SOURCE: Redding, Arthur. “‘Haints’: American Ghosts, Ethnic Memory, and Contemporary Fiction.” Mosaic 34, no. 4 (December 2001): 163-82.

In the following essay, Redding explores the relevance of history in the creation of American literary traditions.

What ghosts can say— Even the ghosts of fathers—comes obscurely. What if the terror stays without the meaning? 

—Adrienne Rich, “What Ghosts Can Say”

No justice […] seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before the ghosts of those who are not yet born or who are already dead, be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and...