Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture (review)

What is there to say about the fact that African Americans generally assumed that Raynard Johnson, an African American teenager found hanging from a tree at his Mississippi home in 2000, had been lynched, while white townspeople generally assumed he had committed suicide? What to say about the nameless anxiety a black American may experience when driving past a cotton field or, for that matter, a police car? Depending on one’s subject position and experience, these phenomena may seem either too obvious or, alternately, too irrational to linger over. Yet the premise of Marisa Parham’s brilliant study, Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture, is that such matters demand careful attention and deserve a conceptual framework.

Building on Avery Gordon’s path-breaking work on social haunting, Parham theorizes haunting as an intensely personal and public phenomenon. While people tend to speak of being haunted by their own disturbing memories, in Parham’s formulation, to be haunted is to experience someone else’s memory. Through close readings of literary texts, Parham offers several ways of thinking about how that “someone else” might bleed, without ever blending, into one’s self. The promiscuous memories she traces are often painful, many of them reflecting what Karla Holloway has identified as a black cultural sensibility shaped by the prevalence of early death. Haunting therefore describes how “the pain of others shades our own subjectivities” (7)—and, more specifically, how one may experience life as a reminder of many thousands gone whom one has never known. The point is not just that people are often viscerally affected by the past’s reverberations, but that they may be fundamentally constituted by them.

The experience of being touched by the afterlife of the past in the present has shaped African American cultural expression in significant ways. As Parham writes, the “subject position [African American] . . . has historically required that one understand at least a small part of oneself as beholden to the memory of others who share that position, as remembering often works in places of absence, for instance in lieu of homeland—or political power” (6). While she theorizes “displacement” less fully than “haunting,” the phrase “places of absence” reflects Parham’s concern with the spatial dimension of memory—with the ways in which memories are experienced as visions of place. By weaving together Toni Morrison’s account of “rememory” and Nora’s notion of milieux de mémoire (the “real environments of memory” whose loss makes sites of memory necessary), Parham articulates a concept of memory based more on “what it felt like to be somewhere” than “to be back in sometime” (29). This is an affective experience that travels. People who do not share lived experiences may nonetheless be seized by a shared vision of the past as present; collective identities are made and remade in such moments.

Haunting and Displacement takes surprising correspondences as its subject and also makes them its method. Structuring the book thematically rather than chronologically, Parham forges connections between works of twentieth-century African American literature that are seldom if ever considered together: the poetry of Bob Kaufman and Jean Toomer, the fiction of Richard Wright and Ann Petry. While she analyzes various texts with equal facility—Notorious B.I.G. album art, trauma theory, the televised Essence awards—she focuses on the literary. Perhaps this is because, as she suggests, “reading may be understood as the best metaphor for haunting . . . a transmutation of history into an experience of reading, into a memory over which one can now claim ownership . . .” (84). That her readings are themselves haunted is a point Parham demonstrates through her periodic shifts to first person narrative, which intimate how texts “work us over, make us remainders of them” (5). Finally, Parham’s writing itself destabilizes another boundary, since many passages in this work of literary criticism are as affecting as the primary texts themselves.

Chapter one, “Like Water,” moves from the enslavement narratives of Olaudah Equiano...