The Ruins of Empire: Postcolonial Hauntings
The notion of ‘haunting’ connotes windswept houses tormented by ghosts and specters, forging a connection between an unresolved past, the troubled present, and imagined futures. With Derrida’s coinage of the French neologism l’hantologie (hauntology), the figure of the specter became a byword for the “disjunction in the presence of being” (Goellner 5), pointing to the conflicting connection between the present and the past. Indeed, “[i]nstead of demanding a distancing, the twists and turns of haunting manifest as a thinking against or after” (Blanco and Peeren 32).