Water has long been a repressed aspect of the New Orleans landscape: for much of the city's history, the Mississippi River -New Orleans' raison d'être -has largely been obscured from view. Levees have long artificially controlled not just the Mississippi but the vast network of canals and waterways that carve up the city. Floods are experienced as a traumatic intrusion.
This interview with Jesmyn Ward, conducted in November 2013, takes as its starting point the publication of her memoir, Men We Reaped. It explores the role of her writing in the context of Hurricane Katrina, the US South, African American culture and identity, and new trends in twenty-first-century US writing.
Malcolm X's life and career offers a window through which to analyze the interactions between race and religion in the post-slavery experience of African Americans. This essay traces the trajectory of Malcolm's two religious conversions, and his evolving sense that Christianity is the backbone of white supremacy and western imperialism, where Islam is the natural religion of the oppressed. This journey, I suggest, features the eclipse of the 'Exodus' motif -that has been so central to much black religiosity since slavery -to make way for the centralization of the 'Egypt' metaphor; thus identifications with Jews are displaced by associations with black and Muslim diasporas. However, exploration of this movement from 'Exodus' to 'Egypt' illuminates not a smooth transition but rather a complex and ongoing interaction between the two motifs, interactions that question the notion that any singular religious identity offers an 'authentic' experience for oppressed peoples. I suggest that Malcolm X's negotiation between what emerge as the competing modalities of race, religion and nation offer an insight into those forces that shape expressions of 'black religion' today.
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