Postcolonial Hauntologies (ACLA 2021)

What sorts of specters haunt the postcolonial realm? How can we conceive of hauntologies that enable us to effectively listen to postcolonial specters? Derrida defines hauntology as a way in which we can learn to acknowledge those things about us or around us that we have forgotten how to notice. He emphasizes that by acknowledging specters, hauntology performs a gesture of “positive conjuration” in which specters are raised to be listened to and not in order to be exorcised. Acting as a disruption to western notions of space and time, specters function as transformative mediums of postcolonial recovery by making space for the co-existence of the past within the present and acknowledging the existence of alternative histories. By examining hauntology through a postcolonial lens, our session seeks to explore the ways in which we can reconcile with those things that “modern history has rendered ghostly” (Gordon).
We invite papers that critically engage with hauntologies, specters, and spectral processes in a postcolonial context.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Memory, memorialization, and postmemory
• Disidentification, resistance, and worldmaking
• Haunted places and spaces
• Forgotten histories and nostalgia
• Museums and museumization
• (Post)colonial amnesia
• In/Visibility and surveillance
• Traveling specters

Please submit your abstract (200-300 words) and a brief bio through the ACLA portal note by October 31, 2020. For queries, feel free to contact us: tarafder@wisc.edu & achatt5@uwo.ca