The postcolonial and/as the Spirit World: Theorizing the Ghost in Jacques Derrida, Achille Mbembe and Ben Okri’s The Famished Road

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As that which keeps returning, the ghost is a highly suitable figure for thinking the postcolonial. However, the seminal theoretical text of contemporary ‘ghost studies’, Derrida’s Specters of Marx, does not include the postcolonial subject as an agent and places the ghost in a distinctly western tradition. This paper uses Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road to argue for the need to explore the ghost as a culturally specific concept whose workings cannot be generalized. Although Derrida’s western notion of the ghost as a figure of temporal disturbance and disjointing is pertinent to Okri’s text, its African setting prompts a supplementary theorization of the ghost through the work of the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe and his conceptualization of ghostly power and violence through the notions of living in death, specular experience, the wandering subject and necropolitics. Whereas Mbembe tends to present ghostly power as an oppressive force wielded by the state or the autocrat, The Famished Road illustrates in several ways how ghostly power is not invincible, but can be interrupted and turned against itself, precisely because of its ungraspable, shimmering status. In the end, therefore, neither Derrida’s nor Mbembe’s perspective on the ghost is fully vindicated by The Famished Road. Rather, the novel brings the two together in a syncretic move that preserves Mbembe’s idea that the ghost can be an oppressive, deadening force aligned with the state, as well as Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a resistive force and possible figure of justice.