Hauntology

Hauntology

We dance to remember all our beloved ones,
To remember how each passed to the spirit world
We dance because the dead love us
The dead are more powerful than memory

Jacques Derrida, in spectres of marx explores the notion of ghosts and the disruption of history and comes to a theory of 'hauntology', a way of representing the unrepresentable in history. There can be no justice, no simile of truth or good faith without seeking a voice or space for the absent. And because the absent, by their very nature, are not present, they are denied hegemonic representation.

The result is that history is haunted: the ineffable, the unrepresentable, and the unknowable howl at the borders of consciousness and undermine narratives of the dominant ideology.

What then does it mean to write a play about the history of the west? How do we arrange the images of the dead to allow a voice for the absent?

A true history of the American Indian must prove a 'haunting' in Derrida's sense of the word providing us with an alternative story of tribal memory and survival that invokes ghost dancing, Indian bodies, communion with the dead, violent confrontation with the 'other'.

A famous photograph indelibly marks the violent collision between the u.s military and the Lakota at wounded knee. Black and white, hauntingly violent, silent. The terrifying photograph represents the vanquished ghost dancers of wounded knee killed on December 17^th, 1890 by the triumphant 7^th cavalry.

In scholarly accounts of the time the 'origins' of the ghost dance are traced to its first enactment by the Nevada Paiute, Wovoka in the 1870's to its adoption by the embattled Lakota. In describing the dance an objective distance is attempted in accounts of the colourful clothing, the position of the sun and the frenzy of the dancers inside the sacred circle but crucially, the meaning of the ghost dance and its attendant prophecy is couched only in Christian and colonial perspectives. The horrible picture of wounded knee asserts the right of the repressed who must always return and haunt homogenous discourse. Scholars are trained in empirical evidence, finite, disciplined vocabulary. Scholars do not converse with spectres or see ghosts. Empirical tools cannot embrace either spiritual actuality or the spiritual historicism of Native Americans.