Haunting and the Black Subject's Spectral and Repetive Presence

I find Morrison’s notion of the shadow particularly interesting. That the black subject marks its presence on the imagination of American white writers, and finds expression in their fiction, through a vocabulary "designed to disguise the subject’. But this seems to indicate two conflicting notions of embodiment: the black subject marked by the physicality of their difference, physically haunted, but their ontological, cultural, and social significance resonates only in the imaginary planes of the white subject’s mind. The spectral haunting of the black or othered on American fiction and white consciousness and its intrinsic accompaniment to the white subject engages notions of memory, repetition, and the act of forgetting.

While it seems unclear how exactly you could exactly identify and codify a way of identifying this spectral presence, I wonder in which way this presence, either spectral or ‘ornamental’ could be subversive: what kind of agency does, the black subject in shadow, or the ghost in the machine, have, with no material weight to disrupt the system it inhabits?

Also what would it mean to explode this ghostly presence, existing between the lines? Morrison is exploring the condition of hauntedness in this essas, but seems to anchor her argument to the textual and metaphysical, when I think the solution is specifically temporal. Haunting seems to indicate an oscillation or a tension between memory tied to the act of forgetting. In comparing this to American fiction writers, and the ‘Africanist’ hauntedness, we could characterize their writing, the textual inclusion and erasure of the black subject, perhaps as a technology of memory.

In considering memory and ghost, two statements come to mind: First, Deleuze’s “forgetting is the impossibility of return and memory is the necessity of renewal” and second, Derrida’s “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost”

Haven’t exactly worked at the implication of those two statements.

In addition, I’m considering Kristeva’s discussion of the abject and memory: the abject stands in opposition to I (helping to constitute the subject) but remains in proximity, haunting the subject. The white writer, the subject, is in a state of perpetually remembering the abject, the black subject, but it is a memory inarticulated, and can never be recalled. It is interesting to consider the difference between an articulate memory, something like the cliché, and an indiscernible one, the abject, and how both notions of reminiscence can inform conceptions of racial otherness.

Moreover memory, whether discernible or inarticulate, indicates some type of repetition; in the act of remembering we attempt to bring back what has past, inducing a form of repetition (Fanon’s closed circuit of colonial memory?) In Race and Technology, Coleman posited black repetition as a sign of pure embodiment and rendering of difference—it differs from itself with no other meaning than this differing. Repetition, can be understood as a process of differing, moving further away from the original….

I’m not sure where I am going with this, but this notion of haunting, memory, the difference between recollection and repetition, and their implication on race all work together in some way. Going to figure it out.