Keywords: Colonialism, Hauntings, Postcolonial, Memory, Imperial, Afterlives, Bodies, Narratives 

Empire's ghosts persist beyond colonial rule, manifesting as hauntings that collapse the distance between past and present. These specters transform the immaterial into tangible forces that infiltrate daily life. The colonial past is never truly gone; it lingers, erupting through material and psychic traces.

Imperial hauntings materialize through disappeared bodies under regimes built on colonial foundations; through enslaved and indentured laborers whose exploitation generated imperial wealth; through ongoing violence against marginalized communities; and through the erasure of Black, Brown, Indigenous, queer, and trans bodies from historical narratives and contemporary spaces. This workshop will explore how haunting and empire—imperial, colonial, neoliberal, or militaristic—intersect to reveal layered manifestations of imperial power in everyday existence. We approach haunting as simultaneously an analytical framework, empirical reality, methodological intervention, and positionality. As colonized subjects, we seek to identify the spectral forces shaping our presents and futures, reclaiming agency in how we position ourselves within these hauntings while imagining decolonial possibilities beyond the empire's relentless grip.

We invite graduate students, early career scholars, artists, and creative writers to contribute to this workshop. We aim to bring together ideas and perspectives that use diverse, intersectional, and innovative methodologies, challenging the normative understandings of ‘rigor’. If you want to talk about ghosts, be our guest— come to Puerto Rico! 

Please email your abstracts to both Prateek Srivastava at  srivaspe@mail.uc.edu and Sreeparna Das at das2sa@mail.uc.edu by March 25.