We carry the pains and stories of our ancestors to advocate for abolitionist pedagogies of Black haunting geared towards the fight for reparations.

Haunting If we think of the petrochemicals as coming to tell us stories, to communicate their inhuman messages, we might also be invited to think about oil as a kind of grand-kin, highlighting the connection of our life force now with the lives of those long-dead organisms that appear as oil. But these more-than-human relations have been unearthed, weaponized. These are not easy relations but rather ones that disturb multiple boundaries of time, memory, the living, and the dead. Oil could be invited, as Zoe Todd asserts, as a reminder of the ancient life that came before ours, that is still a part of us, that makes our lives possible through intergenerational knowledge, through a deep indebtedness to our ancestors, through evolution. Recognizing these long-dead organisms, feeling their vibrancy, could be an invitation to a profound sense of interconnection. But these organisms have been unearthed from their resting place without their consent. As Todd writes, “To turn the massive stores of carbon and hydrogen left from eons of life in this place, weaponises these fossil-kin, these long-dead beings, and transforms them into threats to … the ‘narrow conditions of existence,’ which Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear reminds us we are bound to.” Instead of an invitation into an evolutionary and intergenerational acknowledgment of the ways that our lives are made possible through the knowledge and creativity of so many others, human and other-than-human alike, we have turned these potential grand-kin against themselves. They appear as specters, all their compressed time and stores of energy unloosed to wreak havoc on the living. In a brilliant article, Eve Tuck and C. Ree compare the different versions of haunting and ghost stories in American and Japanese films. They note that in America the narrative asserts the possibility of appeasement. As long as the protagonist does the right thing, the vengeful ghost will rest at last. Once the innocent hero destroys the monster, balance will again be restored to the world. In the Japanese films, on the other hand, the ghost often cannot be appeased, and “the hero does not think herself to be innocent, or try to achieve reconciliation or healing, only mercy, often in the form of passing on the debt.” Instead, people are forced simply to live with these ghosts. Tuck and Ree use these two genres of horror films to talk about two different approaches to settler colonialism. In the American version of the ghost story, the settler is an innocent bystander incomprehensibly attacked by a specter that will not leave them alone. We could read this as the continuing demands for land back, reparations, or abolition that fall on the uncomprehending ears of white settlers, or the narrativization of white fragility that includes death paranoia. The Japanese narrative describes something else. It describes a reckoning with the total violence of slavery and settler colonialism. It describes the way that there is no resolution or reconciliation, only the possible hope of mercy. It describes a temporality that is indeterminate, that refuses progression, and instead asks us to sit with what has been done, understanding that the harms committed are permanent, the lives taken cannot be returned. Tuck and Ree continue: “Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop.” This understanding of the ongoing and insistent legacies of plastic as an extension of the ecology of white supremacy functions precisely “in its refusal to stop.” For the toxicities unearthed through plastic are not going away. The examples of southern Louisiana and the photographic practices that have also etched their marks in Rochester, New York tell of the ways that this haunting plays out in particular forms. Black and low-income communities are left with a devastating mess, a place that is no longer their place, a grief that has set into the land without a clear sense of how to clean up or move on. Plastic’s increasing production mean that these harms will become more commonplace. Instead of turning away in horror or fear, plastic’s multiple and conflicting temporalities need to be taken seriously. Settlers need to learn the lessons of haunting, even as we are being haunted by this material that refuses to let us go. Full reparation here, carrying the meaning of the attempts to repair and also the desire to account for immeasurable loss and violence, is impossible. This does not mean that we should not be held accountable; on the contrary— accountability or reckoning may appear as a haunting. For we, white people, are certainly not innocent. Instead of moving so quickly to evade the present, producing times that circle violently forward and back, what would it mean to sit with this refusal, this total violence, white supremacy? What might we learn if we listened to what these chemical media were transmitting? Under the conditions of white supremacy, knowledge systems and institutions are not well versed to be attuned to these hauntings, to all that has been lost. This is especially true because the social is built on the disappearance of those losses, but these memories, these hauntings and losses, give us a much richer sense of our present moment and offer a different, I would argue, decolonial, knowledge. For haunting involves a “transformative recognition” rather than “cold knowledge.” To make a world otherwise will only be possible when we face what has been lost. For haunting is an animated state where this violence is making itself known. It is a forced seeing, sensing feeling of that which has been repressed, excluded, or forced out. Through the commingling of ancient beings with raced and classed bodies, this violence comes to the fore, as a refusal to stop. Avery Gordon, in her account of haunting, points to its strange potentiality: “To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace.” This is a utopian grace barely recognizable as such, an opening that offers little safety but potentially some solace through lines of relation that open onto ancestors, those to come, and the more-than-human world.