Toward a Critical Hauntology: Bare Afterlife and the Ghosts of Ba Chúc

• Published in: Comparative studies in society and history Vol. 57; no. 1; pp. 191 - 220
• Main Authors: Lincoln, Martha, Lincoln, Bruce
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.01.2015
• Subjects: American literature; Derrida, Jacques; Essays; Ethics; Fear & phobias; Ghosts; Gordon, Avery; Homicide; Human subjects; Interaction; Interdisciplinary research; Lifetime; Massacre; Memory; Messianism; Morality; Morals; Morrison, Toni (1931-2019); Ontology; Political activism; Scholarship; The Unquiet Dead; Vietnam; Vietnamese language; Villages; United States > US
• ISSN: 0010-4175; 1475-2999; 1471-633X
• DOI: 10.1017/S0010417514000644

While cross-disciplinary analysis of ghosts and haunting has burgeoned in recent decades, much of this scholarship presumes the figure of the ghost as a less than literal apparition. We propose that writers such as Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon, who make use of the ghostly as a trope, are in fact describing a phenomenon we term secondary haunting, distinct from accounts of unquiet spirits who address the living directly with specific demands for redress: a visceral and often frightening experience we term primary haunting. Drawing on a contemporary account of the ghosts of a massacre in a Vietnamese village, we explore the complex interaction of primary and secondary haunting, the different kinds of memory work they engage in and the different moral communities they mobilize.