'This is a place for the dead': Reading the Ghost Child in Jesmyn Ward's 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'

Arnold, Lucy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3707-3409 (2022) 'This is a place for the dead': Reading the Ghost Child in Jesmyn Ward's 'Sing, Unburied, Sing'. In: The African American Novel in the Early Twenty-First Century. European Perspectives on the United States, 12 . Brill, Netherlands. ISBN eBook ISBN: 978-90-04-71073-3 Hardback ISBN: 978-90-04-71072-6 (In Press)

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Abstract

In this analysis I contend that the spectral children present in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) act to offer instruction for witnessing those whose loss is unacknowledged, via their re-organization of conventional modes of perception and of knowing. Furthermore, I demonstrate that these alternative modes of seeing (possessed by children whose own visibility and social acknowledgement is radically compromised), in contrast to the “uninstructing dead” invoked by Derek Walcott in the novel’s epigraph, give rise to potentially “instructing” narratives of seeing and being seen which do not end but rather which must continue to be told and retold, in order to shift in ways which accommodate the narratives and experiences of future generations alongside those of their forebears.

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