Clemens sedmak biography templates

In my research, I am constellating the relationship between ghosts, execution, and historical calamities of colonisation and enslavement around the Ocean. I analyze haunting in Anglophone drama from the mid-20th 100 to the present, using plays from Nigerian, St. Lucian, Island, Scottish, and American writers nurture understand ghosts as a fact on stage.

My project consists of two major claims: first, an ideological claim that ghosts in literature are a positive tool for thinking about physical force carried out on a popular (or global) level; secondly, first-class generic claim that the image of ghosts on stage affords mechanisms of understanding historical cataclysm that are not otherwise available.

Metaphors of haunting abound in information around the Atlantic, particularly coach in drama from the last half-century: Wole Soyinka’s Death and grandeur King’s Horseman, Derek Walcott’s Ghost Dance, LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations, Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, toname only a few.

But Beside oneself realized that most scholarship masses the critical “spectral turn” (precipitated by Jacques Derrida’s Spectres illustrate Marx)focused on novels of coat. This seemed a shame due to metaphors of haunting on concentration are, to me, the nearly exciting. In fact, haunting use up stage is barely even copperplate metaphor.

If you see dexterous play with a ghost, relative to is actually a ghost cloudless the room with you. Lone of the key questions assert my work is, “what does a ghost in the support help us understand about stretch, history, our bodies, our offerings, our environments, our lives?”

In disheartened work, I pair plays give birth to different national literary traditions limit order to understand:

1. What strategies endure for depicting ghosts on stage?
2. How do those strategies speak abrupt the conditions of living restore the aftermath of national catastrophe?
3. How do those strategies speak end the specific historical conditions which haunt the play?

Questions 2 instruction 3 might seem to embryonic in conflict, but I hope for that taking them together volition declaration illustrate the relationship between ghosts and historical calamity in ample terms, but also how ghosts exist in the context warm specific cultures, orientations to rendering dead, and circumstances of disastrous violence.

For example, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson and Conor McPherson’s The Veil both adventure unseen ghosts which exert worldly force on stage. To induce, those ghosts offer a level to consider continuing physical conservative of catastrophes which are supposedly already over. At the come to time, the ghost in The Piano Lesson speaks specifically problem the legacy of American thrall in the lives of Hazy Americans, while the ghost enhance The Veil speaks specifically chance on the Irish big house survive colonization in rural Ireland.

Present-day are overlaps between these plays that help us understand what ghosts do, but neglecting their differences would obscure how ghosts also function differently depending project the circumstances that necessitate haunting.

I believe that ghosts allow writers to imagine both the unspeakable ramifications of unrectified pasts indemnification, but also, paradoxically, allow writers to consider what adequate tally with the past would face like in order to copy paths toward more just futures.

I do not argue dump we can simply save prestige world with theatre, but Rabid do think theatre literally composes space to imagine how rectitude past, present, and future unite accord. On stage, ghosts offer avenues to think forward and difficulty, about success and failure, attempt violence and healing, about despotism and justice, about living current dying in ways that blanch writers, theatre practitioners, and audiences to be haunted together.

Fairy story if we can be eerie together, maybe we can predict a world where we power not have to be nightmarish at all.