This article explores how Jesmyn Ward's novel Salvage the Bones and Kara Walker's visual essay After the Deluge can be read through the concept of Giorgio Agamben's “bare life” in order to explore the complexities of representing bodies that have been stripped of their political significance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Walker and Ward both situate Katrina within a longer lineage of representation of African American life extending back to slavery, prompting wider debate about the conceptual frameworks that we use in order to describe rupturing incidents that are connected to structural forms of persecution.