An archeology of silenced voices: spectrality in contemporary african american fiction

• Autores: Vanesa Lado Pazos
• Directores de la Tesis: Constante González Groba (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidade de Santiago de Compostela ( España ) en 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Cristina Garrigós González (presid.), Susana M. Jiménez Placer (secret.), Urszula Niewiadomska Flis (voc.)
• Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Estudios Ingleses Avanzados: Lingüística, Literatura y Cultura por la Universidad de A Coruña; la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela y la Universidad de Vigo
• Materias:
  • Ciencias de las artes y las letras
    • Teoría análisis y critica literarias
      • Análisis literario
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• Resumen

  • Since the so-called spectral turn of the 1990s, the ghost was placed at the forefront of critical debates and artistic manifestations. Adopting the field of spectrality studies, this dissertation seeks to account for the ubiquity of the ghost in contemporary African American fiction. This research is premised on the fact that, in the corpus selected, two complementary dimensions of spectrality, with their concomitant functions, can be ascertained. I argue that, in Paule Marshalls Praisesong for the Widow (1983) and Gloria Naylors Mama Day (1988) the Africanist dimension of spectrality is foregrounded while the psycho-social one occupies a secondary place. In these contexts the ghost appears first and foremost as a marker of cultural identity that is mobilized to problematize the progressive loss of cultural bonds in the process of assimilation into the white hegemonic society and to unveil the anxiety such process of integration in the white supremacist social and political structures entails for the Black subject. Here, the spectral exchange is outlined as a space for gaining a cultural awareness upon which to reclaim the (diasporic) African American cultural identity as a locus of resistance in the face of racial oppression. Conversely, in Randall Kenans A Visitation of Spirits (1989), Tell Me, Tell Me, (1992) Resurrection Hardware or, Lard and Promises (2018) and Jesmyn Wards Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) the psycho-social dimension takes precedence over the Africanist dimension. The spectral scenes and ghosts in these texts denote an individual repressed trauma of intrinsic collective significance in the context of American racial dynamics. The spectral here functions as a catalyst of the subjects confrontation with its own material self as inscribed in the coordinates of the African American community and the nation. In collective terms, this appears as a confrontation with history hinged on the disclosure of the mechanisms of perpetuation of racial oppression in the age of colorblindness. Ultimately, the revisionist character of the specter will transform it into a tool of resistance that allow for the articulation of a social critique and the re-inscription of erased subjects and their (hi)stories in the American national narrative.