However, in June 2021, at the request of Wright’s estate, the nonprofit Library of America published the novel in full which gives readers a look into circumstances that preceded the protagonist’s escape. He is not simply a mysterious and unnamed man on the run; rather, he is Fred Daniels: a devoted husband and soon-to-be father, a devout Christian, and above all, an innocent man. This full release, titled The Man Who Lived Underground: The Novel,follows Fred’s journey as he flees into the sewers after the police violently coerce a false homicide confession from him. Deprived of light and social contact, Fred’s sensory disorientation opens the possibility for a reevaluation of conventional meaning making systems. The absence of the white gaze allows Fred to occupy and move through otherwise inaccessible spaces such as the vault of an insurance office and behind the counters of a jewelry store. This new mobility reveals the arbitrary nature of socially constructed symbols of value such as money, jewelry, time, and, most centrally, the notion of freedom as an American ideal.

The novel troubles the meaning of freedom, in and of itself a vexed term. Many American studies scholars have worked to complicate abstract understandings of American freedom by tracing its genealogy from the nation’s founding. The possessive individualist conception of freedom is predicated upon racialized, gendered, and classed systems of exclusion and domination that are structurally embedded into our legal system. This leaves some subjects hyper-vulnerable to injustices on both the individual and structural levels. Legally vulnerable subjects are not simply excluded from the protections of the legal system, but rather, as Lisa Marie Cacho argues “form the foundation of the U.S. legal system” and are “imagined to be the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists” (Cacho 5). That is to say that freedom, as it is understood in the context of the United States, was never meant to be extended to or exercised equally by all citizens. Wright explores the material reality of how freedom comes to be understood by legally vulnerable subjects, such as Fred, whom the law was not created to protect.

 Once he reemerges, Fred implores the officers to see his underground cave papered with money and jewels as proof of his activity underground. Officer Murphy comments that “colored boys sure go off their nut easily,” and Officer Johnson replies knowingly that it is because “they live in a white man’s world” (Wright 154). As Fred frantically tries to get the officers to come underground with him, Officer Lawson shoots him and lets his body fall into the sewer and get swept away by the water, claiming that “You’ve got to shoot his kind. They would wreck things.” (Wright 159). The “things” the officers are bent on protecting are clearly not any kind of justice, but rather the established order of society that is threatened by Fred’s vision of freedom. Executing Fred and relegating him underground puts a stop to the potential for ideas like his to spread.

This is where the narrative ends, and it is usually read as Wright’s eviscerating critique of the structural injustices of society. While it is surely critical of the inequalities embedded into our supposed “justice” system, the ending does not foreclose upon the possibility for change. As Rebecca Fisher writes, Wright attempts to move “the reader toward a sense of moral outrage that would ideally extend beyond the act of reading and compel the reader toward constructive social action” (162). I agree with this reading and want to add that not only does Wright hope for readers to feel pushed towards taking constructive social action, but that they should move forward collectively when confronting systems of power. Fred attempts to confront the legal system alone, as one man with an enlightened vision, which ultimately fails. However, as he established at the beginning of the novel, he is not without kinship networks or community connections. His family, church, and employers, those who would have attested to the police of his character and innocence, may also have been allies in his struggle against such an unjust system. This is not to condemn Fred’s choices, as his trauma and positionality stack the odds so significantly against him in this larger societal conflict. Nor is it to suggest that working collectively is a utopian solution to issues of oppression, violence, and marginalization. The addition of the previously unpublished passages prompts a reconsideration of the entire text as an assertion of Black futurism rather than futility in the face of structural inequality. While these systems of power and domination work to create feelings of isolation and powerlessness, there are ways to work against these aims towards positive social change.

Works Cited

Cacho, Lisa M. Introduction: The Violence of Value. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, by Cacho, New York University Press, New York, 2012, pp. 1-34.

Fisher, Rebecka Rutledge. “Richard Wright’s Poetics of Black Being: Metaphor, Desire and Doing” in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century, ed. by Monica Michlin and Jean-Paul Rocchi. Liverpool University Press, 2013, pp.158-176.

Literary Classics of the United States. Note on the Texts. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel, by Richard Wright, Library of America, 2021, pp. 220-228.

Wright, Richard, and Malcolm Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground: A Novel. Library of America, New York, 2021.

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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).

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Sharpe’s work is firmly grounded in the Black feminist theoretical tradition as she engages in conversation with Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Claudia Rankine, and Dionne Brand, among others, to lay bare the intricacies of living in the space of the unthought and unremembered. In Chapter 1, “The Wake”, she details the various definitions of the word “wake” and how those definitions permeate black life. The first instantiation of the wake that Sharpe describes is that of the slave ships bound across the Atlantic and what propelled those ships forward: “Racism, the engine that drives the ship of state’s national and imperial project…cuts through all of our lives and deaths inside and outside the nation, in the wake of its purposeful flow” (3). Sharpe at once gestures to the way anti-Black racism operates beyond the boundaries of nation-states and beyond time itself. Particularly within the context of the United States, anti-black racism is not incidental to the country’s founding, but is rather the basis upon which its entire democracy is predicated.

In Chapter 2, “The Ship”, Sharpe uses the documentary film The Forgotten Space (2010) as a touchstone by which to extend her ship metaphor. The ocean acts as the literal and metaphorical space for thinking about a modernity and globalization which, Sharpe argues, cannot be understood without centering the effects of transatlantic chattel slavery. The ship operates in the ocean backdrop as a space where individuals undergo a negative transformation from people to cargo, subject to object. She also introduces her concept of the “Trans*Atlantic” as “that s/place, condition, or process that appears alongside and in relation to the Black Atlantic but also in excess of its currents….to get at something about or toward the range of trans*formations enacted on and by Black bodies” (30). Her play with language is purposeful as she works to reimagine the limits, boundaries, and expectations inherent within language and explore how it can have radical, transformative potential for those occupying that unthought space. Wake work then functions to theorize “the multiple meanings of that abjection through inhabitation, that is, through living them in and as consciousness” (33).  This necessitates reexamining the commonly used disciplinary approaches for working with the archives of slavery and beyond. How does one look at such an archive ethically? When faced with the ongoing disasters of police brutality, various refugee crises, and natural disasters, how do we look without commodifying that pain for our own consumption? Sharpe interrogates the efficacy of memorials for such tragedies and their potential to do wake work. While monuments may be dedicated to those affected by disasters both natural and manufactured, their essence often relegates their subjects squarely to the past. In doing so, the ongoing effects of such events become obscured. These monuments function as commemoration and reparation without needing to contend with the structural inequalities and injustice inherent in their construction.

Grappling with such systemic injustice first necessitates being able to recognize and acknowledge how they may manifest in contemporary contexts. In Chapter 3, “The Hold”, Sharpe traces the genealogies of stop-and-frisk police practice, family detention centers, and the school-to-prison pipeline back to the hold of the slave ship. Again, she emphasizes the role of language in shaping reality as “[the] first language the keepers of the hold use on the captives is the language of violence: the language of thirst and hunger and sore and heat, the language of the gun and the gun butt, the foot and the fist, the knife and the throwing overboard” (70). These violences haunt the lives of Black people living in the diaspora from birth. Partus sequitur ventrem, the slave code that mandated that the condition of slavery passes from mother to child, propagates into the present; Black birth becomes Black death, birthed in the shadow of the slave ship. We must conceive of blackness as “a/temporal, in and out of place and time putting pressure on meaning and that against which meaning is made” (76). While this deterioration of language and meaning can be weaponized against Black subjects to render them less than human, it may also open the space for imagining new potentials. 

Chapter 4, “The Weather”, explores some of those potentialities and offers alternative methods for pushing back against the anti-Black structures that shape Black lives today. Sharpe conceptualizes “the weather” as “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (104). Despite such an overwhelmingly negative environment, Sharpe does not resort to pessimism. Rather she notes how surviving in such a hostile environment calls for improvisation and adaptability to resist the push towards premature death. Sharpe calls us to “aspirate” those figures occupying forgotten spaces, to breathe life into them by remembering their names and giving voice to their experiences. Through this practice, we may exercise a form of care for them. Care and remembrance become radical acts in the wake when these experiences of subjection and dehumanization often pass unacknowledged. She also offers Black annotation and redaction as techniques that can be used when approaching archives. She notes that “so much of Black intramural life and social and political work is redacted, made invisible to the present and future, subtended by plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures” (114). Sharpe implores us to look upon archives as actively working on the behalf of those forgotten voices. That is not to say we speculate wildly to fill in all the gaps of the archive, but rather that we try to listen for the silences and let them speak for themselves when supported by the proper context, unencumbered by the pre-scripted narratives of the story of slavery and its afterlives.

Sharpe poetically shifts between the personal and the political, the local and the transnational, to demonstrate how arbitrary those divisions truly are. She asks us to look at these texts and archives as extensions of the people that comprise them, imploring us to engage archives with an ethic of care and empathy. Through this, she asks us to never surrender to the wake’s powerful current.

Works Cited

Sharpe, Christina E. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, Durham, 2016.

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