My article “Haunting Erotics” is a part of a special issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 39) entitled Issue 6: Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy of Racialised Death

This piece develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology. Following the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of ghostly pain as part and parcel of the anchoring of Blackness in abjection, I read Mayfield Brooks and Molondi Zondi’s processional and haunting performance entitled Dancing in the Hold which premiered in April of 2018 at Gibney Dance New York. With poly-vocalic attention to embodied and expressive theorizations of Black life, I locate haunting within the field of Black Studies, and more specifically in conversations about abjection and Black art. I engage Fred Moten's formulation of ‘absolute nearness’ in my discussion of intimacy in the afterlife of slavery, and then turn to Audre Lorde’s erotics in order to analyse why Black performance’s engagement of spectrality, opacity and haunting marks an emergent and healing, site of Black experimentalism (Moten, F., 2018. Black and blur. Durham: Duke University Press; Lorde, A., 1978. Uses of the erotic : the erotic as power. New York: Out & Out Books).