Dr.
Clemens Sedmak: "Integral Human Development: A Concept..
In my research, I am constellating the relationship between ghosts, performance, and historical calamities of colonization and enslavement around the Atlantic.
I analyze haunting in Anglophone drama from the mid-20th Century to the present, using plays from Nigerian, St. Lucian, Irish, Scottish, and American writers to understand ghosts as a phenomenon on stage. My project consists of two major claims: firstly, an ideological claim that ghosts in literature are a useful tool for thinking about violence carried out on a national (or global) level; secondly, a generic claim that the presence of ghosts on stage affords mechanisms of understanding historical calamity that are not otherwise available.
Metaphors of haunting abound in literature around the Atlantic, particularly in drama from the last half-century: Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, Derek Walcott’s Ghost Dance, LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations, Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan, toname only a few.
But I r