‘The most beautiful song’: Jesmyn Ward and Diasporic Recognition

This Afterword closes the collection by considering the local and the global – and perhaps most importantly, their interrelationships – in Ward’s work. It revisits ‘On Witness and Respair’, picking up from the analysis presented in the book’s introduction, and considers key passages from Sing, Unburied, Sing. In doing so, it attends to areas of Ward’s work that are, surprisingly, rarely discussed: its reach and resonance beyond America and the American South, and its wide and evocative range of genre codings. It points to some of the ways this book addresses these gaps while also noting the many open avenues for future study of Ward’s writing, that they open up.