“Archive,” as defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “a place in which public records or other important historic documents are kept.” This definition not only locates them within a particular physical space, but also within the bounds of what is considered “important” and “historic”. This raises a few questions: who determines what is important enough to be in an archive? What narratives about history are produced through the maintenance of official archives? And to that point, what narratives about history are erased with such archival practices? Scholars across disciplines engage with a variety of historical archives in their research, and these archives are often kept separate by their discipline-specific research methodologies. However, when engaging with haunted archives – archives dealing with unspeakable violence such as those for the Transatlantic slave trade – we may need to look beyond traditional methods to see histories that official records would rather suppress. Sociologists Avery Gordon and Grace Cho take up the task of working beyond disciplinary convention to illuminate new ways of seeing into the archive and attending to the traumatic histories that continue to haunt us in the present.
Avery Gordon’s work Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (2008) calls for other sociologists to take up haunting as a serious critical analytic. Engaging with this haunting necessitates us to not think of history as a series of completed discrete events, but to rather look for how past social traumas find themselves reappearing long after the initial traumatic event has passed. Sometimes subtle, often explicit, these violent histories create ghosts that demand attention and redress. This phenomenon differs from trauma because it “produc[es] something-to-be-done” (Gordon xvi). This “something-to-be-done” operates on individual, social, political, and historical levels. To employ haunting as an analytic means questioning our traditional modes of knowledge production that value distinct binaries (past/present, subject/object) and look towards what Foucault calls subjugated knowledges –d knowledges that are repressed within these traditional modes of production (Gordon xviii).
While Gordon explores how both psychoanalytic and Marxist analysis engage with haunting to varying degrees and may be applied towards haunted archives, she posits that looking at haunting through literature allows for a greater flexibility in methodology; the literary does not have to abide by the restrictions of history, sociology, or other social sciences. These restrictions are often arbitrary and misleadingly so. Gordon writes:
the division of the disciplines separates literature (story/fiction) and social science (fact) … [the division] is an uneasy one, however; the border is not quite as secure as institutional mandates presume. Not only is the origin of sociology as a unique discipline bound up with its relationship to literature (see Lepenies 1988), but sociology’s dominant disciplinary methods and theoretical assumptions constantly struggle against the fictive (25).
The dismissal of the fictive denies the role that narrative plays in constructing history and our understandings of social and cultural analysis. Dealing with ghosts, the repressed, and the traumatic histories they carry requires going beyond what is readily accessible to scholars working in conventional archives. As haunting calls us to consider the imbrication of the personal, the social, and the political, we must reconsider the types of questions we ask when confronting capital letter topics such as Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Poverty. How do these change when we consider ghosts, those invisible forces, as empirical evidence? As a pioneering text of its time, Gordon’s work leaves us with as many questions as answers. However, other scholars have answered her initial call to rethink disciplinary bounds.
Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War (2008) can be read as Grace Cho’s contribution to that call. She looks particularly towards the transgenerational haunting of the Korean diaspora, examining what conditions made such ghosts like the figure of the yanggongju[1] possible and proposes ways we may work to name and release the han[2] she embodies. Cho extends Gordon’s work by turning to the “hallucinatory” and “schizophrenic” as modes of interacting with and trying to understand these archives. Gordon’s work serves as a touchpoint for Cho to apply a haunting framework across various media forms and disciplines to understand a history that operates beyond conventional archival bounds. Cho’s engagement with trauma through diasporic Korean media and sociological data foregrounds the need to be attentive to the gaps within both American and Korean official histories of the Korean War since these gaps require a new mode of seeing. This new mode of seeing deals with the excesses of trauma, of repeated violence, and of systematic erasures that render subjects voiceless and their stories unnarrativizable. Cho also engages with the body as it manifests in the ghostly figure of the yanggongju whose specter continues to haunt the Korean diaspora in narratives about the American Dream and the resultant model minority myth surrounding Korean Americans. Her body has taken on many iterations and connotations from her “comfort woman” predecessor to the Yankee whore, UN lady, and GI bride. Her body acts as the geopolitical battleground for US and Korean relations, the traumas of military occupation, and militarized sex work. She is characterized by her present absence where she is simultaneously the “invisible backbone of the Korean American community” that made immigration possible for many of her relatives and the figure pushed to the shadowy margins by that same community for her deep social stigma (Cho 140).
Cho’s understanding of haunting acknowledges that seeing in the conventional sense, along with archival methodologies that rely on said type of sight, would be insufficient in approaching such ghosts. She challenges us to question our perceptions and engage critically with hallucinations, “performing a phantomatic return, through a multiplicity of voices and altered repetitions of past experiences” to better see trauma (Cho 167). The word repetition is crucial here as a characteristic of haunting and traumatic experiences more broadly. The repetition of the past in the present and of the past into the future dislocates these diasporic subjects, rendering them outside of time and constantly wandering but never arriving. Along with listening to the voices, Cho also asserts that a “schizophrenic” mode of memory is normal “for a diasporic memory that is in constant displacement and that reverberates with the voices of haunted histories” (186). She takes on this schizophrenic mode of memory and meaning making through her own writing style. By seamlessly combining multiple forms of evidence such as sociological data, autobiography, testimony, literature, and other media productions, she engages with the haunting of the Korean diaspora. She purposefully obscures the sources of the vignettes sprinkled throughout the chapters to demonstrate the porosity of diasporic memory and to protect the anonymity of those sharing their experiences of militarized sex work. While this point is only briefly touched on, it is important to highlight, as the question is often asked of how we can engage with the archive without reproducing its violence. Cho’s decision to secure the anonymity of her contributors prioritizes the wishes of those whose experience is being archived. As a writing experiment, her book recreates this porous and fluid diasporic consciousness through its imperfect and reconfigured repetitions, from the stories without identified authors to her own experiences being told through other voices. This occurs both through the content and through the book’s visual presentation, as the vignettes are sometimes framed in gray boxes and at other times, float freely on the page interspersed with historic photographs and art exhibitions from diasporic subjects. Cho creates an intelligible whole from the fragments that may otherwise be illegible on their own.
Archives are tools that can produce narratives that have material effects. The harm of traumatic social events may propagate into the present if the official archives and histories surrounding those events suppress the victims of both physical and psychological violence. These texts are two examples of a growing body of work that seeks to address difficult histories that elude traditional research methodologies and implore us to ask what it means to look at haunted archives, which may mean transgressing disciplinary boundaries in order to engage with these archives both ethically and empathetically.
Works Cited
“archive, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/10416.
Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.
Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.
[1] Literally “Western princess,” but Cho explains that it “broadly refers to a Korean woman who has sexual relations with Americans…most often used pejoratively to refer to a woman who is a prostitute for the U.S. military” (Cho 3).
[2] Unresolved grief and rage (Cho 16).