Hauntology and Lost Futures: Trauma Narratives in the Contemporary Gothic

A post by Emma Dee

Introduction

We begin, not with a text, but with an image.

This is a depiction of a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, a well-known German Romantic painter and explorer of the sublime. Not only is this a representation of what many of us might think of when we hear the term ‘Gothic,’ but the story of this particular image might help elucidate a concept of hauntology that this article is exploring. This picture is not the original.

D(igital)éjà Vu: AI, Mnemohistory, and the Future of Memory

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Mnemohistory, a term coined by German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, refers to the study of how societies remember and construct their historical narratives. Unlike traditional historiography, which focuses on the objective recording and analysis of past events, mnemohistory emphasises the subjective processes through which memories are formed, preserved, and transmitted across generations. It explores the ways in which collective memory shapes, and is shaped by, cultural, social, and political contexts. Mnemohistory investigates the symbols, rituals, and narratives that communities use to create a sense of shared identity and continuity with the past. Originating from the Greek word “mnemos” meaning memory, and “historia,” meaning enquiry or knowledge, mnemohistory looks into the interaction between memory and history, recognising that our understanding of the past is not static but constantly reinterpreted through the lens of present concerns and future aspirations.

Monsters in Qualitative Data

A post by Sheng-Hsiang Lance Peng

Understanding qualitative data poses a significant challenge for many researchers. Despite available resources providing insights into data management strategies, researchers often struggle in this area. Researchers, especially those operating within collaborative contexts, ought to go into how individuals’ self-perceptions and their perceptions of others influence their environments, and to position themselves accordingly in relation to the varied narratives encountered.

The Ghost of the Ottoman Scourge: Ottoman Hauntology and Dystopia in Socialist Yugoslav History Textbooks (1945–1990)

A post by Bakir Ovčina

INTRODUCTION

In 1991, prominent Yugoslav Communist-turned-dissident Milovan Đilas reflected on how the egalitarian utopia of Marxism-Leninism was rapidly coming to its end. He pondered whether a ‘body of new and attractive ideas might arise – perhaps a call for a new utopia’ (Djilas and Urban 1991, 178). When the world was looking to the future, former Yugoslavia was in a deep crisis. Djilas did not believe Yugoslavia would fall apart (Djilas and Urban 1991, 175). He was wrong. The end of the Bolshevik utopia in Yugoslavia brought a devastating war. In that war, Serb forces sought to create their own new utopia, ‘a state cleansed of any “foreign” elements – a nationally pure Greater Serbia’ (Weitz 2003, 236). Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević’s promised state was bound up in utopian language of ‘all Serbs in one state,’ ‘fast railways’ and ‘Swedish job protection’ (Korać 2014). This utopia also meant wholesale genocide of the Bosniak/Muslim population in Bosnia, culminating on 11 July 1995 in Srebrenica, where the forces of General Ratko Mladić, in his words, ‘took revenge on the Turks’ by butchering some 8,372 men and boys (Suljagić 2021, 1). The ‘Turks’ he referred to were the Bosnian Muslims, identified with the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire (ca. 1299–1922) controlled much of former Yugoslavia, Southeastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa. Its influence profoundly shaped the culture, customs and language, of especially the Balkan nations (Lory 2015, 391–404). Maria Todorova (1997, 46–47) argued it is ‘preposterous to look for an Ottoman legacy in the Balkans. The Balkans are the Ottoman legacy.’ However, this heritage has been often maligned, and the Ottoman Empire vilified.

Re-imagining the History of British Abolition: The New Historical Consciousness in Winsome Pinnock’s Rockets and Blue Lights

A post by Xiting Qiao

Introduction

Abolitionism, the movement that aimed to end the Atlantic slave trade and to free the enslaved people, was important in the historical development of countries in Western Europe and the Americas. Although the movement began earlier in France and Britain, the United States is written in the history of abolition to have played a more important role. From a historiographical perspective, the movement in the United States was more intense, as a backdrop to the American Civil War. Moreover, it operated in tandem with other social reforms, such as the Prohibition and women’s suffrage movements, thus adding the complexity. On a literary level, slave narratives, abolitionist fiction, and neo-slave narratives also constitute important genres in the African American literary canon, playing an ongoing role in opposing slavery, preserving historical memory, and documenting the progress of civil rights. In the 21st century, the neo-slave narratives produced by cultural industries (musicals, films, documentaries, etc.) have also occupied a central place in the representation of abolitionist history.

Mati Diop’s Atlantics: Towards a Border Hauntology?

A post by Nabil Ferdaoussi

Border studies have become an ever-expanding field of inquiry, integrating conceptual and theoretical frameworks from the humanities, social sciences and further afield. To pin down what Border Studies is, or gauge its epistemological scope, is thus no easy feat. In fact, a coterie of border scholars is apprehensive about the hyper-interdisciplinarity of the field—irrespective of the gains it has reaped, probing the added-value, relevance and methodological rigor of these disciplinary overlaps. Whilst a series of epistemological ‘turns’ have punctuated the field, the so-called ‘processual turn’ has been trumpeted as a tour de force, redirecting our focus from the border as an ontological object to bordering as a process of reproducing, rationalizing and sustaining exclusionary practices.

Hauntology of Trash in Environmental Education

A post by Rangga Kala Mahaswa, Gloria Bayu Nusa Prayuda, and Luthfi Baihaqi Riziq

1 Introduction

In Postscript on the Societies of Control (1999), Gilles Deleuze argues that capitalism is geographically separated into first-world capitalism and third-world capitalism. First-world Capitalism is characterised by the absence of involvement in production, more about regulating the flow of surplus, signified by stocks, and offering services instead of products. The third world still maintains the old way of buying raw materials and selling finished products (Deleuze, 1999, p. 4). The levels of production, types of products capitalism offers, and geographical conditions, therefore, separate the first and third worlds. The term “Third World” itself has become bad connotative nowadays: it signified poor and developing countries starting in the Cold War period (Wolf-Phillips, 1987, p. 1313). The connotations “poor” and “developing” are a kind of stigma. Many countries have tried to overcome it to reach the ultimate stage: becoming a developed country using economic or educational policies. Indonesia is one of the many countries in the Global South that has attempted to become a developed country characterised by rapid economic growth.