Ecological Catastrophes, Slavery, and Racism: Hurricane Katrina as a Site of Memory in Contemporary African American Literature

“Floods is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,” wrote Toni Morrison in her 1995 essay, The Site of Memory. This thesis explores how the hurricane, a destructive natural phenomenon that is said to become increasingly present and violent in the wake of the Anthropocene, becomes more than just a meteorological event: it represents, in Morrison’s own words, a site of memory, an entity capable of resurfacing debris of history through its powerful floods. Focusing on Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), Sherri L. Smith’s Orleans (2013), and P. Djèlí Clark’s The Black God’s Drums (2018), this thesis examines how the destructive Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in the Gulf of America on August 29, 2005, resurfaced a past of racial discrimination and historical trauma. By reading the hurricane as a site where climate crisis and racialized histories converge, this analysis explores how the echoes of Katrina in African American literature not only address environmental injustice but also reimagine survivability through memory and resistant storytelling.