Robert Sapp (College of Charleston)
The goal of this panel is for scholars from a variety of disciplines to come together to examine the wide-ranging and historically-specific uses of ghosts in graphic novels. The idea is based on an application of Derrida’s notion of hauntologie within the context of the graphic novel, a medium that lends itself to the spectral in that it can disrupts the presumed linear flow of past-present-future through formal elements. For Derrida, the figure of the ghost is a deconstructive agent whose spectral subjectivity disrupts the very notion of the present as tied to reality. Derrida’s conception of hauntologie also articulates an ethical obligation to accept the ghost’s indeterminacy that others have observed (Gordon 2008, Craps 2010). One question this panel seeks to address, then, concerns how the obligation to live with ghosts might mediate an engagement with the unresolved, inescapable, or unfinished stories that continue to haunt the 21st century such as the history of enslavement, inter-ethnic conflict, immigration, or transgenerational trauma. The unifying inquiry that this panel examines is how ghosts are employed in graphic novels or, indeed, how graphic novels employ spectral scenes that disrupt time and space to engage with present through the prism of the past.