Water and African American Memory

"This cutting-edge text not only increases our understanding of African American literature and film, it also enlarges the accessibility and the possibilities of the field of ecocriticism."YVONNB ATKINSON, Mt. San Jacinto College and president of the Toni Morrison Society

While There is no lack of scholarship on the transatlantic voyage and the Middle Passage as tropes in African diasporic writing, to date there has not been a comprehensive analysis of bodies of water in African American literature and culture

In Water and African American Memory, Anissa Wardi offers the first sustained treatise on watercourses in the African American expressive tradition. Her holistic approach especially highlights the ways that water acts not only as a metaphorical site of trauma, memory, and healing but also as a material site

Wardi argues that water has been central to the African American literary and historical tradition, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade in which it is estimaited that one-third of the captives died en route to the Americas and the Caribbean provides the framework wherein connections among water, loss, and migration African American culture can be traced

Using the transatlantic voyage as a starting point and ending with a discussio Hurricane Katrina, this pioneering ecocritical study delves deep into the environmental dimensions of African American writing. Beyond proposing a new theory map for conceptualizing the African Diaspora, Wardi offers a series of engaging an original close readings of major literary, filmic, and blues texts, including the works of Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Julie Dash, Henry Dumas, and Kasi Lemmons

Anissa Janine Wardi, author of Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature, is associate professor of English and director of cultural studies and African American studies at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania