Who are our ancestors, how do they speak, and how can we hear them? In much of Western colonial logics and sociality the ancestors live in the realm of myth, coming to bear on our present through memory and the weight of history. For many Peoples globally, ancestors are an ongoing force in the present. But when ancestors are brought into academic scholarship, they are often reduced to the anecdotal, the religious, the anthropological, or as an imaginary with material effect only insofar as one constitutes them with meaning and attributes a present to them. As such, listening to the ancestors has been assumed to exclude the peoples of colonial empires. This seminar asks not simply how we reckon with ancestors, ancestral and colonial logics in ways that are real and present, but also how we develop critical approaches that rely on the cacophonies of such engagements with ancestral logics.

To attend to these cacophonies is to acknowledge that not all our ancestors are the same and neither our inheritance nor engagement with them. From a critical perspective, this means not only attending to the worlds our ancestors created and sustained that continue to exert force in our present, but also how we engage in scholarly work. Across fields and disciplines, we enter ongoing conversations and use citation to bring to the surface the voices of those with whom we are thinking, but how might such work shift when we understand such citational practices as ancestral work—when citational practice is not evidence of expertise but connection, when, as Aisha Beliso-De Jésus writes, the ancestors push us to “show how expertise itself has allowed for the cover-up of their deaths”? It might look like what Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes as the way in which Indigenous knowledges and political orders evidence “our Ancestors working to ensure we exist as Indigenous peoples, as they have always done.” Or it may mean grappling with the implication of our ancestors in the horrors of colonial racial capitalist violence and environmental devastations. 

This seminar wrestles with the epistemological and ontological implications, realities, and possibilities of ancestral work. We invite papers that grapple with the power of the ancestors in the face of contemporary and ongoing crises and call into question our own longstanding modes of training and learning that announce “distance” as a precondition for critique. What happens when the ancestors call, when their presence is irreducible to anecdotes, anthropological curiosities, or myth, but is instead felt, apprehended, and acknowledged as a significant factor in our doing and thinking? In other words, what happens when the ancestors refuse to take “distance” in their engagements with us, when proximity becomes the pathway to critical and constructive analysis? How does such speaking, such telling, affect our writing, our thinking, our methodologies, our theories, our practices?