ABSTRACT. This article is the continuation of a personal journey, wrestling with (not) belonging, which started almost a decade ago with my arrival in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It was not until I was invited to share my ‘whakapapa’ (genealogy), merely reduced to ‘Spanish’ at that point, that I started to reflect on my own identity as a Canary Islander. Through my engagement with te ao Māori (the Māori world), I started to understand and know myself in relation to the Indigenous peoples of the Canary Islands, as it allowed me to reflect on ‘(not) belonging’ and un/becoming Indigenous (see Ramirez & Pasley, 2022). Learning about the Indigenous histories of the Islands and exploring my relationships with the Canary Islands and their Indigenous histories brought up more questions than answers. The process of decolonising the Canary Islands requires reconstituting onto-epistemological understandings and engagement with the Indigenous and colonial histories of the islands, decentring these from a Eurocentric/Western narrative/lens and establishing a Canarian onto-epistemology. To do so, I diffract Barad’s (2017) void of im/possibility with Derrida’s (1995) hauntology to develop the concept of a necromantic hauntology of the void. This allows me to tend to the wound that has been left behind in the Canary Islands and engage with the im/possibilities of the in/determinacy of Canarian Indigeneity’s nothingness/ openness. This is part of my reconnection with the Indigenous Canarian inheritance (outside Western thinking) and the possibilities that pasados que (nunca) fueron y futuros que (nunca) pueden ser (pasts that were [not], futures than can [never] be) offer to revive my connections to the land, its histories and its/my Indigeneity.

Keywords: Canary Islands; guanche; Indigenous Canarians; coloniality; te ao Māori; hauntology

How to cite: Ramirez, E. (2024). A necromantic hauntology of the void: Pasados que (nunca) fueron y futuros que (nunca) pueden ser in the Canary Islands. Knowledge Cultures, 12(1), 15-30. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc12120242.

Received February 23, 2024 • Received in revised form February 28, 2024
Accepted February 28, 2024 • Available online April 1, 2024