SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION - Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction
SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION - Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction
SPECULATIVE SANKOFARRATION - Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction
Fiction
Author(s): Kinitra D. Brooks, Alexis McGee and Stephanie Schoellman
Source: Obsidian , 2016, Vol. 42, No. 1/2, Speculating Futures: Black Imagination & the
Arts (2016), pp. 237-248
Published by: Board of Trustees of Illinois State University
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OBSIDIAN • 237
Sankofarration: "It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot."
John Jennings coined the term "sankofarration" and defines it as a con-
flation of Sankofa5 and narration, a cosmological episteme that centers
the act of claiming the future as well as the past.6 Jennings specifically
expands upon a central notion of Afrofuturism - that the Western con-
struct of time as linear is a fallacy. In sankofarration, time is cyclical:
"[metaphysically, being was equivalent to duration: each moment em-
bodied a recurrence of a past moment, and implied was a potential
future recurrence" (Barthold 10). This piece builds upon Jennings' con-
cept by exploring its potential literariness within a critical horror frame-
work. We push sankofarration into the realm of the speculative, to fetch
a discourse of horror buried and unacknowledged in the folklore and
literature of the African diaspora. Our more expansive theory of specu-
lative sankofarration actively claims literary hauntings as interstices of
resistance and becomes a crucial framework in reading contemporary
horror literature written by Black women such as Phyllis Alesia Perry
in Stigmata (1998).
Speculative sankofarration clears a space for exploration of com-
posite traumas in the symbolic form of ghosts and hauntings. A Black
women's horror discourse grounded in sankofarration effectively liber-
ates Black horror from necessitating its need to derive mainly from the
trauma of enslavement, allowing the concept of horror to move toward
a more creative and artistic construction and, in the process, provid-
ing us with "an ordered reconstruction of history" that is not linear
in nature (Henderson 632). The privileging of sankofarration does not
OBSIDIAN • 239
The act of haunting conflates and confuses linear time, disrupting and
opening a space for concurrent time existence with the ghosts acting
as "agents of cultural memory and cultural renewal" (Borgan 6, 12).
Thereby, the ghosts of speculative sankofarration enact what Brogan
terms "cultural hauntings," in which Black "histories [...] are recu-
perated and revised" (2). Speculative sankofarration's articulation of a
Black women's horror discourse allows for a simultaneity in the roles
ghosts and the haunted ultimately reflect in terms of parallel oppres-
sions - race, gender, class, and sexuality - that haunt Black women's
own identities.
OBSIDIAN • 241
OBSIDIAN • 2A3
OBSIDIAN • 245
ENDNOTES
1. Zora Neale Hurston is the first Black woman to publish horror. Charles
Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) is the earliest known published
work of Black horror beyond slave narratives.
3. See Linda Addison's blog entry, "Genesis - The First Black Horror
Writers/Storytellers," on Horror addicts, net (blog), February 10 2016.
WORKS CITED
OBSIDIAN • 247