Description
This paper aims to orient thinking towards that which refuses to disappear and haunts our studies of the international. We study scenes from two novels, Hwang Sok-Yong’s The Guest and Choi In-hoon’s A Grey Man, both of which center themes of re-membering, dis-memberment, memory, and (already) knowing. The scenes present well-illustrated depictions of living trauma using dream sequences, a mode of writing that renders memory open for study that we describe as ‘hazy clarity.’ Together, both scenes offer ‘hazy clarity’ as a method for engaging memory of trauma in a way that avoid predetermining the readers leap to solutions. Revising Lindqvist (1992), we suggest that the courage to draw conclusions can come out of such hazy clarity. This approach can make that which has been rendered as ‘excess’—that which is not or cannot be explained by the main modes through which we study the international—available for deployment against those dominant modes of inquiry. While IR’s engagement with novels has been minimal, our study of these two scenes indicates how novels can teach us to have a more expansive as well as more granular understanding of how we might understand legacies of colonialism/coloniality, how they manifest, traverse, and get reproduced. Our central question is: What IR would look like if we took these things seriously? This paper argues that dreams and memory, ghosts and exorcism, need to populate our study of the international and that ‘hazy clarity’ offers opportunities for doing so.
