Clemens sedmak biography channel

In my research, I am constellating the relationship between ghosts, track record, and historical calamities of village and enslavement around the Ocean. I analyze haunting in Anglophone drama from the mid-20th Hundred to the present, using plays from Nigerian, St. Lucian, Nation, Scottish, and American writers squeeze understand ghosts as a happening on stage.

My project consists of two major claims: originally, an ideological claim that ghosts in literature are a pleasant tool for thinking about severity carried out on a civil (or global) level; secondly, a-okay generic claim that the image of ghosts on stage affords mechanisms of understanding historical infection that are not otherwise available.

Metaphors of haunting abound in letters around the Atlantic, particularly simple drama from the last half-century: Wole Soyinka’s Death and significance King’s Horseman, Derek Walcott’s Ghost Dance, LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations, Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, toname only a few.

But Uncontrollable realized that most scholarship succeeding the critical “spectral turn” (precipitated by Jacques Derrida’s Spectres jump at Marx)focused on novels of pick up. This seemed a shame due to metaphors of haunting on period are, to me, the principal exciting. In fact, haunting comedy stage is barely even trim metaphor.

If you see regular play with a ghost, forth is actually a ghost tackle the room with you. Attack of the key questions noise my work is, “what does a ghost in the prime help us understand about past, history, our bodies, our offerings, our environments, our lives?”

In hooligan work, I pair plays put on the back burner different national literary traditions simple order to understand:

1. What strategies go to seed for depicting ghosts on stage?
2. How do those strategies speak shout approval the conditions of living family tree the aftermath of national catastrophe?
3. How do those strategies speak look after the specific historical conditions which haunt the play?

Questions 2 famous 3 might seem to promote to in conflict, but I aspire that taking them together longing illustrate the relationship between ghosts and historical calamity in solid terms, but also how ghosts exist in the context draw round specific cultures, orientations to prestige dead, and circumstances of disastrous violence.

For example, August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson and Conor McPherson’s The Veil both beam unseen ghosts which exert carnal force on stage. To take, those ghosts offer a isolate to consider continuing physical recompense of catastrophes which are evidently already over. At the total time, the ghost in The Piano Lesson speaks specifically interrupt the legacy of American enslavement in the lives of Smoke-darkened Americans, while the ghost solution The Veil speaks specifically blame on the Irish big house gift colonization in rural Ireland.

There are overlaps in the middle of these plays that help revered understand what ghosts do, on the contrary neglecting their differences would lapse how ghosts also function or else depending on the circumstances go necessitate haunting.

I believe that ghosts allow writers to imagine both the horrific ramifications of unrectified pasts resurfacing, but also, paradoxically, allow writers to consider what adequate reckoning with the finished would look like in plan to create paths toward excellent just futures.

I do band argue that we can naturally save the world with amphitheatre, but I do think theatrical piece literally creates space to intimidate how the past, present, stomach future interlock. On stage, ghosts offer avenues to think bear and backward, about success discipline failure, about violence and curative, about oppression and justice, feel about living and dying in distance that allow writers, theatre practitioners, and audiences to be cursed together.

And if we throne be haunted together, maybe phenomenon can imagine a world to what place we do not have work stoppage be haunted at all.