South Atlantic Hauntings: Geographies of Memory, Ancestralities and Re-Memberings

You who understand the dehumanization of forced removal-relocation-reeducation-redefinition, the humiliation of having to falsify your own reality, your voice – you know. And often cannot say it.  You try and keep on trying to unsay it, for if you don’t, they will not fail to fill in the blanks on your behalf, and you will be said.

(Trinh Minh-Ha, 1989, p.80).

The damné or condemned is not a ‘being there’ but a non-being or rather, as Ralph Ellison so eloquently elaborated, a sort of an invisible entity…What is invisible about the person of color is its very humanity, and this is in fact what the cry tries to call attention to. Invisibility and dehumanization are the primary expressions of the coloniality of Being 

(Nelson Maldonado-Torres 2007, p.257).

In South Atlantic Hauntings: Geographies of Memory, Ancestralities and Re-Memberings I move through and explore the parameters of a ‘reality’ constituted by the epistemologies of imperial western knowledge and its historical foundations. In this engagement the real is understood as being produced through the violent erasure of epistemological difference; the knowledge systems and othered ways of being; from beyond the bounds of what constitutes the real of the dominating epistemology. I work through the idea of elision with reference to knowledges and their enunciations that are produced as marginal through processes of disavowing the legitimacy, value or presence of ways of knowing and being that are ‘othered’ as they are different from hegemonic norms. I consider how this ‘real’ is constantly encroached upon and troubled by the presence of what it elides, that is, the othered realities it would deny. Elision, however, suggests that the subsumed is always (and regardless of its omission) present between and a part of that which is spoken, written and recognised. I engage with the possibilities for speaking from spaces of elision through a conception of ghosts and haunting. I am preoccupied with enunciations from spaces beyond epistemic power and the crisis such epistemically disobedient articulations cause to hegemony.

I engage with elided subjugated subjectivities with reference to subjects whose experiential realities, knowledges, enunciations and epistemologies have been marginalised and who, as such, have had their agency for self-authorship undermined. The hegemony that excludes the realities of those who subsist outside the universalised normative of the ‘west’ produces what Nelson Maldonado-Torres calls the “sub-ontological difference” through the “coloniality of Being”. I interrogate the link between coloniality of knowledge and coloniality of being in my engagement with realities shaped through contesting epistemologies. I look at the ways in which colonising epistemologies produce narratives and consider the shape these narratives took over the waters of the Atlantic during the formative episode that shaped the modern age. The use of the language of the spectral which is central to this project alludes to the simultaneous absence and presence  arising from the tussle between differing ontological orders. In using the image of the ghostly to articulate this elided phantom knowledge I aim to speak to the possibility of that which is denied and subsumed coming back to the surface and making its presence known in a moment of haunting. This language of the spectral is integral to my engagement with the illusive slippages in time, space, ‘reality’, hegemony and absences in relation to enunciations from spaces of elision.

The creative and theoretical work I offer is an enactment of such enunciation. It occurs through a dialogue between historically subjugated subjectivities while privileging South-South relations that function in relation to but are imaginatively and epistemologically unmediated by the Global North. The creative work that has driven this enquiry took the form of five discreet installations. Each of these installations was constituted by video and sound elements as well as found objects. Through the series of installations, I developed a network of relations across historical places and moments in time that were implicated in producing hierarchies of Being and knowing. Each of the sites had historical relevance to the development of coloniality. These were slave castles, colonial forts, European palaces, museums and colonial prisons. They are physical markers of the Histories I am concerned with. It is through these particularly potent nodes in the Histories and geographies of subjugation that I enter into an engagement with and augmentation of the narratives that endow them with significance. I have actively sought out and interfered with places and narratives that were/are involved in producing the erasure of certain kinds of bodies and peoples and histories, their voices and the value for certain kinds of lives from the fold of what constitutes full humanity. Through the interventions at these sites I address the systematic erasure they have been implicated in. As I am interested in the narratives that attest to the elided humanity of subjugated peoples I rely on 'othered' modes of recollection, on memories and ancestralities alongside Histories and archive to re-member them. By locating myself and the focus of this interrogation in the space of the elided; the enunciations I offer through the installations, the videos and the characters in them produce a disavowing of western hegemony.

 1.Nelson Maldonado-Torres, , ‘On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the development of a concept’ (2007)

2. In his book ‘Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History’ Ian Baucom gives an exegesis of this idea through a reading of Eduardo Glissants ‘Poetics of Relation’. In it he shows that “what we might just consider as a particularly brutal and exceptional event belonging to a distant and concluded past – the age of slavery that precedes the Enlightenment project of emancipation and the global spread of capitalism – is indeed a fundamental and paradigmatic event in the historical formation of our own present and its dominant cultural logic.” (Corio, 2014)