1. Introduction

3The framework of the cultural haunting can be a useful lens through which to address questions related to understanding and recovering individual, communal, and national identity-making. As literary scholar Teresa Goddu argues, through the Gothic we gain access to otherwise unheard voices—including those who have been excluded from the cultural and historical mythologizations that stand at the core of American identity (10, 11). The Gothic’s concern with exploring “inequities in distributions of power and contests for control” also makes it especially relevant to exploring anxieties and power dynamics related to racial difference (Weinstock 3). For these reasons, the literary ghost—as an extension of the Gothic—is well-suited to uncover and resist forms of oppression and repression: they can address not only the historical oppression that shaped certain narratives, but also the repression of these histories within cultural memory. This is particularly relevant to literature that explores the histories of minority groups—histories that have “in some way been threatened, erased or fragmented” (Brogan 4, 6). While the African American literary ghost has received comparatively more scholarly attention—Morrison’s Beloved and the scholarly response to it have been instrumental in shaping the field of spectrality studies (Chassot 27)—the cultural haunting is a relevant framework to address historical silencing in any minority literature (Brogan 3). As evidenced by recent scholarship, literary specters can fulfill similar functions across a wide variety of minority literatures, including African American, Indigenous, Caribbean, Asian American and other literary traditions.

5While ghosts and hauntings have long been a subject of research in the field of Gothic Studies and other related literary disciplines, the connection between literary spectrality, cultural trauma and national identity remains understudied. From the late-twentieth century onwards this topic has gained more scholarly attention, and while the resultant scholarship has been highly valuable, it is typically defined by a culture- or gender-specific approach. Examples include studies by Joanne Chassot (2018) on ghosts in African diaspora literature, Janna Odabas (2018) on Asian American specters, Gina Wisker (2022) on women’s ghost stories, and Kristina Gibby (2024) on Caribbean literary hauntings. There is clear merit in these culture- and gender-specific studies: it is important to recognize that no two cultural hauntings are the same precisely because of the particular historical and cultural context by which they are informed. Yet, by centering on the significance of hauntings within a specific cultural or literary tradition, there is little consideration for the cross-cultural commonalities in the functioning of cultural hauntings. Consequently, there have been few studies on spectrality as a lens through which to understand and reframe cultural identities and social hierarchies in a broader context. Some valuable studies that do situate the literary ghost in a cross-cultural conversation include those by Avery Gordon (1997), Kathleen Brogan (1998), and Arthur Redding (2011). Each of these works investigate the relation between (literary) hauntings and their ability to reflect on social hierarchies and injustices in American history. Yet, even though their scholarship is enormously valuable, there persists a lack of attention for the potential of the literary ghost to subvert understandings of a national, hegemonic historical narrative. This article therefore seeks to complement existing scholarship by further exploring literary ghosts in relation to the construction of American cultural memory and national identity.

6To this end, this article also draws on scholarship that examines the formation of an American national identity and the construction of the hegemonic narrative of US history. In his seminal work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot contends that such hegemonic narratives are created through the silencing of non-dominant interpretations of historical events or developments. This silencing is achieved through formulas of banalization and erasure. The former trivializes the historical event, while the latter constitutes a more direct and complete dismissal of the historical event. Both formulas work to silence histories—particularly minority histories—within the hegemonic narrative (96-97). As Berthold Molden contends, such processes of silencing continue to be employed to keep or make the past “relevant for the present at the service of contemporary interests within the [hegemonic] group” (139). Even when the silencing is not absolute, the selective remembrance of historical narratives can actively work to obscure or undermine demands by minority groups for accountability or redress.

9This silencing does not only take place in the construction of narratives, but also in the curation of American cultural memory. Building on the foundational work of Maurice Halbwachs, cultural historian and memory scholar Jan Assmann draws on earlier theorizations of collective memory to develop the concept of cultural memory. He argues that cultural memory encompasses the “store of knowledge from which a group derives an awareness of its unity and peculiarity” and that it has the capacity to be reconstructed in relation to contemporary society (130). Cultural memory is distinct from collective memory in its intergenerational relevance, crystallized through “repeated societal practice and initiation” (126). Cultural memory, then, refers to a more formalized commemoration of certain histories beyond individual or group dynamics, which engages with broader processes of institutionalization. The narration and curation of (cultural) memory takes place on many different levels—individual, communal, or national—and for many different reasons, cultural theorist Paul Connerton argues. One type of curation that Connerton identifies is “forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity” (63). This approach to memory suggests that to forget is not a loss; rather, it focuses on “the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practicable purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes. … What is allowed to be forgotten provides living space for present projects” (63). Importantly, this curation of memory constitutes active denial, or erasure, rather than passive forgetting (Tanesini 213). The selective curation of memory is enacted by minority cultures as much as by dominant cultures: as Connerton posits, “such silencings, while they are a type of repression, can at the same time be a form of survival” (68). On a national scale, however, minority cultures are often largely excluded from shaping the memorialization processes underlying the construction of a country’s hegemonic historical narrative.

10Literature can play an important role not only in uncovering processes of silencing, but also in counteracting these processes. As critical race theorists Solórzano and Yosso argue, the narration of “counter-stories” can prove an effective means of resisting historical silencing. Such counter-stories can work to challenge dominant discourses, not only by directly responding to the hegemonic historical narrative, but also by centering on the experiences of those relegated to the margins of society and illuminating their interior lives. This form of storytelling, Solórzano and Yosso contend, “can help strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (32). While literary fiction is not the only medium through which such counter-stories can be told, it does provide an important avenue through which minorities can give voice to their own narratives.

11This article thus seeks to illuminate the role of the literary ghost in mediating and reshaping understandings of American history and cultural identity. It complements the existing body of scholarship on literary spectrality by considering the significance of hauntings in a cross-cultural context, thereby highlighting the broader systemic silencing that contributes to the repression of minority histories. To this end, the following sections offer an analysis of Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Night Watchman and how the ghosts in both novels work to resist silencing. In particular, it highlights two of the primary functions of literary ghosts in narratives of cultural haunting: to represent cultural continuity, and to make cultural trauma visible and narratable. Finally, this article reflects on how this spectral resistance to silencing works to re-imagine the hegemonic historical narrative and the national identity of the US.

2. Ghostly Manifestations of Cultural Continuity in Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017)

12Since the late twentieth century, spectrality has offered an important lens through which African American histories have been understood, framed, and re-visioned in literary fiction. The literary ghost has allowed African American authors to revive their individual and communal past outside of the restrictions of the hegemonic narrative of US history. By integrating spectral themes into their narratives, literary scholar Trudier Harris argues, the authors of narratives of cultural haunting are able to treat history “not as a static, immutable entity” but as a “dynamic force that they can bend and shape at will” (23). Similarly, literary scholar Ruth Mayer suggests that, from the 1980s onwards, more speculative forms of fiction writing gained popularity among African American authors because it allowed them to explore histories that would otherwise remain inaccessible (566). Literary ghosts were central to the construction of such imaginative narratives, giving voice and agency to those whose stories were long silenced. In this way, spectrality has played an important role in recovering and narrating “counter-histories,” which go beyond the focalization of the dominant historical actor and can foreground alternative perceptions of a particular history (Molden 128).

13Building on this literary tradition is Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel about a mixed-race family living in Mississippi whose long-repressed memories of their history in the Jim Crow South and experiences with the failings of the criminal justice system return to haunt them. Jojo, the thirteen-year-old boy who narrates much of the novel, grows up under the care of his Black grandparents, whom he calls Mam and Pop. His father Michael, a white man, is incarcerated in Parchman penitentiary on a three-year sentence, while his drug-addicted mother Leonie, lacking a “mothering instinct,” struggles to take care of Jojo and his younger sister, three-year-old Kayla (158). One of the ghosts central to the story is Richie, a twelve-year-old boy who—decades before the present-day narrative takes place—suffered under the racial violence of the carceral system, specifically at Mississippi’s Parchman penitentiary. In that same prison, at the same time, fifteen-year-old Pop was unjustly incarcerated, and he and Richie developed a close relationship. Ultimately, it is revealed that Pop is the one who killed Richie—not as an act of violence, but in an act of protection to keep Richie out of the hands of a white mob of vigilantes after Richie attempted, and failed, to escape from the plantation-style prison (173). Parchman thus plays a central role in the narrative: it is the site where Michael is imprisoned during the present-day narrative, the site where both Pop and Richie were incarcerated as young boys, and the site where Pop unwillingly killed the boy he had sought to protect. Their traumas—borne out of their experiences of incarceration, criminalization, racial violence, and dehumanization—are central to the novel and play out on an individual as well as on a cultural level.

14Richie’s spectrality plays an important role in uncovering these traumatic histories. As one of the novel’s narrators, Richie is able to offer a first-hand account of his experiences at Parchman. His spectrality allows his narration to go beyond his own individual experiences. As a ghost, he is able to bridge the separation between past, present and future: he describes how, as a ghost, he falls asleep and wakes up again, always at Parchman, but in different eras (127). As such, Richie is able to witness Parchman penitentiary in different time periods: he sees “the Delta before the prison, and Native men were ranging over that rich earth,” as well as present-day Parchman, with “men who wore their hair long and braided to their scalps, who sat for hours in small, windowless rooms staring at big black boxes that streamed dreams” (128). Richie’s ability to see these developments of Parchman over time highlights one important function of the literary ghost: to represent and make visible cultural continuity.

15Cultural continuity involves maintaining connections with the past, as a valuable affirmation of group identity and kinship. Within an African American context, cultural continuity has taken on a distinctive meaning: originating in the complete and irreversible physical and social rupture of the Middle Passage, African American culture is distinctly diasporic. Yet, certain forms of cultural continuity were of crucial importance in the development of an African American cultural identity. As historian Stephanie Smallwood argues, pre-colonial West African cultural practices were adapted to contain and make sense of the Atlantic voyage and enslavement in the US. This cultural adaptation and re-invention was an important factor in retaining a sense of humanity in the face of the commodification and dehumanization of the slave trade (190). Affirmations of cultural continuity helped to resist what historian Orlando Patterson calls “natal alienation”—the complete disconnect from an individual’s heritage and kinship (5).

16While this sense of identity-affirming cultural continuity plays an important role in Sing, Unburied, Sing—as will be explored later in this section—the narrative also makes visible another manifestation of cultural continuity. Through Richie’s spectrality, the endurance of cultural trauma is brought to the fore: his observation about the unchanging nature of Parchman penitentiary—and the broader systems it represents—are an indictment of the deep-rooted, unresolved and racialized failings of the criminal justice and carceral system. “Sometimes I think it done changed,” Richie says about Parchman, “And then I sleep and wake up, and it ain’t changed none” (117). His observations point to the fact that, although decades pass, Parchman has always been and continues to be a site of trauma for its prisoners. Richie’s observations about the enduring cultural traumas related to Parchman and the criminal justice system are reinforced by the experiences of other characters in the novel. Writing to Leonie from Parchman, Michael tells her about “the guards beating an eighteen-year-old boy …. They heard him screaming and then nothing, and then got word he bleed to death like a pig in the room” (70). Jojo also experiences the ways in which law enforcement can reinforce racism when he and his family are pulled over by police officers, who treat them with disproportionate violence. Jojo processes the fact that he has been held at gunpoint and reflects: “Even though [the gun] reminded me of so much cold, I think it would have been hot to touch. So hot it would have burned my fingerprints off” (118). The fact that Jojo imagines being stripped off his identity—losing the identifying markings of his fingerprints—points to the dehumanization he experiences at the hands of law enforcement. This dehumanization mirrors the broader form of erasure that takes place within Parchman penitentiary and the criminal justice system it stands for. The dehumanization inherent in processes of criminalization of African Americans and other minorities contributes to their invisibility as social and political actors, both within historical and contemporary contexts (Jardina and Piston 378). Again, literary spectrality offers a means of resisting this dehumanizing silencing—the most definitive form of dehumanization and erasure is death, but Richie’s ghostliness defies this erasure. His enduring presence allows him to make visible and challenge the ways in which Parchman—and all it stands for—continues to silence African Americans and other minorities.

18Richie’s exorcism draws on similar oceanic imagery. He imagines that, once he finds resolution, he “‘could. Cross the Waters. Be home. Maybe there, I could … become something else’” (187). Evidently Richie, like Given, Leonie, and Mam, understands death and his own spectrality in terms of a crossing of water. Richie also reveals to Jojo he is not the only ghost who lingers, unable to cross the water: there are numerous other ghosts who have come together by a tree in Jojo’s yard, “women and men and boys and girls” who share the circumstances of their deaths with Jojo. Their fragmentary stories reveal traumas of abuse, rape, and the violent deaths of young children. From the ghosts’ appearances—Jojo notes they are dressed in “rags and breeches, T-shirts and tignons, fedoras and hoodies”—it becomes clear that these traumas span multiple eras (189). This gathering of ghosts, all victims of various manifestations of systemic racial violence and oppression, are ultimately exorcised through a wordless melody sung by Kayla, Jojo’s three-year-old sister. The novel’s title refers to this song: the unburied—the ghosts representative of unresolved trauma, marked by their cultural invisibility—are encouraged to sing and, consequently, to be heard. As Kayla sings, it becomes clear that the act of singing is a form of resolution in itself. Jojo observes: “Kayla begins to sing, a song of mismatched, half-garbled words, nothing that I can understand” (189). As she sings, Kayla moves her hand in a way that Jojo recognizes: “[I] know the movement, know it’s how Leonie rubbed my back, rubbed Kayla’s back, when we were frightened of the world.” Jojo associates Kayla’s gestures with his own memories of comfort and protection. This association is shared by the ghosts: they are soothed by Kayla’s song and movements, and “smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” (190). The song thus evokes memories of and associations with family, kinship, and maternal love, for Jojo and the spirits alike.

19Furthermore, the song echoes the sound of water: Kayla “says shhh like she remembers the sound of the water in Leonie’s womb, the sound of all water, and now she sings it” (190). The spirits respond to Kayla’s song only by saying: “Home” (190). As was the case in Mam’s death and Given’s exorcism, water-related imagery holds much significance in this final exorcism. For the ghosts, a connection exists between the sound of water and their conception of home. Again, this association evokes a reversal of the Middle Passage: returning home by crossing the sea appears to be a way to address their suffering and find a form of resolution. According to literary scholar Jennifer Terry, the Middle Passage has been envisaged as “a site of potential mythic or historical recuperation” (478). By recalling and reframing the Middle Passage as part of the exorcism, African American histories of slavery and racial inequality are recuperated: the Middle Passage, which marked the beginning of a life of violent oppression, is reversed and comes to represent the possibility of liberation and resolution instead.

20The song’s power thus lies in evoking cultural continuity. Kayla’s unintelligible song encapsulates simultaneously the remembrance of family and kinship and the reversal of the Middle Passage. “Reaffirming this continuity,” Joanne Chassot argues, “contradict[s] the very logic of the institution of slavery and its disruptive effects on all aspects of the lives of the slaves as much as their descendants” (10). The invocation of cultural continuity thus serves as an act of resistance against the cultural fragmentation resulting from a long history of racialized marginalization and oppression. This reassertion of cultural continuity enables a movement toward addressing the cultural trauma; memories of suffering and trauma are counterbalanced by memories of community and kinship, and it is the promise of a spiritual homecoming that ultimately enables the exorcism of the ghosts in Sing, Unburied, Sing. The cultural continuity embodied by the narrative’s specters thus works both as an indictment of enduring trauma, and as a way to reckon with it.

3. Spectral (In)visibility in The Night Watchman (2020)

21Within many Indigenous cultures, conceptions of spectrality and life after death are of great social significance. As Indigenous studies scholars Boyd & Thrush argue, practices that honor spirits of the dead are understood as acts of “reverence and care” through which the social order is maintained, and through which Indigenous communities “commemorate their own survival in the face of seemingly endless physical and cultural onslaughts” (xix). Outside of Indigenous communities, Native American ghosts occupy a contentious position within American culture. Misconceptions and misrepresentations surrounding Native American spectrality have played an important role in shaping narratives of Indigeneity within the American settler colonial state. Colonists drew on their understandings of Indigenous spectrality to create a perception of Native Americans as mystical and demonic, making them antithetical to the settlers and their Christian virtues (Bergland 1). Representations of Indigeneity in popular culture—for example in the various adaptations of The Amityville Horror (1979) and Pet Sematary (1983)—continue to use spectral themes to reinforce irrational, supernatural, and ultimately dehumanizing portrayals of Native Americans. Aside from these misrepresentations of Indigenous cultural spectrality, Indigeneity itself increasingly came to be understood through a spectral lens. Portraying Native Americans as ghosts, for instance through the myth of the Vanished Indian, constituted a “discursive technique of Indian removal—describing them as insubstantial, disembodied, and finally spectral beings” (Bergland 3). While the trope of the Indigenous ghost has thus contributed to the marginalization of Indigenous peoples across the US, Native American authors have also reclaimed the literary ghost to recover a different narrative. As this section illustrates, one of the primary functions of the specter in Indigenous literatures, as in other minority literatures, is to make visible histories that have long been repressed and silenced.

22Such is also the case in Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman. This novel is set in the 1950s and revolves around a number of characters from the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota who are confronted with the prospect of forced assimilation and the erasure of their cultural history as they fight against federal termination. Central to the story is Thomas Wazhashk. As tribal chairman, he holds an important position within the reservation and becomes instrumental in the community’s fight against a federal termination bill. Working as a night watchman at the reservation’s jewel bearing plant, Thomas is confronted with the ghost of his cousin, Roderick. Thomas and Roderick grew up together on the reservation and were both sent to the Fort Totten boarding school as part of a federal policy which sought to enact “cultural elimination through assimilation” (Jardina and Piston 375). The children sent to these boarding schools were displaced, removed from their families and communities, and were subjected to abuse and exploitation, sometimes with fatal consequences (Evans-Campbell 327). Roderick, too, died at Fort Totten after being locked in the school’s cellar as a form of punishment, resulting in him becoming severely ill and eventually passing away (163). Roderick’s spectral appearance on the reservation forces Thomas to reckon with the traumatic memory of their shared time at Fort Totten. Initially, Thomas feels burdened by Roderick’s presence—he feels responsible for not being able to save Roderick from his punishment at Fort Totten, and has long tried to repress all memories of this formative trauma. Throughout the narrative, though, Roderick comes to represent something beyond Thomas’ sense of guilt: Roderick helps to make Thomas’ trauma—and the broader cultural traumas of which it is part—visible and narratable.

23While Roderick’s role in the novel is mostly mediated through Thomas’ perception of him, Roderick also narrates some passages himself. He is thus able to reflect on his trauma and his spectrality first-hand, challenging the appropriation and misrepresentation of Indigenous histories. In one passage, Roderick reflects on the attempts to forcibly assimilate him and his fellow students at boarding school, taking stock of the things he did and did not like about the culture that was imposed upon him, like canned peaches or hard shoes (372). These personal insights humanize and individualize his experience at Fort Totten, complicating generalized and impersonal conceptions of the impact of forced assimilation. His musings lead Roderick to think about how he would have died, if his community and their lifestyle had not been disrupted by settler colonialism. He decides that “Anything would be better [than to die at Fort Totten]. … No, the horror and agony he had been through, he’d not forgotten all these many years” (372). Roderick’s narration thus not only reveals more about the lived experience of Fort Totten boarding school, but also about the largely unnarratable experience of death. Many of the victims of the cultural traumas central to this narrative have been forcibly silenced in death. Only through spectrality can this most definitive form of silencing be undone: the literary ghost endures in spite of deadly attempts at cultural elimination, and is able to witness, remember, and narrate the histories that would otherwise be silenced.

24This form of spectral agency is particularly foregrounded in the final parts of the narrative, when a Turtle Mountain Band delegation—headed by Thomas—travels to Washington for a hearing with Senator Arthur V. Watkins to protest the federal termination bill. As Thomas prepares to present the tribe’s case, he begins to feel comforted by Roderick’s appearances. He refers to him as “‘my ghost’,” and tells his wife Rose: “‘We’ve gotten reacquainted pretty good since the old days’” (359). Roderick’s transition into the role of a friend rather than a tormentor allows him to take on a more constructive role within the narrative. During the hearing with Watkins, Roderick communicates with Thomas—first to urge Thomas to not let himself get aggravated by Watkins’ line of questioning and his mischaracterizations of the tribe, and later to encourage Thomas to thank Watkins after the hearing. In this second instance Roderick recalls their time at boarding school, reminding Thomas of the time he “buttered that white teacher up to the teeth” in an attempt to help Roderick escape from the cellar at Fort Totten (405). While their shared past has long been a source of guilt for Thomas, Roderick here recalls it in a productive manner. The memories of their traumatic history now work toward protecting the Turtle Mountain Band from termination: Thomas follows Roderick’s advice, thanking Watkins effusively for his time in hearing the delegation’s testimony and appealing to the senator’s vanity. Ultimately, it is revealed that the Turtle Mountain Band is not terminated. While it is not made clear whether Thomas’ performative gratitude successfully swayed Watkins in his decision, his decision to adopt a strategy borne out of past traumatic experiences in order to preserve the community signals a movement to a more productive use of traumatic memory. By bringing the past into the present, Roderick is able to make visible “the ways in which the issues that Euro-Americans relegate to the past impact directly upon contemporary Native cultures” (Tillett 87). Roderick’s spectrality thus forces Thomas to reckon with his trauma and enables the recovery of their history in a way that contributes to the survival of their community.

25The ways in which Roderick functions to make visible the history of the Turtle Mountain Band are further foregrounded in Roderick’s final appearance in The Night Watchman. Unlike in Sing, Unburied, Sing, Roderick’s ghost is not exorcised by the novel’s conclusion. After the hearing with Senator Watkins has taken place and the Turtle Mountain Band delegation returns to the reservation, Roderick lingers in Washington because “there were so many Indian ghosts” there. In an unnamed building—presumably a museum—he finds “Drawers and cabinets of his own kind of people! Indian ghosts stuck to their bones or scalp locks or pieces of skin” (440). Their ghostly presence is a manifestation of traumatic pasts: Roderick realizes that these specters are “Indians brought from the top or bottom of the world as living exhibits, then immediately turned to ghosts. … It was a hazard of travel for Indians to be lynched from streetlamps as a drunken joke. Ghosts with rope necklaces. It turned out the city was packed with ghosts, lively with ghosts” (440). This assembly of ghosts—one that mirrors the gathering of ghosts in Richie’s exorcism in Sing, Unburied, Sing—widens the scope of the histories represented by hauntings beyond those of the Turtle Mountain Band. The cross-cultural collective of ghosts from across the continent, each representative of both individual and cultural instances of trauma, comes together over their shared (albeit distinct) histories. These ghosts, and the traumas they embody, are made visible to each other, creating a sense of kinship in the recognition that their individual and communal experiences do not stand alone, but are borne out of the systemic oppression and marginalization of Indigenous communities across the American continent. Roderick chooses to stay in this ghostly community because he “had never had so much company. And they were glad for somebody new. Glad he stayed behind. They argued with him. Why go back there? Who’s waiting for you?” (440). Arguably, this constitutes a form of exorcism: to confront his traumas of forced assimilation, displacement and isolation, Roderick seeks a sense of belonging, cultural identity, and kinship. While Roderick claims that “You can’t assimilate Indian ghosts,” he also concedes that “it was very hard not to be assimilated all alone, and he wished he could go home” (372, 373). The spirits Roderick encounters in Washington offer him the kinship he seeks, providing a degree of resolution to the traumas that caused Roderick’s haunting. Ultimately, however, Roderick resists complete exorcism: even if he no longer haunts the Turtle Mountain Band, Roderick continues to linger—albeit in Washington instead of on the reservation. Roderick has evolved from an Indigenous ghost into an American haunting.

26This absence of exorcism should not be understood as a lack of exorcism—it does not signal a failure to attain a sense of resolution. The exorcism of a ghost raises the expectation of resolution, of bringing something to an end. As Brogan puts it, through exorcism “the cycle of doom is broken and the past is digested” (11). Within stories of cultural haunting, however, it is important to question whether such a definitive sense of resolution is desirable. When literary ghosts are manifestations of cultural continuity and visibility, is their exorcism not another form of erasure? As cultural studies scholar Arthur Redding contends, the ghosts in stories of cultural haunting are too easily understood as a phenomenon that “must be fully reckoned with … but only, eventually, to be appeased, exorcised” (75). Exorcism or the resolution of a haunting, then, should not be seen as the primary or sole objective. Instead, a haunting can be understood not as something to be resolved, but as something that can be allowed to exist independently and which should be understood rather than dismissed. Sociologist Avery F. Gordon puts forth another perspective. She argues that a haunting should be considered as a representation of “unfulfilled possibility” that demands a “something to be done”—“not a return to the past but a reckoning with its repression in the present” (183). Addressing this “something to be done”—rather than the exorcism or dismissal of the ghost—can thus function as a form of resolution. This understanding of exorcism foregrounds the need to contend with the cultural trauma, and to recognize the injustices that caused it. Rather than seeking resolution in disappearing the ghost, and rendering the trauma it stands for invisible, the haunting itself can play an important role in reckoning with a cultural trauma and seeking redress for it.

27While Thomas is the literal embodiment of the novel’s titular night watchman, Roderick symbolically fulfills a similar function: his spectral vigilance over the reservation and the members of his community offers them much-needed protection against the threat of termination and cultural elimination. Roderick’s resistance to exorcism, then, can be equated to a persistent commitment to challenging cultural invisibility. His enduring presence, along with the other Indigenous spirits in Washington, form a physical reminder of historic injustices that need to be reckoned with. Moreover, Roderick’s contributions to the tribe’s hearing with Senator Watkins highlight his role in making trauma narratable: he takes on an encouraging role by helping Thomas to make productive use of traumatic memory, signaling a movement into narration that works to secure the enduring survival of the Turtle Mountain Band. In doing so, Roderick brings the past into the present as a marker of strength rather than suffering, in order to secure the survival of the Turtle Mountain Band. The Night Watchman thus foregrounds an important function of the literary ghost: Roderick symbolizes and advances cultural visibility, resisting longstanding patterns that work to silence or erase traumatic histories.

4. Deconstructing America’s Haunted History

28The two functions of the literary ghost outlined above—to illuminate forms of cultural continuity and to make cultural trauma visible and narratable—play a major part in how novels like Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Night Watchman are able to address the ways in which certain histories are recalled and represented within the hegemonic historical narrative of the US. Building upon the analysis of Ward and Erdrich’s narratives of cultural haunting, and drawing on the scholarship introduced earlier in this article, this section assesses the ability of the literary ghost to resist silencing and to subvert conceptions of a hegemonic American history.

29Hauntings uncover and counteract processes of silencing on various levels. First, hauntings invoke witnesses of repressed and often traumatic histories who have been silenced. This involves the return of the ghost itself, which signals the regaining of narratorial agency over their personal and cultural histories. Rather than having these histories distorted, misrepresented, or silenced, the specters that appear in narratives of cultural haunting are able to give first-hand accounts of their lived experiences. As such, we gain important insight not only into the histories they lived through, but also into the interior lives of historical actors that have long been denied agency and humanity. Aside from acting as witnesses themselves, ghosts also evoke the remembrance of silenced histories by the people around them. Those who are confronted with the spectral representation of a traumatic past are made to reckon with this trauma, both on a personal and a communal level. In The Night Watchman, for instance, Roderick is a witness of his own trauma, but also enables Thomas to (productively) access and recall his traumatic memories. Similarly, in Sing, Unburied, Sing, Richie’s presence leads to Pop confronting his own traumatic past. Ghosts themselves are witnesses, then, but also enable other, living, characters to recognize and narrate their traumatic histories.

30Second, the witnesses invoked by hauntings can work to make cultural trauma visible and narratable. The narratability of individual and cultural trauma is especially important in counteracting processes of historical silencing. Through a movement into narration, those haunted by a traumatic past are able to resist the repression of certain histories. In both of the novels discussed here, this narration involves intergenerational dynamics. In Sing, Unburied, Sing, Pop’s confrontation with his traumatic past makes it visible and narratable not only for himself but also for Jojo. In The Night Watchman, Thomas is deeply invested in the fight to preserve the tribe’s cultural identity with and for the younger generations of the Turtle Mountain Band, working alongside younger community members such as Pixie and Millie. Importantly, this intergenerational cooperation does not necessarily signal the intergenerational transfer of trauma. Instead, it allows for intergenerational awareness and understanding of the cultural trauma itself, as well as an understanding of the underlying patterns and structures that generated the trauma. As such, making cultural trauma narratable constitutes a form of cultural continuity—not of the trauma itself, but of the remembrance of the cultural history that persists in spite of it. As Arthur Redding argues, the “retelling across generations of incidents of violence tends to produce and give collective shape and purpose to peoples whose agencies have been thwarted” (5). This process of remembrance and retelling, enabled by spectrality, highlights the ways in which the trauma that the haunting has come to represent continues to encroach upon the present (Tillett 87). Narrating cultural trauma thus contributes to sustaining a culture’s collective memory, and the literary ghost plays an important role in enabling this narration.

31Third, spectrality forms a useful lens through which to illuminate the mechanisms of historical silencing. Constructing new identity-affirming memories is dependent upon the forgetting or disavowal of those memories that are incongruent with this identity (Connerton 63). Such dissonant memories, then, are excluded from the historical narrative through formulas of silence (Trouillot 96). The very appearance of the ghost offers a powerful commentary upon such processes of silencing: its visible absence, intangible but palpable, corresponds with the manifestation of cultural trauma as a silenced history. As Avery Gordon contends, a “haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence” (8). The ghost, then, renders the traumas it encompasses as something that is present through its conspicuous absence—as something immaterial, yet substantial. By centering this complex and paradoxical manifestation of cultural trauma within the narrative, stories of cultural haunting illuminate the enforced, unnatural silencing of the histories that inform these hauntings. Spectrality also helps to make visible the scope of such silenced, traumatic histories and the underlying patterns that shape this silencing. This is especially apparent through the assemblies of ghosts in the final passages of both Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Night Watchman. In both cases, these spectral communities—convening under the tree in Pop’s yard, and in the Washington D.C. museum—highlight the wide range of people affected by similar cultural traumas. The ghosts that emerge in these gatherings are explicitly said to be from across time and space, highlighting their diverse and distinct cultural identities. Yet, in spite of all their differences, there is one commonality: their racial, non-white identity. Drawing on Maldonado’s assertion that American exceptionalism builds upon conceptions of white, male exceptionalism, it becomes evident that this commonality informs the silencing of these historical actors and their traumatic pasts. The specters in narratives of cultural haunting can thus help to make visible not only specific cultural traumas, but also the systemic exclusion of these traumatic histories from the hegemonic historical narrative upon which the American national identity is based.

32Through these various functions of the literary ghost, spectrality can work to identify and counteract processes of historical silencing. As representations of cultural identity, heritage, and survival, spectral figures can work to (re)assert cultural continuity, thereby denying attempts to write their histories out of the hegemonic historical narrative. As Kathleen Brogan argues, in cultures that have been or continue to be under threat of termination, “the invocation of the supernatural can be seen as a survival strategy, through which loss or absence becomes, by awful necessity, generative” (32). As such, instead of yielding to erasure, these specters instead function to reinforce assertions of a strong, enduring, and evolving cultural heritage. Ghosts, then, signal a refusal to be forgotten, dismissed, or misrepresented.

33By resisting the systemic silencing of minority histories, literary hauntings can work to revise the hegemonic historical narrative—not necessarily to integrate silenced histories into this dominant retelling of history, but rather to deconstruct the concept of a hegemonic historical narrative altogether. The ghosts in stories of cultural haunting advance an understanding of hegemonic history as incomplete, non-representative, and ultimately untenable. They make visible the shortcomings of constructing a single, homogenous history by foregrounding interpretations of history that diverge from the dominant cultural memory. Therefore, literary ghosts do not necessarily work toward rewriting hegemonic narratives of US history, but rather toward deconstructing a homogenous and exclusionary interpretation of it. Such a deconstruction does not only affect understandings of the historical narrative but also impacts contemporary realities: by moving away from an exclusionary historical narrative, there is room to recognize the agency of marginalized communities as social and political actors, in the past and in the present. More than that, literary ghosts are able to make visible alternative histories that never took place. As Arthur Redding contends, ghosts not only function as “revenants of a violent past” but also as spectral representations of “a more ghostly history that has never been allowed to happen” (7). Cultural hauntings thus come to represent the potential histories that have been denied existence by racially exploitative and colonial structures. In this way, literary ghosts underline the long reach of historical oppression and marginalization, highlighting the ways in which traumas inflicted in the past have irreversibly shaped contemporary communities.

5. Conclusion

34To conclude, stories of cultural haunting can work to re-imagine, complicate, or deconstruct hegemonic historical narratives. Literary hauntings, like those in Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Night Watchman, rework death to be a tool of empowerment rather than a violent means of silencing. By resisting the systemic dismissal, repression, and erasure of cultural trauma and minority histories, literary ghosts can fulfill an important role in mediating and revising the collective memory of cultural traumas. While the traumas shaping these hauntings are largely culture-specific, informed by distinct historical and contemporary circumstances, the literary ghost can reveal broader systems of silencing that transcend cultural boundaries. Stories of cultural haunting can illuminate cross-cultural commonalities, foregrounding the centrality of racial identity in the construction of American historical narratives. Thus, as this article has argued, while Sing, Unburied, Sing and The Night Watchman are from distinct literary traditions, it is valuable to put them in conversation with each other. Examining the cultural haunting outside of its typically culture-specific context allows for a reflection on the function of the literary ghost in relation to the deconstruction of a hegemonic historical narrative in the US. Such a deconstruction need not necessarily unsettle the hegemonic historical narrative altogether, but could rather serve to supplement, complicate, and enrich understandings of the country’s historical foundation in order to work toward a more just and inclusive society. When stories of cultural haunting are understood within a nation-wide context, it becomes increasingly clear that the silencing of minority histories has long been prevalent across American society. The narratives central to this analysis are thus not only part of rich African American and Indigenous literary traditions, but also function as American hauntings, centering on ghosts that demand to be heard by the entire nation.