Call for Book Chapters

Future Spectralities: Raising Ghosts, Conjuring Black Futurity

Edited by Viola Marchi (University of Bern) and Marco Petrelli (University of Pisa)

If, as Dionne Brand writes, “Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting” (25), what does it mean to be haunted—and to haunt—in African American literature and thought? The aim of the proposed collection is to explore the many ghosts and forms of spectrality that populate twenty-first century Black literary, artistic, and theoretical production, their functions, and the relation they entertain with the dimension of the future. 

Black Studies in the twenty-first century have exhibited a pronounced engagement with the temporal structures shaping the epistemological dimensions of Blackness in a post-emancipation world. Saidiya Hartman’s conceptualization of the “afterlife of slavery” has been instrumental in articulating Blackness as inextricably bound to the “racial calculus and political arithmetic” (Hartman 6) entrenched by the plantation economy. Extending Hartman’s analysis, Afropessimism posits Blackness as “coterminous with Slaveness” (Wilderson 226), existing within what Calvin Warren describes as a “void and stasis of temporal linearity” (16), a condition of exile from the historical telos dictated by post-Enlightenment epistemologies. In such a divergent temporality, shaped by a traumatic past that resurges to disrupt the present, the now becomes ensnared in the spectral return of history. 

The gothicized lexicon of Afropessimist-adjacent critique proves particularly effective in interrogating such an existential temporality structured by repetition, phenomenologically uncanny, and in which Blackness is rendered visible through its ghosts and as ghost. As race has operated “over the past centuries as a foundational category that is at once material and phantasmic” (Mbembe 2), the experience of Blackness is not only shadowed by historical trauma, but haunted by the specters of racialization that continue to determine the everyday reality of Black existence. This is the phantasmic process underlying the “haunted life” David Marriott describes, in which the ghost loses its potential as agent of disruption of hierarchical dichotomies and becomes the signifier of a fetishized body caught “between race and terror, magic and surveillance, idolatry and power” (2).

At the same time, however, as Christina Sharpe and others contend, Blackness asserts an “insistence on existing” (Sharpe 11), a refusal to be defined exclusively through death, negation, and metaphysical spectrality. Indeed, significant scholarship has explored how the disruption of Western temporalities is inherent to Blackness itself. By theorizing Blackness through a distinct temporality – one disjointed from the predictive mechanisms of Western epistemology – different conceptions of futurity emerge. While Tina Campt proposes a notion of Black feminist futurity as praxis and performance, as a present prefiguration of a future that must happen, Afrofuturist imaginaries, as Mark Fisher suggests, unravel “any linear model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession” (47). 

A key thinker of the “spectral turn” in the Humanities, Fisher draws on Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology to argue that Afrofuturism and hauntology are “two sides of the same double-faced phenomenon” (46), bearing the same “kind of temporal disjunction that has been constitutive of the Afrodiasporic experience” (46). For Derrida himself, the ghost is not simply a revenant from the past, but a figure that emerges from the future to haunt the present, unsettling its fabric and disrupting the expected course of events. Thus framed, Blackness is doubly haunted: first, by the uncanny recurrence of the past in the afterlife of slavery, and second, by the unfulfilled possibility of a future that fails to materialize. 

Crucially for our discussion, in both Fisher’s and Derrida’s accounts of hauntology the ghost emerges as conceptual metaphor precisely when the horizon of the future begins to fade. This theme is central to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which confronts the vanishing future of communism, and Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, where hauntology becomes paramount for grappling with what he calls, following Franco Bifo Berardi, “the slow cancellation of the future.” As Fisher claims, “[w]hen the present has given up on the future, we must listen for the relics of the future in the unactivated potentials of the past” (53). 

Yet, from the standpoint of the current predicament, are the “relics of the future” Fisher urges us to retrieve truly viable, or even accessible? And what occurs when Derrida’s spectral orientation is inverted, when the ghost is not a symptom of a future haunting the present but is actively deployed as a theoretical and aesthetic instrument to haunt the future? What kinds of future can be envisioned when the dynamics of return, resurgence, and repetition are harnessed as mechanisms of worldmaking, or as tools for dismantling the existing order? Can Blackness-as-haunted be reconceptualized as Blackness-as-haunting, and which futures might such a theoretical shift engender? If “haunting does not initiate a story” but is “the sign of a blockage of story” (Luckhurst 247), what narrative strategies are available to emplot past, present, and future otherwise? 

When W. E. B. Du Bois describes the Black American condition as shrouded by a veil, he evokes a spectral formulation to express a mode of existence foreclosed from full participation in the world. Yet, he also characterizes African Americans as a “sort of seventh son[s],” endowed with “second-sight” (3). The veil, the spectral lens through which Blackness perceives and is perceived, may thus also be a site of clairvoyance and visionary potential, as well as a medium of deliberate distortion, optical refraction, and radical opacity. It is this spectral future, glimpsed and modulated through the veil, that forms the crux of our inquiry.

Topics may include, but are not limited to: 

• Literature and future spectralities: forms, techniques, narratives, genres. 
• Future spectralities in/and the performing and visual arts. 
• Ghost stories and/as philosophies of time.
• Hauntology and Black ontologies.
• Representations of Blackness in/and the spectral nature of modern media.
• Racial capitalism, the commodification of ghosts, and the spectrality of the commodity.
• Ghosts, hypervisibility, and racial surveillance.
• Spectrality, race, and decoloniality.
• Black time(s) and phantasmagorias of futures lost and/or regained.

We invite interested contributors to send a 350-500 word abstract and a short academic bio (max. 200 words) to viola.marchi@unibe.ch and to marco.petrelli@unipi.it by January 11, 2026. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 15, 2026. Final chapters should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words in length, including notes and references, and will be due by September 20, 2026. The editors are in active conversation with transcript Verlag, who have expressed strong interest in the project, for inclusion in the Critical Futures book series. Publication will be finalized once the provisional table of contents is in place. 

References

Brand, Dionne. A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging. Vintage, 2001.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd, 1973. 

Fisher, Mark. “The Metaphysics of Crackle: Afrofuturism and Hauntology.” Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture 5.2 (2013): 42-55. 

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route Terror. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 

Luckhurst, Roger. “‘Impossible Mourning’ in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Michele Roberts’s Daughters of the House.” Critique 37.4 (1996): 243-260. 

Marriott, David. Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. Rutgers UP, 2007.

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois. Duke UP, 2017. 

Sharpe, Christina. In The Wake. Duke UP, 2016. 

Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke UP, 2018. 

Wilderson, Frank B. Afropessimism. W. W. Norton & Co., 2020.