Search

This is a critique of how designers deal with temporality in design to speculate about socio-technical futures. The paper unpacks how embedded definitions and assumptions of temporality in current design tools contribute to coloniality in designed futures. Based on this critique, we reject the notion that it is only AI that needs fixing, as design practice becomes implicated in how oppression extends from physical systems to global digital platforms. To make these issues visible, we dissect the Futures Cone model used in speculative design. As an alternative, the paper then presents hauntology as a vocabulary that can aid designers in accommodating pluriversal histories in anticipatory futures and reorienting their speculative tools. To illustrate the benefits of the proposed metaphors, the paper highlights examples of coloniality in digital spaces and emphasizes the failure of speculative design to decolonize future imaginaries. Using points of reference from hauntology, ones that engage with states of lingering or spectrality, and notions of nostalgia, absence, and anticipation, the paper contributes to rethinking the role that design tools play in colonizing future imaginaries, especially those pertaining to potentially disruptive technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon a cultural-historical reading of the witch, we discuss how modern capitalism is chronically haunted by obstreperous vestiges of what preceded it yet remains proficient in assimilating all that returns to challenge it. By adapting and extending a theoretical toolkit informed by Jacques Derrida and Mark Fisher, we trace market and state administrators' co-optation of the primeval witch figure and her ideological trappings: initially, to expropriate those who threatened incipient modernising structures; later, to provoke increasingly secularised subjects towards consumption; and eventually, to calibrate rather than obviate capitalist expansion so that it remains aligned with consumer interests. Introducing the new concepts of 'retrocorporation' and 'marketplace revenant', we discuss how long-foreclosed, ancient imaginaries become re-invoked and re-programmed to perpetuate capitalism's dominance. Our message for the nascent tradition of 'Terminal Marketing' is that the collision and collusion of past and future has the potential to ossify capitalist realism in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does the Putin regime have an ideology? This question has attracted renewed attention since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars claim that the war is directly linked to the Putin regime’s ideological aspirations to restore Russia’s greatness and challenge the West internationally, while others argue that contemporary regimes in the “Putinist mold” have limited need for ideology and use wars instrumentally for survival purposes rather than messianic aspirations. In this paper we will, first, review arguments pro and contra ideology under the Putin regime and identify existing gaps in such literature: definitional ambiguity, conflation of concepts of totalitarianism and ideology, overfocusing on ideal types of ideology, and so forth. Second, we will offer operationalizable metrics against which the ideology is measured: coherence of ideological repertoire, temporal consistency, elite commitment, codification, indoctrination, internalization, and futuristic vision. This paper finds that the current Putin regime checks most of the ideological boxes (even if it has not necessarily always been the case historically). Lastly, we will conclude by discussing the implications of our findings to the analysis of contemporary autocracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a hauntological frame, this article investigates how the ghosts of colonial pasts are re-emerging in India's national universal biometric identity system, Aadhaar, and a software infrastructure built on top of it, India Stack. It shows how Aadhaar and India Stack facilitate the extraction of data as a form of 'data colonialism.' Examining data colonialism through an enquiry of how the multifarious and unstable relations of colonialism are bound up with the extractive processes of digital data, the article uses a historical approach considering the shifting trajectories of identity ecologies in India to see what is dispossessed through Aadhaar and India Stack. In doing so it continues a trend in spectral writing – forcing an intervention between colonial pasts and presents. Detailing a specific chronology of events, the article reveals how 'data relations' have been co-produced by the Indian state and corporate fintech bodies over the last decade to coerce populations into a 'digital financialisation.' Using the metaphor of 'structural-shape-shifting', it shows how colonial relations continue within data relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concept of 'astral projection' in the letters of the Bluestocking intellectuals Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), and Catherine Talbot (1721–1770). By this term, I am referring to episodes in their correspondence in which they imaginatively project themselves into the physical presence of the letter's reader, or deploy images of death and haunting to poetically bridge social distance. Exploring this concept through the frameworks of Susan Lanser's engagement with Bluestocking Queerness, as well as the concept of material remediation of affect drawn from Sarah Ahmed and others, I would like to address this technique as a device for the affective bridging of distance, as well as exploring the central case study of Elizabeth Montagu's use of astral projection in her letters to Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, Henry Home, Lord Kames, in which astral projection is utilised to bridge not just physical distance, but the barriers of social status, and Montagu's own outsider status from Scottish Enlightenment philosophical circles. Ultimately, I argue that astral projection acts as a synecdoche for the familiar letter as a uniquely transformative textual space, in which meanings of all kinds are renegotiated and redefined, including the meaning of distance and separation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tropelías: Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada is the property of Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to analyse the question of a personal search for identity as well as the broader cultural concept of “feminine identity” in relation to domesticity and landscape in Deborah Levy’s Real Estate, published in 2021. The third and last instalment of Levy’s “A Living Autobiography” series is an account of a woman’s search for identity in the context of major life changes: no longer a wife, no longer a mother living with her children, and no longer young, the narrator (who is and is not the author, according to Levy herself) examines her own relationship with home, homeland, and houses in various geographical locations, including her dream house – her unreal estate. The spectral dream house, positioned at the intersection of the past, the present, and the future, together with land and a very specific type of fluid landscape, constitute an object of the narrator’s profound desire. By expanding on the topic of this longing, Levy engages in reflection on women’s wanting and its habitual subjugation to the needs of others. The paper demonstrates how in this way Levy enters into a dialogue with Sigmund Freud and his famous unanswered question “Was will das Weib?” Most importantly, it is shown how the narrator generally considers women’s – including female artists’ – place at home and in culture within patriarchy. Applying a feminist and gender studies perspective, as well as by combining hauntology with housing studies, this paper examines the key symbolism of Real Estate and ultimately reads the book as a feminist writer’s manifesto declaring “my books are my real estate,” while placing it against the background of older feminist tradition, represented by such writers as Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, and Annette Kolodny.

The Tamagotchi device, which became one of the symbols of the 90s, is extremely interesting for media archaeology for at least three reasons. Firstly, in conditions of relative freedom of technology perception standards, large companies were not afraid to take risks by offering items to the market that were provocative and experimental, both in technological and social dimensions. Secondly, in the case of the Tamagotchi, an object was proposed that, through its activity, was meant not just to communicate or enable something but to introduce "noises"—various deviations and distortions into the structures of experience normalized by everyday life, producing hybridity and spontaneity, claiming an impossible transformation of a stable order. Thirdly, interaction with the Tamagotchi was not a game and, moreover, not a utilitarian practice. A new model of interaction with technology was designated—as with a living being, with its needs, cycles, stimuli, and possible responses to interaction. Individuals correlated themselves with these cycles, finding themselves in the sphere of influence of Tamagotchi's attraction—not as users or owners, not as players or hosts, but as caring and contemplative individuals, as someone who were deeply involved in the growth and development of another life—the formation of an autonomous presence. Instead of some limited and unambiguous functionality, a lifestyle was offered. All these features of the Tamagotchi are at the hearts of our perception of mobile interfaces in all their non-obvious totality. We build our behavior in accordance to them, they participate in the interpretation of the experience, they are included in the events happening to us, they participate in the emergence, distribution, and experience of emotions. They are not so much tools as they are companions. They affect us not so much through metaphors, but as elements that, no matter how imperceptibly, influence the forms of life, making them possible or impossible. The article shows how and why the influence of the Tamagotchi has developed — the influence which has allowed the proto-elements of the mobile interface to function not at the level of communication in value systems, but at the level of transformation of presence.

In this Point of Departure, the idea of authentic assessment is examined and troubled by drawing on Derrida’s hauntology. The spectres of higher education invite us to reconsider what is ‘real’ about past, present, and future assessment practices. Such spectres do not lecture or produce a single, definitive interpretation. Rather, these spectres provoke speculation on whether authenticity remains a useful construct for assessment in academia. This hauntological perspective summons the paradoxes and contradictions of the ‘more-than-real’ in authentic assessment, recalling lost futures and creative possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2019 social upheaval in Chile began with students jumping turnstiles in protest over a modest increase in the metro fare, but it quickly expanded into a widespread denunciation of nearly every facet of the neoliberal economic system installed under the 1973--1990 Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. "It's not the thirty pesos," protesters claimed, "it's the thirty years," referring to the three decades of neoliberal policies after the return to democracy in 1990. In the days and weeks after the protests began, a soundtrack emerged of both original music and songs repurposed from Chile's past. Even the new songs created in the wake of the 2019 protests also frequently reference, sample, or allude to Chile's musical icons of the Chilean New Song era of the 1960s and early 1970s or to dictatorship era music. Both the protests and their music are therefore rooted in a hauntological past. Jacques Derrida coined the term "hauntology" in Spectres of Marx (2006), where he examines the ways in which the spirit of Marxism, like all ghosts which have yet to be laid to rest, would return, repeatedly, disrupting the present and continuing to remind us of another possible future." In Ghosts of My Life, British cultural theorist Mark Fisher applies Derrida's concept of hauntology to English language cultural production, arguing that 21st-century cultural products reflect a "slow cancellation of the future." "It doesn't feel like the future," Fisher writes; instead, "we remain trapped in the 20th century." This article examines how the hauntological songs of the 2019 social upheaval seek to inspire and support an oppositional consciousness against the neoliberal system and how the resilience of that same system maintains Chile's musical ghosts in a perpetual limbo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address. As such, there is no growth, change, or redemption that could activate a new future; there is only the rehearsal of the old ones: failed futures from the past. What's more, this process of defuturing also relies on a winnowing of the past such that only those pasts that align with our present are allowed to be brought forward. I argue that, to reactivate our future, we also need to reactivate our pasts. I am thinking of those pasts that we do not seek or do not want but that nevertheless come to us. These are the multiple and competing pasts that swirl with present and future as in a vortex, denying any one past the privilege of guiding, directing, or foreclosing the future. It is only by facing this vortex and reopening the past that we can re‐open the future and escape the time loop of our ever‐receding horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I offer a reading of Virginia Woolf's story "A Haunted House" from the perspectives of hauntology and heterotopic spatiality. I argue that, initiating with this story, spectrality prevails in Virginia Woolf's writing and haunts her literary corpus. By examining the mystical element rhythmic practice brings to the story, and by linking it to thencept of haunting and spectrality, I discuss the use of haunting and spectres to question modernity's connection to the past. I emphasize that Woolf questions the relation of modernity to the past, which does not necessarily mean that the past has always negative connotations for her, but rather that she distrusts modernity and suspects that it might betray her. By focusing on the quintessential role of the house, I claim that the house transforms into a heterotopic place where boundaries between spaces and times blur and the past, the present, and the future merge, as a result of which the house becomes a space of encounter, which is a way of resisting the rigid conceptualizations of spatio-temporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the material effects of Black trans death on Black trans life, particularly in the dimensions of aesthetics, fashion and beauty. I use a Black trans hauntological approach to analyse recordings of Balls, film and television, and personal anecdotes of Black transness in order to develop a transtemporal mapping between ghosts and their haunted subjects. On the one hand, my research builds upon a growing field of work in Black queer and trans studies that looks at Black trans life and its relationship with the 'afterlife'. On the other, it critiques the liberal humanism that grounds much of fashion studies, thus foregrounding subjects, methodologies and worlds that are still under-researched within the field. By focusing on the practice of dressing, and specifically on the autonomous garmenting of trans people, I show how the violated and murdered Black trans person's haunting can be traced materially. At the centrepiece of this article is the interrogation of how contemporary dressing practices of 'living' Black trans people invoke and are possessed by the ghosts of anti-trans violence. Found in the reciprocal relationship of invocation and possession is the mutual care transmitted between and through the barriers of Black trans life and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of VAD: Veredes, Arquitectura y Divulgación is the property of Alberto Alonso Oro and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article deploys Jacques Derrida's hauntological contextualising of spectres in tandem with Dominick LaCapra's (2004) and E. Ann Kaplan's (2005) contextualising of trauma to unearth the roles which women are made to play within the societies in Ruskin Bond's narratives. Utilising a hauntological treatment of trauma, two short stories by Bond, "Topaz" and "The Woman on Platform No. 8," will be analysed in this article. In particular, this article aims to interrogate the impact of personal trauma contained within the texts as experienced by the women spectres inhabiting both of the aforementioned short stories and their male interlocutors. An analysis of both texts from a hauntological perspective incorporates both spatial and temporal considerations, from the architecture of the enfolding spaces to the connection between past, present and future. The different environments determined the different forms taken by spectres within Ruskin's texts take; therefore, their significance will be examined in this article. In so doing, the article will problematise the notion of revisiting and re-contextualise it from a hauntological perspective. The findings will unearth the ways in which the feminine spectres in these tales are equated with the spaces they inhabit, both in nature and in the ties to architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I suggest that our current relation to the sociopolitical future is one where we are blocked from changing our view of what that future is or could be. In this sense, we are trapped in a time loop wherein the challenges before us are continuously met with social and political solutions designed for futures past, old futures. These past possible futures are ones that failed to solve the problems they were offered to address. As such, there is no growth, change, or redemption that could activate a new future; there is only the rehearsal of the old ones: failed futures from the past. What's more, this process of defuturing also relies on a winnowing of the past such that only those pasts that align with our present are allowed to be brought forward. I argue that, to reactivate our future, we also need to reactivate our pasts. I am thinking of those pasts that we do not seek or do not want but that nevertheless come to us. These are the multiple and competing pasts that swirl with present and future as in a vortex, denying any one past the privilege of guiding, directing, or foreclosing the future. It is only by facing this vortex and reopening the past that we can re‐open the future and escape the time loop of our ever‐receding horizon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My wrestling with (not) belonging, which started almost a decade ago with my arrival to Aotearoa/New Zealand, was prevalent during my re-turn (Barad, 2014) to my birthplace, the Canary Islands, seeking to revive my connections to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity. My engagement with te ao Māori ('the Māori world') was essential to (re)connect with the whenua ('land') in a way I had never done before, as an ancestor, cradling (non-)descendants of the Indigenous Canarians (see Ramirez & Pasley, 2022; Ramirez, 2024). The im/possibilities of the in/determinacy of Canarian Indigeneity's nothingness/openness (Barad, 2012) require an engagement with our Indigenous Canarian inheritance beyond Western thinking. While questions that emerged during my re-turn produced more questions, my travels also offered strategies to move forward. Developing a Canarian onto-epistemology is imperative not only to decolonise the Canary Islands but also to save what is left (cultural and (hi)storical preservation) and save the whenua (from unstainable tourism). This begins with initiating necromantic hauntological practices of the void to 'heal' wounds left in the Canary Islands by colonisation and subsequent colonialities. The pasados que (nunca) fueron y futuros que (nunca) pueden ser ('pasts that were (not), futures that can (never) be') that materialise in the current culture, language, peoples and institutions (legal and educational), revive and reconfigure my relationship to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity. A process of in/re-surrection started. It is now that I am un/becoming Indigenous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That COVID-19 impacted the ability of Higher Education providers to furnish students with practical learning experiences is in no doubt. Between 2020 and 21, national and internationally imposed restrictions on in-person activities incurred a dramatic shift towards online learning systems across the globe and the de-prioritisation or adaptation of many employability-based offers for university students. Arguing that these changes disproportionately impacted employability provision for students registered on professionalisation-based Arts and Humanities courses we use the results of 27 semi-structured interviews, conducted with students registered on one of six UK-based museums, curatorial or heritage courses between 2020 and 2021, to explore how COVID-19 manifested as a crisis of employability for these students. Focusing particularly on Mark Fisher’s [2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology & Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books] reflections on the psychological and affective impacts of previous international crises (e.g. the 2008 financial crash), we use our analysis to highlight the ways in which employability was felt by our participants during this period through the effects of stagnation, loss and a resistant hauntological presence. Such findings, we argue, are not specific to COVID-19 alone, but are conditional to a more general response to the employability crisis that we suggest has relevance to university educators beyond the UK. Indeed, it is our contention that understanding such global systemic shocks from a student perspective is essential if we are to improve our responses to such crises in the future, and we use this article to urge further reflections on the enmeshment between employability and crisis going forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on how residents of the north Bohemian town of Liberec deal with the property they acquired as a result of displacement. The objects they use were confiscated from the German-speaking minority in the aftermath of World War 2. The text provides an overview of narratives of this event in the Czech public discourse and discusses how these are reflected in family stories. The study is based on three family histories collected during ethnographic fieldwork and the analytical framework is informed by memory studies and theories of hauntology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent advent of virtual photography and artificial intelligence (specifically AI photography and diffusion models), presents a major challenge to both photographers and photography theory. All our common-sense assumptions about the ontology of the image now seem to be falling apart. Are these interlopers really photography? Can we hear the final death knell for the erstwhile medium in this era of ever-increasing media convergence and virtualisation? This practice-led investigation of these new media forms draws on the author's recent creative work in virtual photographies, and similar interventions by other photographers and new media artists, seeking to augment and expand their practice using these new tools, whilst querying what photography really means today. From in-game photography to virtual exploration using Google Street View, to AI photography using the latest denoising diffusion models (such as Midjourney), there are surprising commonalities to explore between them, linking these new practices of image-making firmly back to traditions of lens-based photography. Rather than seeking a detailed map of this difficult new terrain, or a definitive ontology of emerging virtual photographies, the author reframes the discourse around practice, examining both photography as an evolving set of practices and also notions of media hauntology – specifically the spectral ways in which new media technologies are always haunted by prior practices and modes of communication. The importance of the frame to both traditional photography and new practices of virtual photography, is suggested as a vital and persistent dimension in photographic authorship. With that authorship increasingly contested by new generative methods, easy appropriation and AI image-making, the act of framing may become the best litmus test we have, for whether or not a photograph should be considered 'real' or valued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this article, I consider the role of emerging digital media technologies in contexts where a scarcity of memory infrastructure contributes to the marginalization of historical figures, places, or events. To do so, I examine Red Summers, a collection of 360-degree virtual reality (360 VR) documentaries that bring to light the impact of domestic White supremacist terrorism on Black communities in incidents across the U.S. occurring between 1917 and 1921. I argue the series relies on a strategy of visual cultural production I deem Black hauntography, which capacities collective acts of critical memory by directing audience visions toward the multiple layers of infrastructural absences left in the aftermath of racial violence. I trace how the series produces a memory of loss which may mediate more truthful, inspired encounters with the weight of history, thereby operating as a critical memory infrastructure suitable for amending amnesiac relations to past injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people’s emergent position in the life-course means that they are widely perceived to embody the future, with their ‘successes’ and ‘failures’ in youth considered important portents of the future viability, prosperity, and moral character of wider society. In many regards, this futurist lens is reflected in research within youth studies, including in the extensive youth transitions literature and in temporal and relational streams of research exploring young people’s ‘imagined futures’ in the context of rising precarity, uncertainty and risk in the contemporary period. While this emphasis on the future is undoubtedly important, it has contributed to the significance of the past in young people’s lives being overlooked and, moreover, often erroneously characterises the future as somehow temporally disembodied from what precedes it. In this article, I argue that there is a need for more meaningful engagements with the past in contemporary youth studies. Specifically, I suggest there is considerable value in Jacques Derrida's (1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. New York, NY: Routledge) concept of hauntology for enriching current understandings of youth. This article describes how hauntology’s pantemporal focus represents an increasingly timely and important conceptual tool through which to capture, analyse, and address the structural and temporal complexities confronting contemporary generations of youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1984, Sikhs were massacred following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Cultural expressions attempt to foreground the haunting legacies of this genocide. This paper explores Harpreet Kaur's documentary, The Widow Colony- India's Unsettled Settlement which unfolds as trauma testimony of the understudied conflict, contextualizing the spectral wounds of Sikh widows and their struggle for survival. Using hauntology and postmemory as critical lens, this article examines the spectral wounds of 1984 Sikh genocide. It also focuses on the gendered dimensions of violence against Sikh women by enunciating their doubly victimized sensibility through their experiences of shame, trauma and suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hauntology has become an increasingly alluring concept in social sciences to reflect upon everyday life and how subjects dwell upon scenarios pervaded not only by the potency of the actual but also the haunting of the past and the virtual. Drawing on the concept of 'hauntology', we inquire about recurring temporalities and spectrality themes concerning the 'controversial' diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in Chile. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with health practitioners, teachers, school staff, diagnosed children, and their peers from 3-year-long research, we examine how the performance of the diagnosis by clinicians at times can produce a modification of the temporality of the diagnosed children from that moment forth. Amidst tension created by educational policies, ideas of well-being, pedagogical practices, and everyday living, the diagnosis keeps repeating its agentic capacity while resisting its decay, becoming ever-present and actual. Once cast, the diagnosis acts as a repeating force that can shape every experience, cancelling the possibility for the child to become different by unfolding out of the diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data collected from a secondary school in Florida to explore how temporally disjointed aesthetics (e.g. (re)photographs) impact constructions of historical knowledge. Using posthuman concepts (e.g. assemblage, rhizome, spacetimematter(ing), hauntology), this study relied on visual methodologies—specifically photo-elicitation—to attend to the question: How do engagements with (re)photographs contribute to the development secondary students' historical consciousness/thinking? Data consisted of artifacts reflecting engagements with three collections of (re)photographs featuring ghosts/hauntings and semi-structured focus group interviews. Rhizomatic assemblages re-presenting entanglements with what was produced during this study suggest that (re)photographs not only fostered historical consciousness/thinking by exposing the in-between/ness of temporality and materiality, but that (re)photography extends the boundaries historical consciousness/thinking through students' emerging relationships to the pastpresentfuture(ing). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Geetanjali Shree's Tomb of Sand as a radical queer remembrance of Partition at the conjuncture of its 75th anniversary. By coining "bordersand," where "sand" takes "land's" place, I highlight the symbolic role that sand plays both in queering the inarticulate space of death, chronicling human connections from milliseconds to billions of years, and demonstrating a universal empathy to the trans/gression of borders. My reading of the novel engages with feminist historiography, making queer kin, and hauntology, showcasing how Shree de-localizes the responsibility of remembering Partition as a nation-state-based interest. To a broader audience interested in tackling the limits of archive and the folly of treating state and tribal violence as an aberrant moment in the history of democracy, Shree exemplifies the use of creative narrative techniques—such as a "second act" for the silenced subaltern—to rewrite the experiences of mass disappearance and displacement caused by global structural violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the trope of invisibility has emerged as a critical concept in the humanities; initially associated with the issue of racial invisibility, it has been applied to all forms of marginalisation, be they racial, social, or political. Today, the context of hypervisibility, which results from intensive media coverage of certain events, has made discussing invisibility paradoxical. This article seeks to reassess invisibility as a key concept in the humanities and discusses the scopic power of literature to make the unseen visible. This will be approached via discussion of contemporary narratives dealing with disappearance and loss, with a particular focus on the literature of the middle passage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nehruvian era has been seen as marked by the focus on sovereign human agents, no longer dependent on non-humans and their powers to achieve self-defined goals. This reinforced the distinction between humans and their others, notably ghosts and otherworldly creatures. However, this article argues, this exorcism was less successful than often assumed. A close reading of the film Mahal (directed by Kamal Amrohi in 1949) shows that ghosts were not only present at a narrative level, but also continued to establish their presence, right at the centre of the modern medium of the film and amongst filmmakers committed to the Nehruvian project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores entanglements of matter, space, and temporalities in shaping academic subjectivities in Norwegian higher education. Drawing on conversations with foreign women working at a major university, I explore the forces (re)producing what matters in academia, creating assumptions of who can be a real academic. Leaning on Karen Barad's (2010, 2017a, 2019) hauntology and Walter Mignolo's (2011) queering of temporality, this study elucidates how foreign women academics are entangled with the past through gendered and racialised hauntings and more-than-human discursive materialities, such as linear temporality and ideals of progress. Illustrating ways in which Othering are still enacted in the world of academia, I argue the necessity of rethinking institutions of higher education as spaces where westernised and patriarchal geopolitics of knowledge are reproduced. This study carries out a decolonial delinking of linear temporality towards the recognition of pluriversal experiences of now-time, expanding geopolitics of knowledge in Norwegian academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns itself with the study of changing dynamics of herder-bovine relationships in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu. By exploring the affective lives of Tamil-speaking herders of South India in their interaction with native Pulikulam breed bovines and foreign bred milch cows, this paper maps the sensuous ways in which these three beings make and unmake each other. At a more abstract level, this paper intends to improvise dialogue between new materialist and deconstructive techniques by exploring Karen Barad's conception of intra-action, and Derrida's hauntology in the context of human-animal relationships. The central argument this paper exposes is that our nuanced moments of interactions with animals are already mediated by visceral absences which we fail to take into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is the continuation of a personal journey, wrestling with (not) belonging, which started almost a decade ago with my arrival in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It was not until I was invited to share my 'whakapapa' (genealogy), merely reduced to 'Spanish' at that point, that I started to reflect on my own identity as a Canary Islander. Through my engagement with te ao Māori (the Māori world), I started to understand and know myself in relation to the Indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands, as it allowed me to reflect on '(not) belonging' and un/becoming Indigenous (see Ramirez & Pasley, 2022). Learning about the Indigenous histories of the Islands and exploring my relationships with the Canary Islands and their Indigenous histories brought up more questions than answers. The process of decolonising the Canary Islands requires reconstituting onto-epistemological understandings and engagement with the Indigenous and colonial histories of the islands, decentring these from a Eurocentric/Western narrative/lens and establishing a Canarian onto-epistemology. To do so, I diffract Barad's (2017) void of im/possibility with Derrida's (1995) hauntology to develop the concept of a necromantic hauntology of the void. This allows me to tend to the wound that has been left behind in the Canary Islands and engage with the im/possibilities of the in/determinacy of Canarian Indigeneity's nothingness/openness. This is part of my reconnection with the Indigenous Canarian inheritance (outside Western thinking) and the possibilities that pasados que (nunca) fueron y futuros que (nunca) pueden ser (pasts that were [not], futures than can [never] be) offer to revive my connections to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon recent criminological scholarship examining spectrality, as well as Jacques Derrida's notion of hauntology, this article sets out a framework to explore harms experienced as 'out of joint'. We propose a new sub-discipline of 'ghost criminology' as a means to explore and reckon with these afterlives. We identify three strands of the (in)visible, the (in)corporeal and dead space with which to capture phenomena hovering between presence and absence. In doing so, we provide examples of justice being achieved within this sense of time being 'off its hinges'. A 'ghost criminology' provides a means of listening to the voices of the discipline's dead, as well as the ghosts of its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review uses hauntological frameworks to scrutinise Kavedžija's work, The Process of Wellbeing. Throughout the discourse, I encapsulate the notions, conceptualisations, and instances expounded in this scholarly work, positing that the integration of hauntology into wellbeing perspectives proffers substantive insights. Elaborating on Kavedžija's contentions, I accentuate the importance of interconnectedness between historical antecedents and contemporary circumstances in configuring the comprehension of wellbeing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks the central question of how to practically engage in the ongoing production of space at Stellenbosch University (SU) as to reimagine and redefine spaces. Spaces, which affect people indirectly and subconsciously, can act as microaggressions on one hand and places of safety connected to identity on the other. The Visual Redress (VR) project at SU focuses on removing or replacing contentious visual elements on campus and facilitating engagements to alter experiences of places and spaces. The VR project is not only interested in physically transforming the space, but also in facilitating critical dialogue and physical interventions to engage in spatial memory and emotional remembrance. In this article Hauntology is used as a methodology to remember and reflect on visual elements on the Stellenbosch campus of SU and how the memory of the past and the dead in the form of visual elements still haunts the present. These hauntological engagements include crucial interactions with students, lecturers, and the various publics of the university. In this article the researchers will provide an overview of VR at SU and show and discuss the processes of three specific VR projects that were implemented at SU to illustrate the importance of hauntological engagements with the aim of reconstructing spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of FORUM is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper uses the arguments set out in Bhekizizwe Peterson's article "Spectrality and inter-generational black narratives in South Africa" as a framework to explore East German narratives of transformational change over the past 30 years, based on interviews with key anti-state activists. Of particular relevance for the East German case are Peterson's commentaries on 1) contrasting the 'limitless hope' of the revolution with subsequent experiences of mourning and melancholia - "unresolved grief" and a nostalgia for a future that once could have been; 2) the exploration of relationship between history, the arts and knowledge; 3) the struggle over creating a national 'good story' and the memories that haunt across generations; and 4) the role of radical imagination in social change. Although the presentation will draw on the larger longitudinal project, it will also incorporate a discussion of Lola Arias's play "Atlas des Kommunismus" which offers a retrospective look at the legacy of communism thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with characters playing themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bhekizizwe Peterson's interdisciplinarity was wide ranging and displayed his easy familiarity with the Arts, Social Sciences and Philosophy. The breadth of his interests and oeuvre make him genuinely psychosocial, interested, for example, in psychoanalytic issues of mourning and melancholia and bringing this together with deep understandings of narratives and the ways in which the archive demonstrates that assumptions of intergenerational ruptures are overblown since, for example, mourning, melancholia and the rewriting of the archive was a feature of pre-1994 Black South Africa so that pre-1994 has left a wake in the present and for the future. This article takes up Bhekizizwe's focus on haunting by considering how people position themselves in psychosocial, intersectional histories. provoked by everyday subjection to racism. It analyses 'found narratives', traces of particular people and/or groups, captured in, for example, filmed documentaries or social media as well as media interviews. It argues that their accounts of everyday subjection to racism are linked to psychosocial, intersectional histories in ways that demonstrate the importance of recognising that unacknowledged histories of racism haunt the present, reproducing the dehumanizing of groups subjected to racism and potentially spurring those affected to consciousness and calls for political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines archival data and statistical analysis to investigate the context-specific ways that prisons expanded and affected communities in the UK, focusing closely on the role of the UK's political economy. We present evidence of a significant increase of prisons in the counties where the coal-mining industry was dismantled during the 1980s and 1990s. We identify former coal-mining areas based on Coal Mining Reporting Areas and the methodology used by Beatty and Fothergill (1996) and test if more prisons were opened in former coal-mining areas than non-coal-mining areas per capita post-closures. Using Poisson regression analyses and controlling for population changes, we found that coal-mining counties were significantly more likely to acquire a new prison between 1981 and 2001 than those areas which were not affected by de-industrialisation. We apply Derrida's thinking on hauntology to reexamine the spatial legacy of Thatcherism in these communities as a means to understand history and culture, and the unraveling of the past, present, and future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spectral in translation may be considered an opportunity for opening, and the textual haunting that results, a way of conceiving of other-inhabitedness. Texts, translations, authors and translators have long been framed in the discourse of hauntedness as a way of coming to terms with their complex subjectivities. A hauntological approach to translation allows for an engagement with the presence-in-absence of a 'source,' the translational disjunctures of time and space, the return of the traumatic and the repressed, and the promise of alterity. We posit three potential components of translational spectrality: (1) translation and trauma; (2) haunted texts and readings, including acts of translation; and (3) the spectral author and translator. The figure of the ghost confronts that of the autonomous author, at the same time giving voice to the (dis)embodied translator and attendant invisibilities of their status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, the first-person narrator details her scholarly endeavour to translate into English Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire – the Irish-language lament of the eighteenth-century Kerry woman, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, on the death of her husband, Art Ó Laoghaire. Interwoven with this narrative, is the narrator’s intimate account of her lived personal experience whilst researching and translating this caoineadh. And yet, even as her search for the Caoineadh’s origins grows increasingly fervent, the narrator becomes ever more wary of the viability and implications of such historical retrieval. Caught between a desire to recover Ní Chonaill’s voice and presence and a recognition of the illusory nature of such longings, Ní Ghríofa’s text probes the interstices between the Caoineadh and its myriad iterations in performance, transcription, and translation. In this way, Ní Ghríofa confronts longstanding European anxieties regarding the relationship between writing and orality. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s seminal critique of this eighteenth-century crisis of writing, this article commences by revealing the caoineadh as an unacknowledged yet ongoing flashpoint in Enlightenment debates concerning orality and textuality. The article then turns to a discussion of Derrida’s associated reflections on haunting to consider the ways in which Ní Ghríofa responds to the marginalisation and silencing of the matrilineal tradition of keening in which she engages. Departing from Derrida’s genealogy of political inheritance, it argues that Ní Ghríofa’s narrative rehearses an alternative gothic textuality in which the oral and the written are intricately interwoven within Ireland’s past, present, and future. In so doing, it eschews the androcentric, ethnocentric and, as the text’s conclusion lays bare, anthropocentric hierarchies that continue to impinge upon both the Caoineadh’s legacy and the Irish literary canon in the twenty-first century.

The online community of vaporwave music is a cultural development that emerged in the 2010s and therefore fully within the ideological sphere of postindustrialism. Consisting of slowed-down samples from pop songs and advertising jingles from the 1980s and 1990s stitched together with original synthesizer pieces that resemble those used in horror-film scores, vaporwave is an undead, artificial soundscape that floats somewhere between music and sound. Its fake nostalgia for an alternative yet ossified past aims to confront our contemporary social paralysis in the face of postmillennial economic failure and political crisis. This article examines gothic elements of the vaporwave music phenomenon to analyze how vaporwave expresses sociopolitical traumas of late capitalism. Derridean notions of hauntology articulate the individual's self-isolation and objectification under the neoliberal homogenization of culture in vaporwave artist Begotten's contributions to the hushwave subgenre of the scene (2018-19). Vaporwave's cyclical and uncanny sounds embody the spectral haunting of Marx in capitalism's repetitive pronunciation of victory over its vanquished, communist foe in Sunsetcorp's 2009 single "nobody here" and the manifestations of American political trauma after 9/11 in Cat System Corporation's signalwave album, News at 11 (2016). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]