Urban specters

Abstract

In this piece, we take up haunting as a spatial method to consider what geography can learn from ghosts. Following Avery Gordon’s theorizations of haunting as a sociological method, a consideration of the spectral offers a means of reckoning with the shadows of social life that are not always readily apparent. Drawing upon art installations in Brooklyn, NY, White Shoes (2012–2016), and Oakland, CA, House/Full of BlackWomen (2015–present), we find that in both installations, Black women artists perform hauntings, threading geographies of race, sex, and speculation across past and present. We observe how these installations operate through spectacle, embodiment, and temporal disjuncture, illuminating how Black life and labor have been central to the construction of property and urban space in the United States. In what follows, we explore the following questions: what does haunting reveal about the relationship between property, personhood, and the urban in a time of racial banishment? And the second, how might we think of haunting as a mode of refusing displacement, banishment, and archival erasure as a way of imagining “livable” urban futures in which Black life is neither static nor obsolete?

Towards an intersectional postcapitalism

“…Secondly, connections can be drawn between Fisher's work and contemporary Black and Indigenous art and activism. Indeed, the reworked Situationist impulse for which Oli advocates is best lived-out by Black and Indigenous women artists, some of which are foregrounded in Margaret's work (Best and Ramirez, 2021;Ramirez, 2017). For example, Margaret considers Faustine Isabel's 'excavation' (Best andRamirez, 2021: 1046) of Black women's exploitation in the formation of property relations, disturbing these relations' supposed neutrality and allowing troubling ghosts to make to their presents/ presence felt in the urban environment.…”

“…Indeed, the reworked Situationist impulse for which Oli advocates is best lived-out by Black and Indigenous women artists, some of which are foregrounded in Margaret's work (Best and Ramirez, 2021; Ramirez, 2017). For example, Margaret considers Faustine Isabel's ‘excavation’ (Best and Ramirez, 2021: 1046) of Black women's exploitation in the formation of property relations, disturbing these relations’ supposed neutrality and allowing troubling ghosts to make to their presents/presence felt in the urban environment. Many such contemporary artistic and activist practices of Black and Indigenous people resonate strongly with the grotesque stratigraphy inherent in Fisher's work (e.g., Adura Onashile's G hosts – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crkk7LM53v0), cracking the consumerist veneer of the urban to highlight its oppressive substrate.…”

“…How might desire for these two different ethics – of slowness and weirdness – amplify one another? I would argue that some of the most cutting edge work in this regard is flagged in Margaret's work (Best and Ramirez, 2021), and it is to her piece that I now turn.…”

Living and dying in the shadow of coal: Relocating social death and its contestations in Lephalale

“…The mining and energy sectors therefore control not only large portions of the land but also provide basic services to the area. Hartman (1997) and Best and Ramírez (2021), writing from the context of the United States, highlight how property rights and property regimes are one of the ways that anti-blackness continues to structure the present. This is evident in Lephalale as the afterlife of apartheid continues through regimes of property ownership and private control over basic resources, which produce relations of domination such that ordinary black people experience themselves as nothing – an experience of social death – in the face of corporate power.…”

World-making, desire, and the future

“…Outlining the atmospheric affect of capitalism, Sutherland writes how ‘affective resistances of capitalism might be in suspension; denoting both a sense of stalling (of something interrupted but with a possibility of future movement) and something ‘hanging in the air’, something not yet grounded’. Here, I see resonance in how haunting, as a temporal and spatial method with genealogies in Black and Indigenous studies, attends to the specters of colonialism, and how haunting too is a form of stalling, of refusal to let colonial histories be buried (Best and Ramírez, 2021; Gordon, 2008; Heron, 2022; McKittrick, 2013; Roberts, 2020). Haunting is a spatially ephemeral form of ‘remembering and reminding’ (Tuck and Ree, 2013: 642) that refuses the colonial-capitalist (death-making) order, operationalized by particular Black and Indigenous art forms.…”