Haunting capital: memory, text and the black diasporic body
By Hershini Bhana Young
Publisher: Hanover, Hampshire, US and London: University Press of New England, 2006.
ISBN: 1584655194
Series: Reencounters with colonialism - new perspectives on the Americas
Library Shelf Mark: ESS YOU
In Haunting Capital, Young theorises the trauma of slavery and colonialism by mapping the experiences of the black female body in the "re-memories" of texts by writers such as Deborah Jack, Gayle Jones, Bessie Head, Maryse Conde and Tsitsi Dangarembga. She builds her argument by deconstructing powerful images within texts by these writers. I also think that Toni Morrison's Beloved provides a textual "ghost" in Haunting Capital - with Morrison as a literary foremother of the study's themes[1].
In the visual arts, Carrie Mae Weems's installation Sea Island Series (1992) and Renee Cox's Yo Mama Series (1994) are invoked to give flesh to textual theory:
‘Weems captures in this stunning installation the essence of my book. Not only does she foreground the injured black body in its collectivity as one body spans two continents, but she suggests the important role of rite, ritual, and art, in remembering and redressing our multiple injuries...' p 3 [and] ‘[T]he body as a form of memory that we see in Weems's installation is nonlinear, heterogeneous, resistant, and above all, lived' p 5 [italics mine]
In this way, Young confronts her readers with a montage of the physical. She references the "long memoried"[2] map of the black female body traumatised by the physical and emotional violence of the black diaspora - a body in which the memory acts as a compass for a bitter journey.
Haunting Capital guides the reader through a present/ past that is connected to a contemporary Africa, peopled by colonial "ghosts". This book is a powerfully painful and poetic view of the black diaspora which makes our current connections concrete.
Maxine Miller
Library and Information Manager
[1] 1"Re-memories" is a term from Toni Morrison's Beloved (19870, a novel that is much referenced in this study. Texts are the poem ‘SHORE' (Jack, n.d.) and the novels Corrigedora (Jones, 1975); A Question of Power (Head, 1974); Heremakhonen (Conde, 1982) and Nervous Conditions (Dangarembga, 1988), respectively.
[2] A phrase from ‘I is a long-memoried woman' a poem by Black British poet and writer, Grace Nichols, that explores with similar themes.