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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
Christina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in Communication and Cultural Studies at Curtin University, Australia.
Summary
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
Report
"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
