Ghosts of the African Diaspora: Re-Visioning History, Memory, and Identity, by Joanne Chassot

摘要

Ghosts of the African Diaspora is an innovative, erudite, well-researched examination of certain influential works by contemporary African American writers.The female voices all originated in the 1980s, though Chassot argues that FredD’Aguiar’s Feeding the Ghosts (1998) can be included as having been heavilyinfluenced by the seminal novels written by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, andPaule Marshall: “what these various groups voiced was a radical critique of theideological and epistemological underpinnings of the narrative that marginalized them” (p. 14). Starting from a flexible understanding of the “ghost” asunifying trope for examining the fictional memory of the Middle Passage andostensibly its role in the formation of identity in peoples of African descent,Chassot frames her book with thoughts on the relevance of Morrison’s Belovedand argues that “the ghost compels us to question what we see and feel, and,thereby, the way we approach the world and the categories and definitionsthat underpin our approach” (pp. 16–17). Taken as an instrument for creating acounternarrative to challenge the master-full history inherited by Western civilization, the ghost becomes a useful hermeneutical tool.