Patricia Yaeger's Southern Hauntology: Response to 'Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or What Does it Mean to Still Be Haunted by Southern Literature?'

Patricia Yaeger's refreshing impatience with standard approaches to southern studies continues to inform her exploration of black and white southern women's writing in "Ghosts and Shattered Bodies." In the current essay, Yaeger argues that black and white southern women's writing registers very differently the ghosts of lost promise and possibility. In readings that range from short stories to novels to a Baptist pamphlet and other cultural texts, Yaeger explores the ghostly slippages that expose what she calls the "conditions of racial haunting" that still organize our thinking about race in southern writing as in these United States. While it is obvious that "Ghosts and Shattered Bodies" takes as a given its investigation of southern women's writing, there remain opportunities for thinking more about the implications of gender in the various texts Yaeger examines. Several and various textual moments cited in this essay are haunted by the twin conditions of gender and race, and occasionally by sexuality as well. Yaeger's fineness as a critic of literature and culture makes me want to see more often what she makes of these intersections. One of Yaeger's great strengths in this essay as elsewhere, her powerful writing style, shows the same acute attention to language that she notices in other writers. Her work seems driven by what annoys her--what haunts her, if I may--and an observant, unflinching prose is part of her head-on analysis. I'd like to read more such academic writing. Yaeger's turns of phrase, questions, and lists all speak of engagement with the texts, the reader, and her own evolving thoughts in a methodology that's generous and dialogic as well as consistently insightful.