UC Santa Cruz

The conventional ghost story in the Western imagination follows a common narrative trope. A ghost, created by the occurrence of some kind of injustice, haunts the place where this injustice occurred. The protagonist(s) of this story will seek to resolve the haunting by repealing the ghost, thereby freeing themselves of this unsettling circumstance. But, what happens when the ghosts can haunt beyond the boundaries of the walls of the house? When the injustice that stirred the ghost is of such magnitude that it cannot be remediated?

Borderland Ghosts: Necropolitics at the Colonial Wound wrangles with these questions as they arise in the U.S.-Mexico border. As part of the colonial infrastructure of the modern world through which commodities flow and peoples movement is regulated, the U.S.-Mexico border is involved in the mass production of untimely deaths and postponed lives. It forms part of a capitalist necropolitics in which death becomes significantly more profitable a commodity than life. I assemble a variety of texts, stemming from multiple genres and disciplines, to map a necropolitical landscape of the border. I argue that attending to the conflict and violence happening at the borderlands also requires attending to the myriad of unappeasable and ubiquitous hauntings seeping across from the U.S. Mexico border. Through a comparative reading of literary and cultural texts via a science/speculative fiction lens, this project resituates haunting as a necessary unsettling that is rife with possibility and seeks to reestablish the relationship between the dead and the living that has been purposely severed by colonization. I contend that texts about the border, regardless of their assigned genre, can be read to listen for borderlands ghosts who through their material absence enact tangible forms of memory that disturbs the droning on of the capitalist and colonial machine and point us in the directions of other forms of being, of other ways of making the world.

Borderland ghosts, therefore, will never be placated or deferred, a phenomenon which prompts a reconsideration of what “justice” looks like for those rendered ghostly and all future ghosts conjured by the border. This project works through and from the borderlands to challenge conventional disciplinary, epistemological, and ontological boundaries. It offers a feminist literary critique and decolonial approach to the fields of border and immigration studies by situating the border within a long settler-colonial legacy that requires the assimilation, dispossession, and erasure of colonized peoples. Attending to hauntings is a decolonial practice that unsettles Western ontological definitions of personhood that deny colonized peoples their existence and deny agency to the dead. By centering the work of Mexican/Chicanx and indigenous scholars, and looking particularly at indigenous cosmologies, borderland ghosts, rather than read as metaphors or tropes, are (non)beings whose return should remind us of our collective responsibility towards building an Other possible futurity, one not plagued by proliferating border walls.