Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture

Looking at texts including Jean Toomer’s Cane, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, James Baldwin’s Another Country, and Beat poetry by Bob Kaufmann, in this original study, Parham describes the phenomena of haunting, displacement, and ghostliness as endemic to modern African American literature and culture. Not only does memory—conscious and unconscious, individual and collective—often drive African American cultural production, but such memory often arrives to artists from elsewhere, from other times, spaces, and experiences.