Affective Transmission and Haunted Landscape in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing

Patrycja Antoszek

doi:10.18290/rh206811-1

Patrycja Antoszek John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9784-6269

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh206811-1

Keywords: affect, haunting, transgenerational phantom, slavery, trauma

Abstract

The essay discusses Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) through Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s concept of “transgenerational phantom” and Teresa Brennan’s theory of the transmission of affect. While the novel focuses on poor blacks in the contemporary American South, and, therefore, on the experience of those marginalized and excluded from official discourse, the narrative seems to transgress racial, social, and generational boundaries to address the human predicament in ways that are both visceral and poetic, disturbing and magical. By employing the trope of haunting to talk about racial oppression, the author combines past and present to demonstrate how slavery and racism continue to take their toll, producing more individual and communal traumas. The essay argues that in Sing, Unburied, Sing Ward not only deconstructs such dominant Western categories as past and present, black and white, male and female, or life and death, but also indicates a way of dealing with and communicating traumatic realities that goes beyond the Symbolic patterns of making sense of the world.

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