The Specter and the Speculative

Mae G. Henderson is a professor emerita in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the co-editor of The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist (2017) and author of Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (2014).  Jeanne Scheper is an associate professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage (Rutgers University Press, 2016). Gene Melton II is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. His work has appeared in Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison (2013).

Introduction 
Mae G. Henderson, Jeanne Scheper, and Gene Melton 

Part I
Watery Unrest: Trauma and Diaspora 


one
Relayed Trauma and the Spectral Oceanic Archive in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!
Diana Arterian


two
“STEP IN STEP IN / HUR-RY! HUR-RY!”: 
Diaspora, Trauma, and “Rep & Rev” in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus 
Christopher Giroux


three
Yoruba Visions of the Afterlife in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata 
Stella Setka


Part II
Raising the Dead: Black Sonic Imaginaries 


four
The Sonic Afterlives of Hester’s Scream: The Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in the Black Nationalist Imagination from Slavery to Black Lives Matter
Meina Yates-Richard


five
Mumia Abu-Jamal and Harriet Jacobs: Sound, Spectrality, and the Counternarrative 
Luis Omar Ceniceros


six
Forbidding Mourning: Disrupted Sites of Memory and the Tupac Shakur Hologram 
Danielle Fuentes Morgan


Part III
Spectral Technologies of Hip-Hop

seven
The Afterlife in Audio, Apparel, and Art: Hip-Hop, Mourning, and the Posthumous 
Shamika Ann Mitchell


eight
Dreaming of Life After Death When You’re Ready to Die: Notorious B.I.G. and the Sonic Potentialities of Black Afterlife 
Andrew R. Belton


nine
“We Ain’t Even Really Rappin’, We Just Letting Our Dead Homies Tell Stories for Us”: Kendrick Lamar, Radical Popular Hip-Hop, and the Specters of Slavery and Its Afterlife 169
Kim White


Part IV
The Posthumous and the Posthuman 


ten
DNA as Cultural Memory: Posthumanism in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Nnedi Okorafor’s The Book of Phoenix 
Sheila Smith McKoy


eleven
Ghosts of Traumatic Cultural Memory: Haunting, Posthumanism, and Animism in Daniel Black’s The Sacred Place and Bernice L. McFadden’s Gathering of Waters
Pekka Kilpeläinen


twelve
Africa in Horror Cinema: A Critical Survey 
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Emiliano Aguilar, and Juan Ignacio Juvé


Part V
“In the Wake”: Racial Mourning and Memorialization 


thirteen
Mapping Loss as Performative Research in Ralph Lemon’s Come home Charley Patton 
Kajsa K. Henry


fourteen
Remembering and Resurrecting Bad N*ggers and Dark Villains: Walking with the Ghosts That Ain’t Gone 
McKinley E. Melton


fifteen
Mourning Trayvon Martin: Elegiac Responsibility in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric 
Emily Ruth Rutter


Coda: Post Vitam Amicitiae, or the Afterlife of a Friendship 
Mae G. Henderson

Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography 
Notes on Contributors 
Index