Fabricating the Ghost: Future Spectralities in 21st century Black Literature and Culture.

At least since the publication of Toni Morrison’s landmark novel Beloved in 1987, the ghost has emerged as a key trope in African American and diasporic literature and culture. As a figure of haunting and loss, the ghost is usually associated with the past, with the work of cultural memory, and with collective trauma, mourning, and melancholia. In contraposition to the established reading of the ghost as a trace of a violent history of erasure and dispossession, and as the metaphor for a past that returns to haunt the present, this paper proposes a future-oriented approach to spectrality in contemporary Black cultural production. Drawing on examples from contemporary fiction and the visual arts, I trace a concurrent, complementary, and yet different deployment of the spectral as an engagement with the future understood as “this utopian possibility of being in charge of your visibility.” My claim is that, in these literary texts and artworks, the ghost functions specifically as phantasma (i.e., as image), and as a technology for the manipulation and reconfiguration of the visual field. Since, given their explicit status as fabrications, optical artifices, or technical contrivances, these phantasms remain opaque to both a gothic and a magic realist lens, I advance the concept of the phantasmagoria as a critical backdrop against which to investigate these visual, digital, and textual forms of future spectrality.