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Seeing Ghosts: Gothic Discourses and State Formation (2012)
Éire-Ireland, 2012
This essay explores the idea that Dublin was a haunted urban space in the 1920s and 30s. This was the period when the aftermath of the Irish Civil War dominated the social and political landscape of the new Free State. While the political legacy of this calamity has been well documented and analysed, the manifestation of the crisis in terms of a public atmosphere is less well understood. One striking sign of this haunting is in the activities of individuals describing themselves as Ghosts – a recalcitrant group that signed and distributed a series of political leaflets across the capital. Associated with the (defeated) republican women’s organisation Cumann na mBan, the Ghosts self-consciously represented themselves as an otherworldly presence that would haunt the fledging pro-Treaty government. Through their spectral practices, the Ghosts sought to question and unsettle the new elites – they literally and figuratively haunted history. Dublin was a haunted city in these years, with the residues of violence and an unfulfilled revolutionary potential suffusing the ravaged streetscapes. This paper explores how the capital city could become eerie and shadowy, an in-between and unstable site for alternative forms of cultural articulation and political mobilization. Indeed, it is argued here that the widespread deployment of gothic tropes in anti-state political rhetoric and cultural practices are suggestive of a particular type of political agency and memory work.
Cryptic Iniquity: nunnery Gothic in nineteenth-century North America
When a hysterical Maria Monk went public with accusations of mistreatment at Catholic nunneries in Montreal, the North American public seized on her “awful disclosures” (1836) as proof of long-suspected evil. Along with Sarah Richardson‟s Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal (1858), Awful Disclosures (with its sequels and rebuttals) fuelled anti-Catholic feeling, as well as a modest reaction in mainstream fiction. The paper will examine the visual, verbal and spatial codes with which this brand of sectarian evil was constructed and demonstrate its roots in European literary gothic, historical anti-Catholicism and contemporary nativist sentiment. Far from being the creations of individual delusion, Monk‟s convent crypts reflect a collective projection of social fears from both the old world and the new.
Studies in Canadian Literature-etudes En Litterature Canadienne, 2015
Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte have drawn attention to the rise of the Canadian post-colonial and transnational Gothic in recent years. This article argues that Carol Shields’s Unless is not only a covert post-colonial and transnational Gothic, alluding to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre , but it also presents us with a writer of such a work as the protagonist. Shields thus highlights the role of the writer and (his or) her negotiation with ghosts in the revision of traumatic national history and the idea of the nation. In Unless , the British-French Canadian writer Reta Winters must realize the ongoing trauma of the “other” in multicultural Canada. The colonial Gothic discourse of the unified nation and alien ghosts from beyond the border perpetuates xenophobia. Reta’s interrogation of this discourse turns into a revisionist Gothic in which the ghosts protest the inauthenticity of the Canadian nation-state and its violence against diverse “others.” Reta utilizes the figure of the g...
Hauntologies: The Ghost, Voice and the Gallery
Vertigo, 2012
An online essay written for Vertigo Magazine exploring John Akomfrah's 'Hauntologies' exhibition at Carroll / Fletcher art gallery, London (5 October – 8 November 2012). http://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/library/documents/john-akomfrah-press/claire-m.-holdsworth-hauntologies-the-ghost-voice-and-the-gallery-close-up-april-2013.pdf