Spectral futurity: The performative afterlives of mourning

Coby, Laura M

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125800 Copy

Description

Title

Spectral futurity: The performative afterlives of mourning

Author(s)

Coby, Laura M

Issue Date

2024-07-12

Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)

Robinson, Valleri J

Doctoral Committee Chair(s)

Robinson, Valleri J

Committee Member(s)

• Davis, Jenny L
• Somerville, Siobhan B
• Burch, Steven D

Department of Study

English

Discipline

English

Degree Granting Institution

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Degree Level

Dissertation

Keyword(s)

• spectral futurity
• specters
• aesthetic mourning practice
• performative afterlives
• grief
• mourning
• performance studies
• queer studies
• queer temporality
• affect

Abstract

“Spectral Futurity: The Performative Afterlives of Mourning” calls into question how we care for the dead and imagines a future for the deceased through the aesthetic. Specifically, this dissertation considers how artwork forged in grief paves avenues for the dead to inhabit the present, refusing death’s finitude through relational exchange. I am calling this aesthetic, temporal, and mourning practice “spectral futurity.” Disrupting binaries of life and death; mourning and melancholia; materiality and immateriality; I bring together experimental aesthetics, affect, and grief to imagine how the dead live on. Positioning the specter as an inherently queer subject, I argue that life does not end at death. Instead, enduring relationalities and lingering affects allow life to continue after one’s body has decomposed. Steeped in the radical belief that how we care for one another matters and continues to matter beyond the grave, spectral futurity is an act of caretaking for the dead. Through aesthetic mourning practices, the living help the dead live on past their corporeal end, and, thus, the dead’s spectral futurity allows them to engage with the living. In this way, through tenderly caring for the dead, we might also learn how to better care for the living. To substantiate these claims, I imagine how specters manifest in the works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Suzan-Lori Parks, María Irene Fornés, and Agnès Varda. I look to these avant-garde artists to analyze how they perform aesthetic mourning practices for the dead and dying and, therefore, grieve these specters into being. I analyze the ways in which visual art, theatre, film, and literature enable spectral futurity. This interdisciplinary project moves throughout the fields of performance studies, queer of color critique, feminist theory, affect theory, and grief studies. The animating force of aesthetic mourning practices enable the dead to harness spectral futurities where they might continue to exist materially and immaterially.

Graduation Semester

2024-08

Type of Resource

Thesis

Handle URL

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125800

Copyright and License Information

Copyright 2024 Laura Coby

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