“A dead man who won’t stop being born”: Maradonian ghosts, South American hauntologies, and the stubborn desire of the impoverished South to feel proud of itself

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Diego Maradona – Argentina’s football legend and cultural totem – never truly left. Instead, he lingers as a ghost, haunting the streets, murals, and collective imagination long after his death. Through an analysis of Jorge Boido’s photographs of Maradona’s muralización in Buenos Aires and Santiago Spigaroli’s paste-ups of his image – not just in Argentina but in Naples and Morocco – I explore how these artistic tributes turn him into a phantom, a restless presence that refuses to fade. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, Avery Gordon’s work on spectral social forces, and Mark Fisher’s ideas on cultural haunting, I examine how Maradona’s afterlife in art reflects deeper, unresolved wounds in Argentine society. These tributes emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when public mourning was dangerous, even forbidden. Yet people risked gathering, painting, pasting – proof of Maradona’s stubborn grip on a nation that, like much of the Global South, has seen its political dreams fail. The resurgence of myths like “Argentina potencia” (Argentina as a world power), the lost welfare state, and the trauma of the Malvinas War during this period shows that Maradona was never just a footballer; he was a vessel for collective longing, a ghost who still demands to be reckoned with.