(Post)Colonial
Haunting

Ghosts are first and foremost figurations of power. By giving intersubjective communication a form that can challenge anthropocentrism and Western conceptualizations of Nature, ghosts have the ability to generate alternative histories. This renegotiation of past events is particularly important in the context of colonialism. Yet, while this characteristic can certainly be instrumentalized for recuperative purposes, it can also be a narrative tool that supports forms of othering and exclusion. In fact, in literature, film, and culture ghosts can and have been mobilised to perpetuate unjust social structures. Particularly the haunted forest has often served as the matrix through which racial subordination has been put in the service of subject formation. A ghost is a reminder that history is not the past, or as William Faulkner famously put it: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. But who is reconfiguring the past in the present? This discussion is led by the often-neglected question, who is hosting the ghost? Ghosts may have the ability to expose the narrativity of history, but they do not necessarily function as a corrective. Based on Sladja Blažan’s recent book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonisation of the Invisible World, the discussion will focus on ways in which settler colonial imaginaries are reproduced and sustained through cultural and personal narratives that centre on spectral land. Particularly forests will be at the centre of our attention.

Sladja Blažan is a writer and lecturer at Bard College Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in North American Literature and Culture from Humboldt University Berlin and her ‘habilitation’ in American Studies from University Würzburg. She has taught as a professor for Literature and Media Cultures at PhilippsUniversity Marburg, Bard College, New York University, Free University Berlin, Dutch Art Institute, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and University College Dublin. Research areas include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, and critical refugee studies. Her book  Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World was published in 2025 with University of Virginia Press. Other publications include the edited collection Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, the manuscript American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der U.S. Amerikanischen Literatur and numerous articles on the intersection of race, gender, and class issues.

Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. Her writing explores how people navigate the complex states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Berliner Zeitung, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in History of Science, she held awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Camargo Foundation, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Edna Bonhomme is the co-editor (with Alice Spawls) of After Sex (2023), an anthology about reproductive justice, and the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues, which was published in 2025.

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. She has previously held positions as a Junior Faculty Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden (2023), an International Postdoctoral Initiative Fellow (IPODI Fellow) at the Technische Universität Berlin (2020-2022), and a fellow at the ICI Berlin (2018-2020). She works on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, ecocriticism/the Anthropocene, science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, and contemporary art. She has published and has work forthcoming at the intersection of these fields in Cultural Politics, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature and the Environment, Symplokē, Paradoxa, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Studies in the Fantastic, Girlhood Studies, and in over a dozen edited collections and artist monographs. She is the editor of the journal issue ‘Climate Fictions’ (Paradoxa) and the co-editor of issues on ‘Anthropocene Sublimes’ (Ecozon@) and ‘Weird Geographies’ (Cultural Politics, forthcoming). She is currently serving as co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television (Liverpool University Press).

Sladja Blažan
Edna Bonhomme
Alison Sperling

ICI Berlin

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Image Credit © Sladja Blažan