ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Jesmyn Ward’s and Toni Morrison’s latest novels as contributions to a specifically black literary tradition that has not only constituted a key site of exploration for the black freedom narrative; it has also functioned as one of its most significant voices. In the late 1960s and 1970s Angela Davis was at the heart of black nationalist tendencies that were seeking to push attention away from civil rights struggles and towards economic and social spheres that were barely affected by the signature achievements of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Ward’s native community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast was devastated by the storm, another moment in recent history that has graphically and brutally highlighted the precariousness of black lives a generation after the civil rights movement and in a new era of state shrinkage and the rollback of social safety nets.
