Chasing Slavery's Ghost

Abstract

In Playing in the Dark (1992), Toni Morrison emphasizes the uncanny influences of slavery on the nation's “racial unconsciousness” (xii). From Harriet Jacobs to William Faulkner to Kara Walker, some of the most celebrated text of US art reflect slavery's horrific scenes. While no one could deny the presence of slavery on the minds of progressive activists, poets, as well as the audience for the mini-series Roots (1977), in the decades prior to Morrison's Playing, US literary scholars all too seldom discussed slavery beyond Frederick Douglas' narrative, even while it was clear to historians and sociologists how much slavery mattered. One could even say that Americanists' failure or reluctance to recognize the centrality of slavery provoked Morrison's assertion that slavery's effects still have yet to be fully grasped. Nor was Morrison alone in making this critique: in an infamous speech at Howard University in 1994, vitriolic black activist Khallid Muhammad remarked about the presence of a Jewish Holocaust museum and the absence of a public memorial recognizing the millions of slaves who died in the Middle Passage. However offensive Muhammad's speech, like the arguments of Morrison and many other scholars and artists, it presents slavery's holocaust as a living present that Americans generally do not want to face. David Marriot puts it another way, observing that the US has failed to mourn slavery, and thus slavery maintains a haunting occult presence, “nowhere but nevertheless everywhere” (xxi).