Ghost Story Corner
“How do we craft a practice for imagining and living a future that does not simply replicate and intensify the present?” A. Shotwell (165)
“Storytelling might pick up diverse things of meaning and value and gather them together, like a forager rather than a hunger waiting for the big kill.” A. Tsing (287)
“The human is not only a languaging being, but also a storytelling species.” (Wynter 25)
“But as we’re engaged in the work of feeling the weight of the past and trying to remember it well, and as we work with the complexity and impurity of the present, time flings us on. The future is coming for us, or we are coming for it, and so it matters how we collectively set our course.” (Shotwell 139)
“We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival.” (Tsing 19)
“‘History is both a human storytelling practice and that set of remainders from the past that we turn into stories.” (Tsing 168)
“Freedom/haunting: two sides of the same experience.” (Tsing 79)
“Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise. Such exercise enhances collective thinking and movement in complexity.” (Haraway 29)
“People’s shared experience of the terror of expropriation, exploitation, and oppression led to their shared resistance, something, unfortunately, left unexamined within Wynter’s oeuvre. Neither the ruling- class version of colonization- as- progress nor the autochthonous view that colonization was caused by “foreigners” entering native spaces tells us this story.” (Sharma 178)
“Let me give a telling example to outline the ways in which progress and exploration are entwined with a different sense of (black) place. The ships of transatlantic slavery moving across the middle passage, transporting humans for slave labor into “newer worlds” do not only site modern technological progression, which materially moves diasporic subjects through space, that is, on and across the ocean, and on and across landmasses such as Canada, the United States, the Caribbean; these vessels also expose a very meaningful struggle for freedom in place. Technologies of transportation, in this case the ship, while materially and ideologically enclosing black subjects—economic objects inside and often bound to the ship’s walls—also contribute to the formation of an oppositional geography: the ship as a location of black subjectivity and human terror, black resistance, and in some cases, black possession.” (McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, x-xi)
