Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930 ed. by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed (review)

Judith Butler, recognizes that such cataloguing raises significant questions about the grievability of racialized subjects who just become objects in the archive or the museum (149). One thinks of David Marriott’s recounting of a white man’s meditation on a nearly destroyed Black male lynching victim, “Don’t look human, does it?” The collected pieces may not “add up” to a full person. Yet the realist reproduction haunts, Reckson suggests, as the Ghost Dance creates a reimagining that will not let us forget, that keeps us in the grip of history— that creates a Pepper’s Ghost. Pepper’s Ghost was an illusion, essentially a 3-D hologram, that fascinated Victorian audiences, one produced by placing a piece of glass between the living person and the viewer and using light to make a reflection appear. I was reminded of this as I saw Reckson’s adept use of photographs, marking racialized people as ghosts even as they lived. These digital doubles— and Reckson’s work involves literary, artistic, sonic, and other digital doubles—are both present and absent, alive and dead, true and false, manageable and frightening, dismissible and haunting. In modern productions, at Disney World for example, the ghosts move among living persons, and Reckson suggests that they do so in Jim Crow America, sometimes confronting, sometimes reproducing history. They also sometimes break out to stand beside. Reckson’s analysis and presentation of this kind of absent presence, a product of racist realism, is strong throughout her work, but most haunting, to me, in this Ghost Dance chapter. I cannot do justice to such extensive work in this short review. Reckson is a talented reader of multiple kinds of texts and has a strong capacity for nuanced interdisciplinary interpretation. She uses multiple theoretical tools to demonstrate how violence is built into what Arjun Appadurai calls his multiple “scapes” that make up the social imaginary, imagining us even when we think we are reimagining, talking back effectively, to the metanarrative. I am grateful for her deft use of theories and thinkers of religion, through which and whom she helps us examine how the religion of the “other” in secular culture is still marked by an unmarked, “pure” Protestantism. In short, there are many strands moving through this complex work. I confess that I wished for a stronger concluding chapter to tie it together. But I recognize and nod in appreciation to Reckson’s insistence that neatness is not her project. She is faithful to her intent not to solve the paradox of realist ecstasy, but to let these examples rest in unresolvable tensions and multiple spaces—behind, before, beside; and her faithfulness marks her work as innovative and makes her analyses deft, difficult, unsettling, and informative.