Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I consider haunting as a metaphor for the ways that African Americans in New Orleans relate to the future deaths of their kin. I explore how, in the face of urban violence, death acquires a ghostly presence: not yet fully present but already effective in anticipatory actions.

Paper long abstract:

While the city of New Orleans is a haunted place, specters of death do not manifest equally for all residents. Patterns of mortality reflect enduring histories of racialized inequality and intersect closely with socioeconomic class. In Black and underfunded neighborhoods, most deaths occur slowly, manifesting as the outcome of poverty-related ill health. Yet since the rise of urban violence in the 1970s, Black and poor residents have also had to increasingly deal with sudden, untimely deaths in their families. This situation has upturned normative expectations about the timing of death and about who will have to care for whose remains. Based on ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2018), I describe how African American parents and grandparents find themselves confronted with the need to reckon with the (future) deaths of their children and grandchildren. They do so, importantly, by securing finances to mourn not yet deceased kin through the consumption of life insurance policies. In this paper, I consider the ways that people relate to the future potentiality of untimely death in terms of haunting. While haunting tends to be used as a metaphor for the lingering presence of systemic injury from the past (Gordon 1997; Holloway 2003), some scholars have suggested that ghosts may come from the future as well (Zeitlyn 2020). I use this notion of haunting—of absent-presences and morbid dreads—to draw out how future death, and the urgent demand to orient oneself to it, may take shape in the face of urban violence.