The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora

The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an afterlife for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and hauntingtextual, visual, and embodied performancesin order to examine how these living archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performancesin addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culturethus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting. See more