Introduction

The back cover of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) suggests that the author's third novel ‘brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first century America’. Arguably though, social, ecocritical and transcultural issues intersect in this narrative: instead of repeating myths of freedom and self-fulfilment found on the open road, it is sceptical about the road's liberating potential. In her reading of Sing, Nicole Dib rightly points out that ‘contemporary critical approaches’ to the road narrative ‘counter the notion of the road as a free and open space for all, whether the notion is depicted in literature or film. However, […] these studies prove the hold that the image of the open road has on the American imagination’ (2020, 140). Scholarship on the road narrative has drawn attention to racialised im/mobilities (Lackey 1997, Laderman 2002, Seiler 2008, Brunnemer 2009), but critics have been slow to mobilise ecocritical perspectives for the study of this genre. Yet, some such perspectives have been emerging in recent years (LeMenager 2012, Seymour 2016, Obernesser 2018, Pesses 2021, Bowman 2022) as scholars begin to conceive of the road novel genre as fertile ground for ecocritical debates. Following the protagonists’ road trip from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison and back against the backdrop of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Sing links historical and ongoing racialised violence to environmental concerns. Though anxiety about the impact of resource extraction and consumption, such as driving fossil-fuelled cars, is growing, Nicole Seymour stresses that the road novel genre cannot be dismissed a priori as anti-environmental (2016, n.p.). Expressing unease with notions like ‘moving west’, ‘individual mobility’, ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’, Seymour draws attention to ‘how visions of mobility might be enticing or at least meaningful to historically oppressed groups – and conversely, how experiences of oppression are often defined by immobility’ (2016, n.p.). My reading of Sing seeks to think together racialised im/mobilities, ecological concerns and ‘histories of oppression’ which nevertheless allow for ‘new and more caring relations to the land’ (Dillender 2020, 131). All these issues are linked via the road trip, although they have been treated separately in previous scholarship.