Ghosts and Shattered Bodies, or What Does It Mean to Still Be Haunted by Southern Literature?

"Ghosts and Shattered Bodies" argues that we must recognize a repetitive structure in southern fiction that depends on the trace or remnant to conjure the unthought of history. The blunt facts of racial trauma can be over-exposed, made facile, in the glam tropology of the gothic. This older rhetorical structure gives way to a shared hauntology in which simple fragments, residues, or traces of trauma fashion a regime of haunting. When white southern fiction makes these ghosts, it is clouded and driven by the return of the oppressed. Attending to starker tragedies, black fiction delineates the return of the dispossessed. While white women writers like Douglas and Porter focus on white children who miniaturize or repress memories of angry black women, African American women writers like Wright, Dash, and Morrison tell stories about what has disappeared but needs to be called forth again--about remnants of people who have been divested of property and can only return as a remnant or fragment that needs to be made into an integer.