Linger: Searching for Ghostly Justice in American History
Bowe, Justine J.
2012
- Linger is a study of ghosts and hauntings that act as representatives of marginalized American histories. This work emphasizes that the return of the dead is socially real, and that this return demands inquiry into the histories of the spaces they occupy. Linger reveals Anglo American and governmental complicity in and demand for the torturous,murderous, and genocidal interactions with African ... read moreAmericans and American Natives that created this nation. This is accomplished by examining haunted Gettysburg as a misconstrued site of salvation of enslaved Africans and African Americans, by following spectral Natives to histories of displacement and murder, and by concluding with the haunting of a Louisiana plantation by black, Native, and white spirits. Linger investigates local and national histories tied to self-proclaimed sites of extreme haunting. These appear on the internet, television, in travel guides, and as profitable facets of the tourism industry. While focusing on the melancholic and troubling subject of trauma, Linger is a hopeful project that endeavors to correct and broaden American history within the Anglo American Dominant Narrative. Linger is an appeal to the reader to approach with a high degree of suspicion any historicism that holds a resolved, not melancholic, relationship to trauma: the dead continue to return in social reality and provide a constructive opportunity to understand our collective positions as inheritors of histories of loss,violence, and murder.read less
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- pz50h732f
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