BOOK REVIEW

 

Bozalek, V., Zembylas, M., Motala, S. & Hölscher, D. (eds.) 2021. Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come. London: Routledge.

 

 

Carol A. Taylor^I; Nikki Fairchild^II

^IUniversity of Bath
^IIUniversity of Portsmouth

 

 

ISBN 9780367527846

It seems entirely appropriate, fortuitous even and, in the terms of this book timely, to be writing a review for Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come during the four-day national UK celebrations for the Queen's Platinum Jubilee (June 2022). The TV is awash with extended programming of gaudy parades, 'pomp and circumstance' (whatever that is), and newscasters, stars and celebrities commentating on this grand and historic occasion. There are concerts, festivities, celebrations, and parties up and down the land as citizens (and the heads of state and subjects of 'our' former colonies) are invited, enjoined, and cajoled to come together as one nation to commemorate and honour the momentous achievement of a constitutional monarchy wielding influence and 'soft' power through sovereignty for 70 years. The television Royal Marathons and the unprecedented granting of additional public bank holidays evidence the extremely hard ideological work being done in the here-and-now to accommodate, memorialize, glorify, and eulogize aspects of the past, while erasing, eliding, and subsuming others. Seen through the analytical lens of this book - which draws on posthumanist and new materialist theoretical perspectives to outline innovative approaches for new higher education imaginaries - the Queen's Platinum Jubilee is a veritable worksite engaging multiple strands of past-present-future. The Jubilee is doing: 1) the representational work of nation - the UK is the epicentre of an extended, global 'family' that it brought into being and fostered; 2) the affective work of belonging - I The Queen's family a microcosm of our own; 3) the political work of unity - the Queen has been served by 14 Prime Ministers during her reign and is argued to provide a 'constant thread' through the times of change; 4) the social work of family - the Buckingham Palace 'Balcony Scene'; and 5) the cultural work of gendering femininity (Camilla's partial reconstruction as future consort and the 'good and wholesome' Kate who will make a wonderful future Queen) - and masculinity (Prince Charles's benign eccentricities and Prince Andrew's darker, dirtier secrets). The book invites us to conceptualise this contemporary UK moment as a scene of hauntological time-space-mattering, a point we return to below, just as other and different national contexts and the higher education systems they give rise to are also enfolded time-space-matterings.

In the Introduction, the book's editors map the theoretical terrain of hauntology and provide an overview of the book's contents. They theorize hauntology with Derrida, Gordon, and Barad. Derrida coined the word 'hauntology' in Specters of Marx (1994) as a play on the word 'ontology' to ponder the indeterminate relationship between then/now, presence/absence, being/non-being. As used by Derrida, hauntology is about having ongoing conversations with the ghosts of the past in order to refuse the fixities of the past and to invent a different future. Hauntology, the editors explain, concerns time's political, social, and materialist dimensions and offers new ways of rethinking the role that time plays in social justice beyond current determinations. The promise of hauntological analyses is that a justice-to-come moves beyond/ outside the calculations of current hegemonic formations to engage with the incalculable. The importance of this, as the Introduction notes, is that justice-to-come requires an openness and an attunement to new possibilities. Gordon's discussion of haunting provides a second entangled theoretical strand for the book, with a particular emphasis on how 'abusive systems of power ... make themselves known and impact everyday life' (2008: 3). The editors explain that such hauntings 'work' and have effects through denial and disappearance, in that 'forms of violence appear not to be present while actually being integrally present and continuing to impact the world around them in a dynamic way'. A third theoretical line comes with Barad's radical re-envisioning of time via quantum field theory which, the editors argue, queers linear notions of time to produce hauntings as 'lively indeterminacies of time-being, materially constitutive of matter itself' (2008: 3). Hauntings, in Barad's view, are not simply rememberings of a past fixed and frozen in time but rather 'the dynamism of ontological indeterminacy of time-being/being-time in its materiality' (Barad, 2017). Then-now, past-present-future are constituted by virtual moments in which 'each moment is thickly threaded through with all other moments'. These theoretical understandings, described with clarity in the Introduction, frame the book's discussions, generate some profound questionings, and provoke new imaginaries of the place, role and purpose of higher education policies and practices in different geopolitical spaces, including South Africa, Canada, Denmark, Argentina. Throughout the book, higher education is understood in a capacious sense and the chapters offer a series of diverse engagements with the potentialities of hauntological analysis.

Anyone interested in the entangled legal-bio-political formation of contemporary cities should read Chapter 1, 'A pedagogy of hauntology: Decolonising the curriculum with GIS'. Written by Michalinos Zembylas, Vivienne Bozalek and Siddique Motala, and moving out from pedagogic work done by Siddique Motala with his engineering students at the Cape Peninsula University of technology (CPUT), this chapter offers a moving account of the hauntological properties of space-place entangled matterings in the context of the brutalities of land clearance in South Africa's Apartheid regime. The chapter is constructed around 'Siddique's story', which the authors tell us 'is a story of maps and ghosts' (2021: 13). Using geographic information systems (GIS) technologies, which are computer-based tools used to visualize and analyse spatial or geographic data, the chapter includes photographs and overhead maps of District Six, to demonstrate visually and with exacting clarity how racist laws - and this chapter names many such laws - were enacted to produce a 'void' in Cape Town by forcibly removing people who once occupied a multiracial 'melting pot' of a neighbourhood to ghettos and to the first Black townships. The clearance and destruction of District Six was underpinned by centuries of colonialist land expropriation practices, but what the chapter makes clear through maps such as the Model Apartheid City and GIS is how, over time, the emptying of District six produced blank/white spaces on maps in line with segregation laws which designated Whites-only areas. Maps and land; violence and dispossession; removal of Black bodies to an otherwhere in order to instate White possession. And Yet. As GIS shows, the silenced voices and spatial voids speak into the present, disrupting assumptions of temporal sequentiality. The analytical power of this chapter comes together in the authors' development and explication of a pedagogy of hauntology. CPUT is built on the site of District 6, its buildings and environments layered over and into District 6. Siddique Motala's engineering students at CPUT use GIS to engage with these multiple physical, material, and affective layerings, and critique how disciplinary practices, such as land surveying, are put in the service of apartheid racism. Not all ghosts take human shape. In CPUT, the buildings, the social fabric, the land itself is a ghostly utterance. This superb chapter ends with a discussion of how hauntology can support decolonisation processes - and how and why 'temporalities and spaces are entangled ... and how this matters' (2021: 25) for us in the here-and-now.

In Chapter 3, 'Shooting the elephant in the (prayer) room: Politics of moods, racial hauntologies and idiomatic diffraction', Kirsten Hvenegárd-Lassen & Dorthe Staunæs engage in an imaginatively diffractive riff on elephants to investigate 'how race and racialisation emerge as ghostly matters in diversity politics and management conducted in higher education' (2021: 51). They map a hauntology of how Whiteness plays out and dis/appears (is dis/appeared) in the work done by racial ontologies in Danish universities where Whiteness is assumed, unremarked and unacknowledged as the normative racialising frame. Focusing on an incident about a prayer room, the media and political furore it generated, and the rector of Copenhagen's diminishment and categorisation of that furore as 'mood politics', they show how, in their beautiful phrase, the university as a White space 'fold[s] comfortably around embodied Danish whiteness' (2021: 51) ensuing that some bodies never have to face the privilege their Whiteness trails with it, while non-White bodies become thereby classified as 'space invaders' (Puar, 2004). In Danish universities - as indeed in many minority world elite university spaces - Whiteness is a hauntological absent-presence - 'the elephant in the room' - which hauntingly discloses the hegemonic structure of Whiteness and the 'work', as Sara Ahmed says, that has to be done to keep that structure in place. Through a theoretical framing drawn from Sylvia Wynter's (2006) analysis of the 'human' as a racialised emanation of the historical ethno-class, biohumanist 'Man project', Hvenegárd-Lassen and Staunas point sharply to the clash between the universalist claims of this project and its racialised and racist limits. What was exciting about this particular chapter was its use of what the authors have coined 'idiomatic diffraction' as a methodological approach to bring 'the elephant in the room' (Whiteness in Danish universities) into diffractive conversation with elephants in the colonial archive, in particular with George Orwell's essay Shooting an elephant (1936/2003). Threading these elephants with Barad and Haraway's feminist materialist uses of diffraction helps the authors 'twist' diffraction to awaken otherwise sleeping and/or silenced elephants, and to enable the elephant, so senselessly but in the colonialist, racist imaginary, so necessarily shot dead in Orwell's story to affectively return 'by the apparition of a specter' (Derrida, 1994: 4). Hvenegárd-Lassen and Staunæs explain and deploy idiomatic diffraction in clear and compelling ways to make elephants roar.

Chapter 2, 'Just(ice) do it! re-membering the past through co-affective aesthetic encounters with art/history', written by Nike Romano, analyses an art history pedagogical encounter and employs this to consider how 'educators and students might respond to calls to decolonise the academy and work affirmatively with difference(s) both within classroom encounters and society at large' (2021: 29). This is important as she notes how higher education was a representation of colonial power in South Africa and how these colonial legacies linked to the hauntings of the trauma sustained during colonial rule. Drawing on three theoretical underpinnings - Donna Haraway's situated knowledges, Karen Barad's agential realism and Bracha Ettinger's matrixial trans-subjectivity - Romano diffracts traditional presentations of art history, that reinforces Eurocentric modes of thinking and colonial practices, with and through the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes (#RhodesMustFall), the imagery found in an ancient statue of the Greek goddess Nike (Winged Victory of Samothrace, also known as the Winged Nike),and Sethembile Msezane's performance entitled, 'Chapungu - the day Rhodes fell'. In doing so the premise was how students and lecturers could 'open up debates across the spatial/temporal that could forge understandings of art/history's performative function and in so doing, highlight the ethico-onto-epistemological implications that arise out of material-discursive practices' (2021: 39). The diffraction of these three key historical and contemporary happenings were crucial to allow students to comment on racialised legacies and the pillage of African artefacts, specifically the soapstone statue of Chapungu the short-tailed eagle which was located in Rhodes' residence in Cape Town. As students worked on the project the time-space diffractions became a nexus point for them to disrupt colonial legacies of art and power. Matrixial trans-subjectivity in this context 'activate[s] a compassionate and co-affective rapport between the artist, artwork, and viewer' (2021: 34), enabling students to explore the transformative potential of the project and consider the traumatic hauntings of apartheid and colonialism. The power of this chapter was exemplified by the performance art of Sethembile Msezane, standing at protest locations for hours as Chapungu, connecting past, present and possible Afrocentric futures with Indigenous cosmologies. Her performance should resonate with readers and encourage them to challenge their own thinking on colonisation and racialisation and how students and lecturers can bring about transformative changes by working in this way.

Lize van Robbroeck, in Chapter 7, 'Self as ghost: Haunting whiteness in Lizza Littlewort's painting', continues the theme of interrogating Whiteness as hauntology in Art History which as a subject is 'deeply implicated in the rise of the European nation-state and Western capitalist expansion' (2021: 102). van Robbroeck argues that South African artist Lizza Littlewort's art develops a hauntological framework to unsettle the grand narratives of the Western artistic canon and the enduring effects and affects of settler colonialism. In this, Littlewort brings her own ancestry as a direct descendent of the 17th-century Dutch immigrant artist Jakob Willemzoon de Wet to bear in her critique through her art of White South Africa's cultural heritage and its entanglement with the 'indiscriminate looting of planetary materials, and exploitative practices such as slavery' (2021: 103). Littlewort's art contests pursuits of 'authentic' origins, disclosing how origins are part of the illusory historical project of Western 'progress' resulting in contemporary planetary devastation. Her art tracks such grand historical narratives through persistent 'turnings over' in which hauntological presences are seen and felt. This chapter provides a fine precis and overview for those new to Littlewort's art, discussing how her interventions with different methods and media (oils, cartoons, collage, sketches, illustrations) critique global Whiteliness and expose its ghostly and surreal manifestations. van Robbroeck's chapter shows that Littlewort's work is an incisive, passionate, and personal art - an art which troubles and provokes. We discover that Littlewort's painter ancestor was an artist and art dealer, whose son occupied a powerful position in the Dutch East India Company in the Cape of Good Hope, supplying European art works to the expanding White global middle class and settler-colonial nation states. This detail is particularly important given Littlewort's subversion of the high European conventions of realism exemplified in 17^th century Dutch still lives: Littlewort's painting History Repeating Myself, in which 'the robust, plain face of the wife of a wealthy Rotterdam beer brewer becomes ... a ghostly apparition who stares out of a dissolving face with watery blue eyes filled with a knowing dread', is 'toxic rather than seductive' as the 'subject melts before our eyes' (2021: 110), its dis-ease tangible. Such hauntological affects are further amplified in Littlewort's later exhibitions which ally Littlewort's 'unmitigated loathing of white entitlement' (2021: 112) with the devastation of nature in the Anthropocene. Here spectral atmospheres and strange apparitions abound in the artist's uncanny visualisations of a deep ecological sadness.

The ways in which settler colonialism can be reconciled in higher education via the kinstillatory practices of reciprocity affect, relationality and art is the focus of chapter 6, 'Reconciliation and education: Artistic actions and critical conversations' by Stephanie Springgay. The key questions in the chapter focus on the ways in which the hauntings of settler colonialism, in this instance in Canada, need to be a focus for those in higher education in ways that do not lead to a perpetuation of harm and violence. This is of particular importance when land acknowledgements become prescribed in academic institutions. These can become problematic as Springgay highlights that performative land acknowledgements see 'settlers stop short of locating themselves as a guest, and the ways that they are accountable to actively working against colonialism, they in fact re-enforce settler modes of legibility and their own complacency in colonial structures' (2021: 89). Thus the hauntings, ghosts and violence to Indigenous land, peoples and culture is consistently being reinforced. The chapter proposes the affordances of art pedagogy and practice in higher education and how the affective, bodily, and sensorial resonances found in working with Indigenous artists in a reciprocal and relation way can provide a counter to the damage done by constant re-colonisation. Taking up Recollet's (2018) notion of kinstillatory gatherings as consensual practices of relationality that imagines future Indigenous worldlings - Springgay details how the work of Dion Fletcher, an artist is residence, produces a transcorporeal move to 'shift[s] land acknowledgements from static cursory statements to active, relational, and intimate engagements with land, bodies, and the more-than-human' (2021: 91). Working with objects, human and more-than-human bodies Dion Fletcher's artwork is provocative, highlighting intersectional violences to 'confront[s] the ways that Indigeneity, the queer and gendered body, and disability are rendered expendable' (2021: 92). Here art practices allow for a push beyond colonialist progress imperatives that many higher education curriculums are based on and open up spaces for Indigenous knowledge and wisdom to flourish. These shifts move the hauntings of colonialism and domination to an active future where decolonisation is a verb and art becomes a site to reimagine different futures for relationality and relationships with the land.

Themes of dis-ease, destruction and time-out-of joint are picked up in Chapter 10, 'Being haunted by-and reorienting toward-what 'matters' in times of (the COVID-19) crisis: A critical pedagogical cartography of response-ability'. Evelien Geerts starts with her body, and the 'billions of made-to-not-matter-that-much bodies' already rendered dehumanized, made inhuman, or non-human. Pursuing bodily vulnerabilities in Covid-19 times, navigating between critical pedagogy, critical theory, and contemporary new materialist and posthumanist philosophy, and working with Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, Geerts constructs a critical cartography of response-ability. This theoretically complex, philosophically ambitious, chapter is propelled by the question: 'what is there to do, pedagogically and politically, when the crisis experienced is so disruptive in nature that the future in which we are supposed to recall exceptional catastrophic events, becomes almost impossible to imagine?' (2021: 157). The virus, Geerts poses, is doing onto-epistemological work of collapsing 'our' unrivalled sense of human exceptionalism and uncanny work of rematerializing itself in host bodies. The virus's rematerialization is a transcorporeal mattering - a matter of the virus making its presence felt -an incorporation, Geerts suggests, that queers notions of the self-contained human. Covid-19 as a hauntological presence shows up in statistics such as daily infection and death rates: who knows what the virus is doing now, as such figures can only show what the virus has done. This is the virus 'trying to find its way into the present via the past' (2021: 158) and, drawing on Judith Butler, revealing to us the fragility, vulnerability, and precariousness of existence, as we continue to commodify and destroy. Geerts boldly brings critical pedagogy into allegiance with new materialism and posthumanism via their shared 'critical pedagogical accentuation of transformation' (2021: 160) which orients us away from future apocalypse and towards the thick material present and its possibilities for living otherwise. 'Thinking-with the present's thickness' Geerts suggests 'implies an ethico-politics of queered temporalities' (2021: 165) which expands the present to include past and future in ways which reconfigure responsibility as and for transcorporeal multispecies flourishing in the here-and-now. A necessary and hopeful message for necro-political times.

Tamara Shefer, in Chapter 5, 'Sea hauntings and haunted seas for embodied place-space-mattering for social justice scholarship', proposes 'an engagement with the sea for a social justice project directed at human and larger planetary injustices' (2021: 76). In the chapter, Shefer explores swimming and playing in the sea as a form of public higher education pedagogy, as a place-space-mattering, and as a slow, embodied methodology. These triple aims situate her sea engagements within the new materialist, posthumanist and affective turn, and oriented to a disruption of the normative logics of the academy which, she rightly contends, continue to reproduce colonial, anthropocentric and patriarchal modes of pedagogy and research. Shefer's sea hauntings summon up an alternative ethics and politics, one more attuned to the body, to wildness, and to human-natural relationalities. In line with the other chapters in the book, Shefer's use of hauntology centres the disruption of temporal linearities but what marks out this chapter is Shefer's emphasis on 'objects and places ... what stories are enfolded in them; how they come to be; and how they may shade or erase or disguise what was there or will be' (2021: 79). Shefer points out that, in the cultural history of South Africa, the sea represents a time-space of power, privilege and subjugation: the sea is historically entangled in slavery and settler colonialism, just as it is entangled in lack of physical access to seas and beaches for the Black majority population today. That seas, beaches and swimming practices are politicized and racialised is one of the key insights of this chapter, and most movingly explored through an instance of apartheid spatial politics in a particular memory story of Camps Bay from the Apartheid Archives Project a black sign with white letters, a white fence, a 'Whites only' beach. How, then, Shefer asks, can we see the sea anew as a 'space of re-articulation, reclaiming and reimagining?' (2021: 81)? In response, she suggests that re-storying practices, poetics, arts-based activism and scholarship, ethnographies of human/nonhuman encounter, can join with mobile and sensory methodologies for thinking our engagements with the sea otherwise as a means to craft pedagogies and politics of care, reparation and flourishing. The sea hauntings - and the sea possibilities - of this chapter continue to reverberate.

How can higher education provide an affirmative and entangled approach to social justice that encourages multi-species flourishing? This is the overarching question posed by Delphi Carstens in chapter 8, 'A posthuman hauntology for the Anthropocene: The spectral and higher education'. Carstens argues that higher education curriculums need to pay heed to the ways in which capitalist extraction and production have resulted in the Anthropocene epoch where nature is seen as an object for human mastery and ownership. The chapter focuses on how engaging with hauntology and Snaza's pedagogy as a bewildering praxis can help lecturers and students develop 'innovative pedagogical accounts that perforate the highly constructed nature/culture boundary' (2021: 120). In this way he argues that higher education curriculums can account for the ways in which economic systems and social production have marginalised some bodies and reified others. There is the acknowledgement that capitalism 'cooks up its dark spells from the flesh of life itself' (2021: 122) and that extraction and destruction has sometimes been re-inscribed by higher education practices and curricula. To forge a justice-yet-to-come Carstens encourages a move away from apocalyptic futures, where species Man is central to the maelstrom of planetary destruction, towards a posthuman affirmative social justice approaches that realise the need for entangled nature/culture thinking. By proposing a posthuman hauntological pedagogical praxis and including transdisciplinary, Indigenous and transcorporeal reading and in module teaching Carstens proposes that attention can be paid to relationality which can help students account for, and pay heed to, the Anthropocentric damage already done. This attunement towards 'ontologically and ethically towards the entangled relationalities of more-than-human world-making ... is our potential gift to the future' (2021: 133).

The rise of nationalism in Europe and its impact on higher education is the focus of Chapter 4, 'A specter is haunting European higher education - the specter of neo-nationalism' by Katja Brøgger. She maps the emergence of European collaboration and harmonisation post World War II and the supranational organisations that shaped policy and practice impacting the lives of all citizens. These global alliances focussed on peace and redevelopment, with the development of the European Union (EU) Single Market which led to policy harmonisation and standardisation. In higher education this saw shared definitions of courses, students and module/course credit equivalence that promoted free movement of students and encouraged internationalisation. More recently these changes have not been well received, not only in Denmark which is the focus of the chapter, but also globally with the rise of neo-nationalism and far-right politics in the EU, the USA, and the resultant Brexit vote in the UK. Brøgger employs Derrida's hauntology, ghosts and spectral revenants to highlight the indeterminacy of the nationalist body politic where 'nationalisms now manifest as the agency of a past that is never closed but iteratively reworked and reconfigured' (2021: 72). She highlights the tensions between the rise of globalization, political volatility and economic shocks, such as the global financial crash, which has cause the rise of nationalistic policies. In Denmark these have manifested in cutting the numbers of international students, removing courses that teach in the English Language, and linking degree to workplace requirements and future employment. The result of this has been a limiting of degrees to those who 'fit' the requirement, thus limiting the number of international students. The promulgation of division and economic neo-nationalism has produced a stereotypical position of 'us' vs 'them' where ethno-nationalistic and protectionist policies reshape 'international alliances with the growing disregard for international accords accompanying the convergence of nationalism and populism in both Europe and the Americas.' (2021: 72). The changing political landscape is a global issue where, with nationalism on the rise, ghostly revenants reveal the tensions between local, European, and global higher education policy reforms which have the potential to push a return to borders and singular nation states. Although protectionism and neo-nationalism are in ascendancy Brøgger argues there is a justice yet-to-come where other possibilities for spectral and ghostly hauntings of collaborations and cooperation reside in a future yet to come.

Pedagogies of haunting and discomfort linked to civic action, place-conscious and critical place pedagogies are the focus for Chapter 9 'Pedagogy of hauntology in language education: Re-signifying the Argentinian dictatorship in higher education' by Melina Porto. This chapter recounts the political violence and murder that took place by the Argentinian military dictatorship between 1976-1983, where the 1978 Football World Cup was a deflection from the human rights abuses and violations that were occurring. The project featured in this chapter was to encourage students to engage with the national trauma by harnessing the relationality of the past-present places along with the ghosts of the 'disappeared' who were victims of the dictatorship. Here students were 'dialoguing with the ghosts in the present' (2021: 136) and making links to social justice via pedagogies of discomfort. Students were able to consider and 'acknowledge histories of loss, absence, pain, and suffering when it comes to human rights violations' (2021: 137). The focus on language education became a vector to challenge Western and Eurocentric epistemologies and anthropocentrism where language becomes a form of (re)colonisation and Global South funds of knowledge are not valued. Place-based approaches to pedagogy provided students the opportunities to experience place in the present, relate to place in the past, and to reinhabit and affectively engage with violent histories of suffering and injustice. As part of the project students researched the history of the disappeared and then used technology and social media to share, discuss, chat and raise awareness of the happenings. In these time-space-diffractions 'the spectres of the dictatorship literally became alive, or haunted, the students' (2021: 142). The importance of critical place pedagogies and local funds of knowledge allowed students to produce artefacts that were shared with the community; this became a connection to the community and was a form of 'civic action resulting from transformative agency inspired by the project' (2021: 144). Porto argues that meaning making via these kinds of multiliteracies and multimodalities can encourage students to take social and civic action out of the university. The importance of this is the ways in which 'spectres become alive not only in the classroom but also in different places, which are continuously re-inhabited and re-signified' (2021: 152). Here important work is done in remembering those that died and how these hauntings become embodied in place and time. The power of these hauntings allows for a reconsideration of how language, knowledge, knowing and being are defined and what this means to civic and community participation.

As indicated at the start of our review, reading this book in the 'now' of the Queen's Platinum Jubilee inspired us to ponder the profound sense of hauntological dis/location in the current Dis/United Kingdom. Post-Brexit UK is haunted by many ghosts whose voices clash and collide: 'we' have 'lost' our former role as world power; 'we' have chosen in a public referendum to take back control of our borders and laws; 'we' have given away our political voice in, and the economic benefits of trade with Europe; 'we' are ruled over by an elected PM with a long track record of being 'economical with the truth'; 'we' have elected an elitist, patrician government whose care-less entitled avarice has led to the destruction of public health services, the unnecessary deaths of many old, poor and vulnerable people during a global pandemic, and the introduction of some of the most repressive laws on public protest in a contemporary democracy. Despite this, surely, 'we' can unite and find some solace in the blessings of patriotism and shared history as evidenced by the royal pageantry on show for the nation and the world? Or perhaps ... we are witnesses to a stately sleight of hand and immensely costly attempt¹ to kick over traces of and erasure of the historic violences, land dispossessions and artefact lootings of colonialism (the Benin Bronzes and the Elgin Marbles are 'ours'-not ours) and with it the socio-economic-geo-bio-political systems of class privilege, racism, sexism, misogyny, and ableism that underpinned the colonialist enterprise, which was led, endorsed and glorified by the British Monarchy (the novelist Paul Scott called colonialist India 'the Jewel in the Crown' but this phrase originally referred to all former UK imperial colonies), and which materially, relationally and affectively shaped and continues to shape bodies in the UK and 'its' former colonies. Reading this book here-now in the UK means sitting with the as-yet-unanswered question: Where is justice-to-come and what might it look like? When the UK is able and willing to face the presence of the ghosts of its past we might be able to approach that question. On current evidence, sadly we may have a long wait.

It is a testimony to the power, strength of argument and analytical importance of Higher Education Hauntologies: Living with Ghosts for a Justice-to-Come that reading this book brings to the fore how hauntologies are embodied in skin, felt in bone, apprehended in sense-ings, and materialised in spaces, places, and environments. Hauntological analyses, this book so amply demonstrates, are about bringing pasts-presents-futures into sharp relief and urging a clear eye as to what is unseen and unheard as much as what is seen and heard. Together, the book's chapters offer critical, analytical, and methodological tools to craft necessary critical appraisals for exploring the enfoldings of differing timespacematterings in higher education and how they bring the present into conversation with the past in order to imagine different higher education futures. The past does not determine the future; the future is open and different futures are possible.

 

 

1 Readers might be interested to know, for example, that the Gold State Coach, an enclosed, eight horse-drawn carriage had a run out in London prior to the Platinum Jubilee and, while not actually used during the celebrations, has been on display for visitors to the celebrations. It was commissioned in 1760 for £7,562 ($1.5billion in today's money), is made of four tons of gold, and is worth almost £28.5m). Interestingly, the UK Chancellor allocated £28 million for the celebrations. However, this is likely to be a small portion of the actual costs, at a time at which inflation and foodbank use in the UK is at an all-time high, wage rises are stifled, and more than one in five are living in poverty, with single-parent families and children in greatest poverty (https://www.jrf.org.uk/data/overall-uk-poverty-rates).