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.