Intertextuality, Domesticity and the Spaces of Disaster in Salvage the Bones and Zeitoun

Abstract

This chapter focusses on Dave Eggers’s work of narrative nonfiction, Zeitoun (2009), and Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones (2011), perhaps the two most well-known literary narratives of Hurricane Katrina. It reads these works in specific intertextual relation to the “domestic” or family dramas of what has come to be known as the “the 9/11 novel.” Focussing particularly on the way these texts replicate the domestic frameworks of the early 9/11 novel, it argues that their oblique but multivalent patterns of allusion amplify the discrete political and societal critiques of their stories of Katrina. Finally, it maps the overlaps and tensions between their interests in systemic racism and/or “slow violence” and traumatic rupture.