The Haunting Absence of Language: How Toni Morrison’s Spectral Formula Unlocks Marginalized Counter-Narratives in Current Gothic American Literature

Abstract: Is Toni Morrison still here? Rather than exorcising Beloved by ordering that her story not be passed on, it appears that the author and her shade have been embraced and remain firmly rooted in current Gothic American literature. Morrison honed the spectral, liberating undocumented Black American slave counter-narratives and exposing concealed ancestral trauma. The fecundity of her contribution is celebrated in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House , both of which employ such ghosts to engage with and enlighten their nescient descendants. In this article, I examine the gap in the scholarly conversation on the proliferation of a spectral formula established in Beloved that echoes through current literary works entailing a corporeal ghost, related to the living characters, haunted by a historically invalidated trauma, that is only released by reintegration rather than exorcism.