| Sumario: | This essay introduces and grounds the conversation convened by this special issue, namely a rethinking of central methods of apprehending the global traffic in racialised death. The authors situate this conversation in ongoing work in cultural studies and interdisciplinary studies of race, gender, and empire surrounding haunting, unpacking its analytic and material possibilities as they are embedded in and emerge against the global catastrophe of capitalism. Where haunting marks relationalities across time and space beyond historicity and linear causality, contributors herein bring together these conversations with aesthetic and political economic attentions and concerns. We ask: How do bodies transgress the frames that construe them as exchangeable objects in global neoliberal imaginaries and economies, haunting and producing the unsmoothness of capitalist flow? What critical reimaginings of bodies, particularly the excesses and hauntings which characterise racialised death and the racialised condition of death in life, offer right relation with these transgressions? With what implications for global collective politics and life? In writing toward these questions and in the context of our commitments to our own bodies that haunt, this essay endeavours to take seriously practices of haunting and begin to model such practices in ways that rewrite relations to those we make life alongside: present, no longer, and not yet.
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