Hauntological cinema: Resisting epistemic erasure and temporal slippage with Sorry to Bother You.

Through a hauntological analysis of Boots Riley's Afrosurrealist comedy, Sorry to Bother You (2018), we explore how fiction can empower sociologists to think beyond the limits of empiricism to better encounter experiences of erasure and senses of temporal disjuncture that characterise capitalist realism. The panoramic power of cinematic world-building enables representations of the ontologically reified but empirically elusive atmosphere of capitalist realism. Sorry to Bother You, we argue, rearticulates through Afrosurrealism the absurdity of capitalist realism's whitewashing of its innately racialising violence. Drawing upon the thought of Mark Fisher (1968–2017) we examine the film's central allegorical spectres: the code-switching comedy of the insidious White Voice, the body horror of the Equisapien human–horse hybrids, and the reality warping influence of shadowy megacorporation Worry Free. By resisting the empirical trappings of capitalist realism, hauntology is able to critique the wavering repression of the no longer and the not yet – the ignored legacies of unresolved traumas and a nostalgia for a future we were promised but never arrived. In response, Sorry to Bother You re-presents to a mass audience the spectre of a positive abolitionism and brings into focus an acid communist horizon using hauntological techniques that visualise experiences denied a presence under capitalist realism. This article aims to highlight the ontological and political potentialities of such works of art and their analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]