Ghosts of the Black Atlantic : Hauntology and the Temporality of Justice in Black British Poetry

This study examines the works of four black British poets and their engagement with mourning, spectrality, and ethics, drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1994) and his concept of hauntology. It argues that hauntology, as it is often applied in British writing on literature, music, and film, often prioritises the relationship between the past and present while neglecting its future-oriented and ethical aspects. This popularised framework, the study contends, often marginalises black British writers, even when their work directly addresses Britain’s imperial history and the syncretic, spectral cultures it continues to produce. By reasserting Derrida’s idea of justice in the future-to-come, the study situates these poets within the dynamic, diasporic space Paul Gilroy terms the black Atlantic, exploring how they engage with ghostly pasts and future possibilities. Beginning with Jay Bernard’s The Red and Yellow Nothing (2016), the study develops a mode of reading – called a spectral poetics of relation – in conversation with Édouard Glissant. It then applies this method to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974), demonstrating how his work enacts a spectral slippage between page and stage. Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter (2008) reveals Derrida’s "visor effect," through which the spectre sees without being seen, and employs a call-and-response structure reject individuality in favour of fugitivity. In Maud Sulter’s As a Blackwoman (1985) and Zabat (1989), Sulter creates justice for black women in the hauntological sense, as a relationship between generations. Finally, Jay Bernard’s Surge (2019) releases the dead, contained in the archives, through poetry. Based on these readings, the study argues that a Black British hauntology offers a space for imagining new futures, even in a present preoccupied with the past.