Conjuring the Haint

The Haunting Poetics of Black Women

Drea Brown

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English

University Press of Mississippi
16 June 2025

Literary studies: poetry & poets; Folklore, myths & legends; Gender studies: women; Ethnic studies; Black & Asian studies

Series: Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

What does it mean to live as a ghost, to live with ghosts, and how might ghosts lead to a path of healing and reimagining? Through an investigation of the intimate relationship between haunting and grief, Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women posits that for Black women, haunting is both a condition and a strategy in lived experiences and literary productions.

Looking at the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, and Claudia Rankine, Conjuring the Haint explores primary stereotypes of Black women. They are aligned with unruly incarnations of the haint, probing the eerie similarities between this specter and one-dimensional imaginings of Black womanhood, examining how this haintliness manifests in Black women’s elegies, the poetry of grief. Disrupting a tradition of consolation and poetic succession, Black women’s elegies rework the genre by wrestling with multiple forms of death: physical, social, and spiritual. These elegies aim both to lay to rest and to resurrect. Black women poets are then repositioned as conjurers who, through the spirit work of poetry, reckon with haints as complex figures of despair and repair.

Each chapter explores the paradox of haints, as evidence of injury and loss and as a pathway to knowledge articulated by various incarnations—the hag, the banshee, and the vengeful revenant. Chapters place these against pervasive images of Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire. Through a pairing and dismantling of these ill-fitting myths, Conjuring the Haint refigures haints as a means of recognition and self-possession, a manifestation of the ancestral and divine.

By: Drea Brown
Imprint: University Press of Mississippi
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9781496856272
ISBN 10: 1496856279
Series: Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies
Pages: 277
Publication Date: 16 June 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Drea Brown is a Black queer feminist poet-scholar, author of dear girl: a reckoning, and coeditor of Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature. brown is assistant professor in the Department of English at Texas State University.

Reviews for Conjuring the Haint: The Haunting Poetics of Black Women

With the emphasis on horror and the speculative in African American writing, this book is likely to join a growing body of work that examines traditional sites of horror/haunting. Reading like both poetry and theory, this book performs a Black feminist analysis of the 'haint' by exploring the gendered implications of the haint's appearance in Black poems and texts and as such, is an invaluable contribution to the growing field of critical work on the speculative/horror in Black writing.--Stefanie K. Dunning, author of Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture and Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture