The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora

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.

Table of Contents:
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 

About the Author :
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).

Review :
"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 "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