Hauntological Poetry: Repurposing 18th/19th-Century Historical Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry

Abstract

This dissertation presents a genre study of contemporary North American poetry that repurposes the language of 18th/19th-century archival documents. This study refers to this poetic subgenre as “hauntological poetry,” a phrase of my own that uses Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau “hauntology” to emphasize the spectral relationships between archival document and citational poem, between past and present, and between poem and reader. Spanning from the 2000s to 2020s, my case studies of hauntological poetry include M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), Quenton Baker’s ballast (2023), Kiki Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013) and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017). Each of these examples repurposes the language of an archival document related to early North American history (18th-19th centuries) that nevertheless bear significant silences. As such these case studies also illuminate the significance of chattel slavery, settler colonialism and early U.S. nationalism to contemporary American culture and politics. These case studies demonstrate hauntological poetry’s capacity to significantly reorient its reader’s affective and temporal sense of the past, particularly in spectral relation to the present and future.