Specters and Spooks: Developing A Hauntology of The Black Body Public Deposited

Analytics

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
Request Version for Screen Reader
Last Modified
  • March 19, 2019
Creator
  • Powell, Kashif
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Communication
Abstract
  • This dissertation utilizes theories of embodiment and performance to develop a "hauntology of blackness," which investigates imaginative sites of death constructed through the historical, social, and performative facets of institutional slavery in the United States to theorize notions of blackness and the black body. I argue that the relationship between the black body and death have conjured a death-driven specter that manifest historically, performatively, visually, and phenomenally as blackness. The rise and continual return of this "specter of blackness" positions the black body in the United States as a body "haunted" by its own biological and phenotypical disposition. Placing the theory of Jacques Derrida and Frantz Fanon in conversation with scholars such as Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison, and others, I evoke the language of haunting to consider the profound effect the relationship between the black body and death has had on ontological, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological understandings of blackness within post-modernity.
Date of publication
Keyword
Subject
DOI
Identifier
Resource type
Rights statement
  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Pollock, Della
  • Alexander Craft, Renee
  • Reyes, Alvaro
  • Lucas, Ashley
  • Watts, Eric
Degree
  • Doctor of Philosophy
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Graduation year
  • 2014
Language
Publisher
Place of publication
  • Chapel Hill, NC
Access
  • There are no restrictions to this item.
Parents:

This work has no parents.

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
Powell_unc_0153D_14867.pdf 2019-04-07 Public