Chasing Slavery’s Ghost

In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison emphasizes the uncanny influences of slavery on the nation’s “racial unconsciousness” (xii). From Harriet Jacobs to William Faulkner to Kara Walker, some of the most celebrated text of US art reflect slavery’s horrific scenes. While no one could deny the presence of slavery on the minds of progressive activists, poets, as well as the audience for the mini-series Roots (1977), in the decades prior to Morrison’s Playing, US literary scholars all too seldom discussed slavery beyond Frederick Douglas’ narrative, even while it was clear to historians and sociologists how much slavery mattered. One could even say that Americanists’ failure or reluctance to recognize the centrality of slavery provoked Morrison’s assertion that slavery’s effects still have yet to be fully grasped. Nor was Morrison alone in making this critique: in an infamous speech at Howard University in 1994, vitriolic black activist Khallid Muhammad remarked about the presence of a Jewish Holocaust museum and the absence of a public memorial recognizing the millions of slaves who died in the Middle Passage. However offensive Muhammad’s speech, like the arguments of Morrison and many other scholars and artists, it presents slavery’s holocaust as a living present that Americans generally do not want to face. David Marriot puts it another way, observing that the US has failed to mourn slavery, and thus slavery maintains a haunting occult presence, “nowhere but nevertheless everywhere” (xxi).

Invoking slavery as a ghost, as Avery Gordon explains, is not a capacious haunting that encompasses most “generalizable social phenomenon,” but something more specific (8); slavery’s haunting is a “repressed or unresolved social violence making itself known” (xvi). Actually, Gordon mischaracterizes the agency of slavery since it is not the haunting subject but the critic who makes “it” known; and in thinking about the previous examples of Morrison, Muhammad, or Marriot, the critic or activist makes the haunting known implicitly or explicitly on someone or something’s behalf. The discloser of slavery-haunting rallies history and memory for a cause, one that demands that institutions and individuals publicly recognize and/or include slavery where it was previously ignored or excluded.

While one might surmise what could have been the broader impact of well-intentioned public reckonings, museums, or presidential apologies on slavery’s ghosts, Americanists have made slavery and its legacies central to their work since the late 1980s. Along with upstart African-American studies programs at prominent institutions, Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gayl Jones, Fred D’Aguiar, and Octavia Butler led a surge in imaginative writing on slavery, along with renewed attention to the significance of slave narratives and other forms of black culture in their diasporic, transnational, and regional iterations.¹ Currently, there is no shortage of slavery texts to look at or discuss, and scholars are still uncovering even more. With a heightened scholarly awareness and institutional support, the discourse of slavery might not be everywhere in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, but it is certainly not hard to find.

Slavery is no longer the outlier, no longer peculiar; confronting, and analyzing it is the status quo. Encouraged by a ground swell of critics unveiling the routine violence and trauma of slavery, scholars still eagerly draw upon the diction of a hidden and unconscious haunting—deploying ghosts, shadows, blackness, darkness, horror, terror and subjection, and all guises of death (civil, social, etc.). On the one hand, almost no one denies the myriad of opportunities to call dramatically upon the history of slavery, yet many critics insist that it is hidden, a ghostly occasion for thinking that discloses the highly adaptable racism always lying in wait. Still, scholars of US slavery have been interrogating the indubitable presence of what Salamishah Tillet calls “sites of slavery”: memories, material objects, events, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery (5). Tillet’s...