Fall 2021: HAUNTOLOGICONSUMPTION | edibles & eidolons
Ghosts arrive from the past and appear in the present. However, the ghost cannot be properly said to belong to the past. . . . Does then the ‘historical’ person who is identified with the ghost properly belong to the present? Surely not, as the idea of a return from death fractures all traditional conceptions of temporality. The temporality to which the ghost is subject is therefore paradoxical, at once they ‘return’ and make their apparitional debut. Derrida has been pleased to call this dual movement of return and inauguration a ‘hauntology’, a coinage that suggests a spectrally deferred non-origin within grounding metaphysical terms such as history and identity.”
— Peter Buse and Andrew Scott “Introduction: a Future for Haunting” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History (1999), various emphasis mine
In the sweet low light of thy face, under heavens untrod by the sun,
Let my soul with their souls find place, and forget what is done and undone.
Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
— Algernon Charles Swinburne, “Hymn to Proserpine (After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith)” (1866)
Hauntology: (n.) from Derrida: the return or persistence of elements of the past in the manner of a ghost, riffing off of haunting and ontology to explore the blurred lines between being and presence. Outside of Derrida: hauntology takes on broader connotations in the fields of psychoanalysis, literary criticism, anthropology, musicology, and Afrofuturism — of which a synchronous definition is difficult to trace.
Consumption: (n.) the ingestion of something, the using up of a resource, the economic purchase of goods by the public, the reception of information or entertainment by a large audience, a wasting disease.
Corona Borealis is pleased to announce its first ever seasonal theme: HAUNTOLOGICONSUMPTION: edibles & eidolons to go through the end of 2021. Autumn is the season that sees celebrations of both haunting (Halloween, Día de los Muertos, All Saints Day) and consumption (Thanksgiving, Black Friday) as the northern hemisphere rolls over to allow the southern hemisphere some time in the sun.
Antiquity shares a similar resonance with Autumn in this way: there are elements from its past that we wish to honor and help persist through to our present/presence, and we also ingest quite a bit of it on a daily basis. But to stretch this metaphor a bit, doesn’t antiquity also ingest us in different ways — consume us, digest us, irrevocably transform us? What about the ancient past keeps coming back up for us again and again, demanding to be expressed in the present? What about it comes back up our digestive tract suddenly in discomforting ways?
After all, you are what you eat.
Corona Borealis is looking for a great variety of pieces exploring the intersections of what is edible and what is eidolon — which could come in the form of essays, reflections, translations, art pieces, theoretical approaches, poetry, collaborations, mixed media, and (most excitingly) suggestions that have not yet crossed my mind. This is an intentionally broad topic designed to go across the different subfields of classical studies. Therefore I’m not just looking for topics across philology and literature, but in medicine, philosophy, iconography, economics, religion, the performing arts, eschatology, as well as all of the fields centering around identity and being (as hauntology demands).
Corona Borealis aims to bring ancient ideologies and belief systems into contemporary networks of knowledge and knowledge-production. When approaching creating something for Corona Borealis, think less along the lines of “what of my research would fit a publication like this?” and more along the lines of “what have I always talked myself out of doing around antiquity?” Those are the pitches that I’m the most interested in. While traditional professors may tell you to narrow and specialize, this publication aims to reach for the radical potential in audacity and excess (Musser 2018).
Submissions for HAUNTOLOGICONSUMPTION: edibles & eidolons will be accepted through the end of the year. All submissions should be sent through the CB email: coronaborealispublication@gmail.com — queries can also go through email or on Twitter at @RonaBorealis. There is not yet a word or length limit, though those who wish to submit longer projects should know that it may be broken up into smaller pieces and spread out through the season. The theme for Winter 2022 will be announced ahead of the AIA/SCS joint meeting in early January.
