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Ghost stories in various forms have been a part of
popular literature for centuries, from Shakespeare to
Dickens to Faulkner. Over the past twenty-five years, a
resurgence of haunting plots has occurred in American
literature. In Cultural Haunting, Kathleen Brogan
makes the case that this recent preoccupation with ghosts
stems not from a lingering interest in Gothic themes but
instead from a whole new genre in American literature that
she calls "the story of cultural haunting."
Examining Louis Erdrich's Tracks, Toni Morrison's
Beloved, and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in
Cuba, Brogan argues that modern ghost stories offer a
way for minority authors to come to terms with their lost
cultural identities. At the heart of this process, she
contends, is the experience of mourning as that form of
memory determined by an awareness of a break with the past.
While conscious of the cultural differences among these
haunted tales of slavery, colonization, and immigration, the
author demonstrates that they all function similarly: to
re-create ethnic identity by imaginatively recovering a
collective history that in many cases has been fragmented or
erased. Her readings show how the specific histories and
local meanings support the pan-ethnic genre she has
defined.
The book suggests that modern stories of haunting reflect
the increased emphasis on ethnic and racial differentation
in American society over the past thirty years. The ghosts
found in contemporary American literature lead us to the
heart of our nation's discourse about multiculturalism and
ethnic identity.
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"Cultural Haunting is a superb genre study of
value to anyone teaching or writing in the growing field of
contemporary literature. Brogan's writing is clear, supple,
and entrancing throughout; her research is rock solid. This
book has the best features of a scholarly critical monograph
without destroying the literary magic in its care."
--Thomas J. Ferraro, Author of Ethnic
Passages: Literary Immigrants in Twentieth-Century
America
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