The Spectral Afterlives of Slavery and the Fallacious U.S. Meritocracy in Jesmyn Ward’s and Quntos KunQuest’s Narratives of Prison

Abstract

Since the 1980s the prison population in the United States has increased at an unprecedented speed, a growth that has disproportionally affected Black citizens. The phenomenon of mass incarceration, inasmuch as it epitomizes the systemic nature of racial discrimination, illustrates the workings of a cruel meritocracy (Pignagnoli and Roldán-Sevillano 2025), one governed by the displacement of structural dynamics of oppression to individual responsibility and the positing of the latter as the only mechanism of upward social mobility. Adopting the theoretical framework of spectrality studies, this paper examines the prison narratives found in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Quntos KunQuest’s This Life (2021). The discussion of the spectral model of representation put forth by the two central characters of these works—a ghost who remains in Parchman Farm, Mississippi after his violent death during the Jim Crow era; and Lil Chris, a flesh and blood inmate serving a life sentence in the present-day Louisiana State Penitentiary—allows us to identify a metaphorical transposition of the ghost’s status to that of the prisoner. However, far from an absolute equation between spectralization and a state of dispossession, this analysis intends to disclose a model of resistance based on the active construction of a race-based community, individual growth in relation to group solidarity and the subversive redefinition of the spaces of confinement. The revisionist potential of the spectral metaphor is thus mobilized to articulate a social critique that reveals the structural inequality, discrimination and stigmatization that constitute the underside of the American dream and ultimately dismantle the foundational pillars of America’s rhetoric of progress and meritocracy.