Thirty years ago, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77) took place in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigeria had been colonized by Britain in the early 1900s, falling under the rule of the British Empire until 1960, when it became independent. As embodied by Lagos, the former British “protectorate” played host to the most significant gathering of the black cultural world, at that point in time, to be held in postindependence Africa. The FESTAC ’77 drew nearly half a million participants, more than seventeen thousand of which were black artists, representatives of global black populations historically shaped by the rise of modernity, as modernity was to configure the pernicious, disenfranchising realities of slavery, racism, colonialism, and imperialism. The FESTAC's impact can be read in the haunting, historic fact of the multitudes that understood themselves as historicized by the specifics of distinct yet kindred oppressions and in the physical manifestation of the black diasporic body made real, made flesh, in the sights, sounds, colors, foods, cultural productions, languages, discussions on solidarity across liberation struggles and regionalized differences, and smaller “villages” representing differing nationalities of the African diaspora that were erected inside the main venue, FESTAC Village. By most accounts, it provided momentous, creative opportunities for interrogating the injuries of captivity, dispersal, colonization, genocide, survival, and resistance. Thus, FESTAC ’77 served as an originating site of contemporary cultural and political theories of “the black diasporic body.” It is within this larger, longer view of black diasporic history that Hershini Young's Haunting Capital: Memory, Text, and the Black Diasporic Body makes its debut and its mark.

In Haunting Capital, Young theorizes the black female diasporic body, in particular, as signed by a series of “haunted” texts. She schematizes “haunted/haunting” through a multiscalar lens: as injury that has been underrecognized, the arrogance of Western claims of dominance situated in “civilization,” as specter, and as resistance (collective black women’s, the reader’s, the text's, and her own), making use of texts that are literary, visual, historic, and fleshed. These texts are ruptured by gender, memory and “re-memory,” and competing truths. They occupy real and reimagined racialized geographies within black women and the black female imaginary in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States.

Thus, the cartography of Haunting Capital sweeps across five chapters in which Young imaginatively deploys literary discourse, visual studies, critiques of theories of trauma, and “spirit-talk” as dialogic analyses of South African novelist Bessie Head's A Question of Power; Deborah Jack's art installation, SHORE, which narrates the historic relation between salt and her Caribbean homeland, the island of St. Martin; the “haunted” history of black American women in Gayl Jones's novel, Corregidora; the gendered landscape of Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, a novel about growing up in a colonial Rhodesia shadowed by the liberation struggle; and the “wounding of displacement” (176) in Maryse Conde's protagonist's “return” to Africa via a childhood in Guadeloupe and later schooling in Paris, France, in the novel Heremakhonon. The intrigue of these exquisite chapters lies in the specific works Young has chosen to address, the multiple, interdisciplinary discourses she places them in conversation with, and their empathic relation to one another as texts. The author's “Coda” at the book's end boldly serves to both interrogate and situate her own memory, ghosts, creativity, and “haunted,” diasporic past present-present past.

Young's work raises a series of intersecting questions about readings of the black female diasporic body: In what ways is this a body that is simultaneously schematized and unschematized? How is the black female diasporic body “here” and “not here”? How is it a porous signifier of a past present-present past and of injury, survival, wound, and creativity? How do landscapes of domination tattoo, or imprint, the black female diasporic body? How can the black diaspora, itself, be read if black women's processes of memory and re-memory are made marginal rather than central to those readings?

Haunting Capital is a poetic, sensuous, highly original meditation on the black female body as text, as living text “embedded in the dense structures of memory” (1). Hershini Young is forwarding a new, expansive canon of black literature here; one that decenters prevailing Western desires for a more comfortable, comforting blackness, wherein only U.S.-based black writers/artists have been chosen to define what is, or can be considered, canonical. The result is a provocative exploration of the myriad, variegated ways in which the triangulated realities of “bodymindsoul” were historically and continue to be inextricably linked for black women of the African diaspora.