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Paper short abstract

My paper utilises Derrida’s hauntology to frame ruins in post-disaster Tohoku, Japan, not just as memorialisation of lost pasts but of lost futures. Temporally, ruins relate to dilapidated, wiped-out pasts as much as they incorporate traces of failed futures that continue to exert force on people.

Paper long abstract

The Tohoku region, in northeastern Japan, has long been exposed to recurrent natural disasters, most notably the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. As recovery progresses, landmarks and ruins have been memorialised. Such ruins have the potential to evoke the spectres not only of “absent-presences” but of multiple temporalities folding into each other, producing affective-material excesses that conjure sensations and imaginaries. My paper utilises Derrida’s hauntology to frame ruins not just as memorialisation of lost pasts, but of lost futures, “endings that are not over”. Temporally, ruins relate to dilapidated, wiped-out pasts as much as they incorporate traces of failed futures that continue to exert force on people. These severed imaginary constitute momentous watersheds for the life of communities, pressured between a “futureless future” (Koselleck, 2004) and an “empty future” (Adam & Groves, 2007): a commodified future irreducibly tied to its economic use, and that frames ruins as inherently valueless. My paper re-values ruins as analytical lens to investigate the paths severed but still nested in our present and past, which “haunts” ruinous landscape and still shape communities’ experiences of memory, heritage, and identity. The absences evoked by ruins at times remain buried, clandestine, but then reappear as resistances, generative moments, trasnformative experiences which in the right circumstances can be re-appropriated by society. Ruins, indeed, are not just mementoes of the past, but a contested layering of multiple dissonant, haunted genealogies.