Friday Speaker Series: Flor Adams

"The Materiality of Haunting: Labyrinthine Time and Embodied Memory within Colonial Capitalism."

 

This work examines the materiality of haunting within posthumanist and new materialist thought to move beyond abstract or purely discursive accounts of spectrality. It foregrounds how haunting is carried and enacted through bodies, focusing in particular on the embodied figure of Janaína in the Brazilian animated film Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013). Using the film as a thinking partner, the article traces how haunting takes shape in postcolonial contexts through cycles of reincarnation, sexualized violence, and resistance that are inscribed on Janaína’s body across six hundred years of Brazilian history. The film stages time and embodied memory within a one-world ontology that troubles boundaries of present and past, human and nonhuman, and reality and fiction. It proposes a form of time that is neither linear nor fully cyclical but labyrinthine, as colonial logics and resistant movements repeat while becoming entangled with new material conditions such as technology. The analysis shows how memory and colonial violence persist not only in landscapes and nonhuman elements but also in Janaína’s shifting corporeality, which is repeatedly produced through regimes of power rather than through a stable inner essence. Haunting shapes the present through the endurance of colonial legacies while Indigenous and feminized forms of resistance continue to disrupt them. By troubling the line between imagination and material reality, the film opens a path that this article follows to rethink the possibilities of enquiry and to highlight what speculative fabulation can offer for thinking about haunting, embodiment, and postcolonial multiplicity.