The Specter and the Speculative

Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora

Edited by Mae G. Henderson, Jeanne Scheper, and Gene Melton

Rutgers University Press

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

'The Specter and the Speculative: Archive and the Afterlife in the African Diaspora asks: how do we reenact the violence in the archive through our processes of memorialization and representation? And, more crucially, how do we stop? An important volume at a crucial time.' Diana Taylor, author of ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence

Mae G. Henderson is a professor emerita in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the co-editor of The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist (2017) and author of Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (2014).

Jeanne Scheper is an associate professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Gene Melton II is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. His work has appeared in Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison (2013).

Introduction
Mae G. Henderson, Jeanne Scheper, and Gene Melton

Part I
Watery Unrest: Trauma and Diaspora

one
Relayed Trauma and the Spectral Oceanic Archive in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Diana Arterian

two
“STEP IN STEP IN / HUR-RY! HUR-RY!”:
Diaspora, Trauma, and “Rep & Rev” in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus
Christopher Giroux

three
Yoruba Visions of the Afterlife in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata
Stella Setka

Part II
Raising the Dead: Black Sonic Imaginaries

four
The Sonic Afterlives of Hester’s Scream: The Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in the Black Nationalist Imagination from Slavery to Black Lives Matter
Meina Yates-Richard

five
Mumia Abu-Jamal and Harriet Jacobs: Sound, Spectrality, and the Counternarrative
Luis Omar Ceniceros

six
Forbidding Mourning: Disrupted Sites of Memory and the Tupac Shakur Hologram
Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Part III
Spectral Technologies of Hip-Hop

seven
The Afterlife in Audio, Apparel, and Art: Hip-Hop, Mourning, and the Posthumous
Shamika Ann Mitchell

eight
Dreaming of Life After Death When You’re Ready to Die: Notorious B.I.G. and the Sonic Potentialities of Black Afterlife
Andrew R. Belton

nine
“We Ain’t Even Really Rappin’, We Just Letting Our Dead Homies Tell Stories for Us”: Kendrick Lamar, Radical Popular Hip-Hop, and the Specters of Slavery and Its Afterlife 169
Kim White

Part IV
The Posthumous and the Posthuman

ten
DNA as Cultural Memory: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix
Sheila Smith McKoy

eleven
Ghosts of Traumatic Cultural Memory: Haunting, Posthumanism, and Animism in Daniel Black’s The Sacred Place and Bernice L. McFadden’s Gathering of Waters
Pekka Kilpeläinen

twelve
Africa in Horror Cinema: A Critical Survey
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Emiliano Aguilar, and Juan Ignacio Juvé

Part V
“In the Wake”: Racial Mourning and Memorialization

thirteen
Mapping Loss as Performative Research in Ralph Lemon’s Come home Charley Patton
Kajsa K. Henry

fourteen
Remembering and Resurrecting Bad N*ggers and Dark Villains: Walking with the Ghosts That Ain’t Gone
McKinley E. Melton

fifteen
Mourning Trayvon Martin: Elegiac Responsibility in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric
Emily Ruth Rutter

Coda: Post Vitam Amicitiae, or the Afterlife of a Friendship
Mae G. Henderson

Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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