Dead Dead but not Gone Gone: A (Re)Memory Archive

Academic summary

The project aims to provide frameworks for the contemplation of history by drawing upon narratives of grief. I am interested in how Indigenous and African diasporic grieving practices defy the concept of Western time as a linear versus cyclical structure. The title “Dead Dead but not Gone Gone” uses the double repetition device of symploce as an invitation to contemplate how someone or something can be deceased or departed but still conscious. Collective grieving practices are omnipresent in global Indigenous and African diasporic societies. These practices often serve as a confrontation towards ahistoricism by prioritizing the collective voice of a community eschewing modern Western philosophies on grief. 

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology positioned with Christina ’s praxis of wake work, my research entry point is how grief lives and functions in the physical body, in memory and in society. Derrida argues that the possibility of a just future depends on our readiness "to learn to live with ghosts. He insists on an obligation to live not solely in the present but beyond all living present aware of and attentive to those already dead or not yet born.  pronounces that wake work is “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme (the wake of slavery) with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.

I´m looking at landscapes of death, or deathscapes within the context of the African diaspora and how they have been westernized over time, how they have been impacted by the great catastrophe of trans atlantic chattel slavery. By deathscapes I mean the spatio-temporal aspects and planes of transition between the living and spirit worlds. Im interested in how deathscapes can serve to interrogate history, both History with an uppercase H (as a written past to be studied for scientific research) but also history with a lowercase  (an oral past which carries implications for the present and future).

For this research I will focus on two sites:

-the Bemba and Tonga tribes of Zambia in Southern Africa

and

the Gullah Geeche ethnic groups of the Low Country in the United States of America.