AMES3651

Writers, filmmakers, and other creative art practitioners from almost every corner of this living world use the figure of the ghost to address questions of ethics, justice, violence, and repression. This course focuses on India's modern ghosts as well as ghosts and spirits from classical Indian literature. In every sphere of our lives, public and private, we are chased by various ghosts that often appear in forms of memory, remembrance, nostalgia, and forgetfulness. Ghosts scare us, enchant us, and capture our imagination. Our intellectual engagement will consist of theorizations around the figure of the ghost and its various conceptual offshoots (hauntology, specter, the uncanny, etc.) as encountered through literary and filmic texts. The course will also connect these ghostly tales with issues of nationalism, gender, communal and ethnic violence, and capitalism.