1st Edition

Spectral Spaces and Hauntings

Edited By Christina Lee Copyright 2017
    220 Pages
    by Routledge

    220 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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

    Biography

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

    "How might contact with geographies of absence shift our taken-for-granted understandings of space and time? In this timely intervention, a range of scholars and artists explore how the memories, experiences and material environments of particular places have the power to haunt the social imaginary and our individual psyches. By reanimating the realities of abandoned places, ruins and the disappeared, the authors of Spectral Spaces and Hauntings call us to attend to the ‘work that needs to be done to prevent future injustices’." -- Karen E. Till, Maynooth University, Ireland

    "A timely and important collection of incisive and insightful essays which address some of the most urgent and important issues which concern scholars working in memory studies, and humanities more generally." -- Anindya Raychaudhuri, University of St Andrews, UK