African American Studies

Description

Assignment #2   “The Ghost Story of the Wake”   We arrive here embraced by ghosts. Because of the undying nature of the past—“the past is never dead, it’s not even past”—Black Studies has a tendency to think “hauntologically” about Blackness: that is, Black Studies tends to think of Black life as haunted life, of the “present” as the afterlife of slavery. The works we’ve engaged in this unit of the course have differently tried to deal with the mechanics and limitations of such a haunting.   Taija McDougall’s essay compels us to lean much less heavily on hauntology and its metaphors of ghostliness because we must also attend to the materiality of the ways the past interjects into the present, and to the material realities of being Black in the wake of enslavement; if we are haunted, and if ghostliness is a useful framing device, it can only be so in tandem with a recognition of the ways these “ghosts” of the past materialize in the present in, really, non-ghostly ways.   Toni Morrison’s Nobel Lecture teaches us about the vexed nature of language in the wake of enslavement, or in the afterlife of slavery. Language, held in the hands of Black people, exists in a liminal state, an indeterminate state of being between alive and dead, prior to its use. It seems that language’s aliveness or deadness depends on its use, both what it is used for and who it is used for. Language can do liberating work, work that “defends the dead” as Christina Sharpe might put it; language can also do the work of subjection, work that reinforces antiblackness. In its living deadness, or deathly living, prior to its use, what remains clear is that “it is in [our] hands,” and so it is ours to wield, knowing well the consequences of how we choose to do so.   Zong! teaches us about the power of destructive writing, about how through the fragmentation of the language available to us, and the language marshaled against us, we can expose the ghostly meanings that haunt the words and limn the lines. And as a legal scholar and poet, M. NourbeSe Philip is uniquely tied up in the middle of the concerns McDougall raises in her essay: on the one hand, meaning is an abstract, ghostly thing, and (if you played Pokémon you’ll get this reference) she offers us a Scope Lens to identify the ghosts; on the other, language has very material contexts and consequences that give those ghosts solid form, and that play out on Black bodies—the case she’s working with is a legal case about insurance that has, as its casualties, hundreds of Black lives.   And finally, we think about the ways we try to use all of the above as the ‘stuff’ with which we create our most caring, most radical work. In the final pieces assigned for the unit, from Lupe Fiasco’s myth-making in the first half of Drogas Wave, to the final scenes of Lovecraft Country’s “Holy Ghost,” to Claudia Rankine’s thoughts about mourning, to Jesmyn Ward’s take on “respair,” and to my own writing on memory and time travel, we’ve tried to consider what we can and do make of all this.   All this said, I’m sure you’re wondering, “Ok, so what am I supposed to write about this?” and/or “What question could possibly account for ALL of this in one assignment?”   You have a few tasks at hand and a few options for approaching them: In a 3 page essay, please write about one of the following:                     -Language                   -Destructive Writing                   -Mourning/Memory                   -Haunted Creation/Creation-in-Mourning   You may use any of the pieces assigned during this time, but you must use at least 2. There are some obvious groupings:   -Zong! and Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture” since both deal so heavily with language -Zong! and McDougall’s “Water is Waiting” since both deal with materiality and haunting -Morrison’s “Nobel Lecture” and Lupe Fiasco’s Drogas Wave, and/or my “Time to Eat” since Morrison’s analysis depends on the USE of language for the sake of enlivening or subjugating Black folk, and both Lupe’s album and my essay differently take this point and make something from it -My “Time to Eat” piece and/or Jesmyn Ward’s “On Witness and Respair” and/or Claudia Rankine’s “The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning” (pick 2 or all 3) all thinking about mourning, loss, and memory in relation to what Black folk can make of being socially dead -Lovecraft Country’s “Holy Ghost” and McDougall’s “Water is Waiting” because the former can be put up against the latter as a staging of the limitations and possibilities of hauntology when hauntology grounds itself in the real/material   There are more combinations, but for those who might have trouble figuring out a direction, those are available to you.