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Ghosts/Haunting theories in the politics of the Middle East/North Africa region

Nayera Soliman

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Ghosts/Haunting Theories in the politics of the Middle East/North Africa region Nayera Abdelrahman Soliman How can we study political and societal phenomena through the unseen felt? Can we study States and their policies through ghosts? How can we understand the feminist theories in the light of haunting theories? Ghosts and haunting are the subject of study in diverse disciplines: sociology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, cultural studies, media studies, post-colonial studies, geography, and political sciences (Lincoln and Lincoln 2015, 191) This course aims to familiarize the students of political sciences and gender studies with this growing literature and its intersections with their two main fields of studies, with a focus on the Middle East/North Africa region. This course thinks about haunting, ghosts and the feelings they invoke in the context of the politics of the Middle East/North Africa region. In this course, we aim to think through how a focus on haunting and feeling promises ways of capturing contradictions, impossibility, hope, defeat, and a whole range of political beliefs and practices that might slip out of view when we use a narrow definition of political, social and economic transformation. Through this course, we will study the correlations between the haunting theory and the concept of ghost one one hand and the feminist theories in writing history and dealing with memory. The political sciences and gender studies students will read a range of literature on haunting, ghosts and memory that will help them to look at the political and social phenomena from “the other door” in the words of Avery Gordon (2008). Haunting has multiple genealogies, including work on the aftermath of conflict in East Asia, the afterlives of enslavement in the Americas, and work on the defeat of communism and the spectre that emerges from it. In her book Ghostly Matters (2008), Avery Gordon eloquently shows us how following the sounds, pictures and appearances of ghosts allow us to decode the un-seen and un-narrated social, political and economic dimensions of contemporary inequality and violence. Thus, the course reflects on the following questions: How might we understand the appearance and disappearance of “ghosts” and what might they signify? How might we follow, converse or study these ghosts, methodologically and analytically? How are the haunting theories and the feminist theories related? How can we study ghosts through a gender perspective? How might theories of affect and feeling help in understanding the appearance of ghosts and how they are experienced by a variety of people? How might affective experiences be connected to acts of remembering, acts of forgetting and the limits of the imagination around political struggle? How might we trace the intangible ways in which feelings, states and emotive experiences shape political and economic processes? How can we use haunting as an alternative way of knowledge production, and how might this build on calls to de-centre Western epistemologies and ontologies? Course flow: Why ghosts and how do they appear? Western academia and its ghosts Thinking against the ghost as a metaphor Travelling with ghosts; absences, archives and methodologies Haunting and feminist knowledge production Women and mothers as ghosts Political Ghosts Space and violence Haunting, nostalgia, and social classes Haunting between past and future close

14 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 14:00 - 16:00 14 Class schedule

Wed, 2025-04-16 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Nayera Soliman