Haunting the Future: Imagining Other Futures in Contemporary Diasporic Black and Diasporic Jewish Literature
Datum
2022-10-04
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Verlag
University of Oregon
Zusammenfassung
Haunting the Future: Imagining Other Futures in Contemporary Diasporic Black and Diasporic Jewish Literature examines how ghosts help those they haunt recognize other ways of understanding history, subjectivity, and living in the aftermath of violence. Most importantly, Haunting the Future, argues that ghosts reveal other, potential futures, and encourage the living to build better futures. This study unsettles the assumption that we must always exorcise our ghosts. What happens if we stop expecting exorcism and instead allow literary ghosts can teach us how to honor the past without letting it possess us and how to build more ethical futures? This question at the core of Haunting the Future pushes us to reconsider what ghosts do and represent in contemporary literature. While previous studies of haunting often consider it a symptom of traumatic repetition or a representation a past that will not rest in peace, Haunting the Future explores how haunting is actually often working in service of the future. Haunting, in other words, is more than simply the resurrection and repetition of past traumas, but functions as a way of engaging in ethical future building. Haunting in this sense, works directly against the concept that history repeats itself and that ghosts are simply repetitions of past trauma; haunting is wholly concerned with the future. This project is organized into two main sections. The first section, “Undoing Expectations and Rethinking the Ghost,” discusses the traditional interpretations of ghosts and the expectations that go along with these. The two works of literature analyzed in this first section each push against these expectations and open other avenues for understanding what ghosts are capable of. Rethinking ghosts makes critics more receptive to other ways that ghosts work upon those they haunt. The second section, “Creating Haunted Futures,” puts these retheorizations into action by analyzing how two works of literature and two memorial museums deploy haunting in service of the future. This section argues against the assumption that ghosts are representations of a troubled or troubling past. Rather, it argues that ghosts help illuminate the ways in which the future can be made better, especially for those who come from legacies of violence. At its most distilled, the core principle of Haunting the Future remains actually quite straightforward: listen to ghosts and they will show us how to achieve better, more ethical futures.
Beschreibung
Schlagwörter
American literature, Black literature, Ghosts, Haunted futurities, Haunting, Jewish literature