User:Aitantv/Tuck & Ree (2013) A Glossary of Haunting

Tuck, E & Ree, C (2013) A Glossary of Haunting. Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Stacey Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, and Carolyn Ellis, pp639–658. Left Coast Press. (Download: http://www.evetuck.com/writing)

+ an glossary of terms, a manifesto, a instructional manual in unknotting interpretations of ghosts, monsters, ghouls, haunting. Haunting here becomes a strategy for revenge. Monsters terrorize because they desire a justice for a historic crime. These apparitions and supernatural terrorists use mercy at their discretion.

"In this case, the glossary appears without its host— perhaps because it has gone missing, or it has been buried alive, or because it is still being written. Maybe I ate it. It has an appendix, a remnant, which is its own form of haunting, its own lingering." (Tuck 2013 p640)
"This glossary is about justice, but in a sense that is rarely referenced. It is about righting (and sometimes wronging) wrongs; about hauntings, mercy, monsters, generational debt, horror films, and what they might mean for understanding settler colonialism, ceremony, revenge, and decolonization." (Tuck 2013 p640)
"Yet this glossary is a fractal; it includes the particular and the general, violating the terms of settler colonial knowledge which require the separation of the particular from the general, the hosted from the host, personal from the public, the foot(note) from the head(line), the place from the larger narrative of nation, the people from specific places." (Tuck 2013 p640)
On American horror: "the audience, are meant to feel outrage in the face of haunting, we are beckoned to root for the innocent hero, who could be us, because haunting is undeserved, even random. !e hero spends the length of the film righting wrongs, slaying the monster, burying the undead, performing the missing rite, all as a way of containment." (Tuck 2013 p641)
"Haunting, by contrast, is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation.... Haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. Alien (to settlers) and generative for (ghosts), this refusal to stop is its own form of resolving. For ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved." (Tuck 2013 p642)
"Haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence, for genocide. Horror films in the United States have done viewers a disservice in teaching them that heroes are innocent, and that the ghouls are the trespassers. In the context of the settler colonial nation-state, the settler hero has inherited the debts of his forefathers." (Tuck 2013 p643)
"Erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; I don’t want to haunt you, but I will." (Tuck 2013 p643)
Desire over damage - reclaiming the narrative "Desire is what we know about ourselves, and damage is what is attributed to us by those who wish to contain us. Desire is complex and complicated. It is constantly reformulating, and does so by extinguishing itself, breaking apart, reconfiguring, recasting. Desire licks its own fingers, bites its own nails, swallows its own fist.

"Desire makes itself its own ghost, creates itself from its own remnants. Desire, in its making and remaking, bounds into the past as it stretches into the future. It is productive, it makes itself, and in making itself, it makes reality." (Tuck 2013 p648)

"Mercy is a temporary pause in haunting, requiring a giver and a receiver. The house goes quiet again, but only for a time. Mercy is a gift only ghosts can grant the living, and a gift ghosts cannot be forced, extorted, seduced, or tricked into giving. Even then, the fantasy of relief is deciduous. !e gift is an illusion of relief and closure. Haunting can be deferred, delayed, and disseminated, but with some crimes of humanity—the violence of colonization—there is no putting to rest." (Tuck 2013 p648) "
"Mercy is a power granted over another" (Tuck 2013 p648)
Monsters - "The promise of heroic resolution is a false assurance. Revenge films provide another more useful storyline for addressing the following questions: What is a monster? (A monster is one who has been wronged and seeks justice.) Why do monsters interrupt? (Monsters interrupt when the injustice is nearly forgotten. Monsters show up when they are denied; yet there is no understanding the monster.) How does one get rid of a monster? (!ere is no permanent vanquishing of a monster; monsters can only be deferred, disseminated; the door to their threshold can only be shut on them for so long.)." (Tuck 2013 p649)

Ruins - architecture - haunting seeping through buildings "I think of Hurricane Katrina and horror movies, toxic schools, and suburban decay. !e leak to me is a sort of sign, the ghost’s memento mori, that we are always in a process of ruin, a state of ruining. Our ruins are not crumbled Roman columns, or ivy covered abandoned lots. Our ruins lie within the quick turnover of buildings, disappearing landmarks, and disposable homes, layered upon each other and over again." (Tuck 2013 p653)

Our blindness to ghosts, haunting, violence - "In these layered always-ruining places, our ghosts haunt, and we are blind to it. They are ghosts birthed from empire’s original violence, the ghosts hidden inside law’s creation myth" (Tuck 2013 p654)
When righting wrongs and writing wrongs has been totally exhausted "Wronging wrongs, so reviled in a waking life, seems to be the work of nightmares and hauntings and all the stuff that comes after opportunities to right wrongs and write wrongs have been exhausted. Unreadable and irrational, wronging wrongs is the work of now and future ghosts and monsters, the supply of which is ever-growing." (Tuck 2013 p654)

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