The Ghosts of Slavery: How an aesthetics of haunting is used to commemorate slavery in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, Cane, The Piano Lesson and Beloved.

Abstract

Ever since the publication of Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' in 1987, people have been writing about the use of ghosts and haunting to commemorate slavery. Many novels written after Morrison's work have employed ghosts to speak of traumas. However, this research will argue that books written before the publication of 'Beloved' also employed a haunting aesthetic. Books such as Charles Chesnutt's 'The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales', Jean Toomer's 'Cane', and August Wilson's 'The Piano Lesson' were all written before the publication of 'Beloved' and all use supernatural elements to raise awareness to the fact that the atrocities of slavery continue to disturb the present. This research uses Jo Labanyi's explanation of an aesthetics of haunting (as given in "Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War”) to analyse the four aforementioned books and argue how all of them use an aesthetics of haunting.