Haunting and/as/of Power

Undergraduate / Graduate

Haunting is a liminal category that signifies presence despite absence, unfinished pasts in the present, or ruptures within what is considered human, scientific, normal and real. In this course we will examine multiple hauntings-as metaphor and as experience-situating them in a global context within the afterlives of racial and caste capitalism, gendered dispossession, empire, and neoliberalism. Mediated through ethnographies, social theory, literature, film, psychoanalysis and historical archives, we will encounter vampires, witches, zombies, jinn, ghosts, transgender monsters, the paranormal, aliens, and other friendly or vengeful spirits in order to understand how they story memory, time, space, embodiment, transgression, violence, and desire. How can the spectral be deciphered? What does being haunted feel like? How does haunting as an analytic foreground the sensuous, affective, intimate and overwhelming dimensions of self and other, of structures of power, and of the limits of the knowable? We will answer these questions and more through the work of David McNally, Tithi Bhattacharya, Silvia Federici, Susan Stryker, Christina Sharpe, Avery Gordon, Stefania Pandolfo, Emily Ng, and Susan Lepselter, among others.