Abstract:This paper applies Avery Gordon’s insights in Ghostly Matters to Kivu Ruhorahoza’s 2019 film, A Tree Has Fallen, and vice-versa. For Gordon, the ghost reveals visibility itself to be “a complex system of permissions and prohibitions.” The ghost is a case, as Gordon puts it, of “visible invisibility,” of seeing that one is not there. In Ruhorahoza’s film, the protagonist, Simon, is an African asylum seeker in the UK, now a ghost. Even before he becomes ghostly matter, Simon is already ghostly: he is held in lim… Show more
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