Family Ghosts: Kinship, Identity, and Memory in the American South

This project examines the relationship between cultural memory of ancestral racial violence among White American Southerners and cultural conceptualizations of kinship, particularly through the impact of various kinship frameworks on notions of inheritance and cultural and familial identity. My population of interest consists largely of “old stock” residents of rural and small-town agricultural communities, those whose families have remained in the same area for generations, frequently going back to settlement. My ethnographic inquiry takes place between the small towns and unincorporated communities of Haywood and Lauderdale counties in West Tennessee. Tensions between the uncertainties of the past, present, and future, between desire and revulsion, and between the area’s history of racial violence and its pride in Black artists such as the author Alex Haley and musicians Tina Turner and Sleepy John Estes, reveal deep cultural anxieties over the heritability of guilt, the uncertainty of the healing process, and rights of access and ownership to the land itself.