Magical Realist Hauntings in Children's Everyday Encounters With Death, or, How to Believe in Impossible Things

ABSTRACT

Modern deaths have become reiterations. That is, despite exhibiting a seemingly high‐level of diversity in death's representations in everyday lives, death suffers from a particular onto‐epistemological poverty that prevents it from being imagined otherwise. This, in part, is due to a contemporary capitalist domestication of thanatological themes into subjects of sensation, exotification, and ultimately, commodification and consumption. Additionally, the modern biomedical and techno‐scientific efforts should also be taken into account in disenchanting the multiplicity of death into a singular and universal experience based on human‐centrism and human exceptionalism. Death, as such, warrants novel conceptual and theoretical re‐enchantment in order for its multiplicity to be revitalised, especially in emerging post‐humanist and relational contexts. Young children's engagements with death/s and dying—long considered to be ‘incomplete’ or ‘magical’ by developmentalist constructions—offers a unique opportunity to reimagine what death can possibly be. Drawing on child‐led, video‐reflexive and art‐based ethnographic work with 5–7‐year‐old children in Australia, this work examines children's everyday socio‐material encounters with diverse death/s: ones that are fictional, more‐than‐human, and ghostly. Specifically, these death encounters encompass children's dreams and constructions of reality, imaginary play with objects, and engagement with non‐human subjects. Informed by cross‐disciplinary literary and sociological theorisations on magical realism and hauntology, we make children's ‘unrealistic’, ‘matter‐of‐fact’ and ‘uncanny’ accounts about death visible, illustrating their magical realist potentials, and thus considering their onto‐epistemological values to be not oppositional but complementary to dominant death narratives. In particular, we show how children's empirical and imaginative constructions of death/s maps onto metaphysical and ontological versions of magical realism. These constructions constitute death as unreal , objective and uncanny ; they collectively expand and re‐enchant death's possible meanings beyond conventional human‐centric and essentialist understandings.