Read more
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Holding Open the Door of Haunting
Part 1: Materializing Environmental Threats
1. Urban Hauntings: On Ghosts and Garbage in GraceLand
2. Spectral Toxicity in Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven
Part 2: Materializing Environmental Knowledges
3. Haunted Histories, Animate Futures: Recovering Noongar Knowledge through
Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance
4. Mapping Modes of Inhabitance: Haunting, Homing, and the Cartographic
Imagination in Henrietta Rose-Innes's The Rock Alphabet
5. Life in the Graveyard: Architectures of Survival and Extinction in Arundhati
Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Conclusion: Plotting Just Futures in the Company of Ghosts
Notes
Bibliography
About the author
Laura A. White is Associate Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, USA.
Summary
Along with humans and animals, ghosts populate the pages of contemporary Anglophone novels. Analysing novels from across the world—including Australia, Nigeria, South Africa, India, and Jamaica, this book explores how these ghosts can help readers to perceive difficult-to-visualise environmental threats and access marginalised environmental knowledge. Instead of prompting fear, these hauntings foster understanding across species and generations to enable inclusive formulations of environmental justice.
Drawing on the latest work in postcolonial ecocriticism, hauntology, and environmental philosophy and such literary texts as GraceLand, No Telephone to Heaven, The Rock Alphabet, and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Ecospectrality is an essential read for anyone working in the environmental humanities today.
Foreword
Explores how contemporary Anglophone writers - including from Africa, Australia, India and the Caribbean - use the figure of the ghost to grapple with issues of environmental justice and knowledge.
