Spectral Spaces and Hauntings

This volume explores the spectral qualities of space, using the language of hauntings, to understand how absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something (that once was, and still is) there. Contributors navigate affective spaces that have the potential to threaten, destabilise and sometimes even c

This anthology explores the spatial dimension and politics of haunting. It considers how the 'appearance' of absence, emptiness and the imperceptible can indicate an overwhelming presence of something that once was, and still is, (t)here. At its core, the book asks: how and why do certain places haunt us? Drawing from a diversity of mediums, forms and disciplinary approaches, the contributors to Spectral Spaces and Hauntings illustrate the complicated ways absent presences can manifest and be registered. The case studies range from the memory sites of a terrorist attack, the lost home, a vanished mining town and abandoned airports, to the post-apocalyptic wastelands in literary fiction, the photographic and filmic surfaces where spectres materialise, and the body as a site for re-corporealising the disappeared and dead. In ruminating on the afteraffects of spectral spaces on human experience, the anthology importantly foregrounds the ethical and political imperative of engaging with ghosts and following their traces.

Autorentext

Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia.

Inhalt

Introduction: Locating Spectres

Christina Lee

PART I: Private Hauntings

1 The Haunted Spaces of 7/7: Memory, Mediatisation and Performance

John Tulloch

2 Dream House

Pippa Tandy

3 Home is Where the Hearth Was: Remembering and Place-Making a Vanished Town

Christina Lee

4 Unsettling Space and Time: Journey to Purton Ships' Graveyard

Lisa Hill

5 'Popping Up to See Pat': Attending Absence at Roadside Shrines

Elly Bavidge

PART II: Spectres of the Social

6 'Un aéroport-fantôme': The Ghost of Mirabel International Airport

Liz Millward

7 Zombie South: Cormac McCarthy's Architectures of the Undead

Daniel Cross Turner

8 Double Exposure: Rephotography and the Life of Place

László Munteán

9 Ghosts on Screen: The Politics of Intertemporality

Alison Landsberg

10 'Our Monuments Shall be the Maws of Kites': Laura Oldfield Ford and the Ghosts of Psychogeography Past

Christopher Collier

11 From Spectres of Horror to 'The Beautiful Death': Re-Corporealising the Desaparecidos of Argentina

Sonia M. Tascón