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The Ethnic American Ghost Story
Douglas Ishii
Mentor: Jayne Lewis
Nancy J. Petersen questions the genre of “ethnic literature” in Against Amnesia, because these authors, who
seek to reclaim the silenced voices of their ethnic group, are pushed outside the boundaries of mainstream
literature by being categorized as “ethnic.” This study understands the commonalities and differences
between the Jamesian ghost story, exemplified by Edith Wharton, and the “ethnic American ghost story”,
represented by Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban, and Nora Okja Keller’s
Comfort Woman. Wharton’s ghost stories hold psychoanalytic significance, as shown by Nicolas Abraham’s
theory of transgenerational haunting; in Abraham’s theory, a ghost is a secret held by one’s predecessors that
passes to the next generation. Understanding the ghost as trauma brings about issues of the unreliability of
memory, the subjectivity of the narrative, and logocentrism. Her works also possess sociological implications,
as demonstrated by Avery Gordon’s theory of haunting; assuming that these stories communicate ghosts that
are real, their presence signals an inability to recognize the past, a refusal to see wrong in socially acceptable
practices, and discontentment with contemporary American society. These issues are raised in the ethnic
ghost stories, which connects the Gothic and postmodern, but at the same time, these issues focus on the
communal problems of an ethnic group, which demonstrates how the ethnic ghost story reclaims the
dominant voice in order to battle marginalization.