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This groundbreaking book rethinks landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorizing 'social haunting': the ways in which social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.
List of contents
Introduction: Ghosts, landscapes and social memory
Chapter 1. Ghost armies: Memory, landscape and social haunting
Chapter 2. Dark caves: Prehistory and the origins of social ghosts
Chapter 3. Revolutionary spirits: Marx, Engels and catastrophe
Chapter 4. Excavating spectres: Haunting and psychoanalysis
Chapter 5. Night spaces: The haunted house
Chapter 6. Zong spectres: Ghosts of the slave system
Chapter 7. Ghastly fictions: Writing the catastrophe
Chapter 8. Nightvisiting songs: Performing the dead
Chapter 9. Spectral machines: Seeing social ghosts
Chapter 10. Conclusions: Arrivals from the future
References
Index
About the author
Martyn Hudson is Associate Researcher and Project Coordinator at Newcastle University of the Co-Curate North-East project, and author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity and Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World.
Summary
This groundbreaking book rethinks landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorizing ‘social haunting’: the ways in which social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.
Additional text
'This wide-ranging study of haunting as a social practice carefully excavates and illuminates the dazzling array of literal and metaphorical landscapes– from the prehistoric to the (post)colonial and from the musical to the digital– in which ghosts are sedimented, ready to re-emerge as social forces in the present.' - Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
'Hudson sets out to write a sociology of haunting, to delineate the "social power of the ghost". Using an associative logic that glides like a spectre through disciplinary boundaries, this book puts Marx, Brecht, Rilke and David Mitchell together, teases ghost stories from ancient landscapes and haunted houses, and even gets grumpy materialist Theodor Adorno together with wide-eyed spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge to meditate on the capacious possibilities bound up with ideas of social haunting. An absorbing, challenging read.' - Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck University of London,UK
