"Postcolonial Spectralities"
This seminar explores the privileged relationships that the postcolonial may be said to entertain with the spectral through the lens of Francophone literature and cinema. Spectrality troubles both our sense of the passage of time and our sensory perception as such. Between life and death, between past and present, between visibility and invisibility, between presence and absence - spectres have frequently been used to highlight both the haunting nature of power and the interstitial being of the (post)colonial subject. The spectre can be that disembodied gaze that insinuates itself into the quotidian intimacies of those it haunts, the intangible « necropolitical » force that transforms others into living-dead. Or it can be a vision that counters such « zombification », drawing attention to itself and to the memory it embodies as an apparition that has shed its flesh yet bares its wounds. Our discussions will place various forms of spectrality in dialogue with each other as we examine key works of theory (Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Avery Gordon, Michael Rothberg, Achille Mbembe) alonside authors and filmmakers such as Leila Sebbar, Nina Bouraoui, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Emile Ollivier and Ousmane Sembene.