Traumatic Haunting in the Neocolonial World: “His House” in the Context of the Spectral Turn

Natasza Korczarowska

natasza.korczarowska@uni.lodz.pl
University of Lodz (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3130-128X

Abstract

The article analyses Remi Weekes’s film His House (2020) in the context of Jaques Derrida’s hauntology, refugee discourse, and Achille Mbembe’s nanoracism. The author treats the arrival of refugees from South Sudan to the former Empire (Great Britain) in terms of a traumatic haunting and places the entire film in the paradigm of the turn closely related to hauntological reflection. Weekes’s film can be regarded as a form of exorcism, the aim of which is to work through the experience of colonial and neocolonial trauma. In the author’s approach, hauntology is connected with Freud’s theory of trauma: the work of mourning and the concept of das Unheimliche, which refers to both what is “uncanny” and “un-home-ly.” Spectres – as in Avery Gordon’s work – are not seen here as a pre-modern superstition or a symptom of individual psychosis but as a social phenomenon of great importance in the neocolonial world. Hauntology – emphasizing the issue of collective responsibility for the Other – includes ethics in the project of postcolonial historiography.


Keywords:

neocolonialism, refugee discourse, hauntology, Remi Weekes, South Sudan

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Published
2024-12-23

Cited by

Korczarowska, N. (2024) “Traumatic Haunting in the Neocolonial World: ‘His House’ in the Context of the Spectral Turn”, Kwartalnik Filmowy, (128), pp. 6–28. doi: 10.36744/kf.3394.

Authors

Natasza Korczarowska 
natasza.korczarowska@uni.lodz.pl
University of Lodz Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3130-128X

Professor at the Department of Film and Audiovisual Media, Institute of Contemporary Culture, University of Lodz. She specializes in the history of Polish film, contemporary European cinema, and the problems of historiophoty. She published the books Ojczyzny prywatne [Private Homelands] (2007) and Inne spojrzenie [Another Way] (2013) – the latter devoted to the images of history in the Polish feature film after 1965. Since 2008, she has cooperated with the Polish Film Institute and the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute on the educational project Academy of Polish Film.



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