Spectral Seeing Between Worlds: A Guide to Living in Suspension

Abstract

In this thesis I introduce my theory of spectral seeing, as a way to perceive the invisible, to imagine the incomprehensible, an approach that seeks to mediate the gaps that inherently exist in our understandings of the world and of others. I identify the spectral as those who possess a quality of liminality or sub-visibility, from their existence between worlds. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke, I identify examples of spectral characters, and the unique potential of their perspectives to bridge across irreconcilable difference. In Toni Morrison’s Sula, I expand that potential to include a non-linear perspective of time, by seeing spectrality in the novel’s water bodies. In Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, I identify spectral sites and how they can uncover boundaries of care in communities that uphold rigid, exclusionary kinship structures. On these spectral sites, I gather my theories of spectrality and its potentials into a framework for making kin with the other and across difference, that I call living in suspension. The theory of spectrality presented in this thesis, was written with an ecocritical perspective of humanity’s relationship to nature – its resultant concept of living in suspension thus retains those relations as a primary consideration, though these theories by no means resist application onto alternate fields of theory.