Spectral modernity: Ghosts of empire in the early twentieth century

My dissertation examines the figure of the ghost in the early twentieth-century British and American cultural imagination. While the rise of psychoanalysis during this period has led many scholars to read specters as figments within an individual's mind, I contend that ghosts must be reconsidered within the context of modern empires. Building upon cultural critics' recent studies of specters as important "social figures," my dissertation interprets ghosts as substantial mediators of deep social tensions during the decline of Britain's colonial empire and the rise of America's "Invisible Empire," the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. Exploring modernist novels and supernatural tales alongside historical documents and mass culture spirit performances, I argue that imperial ghosts emerge repeatedly within modernity's public spaces to negotiate national fears, social fantasies, and cross-racial encounters. At the beginning of my dissertation, I investigate transformations in popular spirit culture in relation to street-haunting specters in novels by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Jean Rhys. Employing the work of feminist postcolonial theorists, I show how British modernists place spirits in civic spaces both to criticize empire's injustices toward its lower classes, women, and colonial masses and to signify anxieties over the nation's changing role after the Great War. While specters force British subjects to rethink their world empire, imperial ghosts press U.S. citizens to reflect upon the realities of Jim Crow race relations. The second part of my dissertation examines the parading spirits of America's Invisible Empire that return en masse after World War I to reinstate social inequalities and to bolster white male protestant supremacy. Drawing on theories of "cultural haunting" and "passing," I explore how ghosts haunt public spaces in fictions by Lilith Shell, Charles Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and William Faulkner to express America's race-related fears and African Americans' communal fantasies. Concluding with a study of the 1930s American spook show, in which racially coded Haitian spirits announce their presence through touch in segregated Southern theaters, I argue that empire's ghosts are not merely misty products of an overactive imagination, but crucial social mediators with a pressing political presence.