ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 tackles narrative time. Referencing Michael Hanchard, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Michelle M. Wright, it looks first at the reductive force of linear time as revealed in Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear, a novel that tells the story of a young Black woman in Berlin who has lost her twin brother to suicide. Linear time in the novel is petrified time: discouraging thinking outside of its rigid temporal pathway, it negates the possibility that things might change. As necropolitical time it constrains what is memorable and knowable as well as what is possible or thinkable. Necropolitics ghosts people and their memories, and the second part of the chapter explores epistemic ghosting in Serhiy Zhadan’s novel Voroshilovgrad, whose protagonist Herman is on a journey into his own past. That puts him in conflict with a capitalist oligarchy that is working to suppress history and memory in order to maximise profit-making in the present.
