Swartzfager, Megan

Description

This thesis examines the roles of haunting in the context of racial violence in three texts: Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, and Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan. In each of these texts, a parent is responsible for the death of a child. In the former two texts, both by Black authors, a Black parent kills a Black child in what they believe to be a protective act in the face of violence by white people. Wolf Whistle, however, written by a white author, is animated by the ghost of a character based on Emmett Till. In this case, a white parent kills a Black child in an act of disciplinary violence intended to reinforce the boundaries between whiteness and Blackness. The reasons that children die and return as ghosts in these three texts shape the way that haunting functions. In the first two novels, haunting forces a reckoning with cultural trauma in order to facilitate communal healing. In the final novel, haunting aids in the problematization of whiteness and in the amelioration of white guiltguilt which results from feelings of complicity in anti-Black violence.

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