Often when I enter a classroom, I remind myself to say a quick blessing, words of self-encouragement that open up the space for me and prepare me for teaching. Those of us belonging to religious or spiritual traditions may do the same using more formal language: uttering prayers that cast the circle open in the name of some higher power dedicated to an exchange of knowledge and connection. These prayers can be recited from a place of stress and survival, in which we surrender ourselves to knowledge itself as a higher power, hoping that it will guide us all ably through the allotted class time, with nothing going wrong (this includes technological as well as pedagogical problems).

My essay here opens up a topic that receives little attention within our discipline, perhaps for many good reasons—that is, the strange entanglement of spirituality, superstition, and antiracist pedagogy. Religion, of course, is often eschewed formally in the classroom, but as educators we frequently perceive what we do through the deployment of incredibly spiritual metaphors: in the reverence for education that accompanies many first-generation students, for instance, or in the profound awakenings experienced by a student when, through the course of a discussion, they start to see the world differently. We often approach the classroom as a sacred space visited weekly, understanding that as soon as we enter, we might speak in a different register, in the service of generating collective affects of growth and care. In her marvelous formulation of semiprivate spaces and institutions, Ellen Rooney identifies the seminar room as indelibly semiprivate, a space that yokes together the intimacy of private spaces with the compulsions incited by being seen in public:

The semiprivate allows for interactivity, but this interactivity has parameters and controls; it is a space that accommodates the needs and common interests of total, and perhaps fictionalized, strangers.

As a scholar principally of television, I had always wanted to read this description of the semiprivate as a lens through which to reconsider the affective dimensions of media spectatorship (for example, television’s penchant to universalize preserves the intimate bond between even the most reluctant of viewers and the captivating characters of its many programs). Yet Rooney epistemologically situates the semiprivate as always liminally functional, always in motion within its contained boundaries: in its very formation it blurs the familiar with the unfamiliar, the individual with the impersonal, and the idea of sanctuary with that of enclosure, thus summoning to mind religious and spiritual architectures that similarly promise through their protocols and rules a raising of consciousness that can be never fully guaranteed.

As teachers, we know that the late capitalist appropriation of higher education has left our once venerable institutions in need of vast repair, and thus we turn to psychic mechanisms of faith each time we enter the classroom to remind ourselves that the work that we do matters, no matter how undervalued that work appears to be within the university. Perhaps, then, the ethical questions that guide our pedagogy today are spiritual questions, as well.

A number of activists, artists, and scholars of color have instructively pointed out the abstraction of religious authority common to white supremacy. Social worker and activist Hayden Dawes, for example, has noted that, “the most damning myth of white supremacy is that whiteness itself lies closest to divinity.”[2] The pomp and circumstance of the university—the set of noble affects that fuel university fundraising campaigns—stands on these twin pillars of whiteness and sanctity, and indeed requires them to sustain its overarching mission. My questions, then, are these: if the classroom functions as a semiprivate space, one that in its very expression evokes spectatorial and spiritual dimensions (and perhaps spectacular ones as well), what work must be done in order to maintain it? And how does this project and this work intersect with an explicitly antiracist pedagogy? Such questions provoke calls to view our classrooms as temples of knowledge and as spaces of awakening, and as such to clean those spaces as we would altars at our homes. Such questions demand that rather than repeating performances of academic wokeness, we must reawaken our pedagogy in spiritual terms, purging dogmatic prescriptions of privilege from the learning goals and class expectations dutifully printed in each term’s syllabus.

Now, while it is important to acknowledge how all too easily certain minoritarian expressions and rituals can become appropriated by the consumer signifiers of New Age spirituality—something I would like to avoid here—I have been thinking about these questions in relation to a body of interdisciplinary scholarship primarily authored by cultural minorities (and predominantly radical queers and people of color) that examines the persistence of the spiritual and the alchemical within intellectual discourses. I want to highlight one trope that emerges in these desires for more holistic and self-reflexive critical interventions and decolonizations: wrestling and making kin with ghosts.

To be in the academy, one might say, is to cohabitate with ghosts. I am often inspired by work in performance studies and black studies that asserts this fact: José Muñoz, for example, foundationally argues for ghost whispering as a methodological practice in order to understand our “desire for politics alongside the politics of desire” better—desires instrumental to the structures of feeling undergirding a utopic future.[3] In a different register, Christina Sharpe’s insightful metaphor of the wake demands that we recognize the afterlives of slavery in contemporary black life; like Muñoz, the wake unearths a process of making ghosts visible that can then enable the possibility for a way forward, as if the idea of forward or of futurity could even happen without such ancestral reckoning.[4] For me as a white person, this scholarship has taught me to recognize my own ghosts—past expressions of privilege, moments of teaching I wish I could revisit differently—as inseparable from my present embodiment, impossible to be fully expelled.

We need these ghosts to help keep ourselves and our teaching accountable. In this vein, I am also inspired by the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs and adrienne maree brown, who return again and again to spiritual ritual as a grounding force for the intersectional activism that must accompany the production of knowledge. For Gumbs, this is expressed by exploding the immateriality of ghosts, tracing ancestral connection across species and lifeforms that affectively resonate and linger, such as in the ceremonies that ask you to engage in ancestral listening, to “go deeper...when you think it’s time to come up for air.”[5] For brown, keeping a connection with one’s spectral ancestors is key to centering pleasure, since we are often separated from our emotional experiences because of the ways that our ancestors learned to experience the world.[6] These rejoinders implore me to acknowledge and talk to the ghosts in the classroom, rather than exorcising them with the melodramatic and campy fervor often seen in horror films.

For me, part of the work of creating an antiracist classroom is to recognize that when I meet with students of color, for example, my whiteness appears to them both materially and spectrally. While I am not responsible for the actions of those ghosts, I am still affected by their spectral remainders, reminders of how teachers and students alike may be disconnected from various affective vocabularies because of ancestral trauma. Because of this, in many of my classes—and especially in the classes in which representation is the primary focus—collaborative standards of communication are paramount. Often, students will solicit “Best Practices” for class conduct that include how to call someone out in a respectful yet direct tone for saying something that a member of the class may find offensive or problematic. This is one example in which letting students create the flexibly unique boundaries of the semiprivate will help identify the ghosts in the classroom, so that we can see the room more clearly, in all of its semiprivate complexity.

Recognizing the ghosts present in our classrooms also creates a new perspective from which to consider the use of trigger warnings before screening potentially offensive or visceral texts. While it is tempting to write off trigger warnings wholly as symptomatic of a larger and generational shift in the commodification of higher education (such that students exercise empowerment and choice not unlike consumers in the university marketplace), I want to retool their utility for the classroom. Consider how one significant intervention from the turn to affect within media studies has been to open up the spectatorial experience to consider the affective traces that linger, often synesthetically, and thus changing the atmosphere in which we sit with and decode texts. Indeed, to take seriously the notion that ghosts inhabit the classroom might be also to resignify the act of “warning”: not a warning that forecloses the critical study of representation (and the discomfort that often accompanies these inquiries), but to warn the ghosts that spectrally sit with us that their presence is acknowledged—put differently, to invite them to join our discussions while holding them accountable to the shared pursuit of the exchange of knowledge. These ghosts, after all, are as much a part of the affective atmospheres that shape the epistemological contexts of reception as any other environmental factor, and while they can often be borne from past pedagogical traumas they do not necessitate adversarial relationships. In her useful historicization of trigger warnings within media studies, Lynne Joyrich notes their origins in early 2000s fan fiction, tying such warnings to fannish logics of appropriation and resignification.[7] Perhaps applying such tactics to how we approach provocative material can help a classroom collectively disentangle these spectral remainders.

Such work is difficult, as it often requires relinquishing full control over the classroom, even more so than in the prayers or breathwork done as we enter. It requires betraying our standards of epistemological authority, since spectral others warp our sense of objectivity. It requires hearing the ghosts of our students in non-traditional and non-formal languages and embodied performances. And perhaps above all, it requires welcoming pedagogical crises of faith as opportunities to meditate on and build a more just and antiracist world.

Hunter Hargraves is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. His research and teaching traverses the intersections of television and digital pop culture studies and questions of affect, performance, and representation. His first book, Uncomfortable Television, which explores the turn to discomfort in early-21^st Century American television, will be published next January (2023) by Duke University Press.

1. Ellen Rooney, “A Semiprivate Room,” differences 13.1 (2002): p. 132. ↑

2. Hayden Dawes, Twitter post, January 2021, 4:53 a.m., https://twitter.com/hcdawes/. ↑

3. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: the Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: NYU Press, 2009), p. 48. ↑

4. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). ↑

5. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), p. xiii. ↑

6. adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019). ↑

7. Lynne Joyrich, “Keyword 8: Trigger Warnings,” differences 30.1 (2019): pp. 189-196. ↑