Reappraising Land And Inheritance, Revisiting Ghosts: A Black Feminist And Decolonial Land-informed Reading Of Beloved by Toni Morrison And I, Tituba, Black Witch Of Salem by Maryse Condé

Abstract: How do we, Black women, experience “inheritance” as it relates to land, ghosts, and embodied experiences? How do we talk about inheritance in ways that are not capitalist nor predicated on the commodification of land that is also dominantly understood as outside, and therefore, not a part of us? With Beloved and I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , this article traces material and immaterial possessions handed down via literature. By challenging existing settler-derived and dominant understandings of land, different experiences and states of possession, and thus, “inheritance,” arise. The African diasporic culture, subaltern, ancient, non-dominant and Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and methodologies, as well as altering encounters with the (im)material world, guide our study of ghosts as “inheritance.” Our ancestral onto-epistemologies, both native to us as Black women and those selected by us (such as Traditional Chinese Medicine’s concept of the ghost), point to our relational conceptualization of land as ancestral knowledge, and the concept of “the land within.” Cultural transmissions (in this case, literature), (im)material world encounters, and the transmission (of memory, energy, spirit, trauma) that gets coded into script of the (internal)body, present the (internal)body as a geographical scale and identify a composite of ancestral knowledge(s), memories, and experiences lodged within. “The land within” as inheritance neither reproduces settler racial capitalist notions of private property nor implies a static possession as it relates to time, geography, or expression.