Spectral Spaces and Hauntings The Affects of Absence [Hardcover]

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 Hauntingsillustrate 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 afteraffectsof 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

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

2 Dream House

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

4 Unsettling Space and Time: Journey to Purton Ships Graveyard

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

6 Un a?roport-fant?me: The Ghost of Mirabel International Airport

7 Zombie South: Cormac McCarthys Arcls