More Haunting Revelations: Race, Rememory, and Storytelling

• In Event: 52.023 - Quantitative and Qualitative Methods Are Not Enough! The Ethics of Research Beyond Methodocentrism

Abstract

In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon offers haunting as one way to understand the complicatedness of social life. Ghosts, she explains, are indicative of “something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our well-trained eyes” and it is through haunting that such ghosts make themselves known. In essence, haunting describes how “that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities…drawing us into a structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition” (8). And yet the transformative recognition, as Gordon argues, is impossible if we are unable to grasp how reckoning with ghosts calls for a “fundamental change in the way we know and make knowledge” (6). Gordon’s point is akin to my own contention that a rational approach to knowledge, an approach focused on seeing what is seeable, may render a legitimate understanding of things, but it does not likely or necessarily render a fuller understanding of things.
Arguably, a rational approach has no way to take seriously those things we deem irrational, like feelings and ghosts, because it legitimizes only what can be seen; it frames the knowledge relationship as one between subject and object, rather than a negotiation between subjects; it seeks certainty rather than clarity. Such an approach misses the intangible, the subconscious, the way that the unaddressed or insufficiently addressed racialized trauma of the past lingers in the flesh and bone of humanity, and settles deeply into the physical and metaphysical environment as repressed feelings, nagging reminders, perpetual meddlers—an inconsolable racial melancholy. What kind of paradigmatic shift, then, allows for the acknowledgement, mapping, articulation and ultimate surrendering of racial grief?
Kelly Oliver (2012) in the Colonization of Psychic Space and Ann Anlin Cheng (2004) in The Melancholy of Race both turn to literature to speak to the affective complexities of raical grief, noting that literature can often reveal what theory cannot. While their analyses of literary texts offer strong support for their theoretical presumptions about racial grief and its lingering, I prose yet another approach to grapplingly with the ghostly aspects of such grief. Drawing on rememory (Morrison), radical imagination (Havien & Khasnabish, 2014), and the poltics of storytelling (Stone-Mediatore, 2003 I discuss how the crafting of creative non-fiction is a form of theorizing rooted not in pulling things apart for analysis, but rather in putting things (back) together, such that a fuller understanding of racial grief and its ghostly aspects are possible.

References
Cheng, A. A. (2001). The menalcholy of race: Psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gordon, A. (2008). Ghostly matters: Haunting and the sociological imagination. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Haiven, M. and Khasnabish, A. (2014). The radical imagination: Social movement research in the age of austerity. Canada: Fernwood Publishing.
Morrison, T. (1984). Memory, creation and writing. Tought, v59(4), pp. 385-390.
Oliver, K. (2004). The colonization of psychic space: A psychoanalytic social theory of oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Author

• Denise M. Taliaferro Baszile, Miami University