Finding Zion: Spectral intimacy and state indeterminacy at an erased American cemetery

ABSTRACT

In 2018, a previously erased African American cemetery was dramatically rediscovered in Tampa, Florida. The rediscovery was accompanied by multiple acts of remembrance: archaeologists set about confirming the presence of coffins and bodies; people living on top or nearby this and other burial grounds began reporting a series of ghostly visions and visitations; and the city government and its contractors put forward plans to memorialize the erased cemetery. Based on participant-observation with city employees, developers, and activists undertaken as part of a broader project on the politics of race, empire, and urban life in South Florida, this article investigates the erasure and rediscovery of this and other historic cemeteries in order to inquire into the social and political life of indeterminacy at sites of necropolitical violence. While some residents attempted to enter into meaningful interpersonal relations with the spirits of actual deceased persons, taking their existence as a potentially transparent fact, agents of the state instead developed a position on the question of haunting more in line with social theories of the spectral as an impossible possibility. Attending to this fact ethnographically reveals the relationship between statecraft, the nonsecular, and the politics of indeterminacy in a new light.

KEYWORDS:

• Cemeteries
• ghosts
• intimacy
• state
• indeterminacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names are pseudonyms. Other biographical details have been amended to protect the anonymity of my research participants.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US-UK Fulbright Commission.