Conference Agenda

On October 7, 2023, choir students from Virginia State University (VSU), a Historically Black College and University, performed for the annual Slave Memorial Commemoration at Mt. Vernon, George Washington’s plantation. Positioned in a space marked by the legacies of racial violence, the students’ re-enactments of the music of enslaved people haunted them with specters of the past. The ceremony began with descendants of enslaved people offering oral histories of their ancestors interwoven with the choir performing concerted spirituals. The students then processed towards the enslaved burial ground singing the song “Oh Freedom” for over twenty minutes, surrounded by graves. Later, a student remarked on the sun emerging and the wind blowing as they sang, and said “This is just too much, just way too much.” While some students were overwhelmed by the experience, others channeled ghosts: pantomiming being an enslaved person or dramatically re-enacting having teeth extracted to be set in Washington’s dentures.

This paper centers the experience of the VSU choir students to consider musical practice as a conduit for haunting, a means for contending with cultural memories of slavery. Through student testimonials and fieldwork, ghosts emerge not as metaphors but as lived, sensory experiences. Students discussed how singing these songs reinforced the connection between ongoing racial violence and its historical roots. Others found performing these songs directly connected them with their own ancestors who had lived and died on similar plantations. Some felt enraged by the experience, while others noticed the disquieting affect their performance had on the predominantly white audience. These experiences resonate with Black feminist theories of hauntings (Morrison 2019; Saleh-Hanna 2015; Hartman 1997), which suggest ghosts are not just remnants of trauma but also calls to recognize structural racism and incite action. Moreover, these hauntings align with anthropological understandings of spiritual possession and embodied colonial memory, illustrating how re-enactments of hegemonic relationships can serve as a means for renegotiating power (Stoller 1995). By focusing on musical performance and re-enactments of traumas, I observe how hauntings create openings not only for reanimating the past, but also for reimagining individual and collective Black identity.

Invariably on holiday visits to see my father, I will hear the chug-chug-chug of acoustic guitars emanating from his computer speakers. These guitars form the backbone of his favorite ranchera-pop disc Canta a Juan Gabriel Volumen 6 (1984) by Spanish diva Rocío Dúrcal, with songs written by Mexican singer-songwriter Juan Gabriel. Dúrcal is a household name for Mexican-American families, known for her powerful voice and emotive delivery of Gabriel’s compositions, lending her the title, “la española más mexicana.” My father’s favorite is “Amor Eterno,” a heart-wrenching lament written by Gabriel at only 16 years of age. Initially, the song was thought to chronicle the loss of an ambiguously defined beloved; a memorialization of love underscored by grief. It was not until Gabriel’s live performance of the tune in 1990 that listeners learned of the song’s true inspiration, when he ad-libbed the word “mamá” at the end of a lyrical phrase. Ever since, “Amor Eterno” has solidified as an archetypal funeral lament within Mexican diasporic culture, often accompanying tales of loss, struggle, and displacement.

Recently, my father insisted I learn the song, a weighty request considering his own mother’s death, which occurred, like Gabriel’s, at a tragically young age. The parallels are unmistakable; both men born to rancher families in west-central México, whose mothers fled to borderlands states in search of better lives. However, I was surprised to learn that my father knew nothing of the tune’s original significance. “Amor eterno” was not his way of processing his mother’s death, rather, the song’s pluralism of meaning bonded us through an unconscious remembrance of a traumatic past.

This paper shows how, through the voice of Dúrcal—a Spanish woman—“Amor Eterno” became a universal song of grief within the Mexican diaspora. I investigate how Dúrcal, under the tutelage of Gabriel, has been able to voice the ghosts of wounded mestizo and migrant lives. Specifically, I propose that Dúrcal, through an embodiment of the role of a professional mourner, or, la Llorona (Anzaldúa 1987, 1995), allows for the collective musical navigation of the specters of Mexican colonial history.

In 2008, Paris by Night, a diasporic Vietnamese variety show based in Orange County, California, released their 91st episode. Titled “Huế, Sài Gòn, Hà Nội,” the program features a staged reenactment of the Hue Massacre, a violent mass murder that occurred during the Tết Offensive of the Vietnam War. Quang Lê’s warm rendition of “Những Con Đường Trắng” (“The White Roads”) is followed by Khánh Ly’s sobering performance of “Bài Ca Dành Cho Những Xác Người” (“Song for the Corpses”), where she enters the stage as the only person dressed in a black áo dài among corpses strewn across the floor and swaddled in white.

Khánh Ly, born Nguyễn Thị Lê Mai in 1945, is known for her signature raspy alto voice, described as “seductive” and “smoky” by listeners in conversations that are often accompanied by wistful memories of a lost past, loved one, or homeland. From “Một Cõi Đi Về” to “Hướng Về Hà Nội” (where “về” or “đi về” alludes to homecoming), Khánh Ly’s discography is characterized by complicated nostalgias, transnational movement, meaningful recontextualizations, and hauntings of home. Her career is steeped in controversy, as she was famously reprimanded and fined by the Vietnamese communist government in 2022 for performing a song that criticized historical cycles of slavery, colonialism, and violence.

Drawing upon studies of voice, media, trauma (Alexander 2004), hauntology (Derrida 1993; Cho 2008; Lincoln and Lincoln 2015), memory (Foucault 1977; Boym 2007; Nguyen 2008), and reception, this paper explores the afterlife of Khánh Ly’s music in Orange County’s Little Saigon by focusing on its transnational presence in the ghostly space between Saigon, Vietnam and Little Saigon (OC), California. I argue that Khánh Ly, through community-based performances of trauma and grief, serves as a medium between the ghosts of the Vietnam War and the resultant diasporic communities that are haunted by them. From the bodies that float in the river to those that drape off city rooftops, Khánh Ly sings on behalf of those who died in the Vietnam War, survivors and descendants who mourn, and a fallen nation.