Specter and the Speculative

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).

"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)

• Introduction Mae G. Henderson, Jeanne Scheper, and Gene Melton Part IWatery Unrest: Trauma and Diaspora  oneRelayed 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 threeYoruba Visions of the Afterlife in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata Stella Setka Part IIRaising the Dead: Black Sonic Imaginaries  fourThe Sonic Afterlives of Hester’s Scream: The Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in the Black Nationalist Imagination from Slavery to Black Lives MatterMeina Yates-Richard fiveMumia Abu-Jamal and Harriet Jacobs: Sound, Spectrality, and the Counternarrative Luis Omar Ceniceros sixForbidding Mourning: Disrupted Sites of Memory and the Tupac Shakur Hologram Danielle Fuentes Morgan Part IIISpectral Technologies of Hip-HopsevenThe Afterlife in Audio, Apparel, and Art: Hip-Hop, Mourning, and the Posthumous Shamika Ann Mitchell eightDreaming 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 169Kim White Part IVThe Posthumous and the Posthuman  tenDNA as Cultural Memory: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix Sheila Smith McKoy elevenGhosts of Traumatic Cultural Memory: Haunting, Posthumanism, and Animism in Daniel Black’s The Sacred Place and Bernice L. McFadden’s Gathering of WatersPekka KilpelÄinen twelveAfrica 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  thirteenMapping Loss as Performative Research in Ralph Lemon’s Come home Charley Patton Kajsa K. Henry fourteenRemembering and Resurrecting Bad N*ggers and Dark Villains: Walking with the Ghosts That Ain’t Gone McKinley E. Melton fifteenMourning 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. HendersonAcknowledgmentsSelected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index