The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.
#4: Afterlives, Ghosts, Hauntings
When: Friday November 13, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)
Where: Zoom
The readings for this session consider the afterlives of slavery and colonisation, tracking the way that the histories of racial ascription continue to haunt the present. The sociologist Avery Gordon described the concept of haunting as ‘one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security).’ This session will focus on the temporalities of racialising practices and the ways in which unresolved or repressed social violence (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) repeatedly and cyclically makes itself known. The readings consider how the afterlives of race are mediated and how the reproduction of racial regimes might be interrupted.
Tuck and Ree offer a glossary of terms related to the violence of colonialism and the various trauma it produces; the Karrabing Film Collective offer as a dystopian vision of the near future that considers the history of the forced removal of Aboriginal children and shows us how the past is bound up with the present; Ruha Benjamin considers the afterlives of slavery in relation to caraceral systems in the US and posits kinship as a way of intervening in the reproducing of racial injustice; and Legacy Russell develops the glitch and the void as generative figures for moving beyond the body defined by structures of domination such as the gender binary and race. Further readings provide additional context for thinking through the climate of anti-Blackness and further developing the concept of haunting.
Themes/Objects: archives, racial legacies, afterlives of slavery and colonisation, temporality, reproduction, affective climates, incarceration, hauntings, glitches, agency
Readings for Discussion:
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis (Routledge, 2013), pp. 639-658
Karrabing Film Collective (film), The Mermaids, or Aiden In Wonderland (2018)
Ruha Benjamin, ‘Black AfterLives Matter’, Boston Review, July 2018
Legacy Russell, Chapter 4: ‘Glitch Ghosts’ and Chapter 6: ‘Glitch Encrypts’, from Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020)
Further Reading:
Christina Sharpe, ‘The Weather’, The New Inquiry, July 2017
Avery Gordon, ‘her shape and his hand’, from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008): pp. 3-30
To join the mailing list for the reading group and receive access to copies of the texts, please contact Andrew Brooks directly.
