| Sumario: | This paper discusses how the ghosts of a thorough and unrelenting epistemicide might climb out of chronopolitical silence and return to the bodies, buildings and materials of our higher educational institutions. Rather than 'exorcise' the hungry, angry or vengeful ghosts of a colonial and patriarchal past through faux-performances of 'allyship' that seek to lay these ghosts finally to rest inside the boundaries of decolonial literatures and in published allied 'knowledge' – and yet never in practice – this paper discusses ghosts and attempts at their exorcism through the live performances of Moor Mother, the imaginaries of Christina Sharpe on 'the wake', Zakiyya Iman Jackson's work on 'becoming human', the poetry of NourbeSe Philips, anecdotal 'performances' of silencing witnessed in the everyday of the academy, and through the live performance-art engagements of the paper's author in UK higher education contexts namely: at Cambridge University and the Royal College of Art. Two key critical problems emerge from what is intra-actively fictioned through all these. One: where are the ghosts of the colonised dead supposed to 'go'? What does this say about political configurations of time, space and matter? And two: what exactly is being watched and waited for in so-called allied 'decolonial' moves? How does the institution know when it has 'decolonised' itself? Taking the premise of David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan's 'fictioning', TJ Demos' work on 'futurisms', the decolonial endeavours Dixa Ramirez-D'Oleo makes for Donna Haraway and the new materialists, and legacies of the work of Boaventura De Sousa Santos, this paper will aim not to fiction a possible future(ism) but instead to reverse engineer the exorcisms, exploring the relative diffractions and diffraction patterns these produce. Thus, the dead, silenced voices of ways of knowing and making in and through performance will be encouraged to 'wake' and 'walk out' into strange and alien(ated) pasts, presents in service of possible, pluriversal futures.
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