The Specter and the Speculative: Afterlives and Archives in the African Diaspora engages in a critical conversation about how historical subjects and historical texts within the African Diaspora are re-fashioned, re-animated, and re-articulated, as well as parodied, nostalgized, and defamiliarized, to establish an “afterlife” for African Atlantic identities and narratives. These essays focus on transnational, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical sites of memory and haunting—textual, visual, and embodied performances—in order to examine how these “living” archives circulate and imagine anew the meanings of prior narratives liberated from their original context. Individual essays examine how historical and literary performances—in addition to film, drama, music, dance, and material culture—thus revitalized, transcend and speak across temporal and spatial boundaries not only to reinstate traditional meanings, but also to motivate fresh commentary and critique. Emergent and established scholars representing diverse disciplines and fields of interest specifically engage under explored themes related to afterlives, archives, and haunting.

Contributions by: Mae G. Henderson, Jeanne Scheper, Gene Melton, Diana Arterian, Christopher Giroux, Stella Setka, Meina Yates-Richard, Luis Omar Ceniceros, Danielle Fuentes Morgan, Shamika Ann Mitchell, Andrew R. Belton, Kim White, Sheila Smith McKoy, Pekka Kilpeläinen, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Emiliano Aguilar, Juan Ignacio Juvé, Kajsa K. Henry, McKinley E. Melton, Emily Ruth Rutter