What is a ghost? How can déjà vu liberate individuals from a locked sense of time? What can we see if the present is haunted by the future? Such are the questions that will be explored by writer and filmmaker Charles Mudede in this newly commissioned lecture held virtually on the occasion of Haunted Haus. Mudede, whose recent writings have considered afrofuturism in Black Panther and the relations between capitalism and extraterrestrials, here turns his attention to the paranormal. Drawing from depictions of ghosts across eras and cultures, Mudede suggests that ghosts may not arise from the past, but rather from a teeming two-way realm that involves the future.
Charles Tonderai Mudede is a Zimbabwean-born culture critic, urbanist, and filmmaker. He is the Senior Staff Writer of the Seattle weekly The Stranger, and lectures at Cornish College of the Arts. Mudede has collaborated with the director Robinson Devor on three films, two of which, Police Beat and Zoo, premiered at Sundance, and one of which, Zoo, screened at Cannes. He directed the 2020 film Thin Skin, from a script he wrote with Lindy West and Ahamefule Oluo. He has written for the New York Times, Cinema Scope, Tank Magazine, e-flux, LA Weekly, Nest Magazine, and C Theory.
