Spirits’ Homecoming: The Way We Archive Trauma

Excerpt from my article “Channeling Alterity: Toward a Theory of Shamanic Audiovisualization,” Theory, Culture & Society (OnlineFirst, 2026). DOI

Abstract

This article theorizes the concept of ‘shamanic audiovisualization’ – a process whereby the cinematic apparatus itself functions as a ritualistic medium channeling alterity – to challenge logocentric models of testimony and trauma that dominate the archive. Moving beyond the imperative to ‘give voice’, which risks re-performing the violence of the event, I examine how Korean screen media offers an alternative ethical framework. Through an analysis of the Korean film Spirits’ Homecoming, directed by Cho Jung-rae in 2016, I argue that the cinematic medium functions as a shamanic conduit. This process, inherently gendered and coded feminine, facilitates a mode of ‘channeling’ alterity that operates through receptivity rather than extraction. Shamanic audiovisualization thus proposes a new social temporality for trauma – one that acknowledges the past without being entrapped by it – and models a politics of emotion that moves beyond wound-based identity toward a future-oriented embrace.

From Testifying to Channeling

The Western archival impulse is fundamentally logocentric. It is driven by a desire to capture, document, and preserve narrative testimony, enshrining it as evidence. Jacques Derrida’s work on the archive reveals it as a site of consignation – a gathering of signs – but also of institutional power that determines what is sayable and what is not. The violence, therefore, lies not only in the original event but in the structural constraints of the archive itself, which demands a coherent subject of testimony.

This creates a double bind for the trauma survivor, whose experience, as Caruth (1996) argues, is inherently unassimilable – a wound that refuses to be fully integrated into narrative memory. The demand to testify can thus become a demand to perform a subjectivity fractured by an event that, by its very nature, resists representation.

Shamanic audiovisualization offers a way out of this double bind by shifting the paradigm from testifying to channeling. Channeling does not require the conscious, narrating subject. Instead, it operates through a medium – in this case, both the shaman and the filmic screen – that becomes a receptive vessel for alterity.

Related concept: Shamanic Audiovisualization · This argument also opens Chapter 1 of The Spectral Screen (book manuscript in progress).

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