JOANNE CHASSOT Ghosts of the African Diaspora Re-Visioning History, Memory, & Identity Ghosts of the AfricAn DiAsporA re-MAppinG the trAnsnAtionAl A Dartmouth Series in American Studies series eDitor Donald E. Pease Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute Dartmouth College The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its inception. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order de- manded an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The se- ries Re-Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly compar- ativist understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press wel- comes monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States. For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com. Yael Ben-zvi, Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories Joanne Chassot, Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity Samuele F. S. Pardini, In the Name of the Mother: Italian Americans, African Americans, and Modernity from Booker T. Washington to Bruce Springsteen Sonja Schillings, Enemies of All Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence Günter H. Lenz, edited by Reinhard Isensee, Klaus J. Milich, Donald E. Pease, John Carlos Rowe, A Critical History of the New American Studies, 1970–1990 Helmbrecht Breinig, Hemispheric Imaginations: North American Fictions of Latin America Jimmy Fazzino, World Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. Literature Zachary McCleod Hutchins, editor, Community without Consent: New Perspectives on the Stamp Act Kate A. Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side Yuan Shu and Donald E. Pease, American Studies as Transnational Practice: Turning toward the Transpacific Melissa M. Adams-Campbell, New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage Joanne Chassot Ghosts of the afriCan Diaspora Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity DArtMouth colleGe press hAnover, new hAMpshire Dartmouth College Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2018 Trustees of Dartmouth College This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. All rights reserved For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com. Published with a subsidy from the Commission des publications de la Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Lausanne. Page 237 constitutes a continuation of this copyright page. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-5126-0158-9 Paperback ISBN: 978-1-5126-0160-2 Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5126-0161-9 Everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of the other. — Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx contents Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Tracing the Ghost 1 1 “Voyage through death / to life upon these shores”: Representing the Middle Passage 34 2 Dusky Sallys: Re-Visioning the Silences of History 75 3 “You best remember them!”: Repossessing the Spirit of Diaspora 109 4 “A ghost-life”: Queering the Limits of Identity 152 Afterword: Learning to Live with Ghosts 195 Notes 201 Works Cited 219 Credits 237 Index 239 AcknowleDGMents A book, AccorDinG to DAviD punter, is always “only a shadow or a ghost of a book that might have been written” (6). There is — will always be — much more that I would have liked to write, and write better. But that this book exists at all is due to the help, encouragements, and sup- port of many people I wish to thank here. Some of them played a crucial part in the thinking, writing, and revising process that resulted in this book. Oth- ers played an equally important part in keeping me strong and motivated, and in taking me out of the realm of the living dead from time to time. I first and foremost wish to express my deepest gratitude and respect to Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, without whose guidance and mentorship this project would never have come to life. She was often able to see what haunted a confused and not fully articulate(d) argument, and help me bring it to light. This book is also a much more coherent and carefully thought-through piece of work thanks to Teresa Goddu and Justin Ed- wards, whose insights and questions pushed me to re-vision some impor- tant theoretical and methodological aspects of the project. I am also very grateful to the reviewers who read the manuscript for UPNE, for their time, attention, and generosity. Thanks to Richard Pult, my editor at UPNE, the publication process was incredibly fast and smooth, and I am grateful to him for making this first publication experience much easier than I had imagined. I presented parts of this work and received precious feedback at var- ious conferences and workshops, at the University of Reading, Howard University, and Southern Illinois University, at the International Gothic Association conference at the University of Heidelberg, and at the Eu- ropean Association for American Studies conference at Trinity College Dublin. I have greatly benefited from being a part of the PostCit com- munity, and I am grateful to the brilliant and inspiring scholars who compose it, with special thanks to Noémi Michel. At the University of Lausanne I particularly wish to thank Christine Le Quellec Cottier and Brigitte Maire, as well as the Formation Doctorale Interdisciplinaire, and especially Jérôme Meizoz and Alberto Roncaccia. [ xii ] Acknowledgments Isis Giraldo has played a major part in my academic life and beyond, and our intellectual, political, and human bond sustained me throughout this project. I have learned much from her strength, her passion, and her unrelenting critical engagement. Sarah Baccianti also holds a special place among the people who have inspired me. Her unwavering friendship and generosity have made aca- demia a better place to be in. I have been blessed to work with wonderful friends and colleagues in the English Department at the University of Lausanne, who supported and guided me through the dissertation and the publication process. I am particularly thankful to Valérie Cossy, Mary Flannery, Martine Hennard Dutheil, Roxane Hughes, Kirsten Stirling, Boris Vejdovsky, and Najat Zein, for the many ways in which they have helped me. I also wish to thank all the other people who made Lausanne such a great place to work at, in particular my ACIL friends, who helped take my mind off research and put it to more practical questions and active projects. My students throughout my years of teaching at UNIL have also been a regen- erative presence. Their curiosity and enthusiasm have nourished my own. My friends in “the real world,” thank you all for supporting me and bearing with me from the beginning to the end of this long project. You didn’t forget me when I became a ghost, and you brought me back to life on countless occasions. I could never have followed this path without the love and encourage- ments of my parents, Dominique and Marc Etienne, who always found ways to help that only parents can, and whose interest in my work cer- tainly made them my most careful and diligent readers. I’m also grateful to my brother Mathieu, who has taught me much about courage and perseverance in life. Beyond words is what I owe to Cédric Cramatte. His faith, patience, and love have been a source of strength through times of doubt and weariness. The very existence of this book proves he was right on many points, and these wouldn’t be acknowledgments if I didn’t admit to that. Finally, I wish to thank the Société Académique Vaudoise, the Fonda- tion van Walsem pro Universitate, and the Commission des Publications de la Faculté des Lettres (UNIL) for their generous support, which has made this project and its publication possible. Ghosts of the AfricAn DiAsporA introDuction trAcinG the Ghost I am very happy to hear that my books haunt. — Toni Morrison, interview with Nellie McKay My first encounter with a ghost was — like that of many readers of African diaspora literature — with the spiteful baby spirit at 124 Blue- stone Road, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio, in the 1870s. That ghost haunted me for years. My second ghost sighting was in the woods of Willow Springs, a Sea Island in the limbo space between Georgia and South Carolina, in the late 1990s. That apparition was far more fleeting than the house- shattering baby spirit and the fleshy ghost that named herself Beloved. In fact, were it not for that previous encounter with the ghostly, which had somehow made me more alert to such apparitions, I might not even have noticed this second ghost. While Beloved was a greedy, insatiable ghost always demanding more of everyone’s attention, the discreet presence of this other ghostly woman whose name nobody remembered made itself known only in the rustle of her long woolen dress and in whispers in the wind blowing through the trees. When, by happenstance, I landed in Jamaica in the 1950s and discov- ered the wilderness of the Cockpit Country, I had the uncanny sensation that this place too was haunted. Not only figuratively, by violence, rac- ism, classism, and the specter of neocolonialism, but also quite literally by a woman warrior from the past whose struggle against the oppressive forces of her time, slavery and colonialism, seemed anything but over and whose great power and guidance were more necessary than ever.