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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Caribbean Ghostwriting
ISBN# 9780838642221
Reviewed by: J.C. Richards, Park University
Choice, June 2010 |
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Studying how Caribbean writers use ghostwriting to construct narratives from fragments of biographical data pertaining to black women's lives, Johnson (Wagner College) discusses the genre's methodologies and clarifies ghostwriters' approaches to character and plot development by combining fiction, historical "facts," oral traditions, and intertextual references. She considers how Michelle Cliff, Maryse Conde, and Dionne Brand redress hegemonic versions of history in highly creative texts that employ multiple levels of time and memory, locating narrators in transnational adjacencies that reflect the circum-Atlantic scope of slavery. Johnson looks at how Cliff's Free Enterprise features biracial abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant, whose financial support aided rebel slaves' 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry; how Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem revisits self-reliant slave woman Tituba, burned alive only to reappear, a ghost haunting multiple sites tied to slavery's reach; and at how Dionne Brand's In the Full and Change of the Moon addresses the traumatic legacy of slavery through the heroic Thisbe, mutilated and hung after assisting willing slaves to die by poison, who survived because she wanted to see her owners' horrified faces. Reminiscent of Kara Walker's use of haunting silhouettes, ghostwriters seek epistemic justice by giving shape to those who must not be forgotten.
Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty.
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