Haunting homes: Tracing the lingering afterlives of violence in the domestic

The home, and domesticity, is not only central in the Western imaginary blurring the lines between domestic space and individuality, but the home can also be seen as an extension of the self, a scaffold to which we construct and critique our identity, built of mirror as well as mortar. But homes are also inherently haunted, dyschronous and disjointed from time, where the present wavers with ghosts of both past and future. Using the haunted house as a conceptual metaphor, this paper aims to delineate a framework to encapsulate and understand lingering afterlives of violence in both literal as well as conceptual ‘homes’. Exploring haunted houses as both literal figurative sites, we map out the frame of this metaphor using two examples, exploring both the meaning of ‘haunted’ as well as the structural scaffold of the house itself as it relates to afterlives of violence. Reading the Swedish People’s Home as a form of ‘haunted house’, we explore the effects of lingering violence built into the very foundations of this home, now making its return. We also explore how the analytical framework of the haunted house can be used to conceptualise the displacing effects of climate weirding, using the town of Acerado as an example, tracing the haunting effects of solastalgia and its asynchronic relationship with home. These examples are used to illustrate how our proposed framework can be used both to deconstruct the bones of the haunted house, as well as the ghosts haunting it. This does not only provide us with a lens to identify cultural, social or political trauma embedded in actual as well as symbolic structures, but it also allows us to challenge the boundaries of our ‘homes’; challenging deep-held notions of privilege and power, allowing us to identify and dismantle structures of inequality and oppression.