Haunting as Method: Mapping Imaginaries & Investigating Slavery's Archive

Endia Hayes, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

"Haunting as Method: Mapping Imaginaries & Investigating Slavery's Archive" argues that the felt condition of haunting projects lost histories of formerly enslaved Afro-Texan peoples. Nevertheless, enslaved peoples respond to this archival neglect using what this paper describes as a strategy of enslaved imaginaries. These imaginaries take up this very condition of haunting to refuse, and actively create against, the white imaginary that makes up the archives in question. For this reason, I excavate oral narratives for stories on haunting, such as tales around fugitives from slavery who had a “devilment” spirits in the head and restless spirits of folks killed by white enslavers. Archival analysis of the Texas Born in Slavery volumes of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) question not only their limited material utility but further make room to play with finding enslaved imaginaries’ moments of renavigating these archives and possibly Texas history. Therefore, this work demonstrates that enslaved imaginaries are a way of knowing, feeling, and watching whiteness outside the limits of historical material. Rather, enslaved imaginaries point to haunting as an immaterial alternative to crafting a history whiteness can never touch, it can only be haunted by.

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 Presented in Session 220. Race, Region, Place,