ARTH 448 / FMST 448 Advanced Seminar in Art and Film: Haunting in Contemporary Art and Culture

• Tuesdays, 8:45am-11:15am
• EV-3-760
• Instructor: Dr. May Chew

In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon proposed that haunting, rather than signalling absence or cessation, instead acknowledges that the spectral is a “seething presence” refusing to be laid to rest. Haunting offers us a way to think and speak about racism, imperialism, settler colonialism, and other violences and traumas that society often attempts to disavow, but which continue to permeate contemporary life. Haunting also reveals how spectral presences disturb fantasies of linearity, autonomy, and historical progress. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that draws from studies of film, art, architecture, visual and material culture, this course traces the ways in which haunting reoccurs in art and culture. We will also focus on how contemporary artists’ interventions with colonial topographies and narratives suggest ways that official histories might potentially be unsettled.