Can grieving death be the presence of a haunting? In this brief think piece, I draw on memory studies to contemplate the ongoing pandemic of racialized violence against Black and Indigenous people specifically and people of colour more generally. Life and death, surviving and suffering, and tenebrous apparitions are discussed as I synthesize the work of Sharpe (2016), Dean (2015), and Gordon (2008) to consider how we, particularly white scholars like myself, are implicated in a present that is haunted by an insidiously active past. Vision and the nuances of sight are also discussed in relation to whiteness, accountability, and allyship with/in our seemingly over-and-done-with pandemic of anti-Black and settler-colonial violence.
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