| dc.description.abstract | The term hauntology is as elusive as the metaphorical ghosts it conjures. Derrida’s original iteration allegorizes the spectral returns of Marxism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an insistent non-present/non-absent apparition that problematizes the role of the left in post-1989 Western society. A decade later, cultural theorist Mark Fisher built on Derrida’s definition when analyzing the British record label Ghost Box and its artists’ engagement with sounds and images connected to an uncanny fictional past: simulated memories that trick the audience into tracing the music’s origin to somewhere in the 60s and 70s. In a broader level, Fisher’s hauntology acknowledges a yearning for promised futures that were lost in the context of a seemingly inevitable capitalist society.
Recent scholarship by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen has translated hauntological thought to a Latin American setting, moving beyond nostalgic recollections of the past and instead understanding the ghost as a recurrent reminder of Latin America’s violent past: the ghost of colonial violence, dictatorial regimes, systematic disappearance of political adversaries, and so forth. However, Ribas-Casasayas and Petersen also acknowledge a hauntological dimension in the resistance to this violence, manifested in the spectral entities conjured during the acts of remembrance of the lost ones, acknowledging their existence against regimes that have attempted to erase them. As opposition to the erasure, the ghost is found in the photographs of the disappeared, the narratives of a what-if present, and in the reappropriation of artistic forms that once served the oppressive regimes.
Considering the different definitions of hauntology and its subsequent translation to the Latin American context, this research project analyzes music in Latin American cinema as a hauntological device, a reminder of a lost past associated with notions of nostalgia, cultural memory, and loss in the context of the region’s tumultuous political past. The music in Latin American cinema complicates the separation of the past and the present through mechanisms that evoke different manifestations of the ghost, both in the films’ cinematographic narrative and the real-world circumstances they attempt to reflect. In this thesis, I propose a theoretical and methodological approach to the study of Latin American film music from a hauntological perspective. I propose three films as case studies to illustrate this approach. | |
