Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones tells a story of devastation. The novel takes place over twelve days leading up to and immediately following Hurricane Katrina's landfall in southern Mississippi: readers experience the storm's slow and menacing approach, face its overwhelming violence, and glimpse the aftermath of its brutality. The storm is a constant presence in the novel, yet it is not the sole source of ruin. Katrina may be the force that ‘swept into the Gulf and slaughtered’, as narrator Esch describes it (Ward 2011, 255), but other, slower, more systemic violences have already afflicted the communities most vulnerable to the storm's destruction. As Katrina's threat grows, so too do markers of poverty, race-based inequality, and systemic neglect accrue within the narrative, and these systemic violences cause harms that interweave with and intensify the danger of the storm.

Because Hurricane Katrina magnified racist and systemic inequities already in place in the Gulf Coast region, it has been labelled an ‘unnatural disaster’, a term that describes a catastrophic event whose harmful impact derives from a mix of natural forces and human (in)action. ‘Unnatural disasters’ highlight the relationship between one's social position and one's vulnerability to environmental harms, since the social, cultural, economic and environmental injustices that afflict minoritised and disadvantaged populations also make these populations more susceptible than others to worse outcomes after natural events. Katrina's violence intensified and was intensified by a long history of social and systemic violences that left Black, rural and poor people particularly vulnerable to environmental destruction. In this respect, Hurricane Katrina exposed a complex interplay between cultural and so-called ‘natural’ forces of harm. By setting her novel amid Katrina's destruction, Ward highlights ‘the need to resist an easy separation between “nature” and “culture”’ given that, as Naomi Morgenstern argues, ‘this supposedly “natural” disaster proved to be profoundly enmeshed with socioeconomic forces, with years of failed and inadequate policy and its material legacy’ (Morgenstern 2020, 106). In Salvage the Bones, Ward's poor rural Black characters experience, both before and after the storm, what Morgenstern describes as a level of ‘social abandonment that undoes the very opposition between culture and nature’ (Morgenstern 2020, 111).

Performativity as an Account of Agency

The theory of performativity has always been almost automatically linked to the performativity of gender. Gender is, as we have seen, one – albeit extremely powerful – norm that in multiple ways conditions the lives of the bodies in the world given to us long before we are capable of being autonomous. However, the idea that we do or craft our bodies into genders, that the reality of our bodies is the reality of our acts, unmoored from any givens, has from the very start demanded elaborate theorisation of what it means to act. On several occasions, Judith Butler has claimed that performativity is an account or a theory of agency (Butler 2009b: i; GT: xxv). Drawing on the notion that Butler's philosophy is an insurrection at the level of ontology, we can say that the account of agency she has attempted to offer refers to the crucial question of how reality might be remade (PL: 33).

The theory of agency can also be read as Butler's theory of the subject. This is why we must begin with the vexed debate on voluntarism and determinism – the unsolicited legacy of Gender Trouble – which further splintered into debates on subject constitution and the character of the agent. The debate revolves around two questions: does Butler's notion of agency enforce a subject who freely decides with which norm to comply with today and which to violate tomorrow? Or, contrarily, to what extent is the social character of reality permissive of a free action, if ‘the social conditions of my existence are never fully willed by me, and there is no agency apart from such conditions and their unwilled effects’ (FoW: 171)? The third issue, to which we will return in the latter part of this chapter, is how individualist this account of agency is, if it is bodies that act, but their acting is in some crucial sense a ‘shared experience and “collective action”’ (Butler 1988: 525)?

With her rejection of both biological and social determinism (GT: 10), yet without an unambiguous answer to the question of what urges us to act the way we do, Butler encountered accusations of radical voluntarism: if there are no internal restrictions preventing us acting as we please, we may act in whatever way we like.

It is because of their potency in generating obligations that oaths are at the heart of the constitution of political communities. The oath is one of those concepts that have undergone numerous theological– political transfers, to which Carl Schmitt referred when talking about political theology. Schmitt himself thought that the oath will always remain a necessary institution, no matter how much it might seem to have disappeared from public life: whatever the formula, it ensures internal disposition, so that the institutions of the modern state are not abused and their very foundations destroyed. In fact, when written constitutions emerge, legislatures seek to institute and sanction their identity through solemn declarations, for example, by appealing to God or some other moral or ideological formula. Paolo Prodi, following Schmitt's theological–political hypothesis, declares that the oath is the basis of the political covenant in Western societies. Prodi's main theological–political argument is that the modern state has taken the place of God as the absolute witness of every oath as a result of the secularisation process. Hence, the oath has become a prerogative of sovereignty.

The oath, as a mutual promise between two or more persons to trust each other's word under the sight of the ‘immortal God’, can be understood as a meta-political guarantor of the political bond. Consequently, it is possible to think as Prodi does, that the decline of the oath to the status of a solely secular commitment, which can be broken at any time, carries with it the crisis of the very idea of political community. In contrast to this catastrophist thesis, Aroney still perceives that oaths of office and oaths of allegiance have marked the path of the authority of the modern state and continue to do so until today. In fact, he argues, that we can still find the theological–political paradox at the core of the state's institutional proceedings and arrangements. On the one hand, oaths seek to guarantee the performance of official duties; on the other hand, they subject the content of those duties to another potestas external to that of the state, that of God.

The Ergodic Text

Most works of fiction call for a linear reading from title to last word, and, although the codex form of the modern book allows for easier checking backwards and forwards than the papyrus roll it supplanted and the e-book adds to this facility the capacity for searching by means of words or phrases, the basic assumption that governs the processing of fictional prose is that the text unfolds continuously from start to finish. However, a different mode of semantic enrichment may happen when the visual layout of the page or the organisation of the book includes elements that ask to be taken in separately, at a moment of the reader's own choosing. Texts of this kind invite a reading process that is the opposite of the inorganic works discussed in the previous chapter: rather than learning or deducing and following out the special rules obeyed by the text, the reader has an unusual amount of freedom in deciding how to engage with it. Espen J. Aarseth, in a discussion of cybertexts, provides a full discussion of this issue, coining the term ‘ergodic literature’ for texts in which ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’; by contrast, traditional texts, which require only ‘eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turning of pages’, are ‘non-ergodic’ (Cybertext, 1). Ergodic literary productions are one example of multimodality, a phenomenon that is receiving increasing attention in studies not only of literary texts but other art forms and games. In this chapter, I wish to explore the reader's experience of this type of fiction.

Before Finnegans Wake, Joyce was content to observe linearity in his fiction. The introduction of headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ episode of Ulysses is an example of multimodality, but not one that requires the reader to deviate from a continuous progress through the text. In his last work, however, he broke decisively and influentially with linearity: the ‘Nightlessons’ chapter includes a drawing that catches the reader's eye as soon as the page is turned (293) and is studded with both footnotes and sidenotes.

In her memoir Men We Reaped (2013) Jesmyn Ward documents an exchange that took place when she was still striving to become a writer. She is back South for the summer from the University of Michigan, having crawfish boil with friends and family in her home town of DeLisle, Mississippi. ‘So, what you doing up there?’ a friend asks. ‘I’m trying to be a writer’, she answers while munching on the fish, declaring that she wants to write ‘books about home. About the hood.’ Her sister chimes in: ‘she writing about real shit’ (Ward 2013, 69). Fulfilling this resolution, Ward's career has developed to demonstrate a serious involvement with the condition of underprivileged Black people in the South, the will to bring front and centre their everyday struggles for a decent life – or better, for life tout court – and to denounce the unrelenting machinery of violence, oppression and discrimination working against them. In the memoir, DeLisle is transfigured into an ephemeral, ravenous being feeding on the lives of young Black men, a ghost wolf made of ‘darkness and grief’ (Ward 2013, 21) bent on a perennial hunt. As Ward herself writes in the prologue, in telling the stories of her family and her community and how death became the paradigm that defined them both, she hopes to understand the ‘epidemic’ that befell her home town, ‘how the history of racism and economic inequality and lapsed public and personal responsibility festered and turned sour and spread [there]’ (Ward 2013, 8).

The urge to narrate is fuelled by the necessity to find meaning in, and deliverance from, the violence that permeates the lives of Black people around her – and, by extension, in America at large. Through her work, Ward gives voice and representation to the African American community, exposing the harrowing conditions in which its people have been forced by neglect, poverty and systemic racism – the effects of which she presents unsparingly. At the same time, her insistence on the salvific powers of kinship and bonds that people establish to counter and redress the destructive, dehumanising impact of institutional violence demonstrates a determination to counter this state of things through the liberation afforded by a community united by love, care and resistance.

On 30 January 1915, a few months into the war, readers opened their weekly issue of the Cambridge Magazine to a request by the university's librarian, Francis Jenkinson. Titled ‘For the Historian of the Future’, Jenkinson's short note asked readers to submit their war ephemera for preservation in the library's War Reserve Collection. No printed piece of paper would be too trivial for inclusion: Christmas cards, letters, regimental orders, pamphlets, Flugblätter, posters, postcards, trench journals, newspapers, even paper balloons used for distributing propaganda leaflets behind German lines. While the request came rather early in the conflict, in a sense it arrived already too late: Jenkinson regretted not having probed the refugees he met in the first weeks of war for printed materials from Belgium. Similar initiatives on the continent had also been guided by the memory of loss (never systematically collected, most ephemera of the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, had vanished by 1914). With future historians in mind, Cambridge's librarian began collecting with a vengeance, receiving packages from places as far-flung as Gibraltar (a copy of the Peninsular Post, ‘with its Spanish supplement, which the few English residents in Spain are bringing out as a local counterblast’), Sumatra (enemy propaganda) and Shanghai (a local Chinese periodical entitled The War).

‘My’ place is that which I occupy as an embodied being. Yet, by my very embodied nature, I am an ecstatic being, outside of myself, given over to others. ‘My’ place is thus not entirely mine, because we, as bodies, cohabitate, we are and we have together. In a world in which to have means to be the sole possessor, having something together often means not having it; we are taught that we must do all in our power to reclaim what belongs to us and reject the state of dispossession into which our bodies put us:

Violence appears as a reclamation of my own being and a rejection of the shared world that dispossesses me.

Reclamation and rejection shape the relation between the body and the world, which in its radical form can turn into an annihilation of others constitutive of the relation, and thus an annihilation of the relation itself. The ‘quandary’ – whether someone (an individual, a group or a nation) has the right to reclaim their own place for oneself, which in the final instance may lead to purging the place of others – requires an unambiguous affirmation or rejection of violence. From 2001, when she suggested that responsibility involves ‘an experiment to living otherwise’ (Butler 2001b: 39), opening us towards a practice of nonviolence in an emphatically non-reciprocal way, Judith Butler's answer to this question is an unambiguous no.

Nonviolence thus appears as an active form of perseverance in cohabitation. To persevere in cohabitation – a having that is not having, a having that is sharing – is to claim responsibility for the liveable world and commitment to the equality of lives. To persevere is to sustain an affirmation of the social relation in the force field of violence, because nonviolence only becomes possible at the moment when to strike or strike back appears an obvious or desirable reaction.

The continuous economic integration of the European common market has arguably paved the way for establishing a bundle of transnational rights which in the course of further European integration was suposed to become a comprehensive citizenship status. The introduction of ‘Union Citizenship’ in the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) was an explicit attempt to transcend the economic logic: integrating the existing worker's rights of free movement and equal treatment into a transnational citizenship status raised the expectation of empowering political subjects and leaving a primarily market-oriented dynamic of European integration behind. But so far, the political meaning of this transnational status has remained deficient: European Union (EU) citizens are still mainly addressed as workers or consumers but rarely as conscious political agents, who deliberate and decide issues of common concern as equals in a pan-European space.

Despite the ever-increasing influence of European politics on the everyday life of citizens political agency is still predominantly linked and channelled through the national context. Normatively, citizenship combines membership in a bounded community with the political status of an equal. In the national context this status is supposed to be secured by the constitutionalisation of fundamental rights which empower the subjects to actually make use of legal entitlements, previously the privilege of a particular social estate or class. The political meaning of modern citizenship has evolved in the course of democratic revolutions and struggles that have taken place since European Enlightenment. Its normative promise – freedom and equality under selfenacted laws – nevertheless covers a persistent dilemma: formal political equality coexists with a continuing inequality of social status, that is reproduced under capitalist conditions and reappears in the European context with a vengeance. Given the EU's persistent ‘joint-decision trap’ the functioning of the internal market is shielded from democratic decision-making rather than the other way round (Scharpf 2009). The tension between political equality and inequality of social status was supposed to be evened out by national welfare state regimes (Offe 2013; Bude and Staab 2016). But while welfare state regimes remained mainly nationally organised they have come under pressure in the course of deepening global interdependencies and processes of denationalisation and Europeanisation.

Notwithstanding burgeoning scholarly attention to Jesmyn Ward's writing – epitomised by this edited collection – Where the Line Bleeds (2008) remains oddly overlooked. This is a regrettable lacuna, and not only because Ward's debut introduced readers to Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the majority-Black town – based partly on the author's home town of DeLisle – that recurs so powerfully in her National Book Award-winning second and third novels, Salvage the Bones (2011) and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). In this essay, I hope to demonstrate that Where the Line Bleeds is particularly valuable for its precocious attention to the intersection of forms of racialised exploitation long associated with the US South and the more contemporary reality of economic globalisation. The novel dramatises how these overlapping social and economic forces, operating across temporal and geographic scales, impact upon the poor Black denizens of Bois Sauvage.

Where the Line Bleeds opens in the summer of 2005 with the eighteen-year-old twin protagonists, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle, graduating from high school and preparing to enter adulthood and the working world. Over the course of the novel, the twins’ experiences anatomise the formation of this world by both a regional history of racialised labour and the contemporary global expansion of neoliberalism. While Where the Line Bleeds takes place almost entirely at the local scale of the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Ward dramatises Michelle Alexander's point that a ‘new global economy’ has ‘deemed disposable’ young Black men like the DeLisles (Alexander 2012, 18). If such disposability is disturbingly resonant of slavery and its legacies in the US South, it results too from the recent outsourcing overseas of blue-collar jobs. Facing few legitimate options in a coastal economy largely evacuated of industry and increasingly reliant on poorly salaried service-sector positions at fast-food franchises (McDonald’s, Burger King) and box-store behemoths (Wal-Mart), young Black citizens have little choice but to begin dealing drugs to friends and neighbours.

Where the Line Bleeds examines this racialised and neoliberalised disposability at the intimate scale of the twins’ interpersonal relationship. Joshua secures one of the Mississippi Gulf Coast's few remaining blue-collar positions while Christophe, unsuccessful in seeking legal work, begins to deal weed and then crack cocaine.

INTRODUCTION

The start of the final decade of the twentieth century saw a number of significant organisational and operational changes amongst Scotland's principal agencies. The establishment of Scottish Homes in 1989 in place of the SSHA and the Housing Corporation, the emergence of Scottish Enterprise (SE) in 1991 and the amalgamation of the CCS with the NCCS in 1992 to form Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) are just three examples. Scottish Homes was empowered to assist all sectors of the housing market, particularly in areas of ‘tenure deficiencies’. With the abolition of the SSHA in 1989 and the transfer of its functions to Scottish Homes, a strategic development plan was drawn up for the phased development of housing for rent and low-cost home ownership at Tweedbank with the intention of completing development by 1996, and sites for owner-occupied housing were identified. Scottish Homes embarked on an expansion of housing at Tweedbank with a further 400 houses of varying tenure over a six-year programme. Its Rural Policy, published in September 1990, identified four key challenges: increasing the supply of housing in rural areas; tackling poor housing conditions; ensuring affordability and tenant and community involvement. However, Scottish Homes seemed determined to by-pass local authorities despite such bodies having an established organisational infrastructure and local accountability. Instead, emphasis was placed on low-cost home ownership rather than social renting, and local housing agencies with grants for rent or ownership. In the Borders, new housing was provided by Eildon Housing Association and organisations such as Waverley Housing and the Berwickshire Housing Association took over local authority housing responsibilities in the Central Borders and Berwickshire respectively.

Scottish Enterprise (SE) was established in April 1991, an amalgamation of the SDA and the Training Agency, under the Enterprise and New Towns Act 1990. SE thus became responsible for the economic development functions of the SDA; industrial development and job creation and environmental regeneration, and the employment training programmes previously administered by the MSC. There was a marked change in economic development strategy, reflecting the government's view that there had not been sufficient involvement of private business in managing the SDA.

This book explores the modernist fascination with the material culture of the First World War – a focus that may seem counter-intuitive at first. Modernist authors were famously captivated by the ways the conflict unravelled the mind, recruiting experimental forms to capture this undoing in writing. At the same time, their texts were packed with monuments, gravestones, helmets, uniforms, shells, military signs, mud, war debris and shrapnel. The First World War had even prompted a way of thinking of these texts as objects in their own right, from books handprinted at the front to tattered letters and censored newspaper pages all uniquely shaped by the ongoing hostilities. What meanings convened around these objects and around these texts as objects? This book tells the story of that two-pronged question. It argues that modernist encounters with the things of war – equipment, museum pieces, souvenirs, paraphernalia, commodities, curiosities – served as a way to make sense of an extraordinary historical moment.

Each chapter centres around this dual question. The five authors featured in this study are Guillaume Apollinaire, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Mulk Raj Anand. In the years between 1914 and 1941, these writers represented and repurposed a great number of objects from the war world. Engagement with these objects figured as a response to some of the First World War's emblematic experiences. For instance, Guillaume Apollinaire's dispatches from the front, in which the French poet humorously reinvented the use of the Adrian helmet as a shopping basket, read as an attempt to grapple with the precarity of life in the trenches. These dispatches appeared in trench publications that were peculiar material records of their wartime surroundings: printed in the war zone on poor-quality paper, affected by paper shortages and censorship, stained, annotated by hand or wrapped in pages from army newspapers. Apollinaire's modernist texts, then, reflected on the war through staging visceral encounters with the material culture of conflict, and were themselves encountered as such affectively charged objects, with their physical contours serving as unique witnesses to the poet's precarious existence at the front. The chapters that follow will turn to other writers and other things: Forster's shop signs, Woolf's monuments, Mirrlees's gravestones and Anand's mud-stained bodies.