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As liminal beings, ghosts seem particularly appropriate to define, question or challenge hybrid cultures where several, seemingly irreconcilable, identities coexist. The present volume wonders how they manifest themselves in the English-speaking world, and whether there is a specifically postcolonial kind of haunting. The twenty-two articles deal with textual, translational or historical ghosts, and take us to Canada, Australia, Africa, India or the Caribbean. Poems by Gerry Turcotte literally haunt the volume, which thus juxtaposes theory and practice in a dynamic and fruitful way. De par leur liminalité, les fantômes semblent particulièrement adaptés pour définir, interroger ou remettre en question des cultures hybrides où coexistent plusieurs identités apparemment inconciliables. Ce volume explore leurs diverses manifestations dans le monde anglophone, se demandant s’il existe une hantise proprement postcoloniale. Les vingt-deux articles nous présentent des fantômes historiques ou textuels, et nous emmènent du Canada à l’Australie, de l’Afrique à l’Inde ou à la Caraïbe. Des poèmes de Gerry Turcotte hantent littéralement le volume, qui juxtapose ainsi théorie et pratique de façon dynamique et féconde.

This essay looks to Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land (1992) in order to explore the ways in which the writer stages the conjunction of types of writing that seem to find their discursive origin within the disciplines of anthropology and history respectively. In this meeting of modes, it is argued, a haunted space is opened which speaks of the past but is always orientated toward an ethical revisioning of the present and, more significantly still, of the future. Ghosh’s engagement with ghosts within his accounts of twelfth-century cosmopolitan connections and of the realities of contemporary Egyptian rural life allows him to develop an oppositional stance that stands outside of modernity’s enforced divisions. In attempting to speak to the ghosts that cannot be contained in an easily imagined past, but become manifest instead in the present, he finds a way of writing about a lost history that is more than just nostalgia, and a way of presenting ethnography that is always marked by a disruptive potential set into motion by the problematised position of the recorder.

One cannot fail to be impressed by the number of works of fiction relating to slavery and the slave trade, writing back to the original slave narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries. If the African-American authors of the 1960s and 1970s are now well-known, they find an echo in works written more recently in the 1980s and 1990s by American, African, African-American and Caribbean writers. About twenty writers come under the scrutiny of renowned scholars, offering perspectives into what makes it so necessary today for writers, critics and readers alike to revisit, reassess and reappropriate the canonical texts of slavery and post-slavery literature. The specificity of this collection is to focus on neo-slave novels while bringing together African-American and Caribbean authors. On ne peut qu’être impressionné par le nombre d’œuvres littéraires de fiction qui se rapportent à l’esclavage et au commerce des esclaves, répondant ainsi aux premiers récits d’esclaves publiés aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Si les auteurs africains-américains des années soixante et soixante-dix sont maintenant bien connus, toute une nouvelle vague d’écrivains Américains, Africains, Africains-Américains et Caribbéens, poursuivent et renouvèlent, depuis les années quatre-vingt et quatre vingt-dix, cette tradition. Rassemblés autour de l’œuvre d’une vingtaine d’écrivains, des universitaires de renom ouvrent, dans ce recueil, des perspectives nouvelles pour comprendre la nécessité qui poussent écrivains, critiques et lecteurs à relire, réécrire et revisiter cette littérature de l’esclavage encore aujourd’hui.

This paper intends to examine the ways in which Fred D’Aguiar portrays Whitechapel, the slave protagonist of his 1994 novel The Longest Memory. I wish to argue that Whitechapel can be seen to represent an archetypal figure in the literature written about slavery and race relations but also that specific aspects of his composition belie the social and political concerns of D’Aguiar’s immediate era. I will look at how the fictional exemplar of the accommodationist slave, Uncle Tom himself, has been redeployed from Stowe’s 1852 novel into various twentieth-century diasporic writings. From the conspicuous absence of a viable position from which to collaborate with Jim Crow oppression in Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) to the despair and nihilism expressed in the ’Tom’ poems in Edward Brathwaite’s Rights of Passage (1967), I argue that the Uncle Tom character has proved invaluable to writers wishing to explore the spirit of contemporary racial politics. I suggest that D’Aguiar’s Whitechapel fails in his attempts to forget the brutality of the slave system and thus accentuates the author’s insistence on the continual remembering of the slave past yet his ambiguous relation to the mechanisms of oppression highlight D’Aguiar’s reluctance to oversimplify the complexities of history for contemporary political utility.