The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory / Edition 1

by Maria del Pilar Blanco, Esther Peeren

Overview

The Spectralities Reader is the first volume to collect the rich scholarship produced in the wake of the "spectral turn+? of the early 1990s, which saw ghosts and haunting conjured as compelling analytical and methodological tools across the humanities and social sciences. Surveying the past twenty years from an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective, the Reader displays the wide range of concerns spectrality, in its diverse elaborations, has been called upon to elucidate. The disjunctions produced by globalization, the ungraspable quality of modern media, the convolutions of subject formation (in terms of gender, race, and sexuality), the elusiveness of spaces and places, and the lingering presences and absences of memory and history have all been reconceived by way of the spectral. A primer for the wide readership engaged with cultural interpretations of ghosts and haunting that go beyond the confines of the fictional and supernatural, The Spectralities Reader includes twenty-five groundbreaking texts by prominent contemporary thinkers, from Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak to Avery Gordon and Arjun Appadurai, as well as a general introduction and six section introductions by the editors.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781441105592
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/15/2013
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	584
Sales rank:	1,070,513
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

María del Pilar Blanco is University Lecturer in Spanish American Literature and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012).

Esther Peeren is Assistant Professor in Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She has published articles on Mikhail Bakhtin, queer television, translation theory and the chronotopic dimension of diaspora. Her first book, entitled Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond appeared in 2007 with Stanford University Press and she also co-edited a collection of essays entitled The Shock of the Other: Situating Alterities (2007). Currently, she is developing a project on spectrality in contemporary literature, television and film.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Permissions

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities

I. The Spectral Turban

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectral Turban / Introduction

Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Spectrographies

Colin Davis, État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, from Introduction: The Spectral Turban

Julian Wolfreys, Preface: On Textual Haunting

Roger Luckhurst, from The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the "Spectral Turban"

II. Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary / Introduction

Avery F. Gordon, from her shape and his hand

Achille Mbembe, from Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola

Arjun Appadurai, Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai

Peter Hitchcock, from ( ) of Ghosts

III. The Ghost in the Machine: Spectral Media

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Ghost in the Machine: Spectral Media / Introduction

Tom Gunning, To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision

Jeffrey Sconce, from Introduction to Haunted Media

Akira Mizuta Lippit, from Modes of Avisuality: Psychoanalysis – X-ray – Cinema

David Toop, from Chair creaks, but no one sits there

Allen S. Weiss, Preface: Radio Phantasms, Phantasmic Radio

IV. Spectral Subjectivities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Spectral Subjectivities: Gender, Sexuality, and Race / Introduction

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, from Ghostwriting

Carla Freccero, Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past

Sharon Patricia Holland, from Introduction: Raising the Dead

Renée L. Bergland, from Indian Ghosts and American Subjects


V. Possessions: Spectral Places

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Possessions: Spectral Places / Introduction

Anthony Vidler, Buried Alive

Ulrich Baer, To Give Memory a Place: Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition

David Matless, A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts

Giorgio Agamben, On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living among Specters

VI. Haunted Historiographies

María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Haunted Historiographies / Introduction

Judith Richardson, A History of Unrest

Jesse Alemán, The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest

Alexander Nemerov, Seeing Ghosts: The Turban of the Screw and Art History

Index