| Sumario: | Literary ghosts are understood as elusive apparitions that haunt the dark, often shadows of the past who represent the traumas and questions that have been brought forth through time. Taken here as a key critical voice, Toni Morrison reflects on the ghosts of Blackness in American literature and the constructs of color who permeate it, bringing forward the traumas of White supremacy and social Othering. She claims that these ghosts of racial hierarchy should be hard to ignore; however, they remain as an insignificant Other, an imaginary, unacknowledged ghost, in the structure of American literature. In arguing that there is no space to separate Blackness from the literary White, Morrison centralizes race in American literary criticism in contrast to what major figures claim to have done in their works of the literary canon. Morrison's argument underlies a central question: given that the traditional position of American literature is that of a White majority, how can Black writers consciously represent their own race to contrast a nation of readers who regard themselves as universally "race-free"? Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing is a case of what happens when Black writers are cognizant of such a scenario. In its response, this essay will discuss the novel's ghost Given-not-Given as a critique of prominent literary notions of racial hierarchy, exclusion, and vulnerability as understood by non-Black authors who previously explored or held those ideals.
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