly fall into two categories: “texts that focus on testimony and deal
with processing the storm and its traumatic and cultural effects” and
“texts that center on the identity politics activated and complicated by
Katrina” (x). I align Ward’s novel with the former, and—in its mythical
form—Zeitlin’s with the latter. More importantly, both texts “give voice
to the experiences of those wounded and displaced by the storm, under-
scoring the need to better comprehend the ways our nation failed to pro-
vide for its citizens” (Marotte and Jellenik ix).1 I contend that focusing
on displaced or disposable bodies after Katrina can illuminate the mul-
titudinous ways in which southern life is regulated by historically racial-
ized forces: what I call the South’s corporeal legacies. The events were,
in Henry Giroux’s words, “the consequence of a systemic form of social
engineering” that “marginalized [people] by race and class” (11), render-
ing them disposable. I have elsewhere discussed the ways in which we
can see Katrina as revealing the persistence of southern history, arguing
the storm’s effects on black southerners recollected the historical legacy
of denigrating African Americans to a form of “bare life.”2 Those who
were marginalized before the storm’s arrival—through entrenched pov-
erty and structural racism—were further marginalized after it.
A useful way of framing the concept of the throwaway can be found
in Judith Butler’s work on “precarious life.”3 Butler argues that “each of
us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of
our bodies” (20), pointing to the ways in which we are biopoliticized. As
“socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those
attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence” (Butler 20), we can
see those southerners abandoned in the wake of Katrina as socially, and
corporeally, precarious. While in Butler’s rendering we are all in this
delicate relational web, the inhabitants of the Gulf South were revealed
to be in a heightened state of precarity due to the neglectful marginal-
ization of them before, during, and after the storm. Butler articulates
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 an ethically attuned model of biopolitics that is rooted in the relational.
However, as recent theory suggests, there is also a “reciprocal proxim-
ity between human and non-human animals” (Vermeulen and Richter
1) for which we need to account. Vermeulen and Richter suggest that
the “focus on relationality and encounter makes the study of human/
animal relations an important site for a critical interrogation of moder-
nity and its others” (1). Yet, they contend that “animal” perhaps is not
suitable enough a term to encompass the range of “intimate forms of
implication and connectedness” (2), and they center on the notion of the
“creaturely” instead.
Eric Santner defines creaturely life as “a specifically human way of
finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the polit-
ical field” (xix). Creaturely life is a “peculiar proximity of the human to
the animal at the very point of their radical difference,” at the moment
of the human’s “exposure to a traumatic dimension of political power
and social bonds whose structures have undergone radical transforma-
tions in modernity” (Santner 12). As in Foucault’s description of biopoli-
tics, Santner’s sense of the creaturely is a “threshold where life becomes
a matter of politics and politics comes to inform the very matter and
materiality of life” (12). The exposure of the South’s inhabitants to social,
historical, and natural forces during Katrina revealed a kind of creature-
liness; humans and nonhuman animals were simultaneously stripped
of security, defenses, and bodily stability. While humans, for Santner,
are not simply animals “among other creatures,” and are “in some sense
more creaturely . . . by virtue of an excess that is produced in the space
of the political” (26), I want to suggest that this theory can offer further
insight when directly connected to the study of animal life. In Santner’s
argument, animals and creatures are not produced by political life—they
cannot be biopoliticized (at least in the same way as humans). However, as
Vermeulen and Richter suggest, “By reimagining human life as animated
by fleshy, creaturely excess, the human is conceptualised as entering a
creaturely realm from which it cannot separate itself,” thereby intimat-
ing an “uncanny proximity to the animal world” (6). While Santner’s the-
orizing of the creaturely reinforces a human exceptionalism, Vermeulen
and Richter enable us to see differing but interlocking modes of creature-
liness, in which the matter of a body is politicized between and across
species lines.
Animal studies is a growing field of scholarly inquiry with various
trajectories, such as animal rights and welfare (Singer 1975, Hearne
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1986); the human/animal divide (Weil 2012); and animals in culture
(Pick 2011). Some of this work identifies the overlaps between the study
of animal life and discourses on race, gender, sexuality, disability, and
minorities. Colleen Glenney Boggs argues that “the way we read sub-
jectivity depends on the way we represent the relationship between
human beings and animals” (4). Investigating “animal representations”
in American literature, Boggs focuses especially “on the terrain where
questions of species—human, animal—get worked out at the intersec-
tions with race and gender” (28). This knotty world of human/animal
interpenetration allows us to formulate ways of seeing animal life and
precarious or creaturely African American life in relation to one another.
We must, though, be aware of the dangers in this relational thinking:
of flattening out the important distinctions between different kinds and
forms of violence and marginalization. Questions of species must not
overwrite the specificities of gendered and racial subjectivity, even while
they are mutually productive.
Cary Wolfe elaborates the idea of “speciesism,” which further theo-
rizes the connections between human and animal.4 Following Stanley
Cavell, Wolfe writes that “our stance toward the animal is an index for
how we stand in a field of otherness and difference generally, and in some
ways it is the most reliable index” (5). The human subject becomes sover-
eign through the disavowal of otherness, as embodied in the figure of the
nonhuman animal. Speciesism and its logic rely, among other things,
upon the systematic killing of animals without repercussion (a link, par-
ticularly, to Agamben’s notion of “bare life”). This sacrificial realm, how-
ever, also allows for the killing of other humans without repercussion by
“marking them as animal” (Wolfe 6).
So, one of the most important elements of Wolfe’s theory for us here
is that

as long as this humanist and speciesist structure of subjectivization

remains intact, and as long as it is institutionally taken for granted
that it is all right to systematically exploit and kill nonhuman animals
simply because of their species, then the humanist discourse of spe-
cies will always be available for use by some humans against other
humans as well, to countenance violence against the social other of
whatever species—or gender, or race, or class, or sexual difference (8).

It should thus be clear that my discussion of biopolitical life in the

post-Katrina South depends on an acknowledgement of the ways in which
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 nonhuman animals and marginalized humans (African Americans espe-
cially) are imbricated in political, social, and cultural institutions that
regulate existence and survival, though not equally. Erin Tarver, however,
argues that critical race scholars have been uneasy with speciesist argu-
ments, writing “the notion that ethical distinctions between humans
and non-humans is arbitrary and unjust is much easier to stomach . . .
when one has never been in danger of being seen as, or treated like, an
animal” (273–274). I would argue, however, that the argument cited by
Tarver sidesteps the logic of speciesism as Wolfe describes it. The “struc-
ture of subjectivization” that is paralleled in the killing of various species
is vitally important for understanding the ways in which certain popula-
tions are perceived and treated. Moreover, Tarver’s statement still sug-
gests that being “like an animal” is to be inherently lesser than human.
The expanding field of animal studies, while dominant in mainstream
cultural discourse, has yet to find significant application in southern
studies, and even Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire, which is still an extensive and
ground-breaking catalogue of southern corporeality, has little to say on
the topic. While Yaeger notes that literature “about the South turns often
in the direction of deranged or deformed bodies in order to multiply the
possibilities for confronting the strangeness of the South’s brand of sav-
agery, especially the ways in which racial violence . . . distorts ordinary
bodies” (231), I want to extend Yaeger’s notion to the boundaries between
human and nonhuman corporeality given the deeply rooted ways in
which racial embodiment particularly has been implicated in and tied
to animal life. Moreover, southern writers have frequently turned to the
animal to think through regional subjectivities, a move that has received
scant attention. It is the aim of this article to address this absence by
attending to black human bodies alongside nonhuman ones in the wake
of Katrina.

“Everything deserve to live”

Salvage the Bones is a vivid portrayal of rural black life in the South. Ward’s
characters reside in a “symbolic landscape of the socio-economically
and racially marginalized,” which is an “extension of a twentieth-century
tradition of the literature of the American South that deals in figures of
waste, trash and dirt” (Crownshaw 162). Here, Rick Crownshaw borrows
from Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire, situating Ward’s novel in a larger network
of southern representation. Crownshaw goes further, however, identi-
fying Salvage the Bones as a form of literary testimony that is mediated
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through the regional environment. I am interested particularly in what
Crownshaw calls the novel’s “dispersal of subjective experience” (161)
after Katrina. While he suggests that the environment of Ward’s novel is
constituted by “animals, detritus” (161) as though they are interchange-
able, I want to focus far more closely on the overlaps, relations, and con-
nections between humans and animals to see what kind of creaturely,
throwaway, and precarious life is represented in the contemporary South
and how literary presentations of animality might skewer, or at least
question, such biopolitical regulations.
The novel opens as China, a pit bull, is giving birth to puppies. A lit-
tle later, the teenage protagonist and narrator Esch learns that she is
pregnant. While China and Esch are thus twinned by Ward as (potential)
mothers, China is first paired with others in the family, including the
mother. The clearest link in these opening pages, however, is of China
and Skeetah (Esch’s brother and China’s owner). “She only has eyes for
him,” Esh tells us (2). When China’s near labor, Skeetah “curled around
[her] like a fingernail around flesh,” and “he is focused on China like a
man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is”
(3). Yet Ward does not just relate humans to dogs. As a child, Esch “ate
figs careful as a bird,” and, as a baby, clung “like a monkey to Mama” (59).
Mama herself cleaned the children’s food-smeared faces “like kittens,”
and when older, they “slither like snakes” while moving through a forest
as friend Big Henry “tears through low bushes like a startled bear” (69,
80). Even the family’s house “is a drying animal skeleton” whose con-
tents are “evidence of living salvaged over the years” (58).
The human-animal connections are not only comparative. When Esch
and Skeeah cook and eat a squirrel, Esch says, “I bite and I am eating
acorns and leaping with fear” (49). The ingestion of animal flesh is a
transformative act, at least figuratively, turning Esch into the creature
she’s eating. Imaginatively, external animal becomes internal self, and
thus the links between outside and inside, human and creaturely are col-
lapsed. The novel elaborates on this collapse early on when Ward draws
distinct parallels between Esch’s mother and China. Giving birth to
Junior, Esch’s mother “strain[s] to push [him] out,” and Junior “snag[s] on
her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try and stay inside her,
but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born” (4). Similarly, as
China gives birth to her puppies, “she seems to be turning herself inside
out” (4). The relation between inside and outside is one that crosses
the species line: human and dog both feel the transformative effects of
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 making something interior exterior. Moreover, for both mothers, chil-
dren radically breach bodily limits. In Esch’s mother’s case, Junior tries to
remain inside her body, but in failing to, brings those insides out (which
ultimately leads to the mother’s death); in China’s case, she seems to
alter her body so as to bring those insides out: birthing for her seems
painful in its release. China also enacts a kind of self-annihilation: “If I
didn’t know,” Esch says, “I would think she was trying to eat her paws”
(1). Corporeal processes that distort the boundaries between interiority/
exteriority, birth/death, and containment/exposure are presented here
across species lines, suggesting the interconnections between humans
and animals and the precariousness of ontology. Ward’s focus, though,
is clearly anthropocentric. Even while she’s interested in unfolding ideas
of embodiment, she is not suggesting that all southern life is creaturely
in the same way as the experiences of the novel are framed differently by
different species. Yet, Ward is insistent on their connective tissue, how-
ever discontinuous.
The blurring of boundaries suggests that in Ward’s South, “subjectivity
is to be found forever breaking its bounds, oscillating between the world
of subjects and objects, environmentally dispersed, or more accurately
put, ecologically constituted” (Crownshaw 161), or as Erica Edwards
writes, “Bones’s evisceration of the distinction between human and non-
human life opens its ethic of subsistence and sustenance . . . in parallel
relationship to the biopolitical operations of the state” (157). In think-
ing about these suggestions, I want to focus on the ways that humans
and dogs relate and particularly how Skeetah and China are connected.
Throughout the novel, China and Skeetah’s relationship is both seem-
ingly romantic—“China . . . licks his pinkie. It is a kiss, a peck” and “Her
front legs rest on his chest like a lover’s” (17, 101)—and familial—“He
has turned from lover to father. She, his doting daughter” (98). Their
closeness is often misunderstood, but Skeetah clearly says “between
man and dog is a relationship . . . [e]qual” (29). Whether the novel actu-
ally represents animal and human as equal is debatable (there are senses
in which Ward reveals a hierarchy of life), but as Katrina strikes the Pit,
Skeetah is desperate to bring China and the puppies inside the house for
safety. His brother Randall says no: “This is a house . . . For humans. Not
for dogs” (211), which Skeetah responds to with a trans-species ethos:
“Everything deserve to live” (213). Skeetah sees this ethic of survival,
home, and family across species lines, emphasizing the ways in which

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precariousness and creatureliness—exposure to biopolitical forces, such
as those engendered by Katrina’s effects on the Gulf region—is not con-
fined to human life. Rather, such creatureliness might be said to reartic-
ulate Yaeger’s suggestion that women’s writing from the South “provokes
the uncanny presence of disposable bodies,” which helps us think about
“the relation between American history and the body—particularly, what
happens to the body within a culture of neglect” (Dirt 67).
It is also worth examining the ways in which Skeetah pits China against
other local pit bulls for money. The major event at the end of the novel, in
which China fights local dogs in her post-pregnancy state, is particularly
affecting. The dogs fight nearly to the death, and Ward focuses on the sav-
age nature of these bouts as well as the ways in which the torn and bloody
flesh of the dogs is related to the flesh of their black male owners (and
those around them, like Esch). As Skeetah nurtures China, sleeping in
the bed with her after the fight, so Esch and the rest of the family prepare
for the oncoming storm. Natural disaster, animal wounds, and human
precariousness all conjoin and align—not homogenously, but relatedly.
Mary Marotte sees Skeetah’s care for China as a “transference of love
and affection,” emerging from the mourning of his mother’s death years
before (209). Marotte’s reading overlooks the complicated emotional
and physical worlds of this family, and she underestimates the deeply
implicated lives of human and animals in this southern locale.
The links between humans and animals in the South have a long his-
tory, particularly in racial discourse. As is well documented, “compari-
sons between people of African descent and nonhuman primates were
often made in arguments meant to justify enslavement” (Fielder 488).5
By focusing on the productive ways in which blackness and the animal
correlate, we can see how Ward’s novel unpacks racial epistemologies.
This is not to say that Ward is merely running the racist “animalization”
of African Americans backwards but instead is commenting on the far
more complex entangling of multispecies life. Through a racial lens,
Ward is unpacking the complex webs of biopower that have long regu-
lated black Americans—and animals of various kinds—in different, but
overlapping, ways. Or as Yaeger might put it, “bodies in southern wom-
en’s fiction can be intensely political” (Dirt 121). Where Yaeger looks only
to human bodies in this light, I want to look closer at the existing con-
nections between black men and dogs, particularly pit bulls, to frame
Skeetah and China’s relationship.

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 Harlan Weaver argues that the discourse around pit bulls often
conforms to “like-race” analogies that discuss animals and African
Americans as related species in the ways that they are treated. Pit bulls,
for instance, are less a distinct breed than a type, identified or profiled by
their look, which can, of course, be varied. Often seen as “dangerous,” pit
bulls and African Americans (men especially) become clearly connected;
Erin Tarver suggests that this is a “metonymic feedback loop” (282).
Weaver notes contemporary iterations of this connection, citing the
case of Michael Vick—an NFL star who was convicted in 2007 of funding
and facilitating a dogfighting ring—and the recent film Fruitvale Station
(2013) which fictionalizes the death of Oscar Grant. On Vick’s com-
plex case, Weaver suggests that it clearly “reveals how pit bulls . . . are
increasingly involved in contemporary productions of black masculini-
ties” (“The Tracks” 347). Evidencing this further, Fruitvale Station, which
represents the current state of black precarity in the U.S. in relation to
the #BlackLivesMatter movement, has a scene in which the protagonist
Oscar holds a pit bull after it has been struck by a car. Weaver quotes
Michael B. Jordan, the actor who plays Oscar, who says: “Black males, we
are America’s pit bull. We’re labeled vicious, inhumane, and left to die in
the street” (“Pit” 345). Though Jordan is, perhaps, suggesting that black
men are reduced to the level of the animal—in effect, hierarchizing life
in racial and species terms and reinforcing an anthropocentric logic—we
should pay attention to the ways that, as Weaver comments, “This tan-
gle of connective language reveals the many ways that debates about pit
bulls touch on, join, and participate in perceptions of race and practices
of racialization” (“Pit” 345).
During an interview with Jesmyn Ward at the New York Public Library,
the critic William Jelani Cobb notes something similar when speaking
about the role of dogs in Ward’s work: “Many a person has asked what
is this thing with black men and pit bulls, and I always say: we under-
stand each other on the level of being misunderstood by society, and
messed with by the police” (“In Conversation”). While this elicits laugh-
ter from Ward and the audience, Cobb articulates something central to
human-animal representations in the novel. I am suggesting that Ward
not only taps into this discourse—connecting, among other things, black
men and pit bulls, dogfighting and structural violence against African
Americans—but also she entangles human and nonhuman life so as to
perhaps rethink this “racialization by animalization.” That is, she artic-
ulates some of the ways in which black life and animal life are mutually
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constructive, especially in terms of wider cultural perceptions. Ward
does this predominantly through enmeshing Skeetah’s and China’s bod-
ies and lives.
The entanglement of humans and animals, especially dogs, can be
framed by Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet (2007). Writing of her
relationship to her own dog, Haraway states: “We are, constitutively,
companion species. We make each other up, in the flesh. Significantly
other to each other, in specific difference” (16). Companionship is not
merely a way of species connecting; rather, “the partners do not pre-
cede their relating; all that is, is the fruit of becoming with” (Haraway
17). Subjectivity—human, animal—is a process of becoming and is
always ongoing. As Boggs glosses, “we need to understand subjectivity
as a relational category that emerges in the interaction between human
beings and companion animals” (65). For Boggs, this is more precisely
a relationality that produces racial, sexual, and gendered subjectivities.
Haraway, Boggs writes, further argues that loving an animal “opens up to
the alterity of the other”—animalizing, in a sense, Judith Butler’s notion
of precarious life—and thus “the possibility emerges for a subjectivity
that is deeply relational and nonviolent.” Boggs suggests that this “ide-
alization of affection as the antidote to violence” (65) is too sentimental
and romantic, but Haraway’s argument nonetheless offers an incisive
context to Ward’s characters, fighting for survival, community, family,
love and inclusion. As Edwards writes, Salvage the Bones reveals “commu-
nal care and regard for human beings as one vulnerable life form among
many” (160). Surrounded by nature and connected to the animal world,
Ward’s southerners are companion species in the face of ecological and
sociological collapse. Esch and China together, make each other up,
reflecting and mirroring one another’s throwaway existence.
Salvage the Bones suggests that the long-term and deeply rooted his-
torical structures of dispossession in this region are still rigidly in place,
particularly in Mississippi, which is “a crucible of a landscape of racial
memory” (Davis 113). This crucible, though, is refracted in Ward’s novel
through the discourse of species. It is not just that the species line is
blurry but that Ward is interested in the ways that bodies are never quite
entire, intact, or solid; the line that ostensibly separates human from
animal is a fiction and obscures various modes of corporeal precarity. As
black southerners, the characters of Ward’s novel perhaps see this fact
clearer than many. Caught in the midst of a particular natural and human
disaster and enmeshed in the larger regional and national structures of
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 racism and inequality, black southerners are complexly presented as pre-
carious, creaturely, and throwaway.

“Yeah, you’re a animal”

Like Salvage the Bones, the black protagonists of Zeitlin’s Beasts of the
Southern Wild live in a rural environment of waste and destruction,
a world saturated by throwaway children. “The Bathtub” is the locals’
name for the bayou they inhabit, a fictional island called Isle de Charles
Doucet, a watery world south of New Orleans. In a review of the film,
Yaeger argues that the drama “investigates a culture of racial neglect,
creates a zone of history-making for Katrina’s disposable bodies” (“Dirty
Ecology”). Its “rags and wastelands . . . become powerful emblems of the
Southland’s (and our nation’s) commitment to toxic inequality” (“Dirty
Ecology”). While Yaeger focuses on the film’s mythic imagining of life
in the Anthropocene, I want to look at the ways in which the throwaway
figure is twinned with the animal and the biopolitical machinations of
cross-species creaturely life. Hushpuppy, the film’s young black protag-
onist, communes with nature in various ways, but she is most strikingly
followed by the historical aurochs, a tusked mammal who is awakened
from a melting icecap.
The film has received much critical attention, both positive and
negative. David Denby’s review in The New Yorker is exemplary: Beasts
of the Southern Wild is “dream-haunted and visionary,” “joyous,” “excit-
ing,” “raucous and alive,” “thrillingly loose-limbed and savagely happy.”
Yaeger, too, “adore[s]” the film (“Dirty Ecology”). Others, notably black
feminists, have taken a different stance. Scholar bell hooks declaims that
“It is a major mystery that moviegoers adore this film and find it deeply
moving and entertaining.” Similarly, Christina Sharpe asks, “How does
a little black girl orphaned and abandoned become a vision for climate
resistance?”. She suggests pointedly that the film “needs black bodies
because how else could incipient sexual and other violence . . . be inspir-
ing and not tragic?” Yaeger disagrees, saying that such critiques are “off
the mark” because the film is “not a slice of life or a realist screed; its
business is mythological” (“Dirty Ecology”). I disagree with Yaeger here,
for surely, even if the film’s vision is mythological, its regional context and
social implications are integral to Beast’s message. Yaeger herself notes
the ways this film is an “incursion into the southern surreal” that pres-
ents throwaway life after Katrina, but these positions are difficult to align
(“Dirty Ecology”). Sharpe’s reservations underpin my thinking here.
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 The film opens, as in the novel, with the twinning of a young black
girl and the natural environment. Crouched down in front of a house
cobbled together from scrap material, Hushpuppy builds a mound
from wet mud, a kind of makeshift nest for the chick that she’s hold-
ing. Hushpuppy clutches the chick to her ear, listening for its heartbeat,
before putting it down. Next to the girl, a pig is lying in the mud, whose
heartbeat she also feels; there are tires and trash strewn everywhere as
chickens run around. She is “at one in and with the dirt” as well as the
debris and animal matter (Sharpe). In the Bathtub, “everything is dirty
and broken. Dogs, chickens, and pigs live among the people in com-
panionable squalor” (Denby). Hushpuppy, in a voiceover, says: “All the
time, everywhere, everythin’s hearts are beatin’ and squirtin’ and talkin’
to each other in ways I can’t understand. Most of the time, they proba-
bly be sayin’ ‘I’m hungry,’ ‘I got to poop.’ But sometimes they be talkin’
in codes.” Here, at the film’s opening, Hushpuppy alerts us to what she
sees as both the intractable connections of human and nonhuman life
(everything has a beating heart, everything speaks, everything wants to
eat, and so on) as well as those differences (everything speaks in differ-
ent languages). As the film goes on, Hushpuppy continuously listens for
heartbeats: the chick, a crab, a leaf, her father.
Moreover, the film mirrors the novel in its commitment to seeing the
overlaps and consistencies between human and nonhuman life. The lack
of species borders is clearly articulated by Hushpuppy’s teacher, Miss
Bathsheba, as the children in her class are confronted by a table of shell-
fish and cages filled with reptiles and birds, who opines: “Meat. Meat . . .
Every animal is made out of meat. I’m meat. Y’all asses meat. Everything
is part of the buffet of the universe.” Miss Bathsheba articulates a fleshy
ontology, like that theorized by Cary Wolfe and Donna J. Haraway, that
reverberates throughout the film. For instance, as Hushpuppy gets a les-
son in opening a cooked crab with a knife, her father Wink shouts “no,”
she has to “beast it.” To beast her food, she must tear open the crab with
her hands, sucking out its meat. Hushpuppy is surrounded by people
chanting for her to “beast” the crab; when she succeeds, she mounts the
table, flexes her arms, and screams. Wink says: “Yeah, you’re a animal.”
Later, as the community is taken to a hospital shelter, and the sick are
given IV drips and medicine, Hushpuppy says that “When a animal gets
sick here, they plug it into the wall.” A mere selection of examples, these
scenes from the film reveal the striking ways in which humans are simply
considered as animals. However, the animalization of African Americans
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 cannot be seen without the racist genealogies that have sought to debase
and dehumanize black individuals. Tavia Nyong’o notes the anxiety pres-
ent: “depictions of black (and other subaltern) people as primitives on
a continuum with nonhuman animals” (251). Thus, like Salvage, the
remediation of human/animal relations in this racialized context must
be refracted through historical contexts.
To outline this critical terrain further, we need to focus more closely
on the central human and animal relation in the film: Hushpuppy and
the aurochs. This prehistoric ox-like creature enters the film’s world after
Miss Bathsheba has instructed the children about meat. Showing them
a tattoo on her thigh, Miss Bathsheba tells them about the aurochs, a
“fierce mean creature” living long ago that would “gobble . . . cave babies
down.” Articulating a warning of their perilous position in the world, she
says that the “fabric of the universe is comin’ unravelled. Ice caps gonna
melt, water’s gonna rise”; Hushpuppy looks at a photograph of arctic
glaciers and then sees the aurochs trapped under the ice. Later, after
she’s been left alone for some time, Wink returns to Hushpuppy who
has nearly burned down her house. Angry at him, she says “I hope you
die,” hitting him in the chest. As her fists make contact, thunder rum-
bles loudly and Wink collapses, having a heart attack. As Hushpuppy
hears the thunder, she sees the melting icecaps, and the next shot reveals
water lapping at her feet—to which Hushpuppy declares, “I think I broke
something.” In this single moment, Hushpuppy’s anger at being aban-
doned, her father’s sickness, the coming hurricane, melting ice caps,
and the aurochs’ reawakening merge. What Hushpuppy thinks she has
broken is the universe’s fabric, and the film seems not to argue with her.
From this moment on, Hushpuppy is stalked by the aurochs, who
seemingly embody a multitude of forces (i.e., personal, regional, his-
torical, and natural). We see them as the storm rages with glimpses of
hoofs, hair, tusks, and snouts. Later we see some of them struggling to
survive. One dies, and the others eat it. “Strong animals got no mercy,”
Hushpuppy clarifies. Finally, as Hushpuppy and her young friends
return to her father’s deathbed, the aurochs catch up with her, rum-
bling the ground as they stampede across the open terrain. Hushpuppy
stops, watched by her father, and faces an auroch eye to eye. The camera
cuts from a shot that emphasizes Hushpuppy’s smallness in relation to
the aurochs, to a close-up of the animal’s eyes. As the two look at each
other, Hushpuppy asserts a semblance of control; the aurochs kneel

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before her. She says, “You’re my friend, kind of,” and then they leave her
alone. This scene, Nyong’o suggests, reveals “a reconciliation between
human and animal on shared autochthonous ground, in which it is
left deliberately uncertain who truly is the titular ‘beast of the southern
wild’” (256).
To understand the aurochs’ role in the film, we must investigate their
origins. Nyong’o explains that the aurochs historically thrived in Europe,
North Africa, and India. In the eighteenth century, a Polish king attempted
to conserve the species after human development and poaching nearly
wiped them out. The king, as sovereign, protected the creatures in what
Nyong’o calls a biopolitical act. That scheme failed, and the aurochs died
out. However, to jump from this history to the contemporary moment of
the film is, Nyong’o says, to miss a key historical touchstone: Eugenicist
breeders in Nazi Germany “sought to rewild” the aurochs as they saw it as
an Aryan emblem (259). Thus, the aurochs’ history is one of biopolitical
regulation, sovereign power, and nonhuman distinctions. For the Polish
king, “the aurochs belonged to an environment whose wildness was to
be fostered” even if that meant human life was “disallowed” through their
displacement for the conservation plan (260); moreover, for eugenicists
in the mid-twentieth century, the aurochs figured as mythical images
of a superior race. We must posit, Nyong’o writes, that the aurochs are
thus “neither prehistoric nor mythical creatures” but “a species that has
migrated repeatedly across the electrified fences between actual and vir-
tual being, always trailing the scent of the predatory designs of sovereign
power” (259). Why, then, does Zeitlin—and his co-writer Lucy Alibar,
from whose play this film is adapted—choose the aurochs as the crea-
turely figure in this southern story? Indeed, the aurochs are not native
to the US, and thus their “‘return’ to southern Louisiana is . . . a territori-
alizing of native landscape by Eurocentric myth”: it, in effect, “re-enacts
the European colonization of the New World in bovine form,” Nyong’o
argues (265).
Nyong’o then ties this historical rewriting to the film’s reimagining of
the Louisiana bayou. For, the film was shot on location at the Isle de Jean
Charles, which is home to a diverse group of French-speaking Native
Americans from the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribes, who are not
onscreen. The Bathtub community is racially mixed, certainly, but we do
not really see native peoples, only black and Cajun southerners. Moreover,
native existence in this perilous and eroding landscape—particularly

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 after recent hurricanes and the Deepwater Horizon disaster—is pre-
carious at best. Indeed, “indigeneity is pushed off the map” in order to
enable the fantastic and mythological tale of the southern wild (264).
It is as though native invisibility is needed to narrate the story of black
precarity by displacing one racial group to show the displacement of
another. Moreover, the black precarity in Beasts of the Southern Wild is,
as Sharpe suggests, not sufficiently historicized: the corporeal legacies
of slavery and segregation that shape throwaway life in the region are
absent from the film. Thus, native history and African American history
are discarded by the film’s reimagining of the gulf.
Nyong’o ultimately gestures to the difficulties of reading the racial
dynamics in the film. The recent turns in animal studies toward acknowl-
edging the human-animal paradigm are concomitant with the growth
of posthumanism. Rosi Braidotti notes that the posthumanism ushers
a “qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit
of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship
to the other inhabitants of this planet” (2). More generally, this ideol-
ogy has decentered the epistemological and ontological category of the
human altogether. Nyong’o, however, suggests that this theory has pro-
gressed “largely innocent of history” (266). More precisely, in relation to
the African American studies here, he says “black studies has repeatedly
asked: have we ever been human? And if not, what are we being asked to
decenter?” (266). Thus, if black Americans have not often been consid-
ered fully human—consider the history of slavery through Jim Crow and
contemporary incarceration and social inequality—then how can schol-
ars of black culture decenter a body that is already not-quite-human?
Indeed, the emphasis on decentering seems to reveal the very instability
and impossibility of such a binary to begin with when it comes to human
life. In relation to Hushpuppy’s story, we must inquire as to whether the
fantasy of a posthuman, animalistic southern wilderness obfuscates the
very real conditions of black Americans who have been rendered lifeless
and nonhuman throughout the nation’s history. While the film’s vision
“might be alluring,” it is only achieved “by tapping into the primitive
vitality of a native terrain and its mongrel denizens” (Nyong’o 266). By
erasing a native culture and thereby repeating American colonial history,
invoking prehistoric creatures whose existence is deeply marked by bio-
political acts and regulations, and focusing on neglected black citizens
without much context, the film obscures the ways in social practices ren-
dered individuals creaturely to begin with.
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Twenty-First Century Throwaways
In Dirt and Desire, Yaeger argues that “we lack an adequate critical lan-
guage to explore the literary attempt to dramatize a southern culture
of neglect” (69). While southern studies has done much to rectify this
absence since the book’s publication in 2000, the discourses of animals,
the creaturely, and precariousness as elaborated here still have much
work to do in considering neglect in the South. Where Salvage the Bones
uses the particular racialized history of pit bulls to partly overturn racist
assumptions and stereotypes, to intertwine species, and to rethink the
boundaries of flesh, Beasts of the Southern Wild perhaps uses the fantas-
tical aurochs ignorant of their history and the racial biopolitics accom-
panying them to reanimalize blackness. While Ward’s novel subtly traces
the interpenetrations of human and animal bodies to show how south-
ern life is rendered vulnerable, precarious, and creaturely, Zeitlin’s film
demands that we see a multitude of southern creatures or beasts without
contexts and critique. I do not mean to set these texts in opposition to one
another; rather, I posit how the parallel investigations into animal and
human life post-Katrina produce quite divergent images of vulnerability
and the creaturely. While all of these characters are southern throwaways,
to use Yaeger’s terms, their lives variously overlap with animals, creating
differing scenes of southern precarity. The beastly and creaturely in both
texts are animated by what Santner describes as the product of an “expo-
sure to a traumatic dimension of political power and social bonds” (12).
The biopoliticization of southern life, particularly after Katrina, evinces
a kind of creatureliness that is literalized in the connections between
humans and animals. This creatureliness in Salvage the Bones is rooted
in the sociohistorical forces of rural Mississippi. In the film, however, it
seems that black precariousness rests upon disavowed narratives of bio-
political control, eugenics, and native displacement. Thus, while the tex-
tual strategies overlap, the endings of Ward and Zeitlin’s texts confront
us with quite different southern locales.
Jellenik argues that the widespread narratives about Katrina are over-
turned by both the film and the novel: notions that the storm revealed
the “marginalization of people through poverty, racism, and aban-
donment by the government” are “dismissed and dismantled” (229). I
suggest otherwise, seeing the beasts of all kinds in this flooded South
as perilously exposed to powers of the state in addition to powers of
the planet. Jellenik further argues that there has been a shift in cul-
ture after Katrina, from texts that act as politicized memorials for the
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 disaster and its losses to “cultural records that function as monuments
to where these people have been and where they’re going” (234). I think
that these two texts do both: acting politically to show how African
Americans in the South are throwaway and creaturely as well as monu-
mentalizing the future of black southerners, reaching into and beyond
the present moment. At the end of Salvage the Bones, Ward’s characters
are left exposed and creaturely—bearing Katrina’s aftermath, “salvag-
ing” their home, mourning the loss of China, and apprehending Esch’s
pregnancy. At the end of Beasts of the Southern Wild, Wink is dead, the
aurochs have disappeared, and Hushpuppy and her community charge
onwards along a road through an ever so watery Bathtub. Through their
representations of a South devastated by storms, both texts illuminate
the precarity and creatureliness of throwaway southerners, even in the
twenty-first century.

NOT E S
I thank the editors Sharon Holland and Andy Crank for their insightful edits of
this essay. I also thank Lucy Bond, Christopher Clark, and Monika Loewy for
their perceptive comments and suggestions.
1 Jellenik’s own essay in Ten Years After Katrina, however, offers a somewhat dif-
ferent argument, suggesting that “Beasts and Salvage consciously shift away
from an overt focus on dissenting political, racial, and economic commentary
and toward creative processings” (221).
2 In Rooting Memory, Rooting Place: Regionalism in the Twenty-First-Century
American South (2015), I argue that the South’s past continues to make itself
known through cultural memory. Particularly in light of southern (and
American) studies’ tendency towards globalizing the region and nation—in
often radical ways—my argument suggests that we need to pay attention to
memories that continuously rise to the surface of southern culture. In rela-
tion to Hurricane Katrina, I argue that the disaster recollected the past subjec-
tions of African Americans in the region and thus to view the storm in a larger
national and/or global framework might obfuscate the continuities between
the contemporary South and its history of race relations.
3 Butler’s notion here differs from other discourses of precarious life, which tend
to focus on economic framings of contemporary existence. Butler, instead,
focuses more on the corporeal and its links to political and ethical modes of
living.
4 While I use Wolfe here to make my point about animals and race, I nevertheless
take heed of Susan Fraiman’s critique of Wolfe and related animal studies. As
Fraiman writes, “What dismays me most is Wolfe’s emphatic framing of animal
studies as discontinuous with and even antithetical to scholarship on women,
African Americans, queers, and other marginalized groups” (106).

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5 Fielder’s article is also interesting for its comments on the post-Katrina feelings
of sympathy for abandoned dogs, rather than for abandoned black people. Her
essay carefully traces processes of kinship and sympathy across species and
racial lines.

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