ARTH 448/FMST 448 - Special Topics in Art and Film: Haunting in Contemporary Film & Culture

• Tuesdays, 8:45-12:45
• FB 250
• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

This course explores haunting and spectres as motifs that reoccur in contemporary film, art, and culture.

In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon proposed haunting as a trope which, rather than signalling absence or disavowal, acknowledges that the spectral is a “seething presence” refusing to be laid to rest. Haunting offers us a way to think and speak—sometimes obliquely—about racism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and other violences that society attempts to disavow. It also proposes the figures through which we can begin to articulate how things linger and remain, no matter the effort to erase and repress them. Ghosts disturb the stability of the body, subjectivity, knowledge; they also trouble modernity itself as a fantasy of linearity, autonomy, and progress. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from imbricated studies of film, new media, and contemporary art, this course traces the ways in which haunting reoccurs in our cultural imaginary and “saturates” modern social life.