Haunting and Spectrality Research Papers (original) (raw)

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976... more

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

Puerto Berrío is a small town on the banks of the Magdalena River, Colombia. For years, its inhabitants watched unidentified corpses, known as NNs, float down its waters. But instead of letting them pass along they chose to rescue and... more

Puerto Berrío is a small town on the banks of the Magdalena River, Colombia. For years, its inhabitants watched unidentified corpses, known as NNs, float down its waters. But instead of letting them pass along they chose to rescue and adopt them. Requiem NN (2013), a film by Colombian artist Juan Manuel Echavarría, documents this practice, providing a stunning testimony of a community’s resilience and advancing fundamental questions about the relationship between mourning, memory, ethics, and representation in the context of extreme violence. Through an analysis of Echavarría’s film, a reflection on the ghostly practice of adopting the NNs, and an exploration of the ethical potentiality of the spectral (Derrida, Gordon, Demos), I argue that Requiem NN highlights how the extension of kinship based on the will to mourn truncates the desire for radical annihilation and silencing that NNs embody; it mobilises a way to unpack the complex relation between representational practices, historical violence, and ethical concerns, and invites the viewer to reflect on the ways in which the thousands of disappearances caused by the armed conflict make Colombia a haunted country, that is to say, a country that needs to acknowledge, converse with, and seek justice for its ghosts.

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media... more

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media (hence its frequent references to radio and television). This paper is an attempt to summarize the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetic breakdown, taking into account both the main inspirations behind the movement and profiles of the artists in it.

Das Gespenstische hat Konjunktur, auch in der Welt der Wissenschaft. Seit einigen Jahren, deutlich verstärkt zu Beginn unseres noch jungen Jahrtausends, fällt die Zunahme einschlägiger Titel in profilierten akademischen Verlagen und... more

Das Gespenstische hat Konjunktur, auch in der Welt der Wissenschaft. Seit einigen Jahren, deutlich verstärkt zu Beginn unseres noch jungen Jahrtausends, fällt die Zunahme einschlägiger Titel in profilierten akademischen Verlagen und Zeitschriften auf. Gespenster - Erscheinungen-Medien-Theorien, Gespenster und Politik, Gespenster und Gelehrte, Kultur & Gespenster, Gespenster der Migration, Kollektive Gespenster, Diskrete Gespenster, Jelineks Gespenster, Rousseaus Gespenster... Setzt man die Suche mit Schlagworten wie Geister, Wiedergänger, Untote im deutschen Sprachraum fort, oder international mit Ghosts, Spirits, Haunting, Uncanny, Specter, Spectral, Spectrality, so staunt man, auf welchen akademischen Feldern überall Geisterhaftes gesichtet wird: in Literatur-, Film-, Theater-, Medien-, Geschichts- und Politikwissenschaft, post-kolonialer Theorie, Gender- und Migrationsforschung, den Queer Studies, und selbst in der Soziologie trifft man hier und da auf Ghostly Matters. Fast könnte man meinen, man hätte es mit einem weiteren cultural turn zu tun, womöglich einem spectral oder ghostly turn.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film, Kairo (Pulse), is an enigmatic piece of cinema. Even its genre cannot be neatly delineated. Part horror film, part art-house cinema, part social commentary, Kairo has a quality all of its own. While some... more

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film, Kairo (Pulse), is an enigmatic piece of cinema. Even its genre cannot be neatly delineated. Part horror film, part art-house cinema, part social commentary, Kairo has a quality all of its own. While some commentators have identified the particular style of directing peculiar to the ‘other’ Kurosawa, even finding this mode of directing to be compatible with auteur modes of filmmaking, I seek to capture the singularity of the film’s content. In spite of the fact that Kurosawa as a director is notably repetitious in his choice of themes, the circumstance of repetition, as Gilles Deleuze reminds us in his 1969 book, Difference and Repetition, does not preclude the singular, evental nature of any and all such repetitions. Here I understand the phrase ‘repetition’ in the Deleuzian sense of the term, denoting a pure ‘difference without a concept’. Repetition is difference as it actualizes itself in the world. According to the Deleuzian view, underneath laws and generalities there may be found countless layers of singularities, processes and becomings that cannot be easily accessed. Obscurity, as I hope to show through numerous examples from Kairo’s screenplay, seems to be a pervasive phenomenon in Kurosawa’s apocalyptic vision of cybernetic society. Instead of connecting human beings with one another, information and communication technologies come to serve as conduits for spectral presences that produce new forms of disappearance. Productivity, far from being opposed to absence, is transformed during the course of the film into the virally proliferating production of nothing. For Deleuze, signs become deadly when they strike ‘with full force’. When the absolutely other strikes into the very heart of our Being, our very existence is endangered by machineries of abyssal replication. Every single character in Kairo is alienated from themselves and one another. The only vital, functioning form of community is, perversely, the realm of the dead, mediated by the transgressive power of cybernetic networks. As Valerie Wee has pointed out, the sense of lost community and the decline of tradition seems to be a salient theme of Kurosawa’s Kairo, as opposed to its rather more shallow 2006 American remake. Registering the circumstance of cultural decline and societal extinction, a very real phenomenon in early twenty-first-century Japan, should not be equated, however, with some form of nostalgic pining for a bygone era. Rather, I propose that we view Kairo as a deeply philosophical meditation on the posthuman condition, and the immanent possibilities of haunting repetitions lying beyond representation.

This article is a reexamination of the author’s understanding of pedagogy, aimed at developing an increased awareness of the provinciality, limits and blind spots of the pedagogy and knowledge systems of colonial modernity. It engages... more

This article is a reexamination of the author’s understanding of pedagogy, aimed at developing an increased awareness of the provinciality, limits and blind spots of the pedagogy and knowledge systems of colonial modernity. It engages with particular Indigenous epistemological theorisations of non-human agency, with Haraway’s notion of multispecies entanglement, and with the Australian Great Barrier Reef in an inquiry aimed at noticing absences and hauntings of pedagogies of modernity, including the absence of ways of knowing and being without separability and determinacy and the damage that has come of this. This opens space for contemplating separability and determinacy as ontological difficulties contributing to socio-ecological crises of our time. The article is intended as a move by the author toward developing greater capacity to stay with the trouble of educating and living on a damaged planet that is fast becoming uninhabitable

Since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the often-precarious status of the Georgians displaced from Abkhazia has received significant academic attention. In contrast, the consequences of displacement from the reverse perspective—how it... more

Since the end of the Georgian-Abkhaz war, the often-precarious status of the Georgians displaced from Abkhazia has received significant academic attention. In contrast, the consequences of displacement from the reverse perspective—how it has affected the people who stayed behind—remains underanalyzed. Drawing on narratives collected during several months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article argues that although ethnic Abkhazians see themselves as victims of ethnic violence rather than perpetrators, the re-distribution of Georgian property nevertheless caused significant distress. Many condemned the practice of appropriation, suggesting that taking what is not one’s own is not only a violation of the property of the original owner, but also of the Abkhaz moral code and therefore shameful. To them, the trophy houses were a curse, both literally—as spaces haunted by former occupants—and metaphorically, as a source and reminder of a certain “moral corruption” within Abkhazian society. However, while the stories around the trophy houses reflect substantial intra-communal divisions, I suggest that they are also an expression of a shared postwar experience. Like the horror stories of Georgian violence, and the tales of Abkhaz heroism, they have become part of an intimate national repertoire constitutive of Abkhazia’s postwar community.

Our memory and perception are distorted by the influence of the wide variety of media and technology that fill our daily experience of reality. The effects applied to sound and images are not only an artistic treatment or new aesthetic... more

Our memory and perception are distorted by the influence of the wide variety of media and technology that fill our daily experience of reality. The effects applied to sound and images are not only an artistic treatment or new aesthetic that filters into audio-visual art and performative practices; they also bring us closer to specific memories of media usage. The navigating of “traces” and “reflections” resembles moving across a map or through memories. Repetition constructs memory, but its also provides a certain form of pleasure, and often becomes an important narrative element of new media practices, as well as of our individual experiences of technology.

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom... more

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom and crypt made by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Then the Author shows how the notion of specter was absorbed and could be use in literature studies (Esther Rashkin, Nicholas Royle, Jodey Castricano). Derrida's theory makes it possible to perceive literature not as homogenic and coherent but as open structure, inhabited by voices of Otherness.

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He... more

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed. Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences. A...

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s... more

Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction is about the appearance of the specter in the work of five major US authors, and argues from this work that every one of us is a ghost writing, haunting ourselves and others. The book’s innovative structure sees chapters on Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Philip Roth alternating with shorter sections detailing the significance of the ghost in the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, author of Specters of Marx. Together, these accounts of phantoms, shadows, haunts, spirit, the death sentence, and hospitality provide a compelling theoretical context in which to read contemporary US literature. Ghost Writing in Contemporary American Fiction argues at every stage that there is no self, no relation to the other, no love, no home, no mourning, no future, no trace of life without the return of the specter, that is, without ghost writing.

In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives.... more

In this article, I argue that Jesmyn Ward deploys a road trip in her 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing as a literary formula through which she demonstrates the immobilizing effects of racism and incarceration on contemporary black lives. The association of the American road-trip novel with freedom and free movement is strong in the American imaginary, and Ward manipulates this association to explore what happens when automobile travelers are precarious rather than privileged. The road trip in Ward's novel makes visible various forces of mobility and immobility that differentiate citizens by race. She conjures two dimensions of the African American experience that are immobilizing: the carceral system and the risk of “driving while black.” Sing, Unburied, Sing already critiques the traditional road trip in its plot and narrative structure; for Ward, it is the linkages of dimensions of African American immobilization around the road trip that are powerful. Ward's novel demonstrates that black automobility, or the unique experience of the road for racialized drivers, reveals the political and social dynamics that shape our conception of the road for all drivers. Furthermore, I analyze how the road trip within the novel “unburies” a story about the violence of incarceration. I explore how Ward finesses that iconic American narrative trope, the journey by car that ought to be freeing, to heighten her critique of racist, anti-black structures of oppression in the United States.

Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" thwarts all readerly expectations. The story at once endorses and transgresses the rule of its genre, the ghost story, to become a playful and reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space. In... more

Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House" thwarts all readerly expectations. The story at once endorses and transgresses the rule of its genre, the ghost story, to become a playful and reflexive modernist text, a haunted intermediary space. In this article, I would like to suggest that the short story is haunted by texts and images and that this makes it a site of both inheritance and creative subversion, the very locus of early-twentieth-century literary crisis and experimentation.
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« A Haunted House » de Virginia Woolf déjoue toutes attentes lectorielles. La nouvelle à la fois reprend et transgresse les lois de son genre, la ghost story ; elle s'impose comme un texte moderniste ludique et réflexif, véritable espace intermédiaire de hantise. Cet article analyse en quoi la nouvelle est hantée par des textes comme par des images ce qui en fait le site d'un héritage autant qu'un espace créatif de subversion, le lieu d'expression d'un geste expérimental émancipateur et d'une littérature qui, au début du vingtième siècle, est en crise.

This article examines the intervention of one work of art in the public debate about Germany's colonial past. It suggests that Black Box/Chambre Noire by South African artist William Kentridge has provided a forum for the calibration of... more

This article examines the intervention of one work of art in the public debate about Germany's colonial past. It suggests that Black Box/Chambre Noire by South African artist William Kentridge has provided a forum for the calibration of archival evidence and ethnical considerations on reparation, reconciliation and forgiveness.

Autor twierdzi, że współczesna kultura odeszła od pragnienia nieskazitelności i przestała interesować się tym, co bezbłędne. Stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie dlaczego zakłócenia i mankamenty zajmują centralne miejsce w świecie sztuki... more

Autor twierdzi, że współczesna kultura odeszła od pragnienia nieskazitelności i przestała interesować się tym, co bezbłędne. Stara się odpowiedzieć na pytanie dlaczego zakłócenia i mankamenty zajmują centralne miejsce w świecie sztuki najnowszej oraz pragnie zbadać ich rolę w kształtowaniu obrazu współczesnej rzeczywistości. Odpowiedzi na zadane pytania znajduje w późnej filozofii Jacquesa Derridy, badaniach w ramach glitch studies (Rosa Menkman, Michael Betancourt) oraz pracach dwóch współczesnych artystów wizualnych: Andy’ego Denzlera oraz Davida Szaudera.

Merchant's House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences,... more

Merchant's House Museum is haunted. While it functions as a historic house museum in Manhattan, the house remains the home of the Tredwell family who now appear as ghosts. For the museum, these ghosts become animating presences, continuing to keep the everyday things of the house embedded in the intimate space of a family's home. Throughout this article, I explore how those connected to the house as staff, visitors, and volunteers present the ghosts of the Tredwells and, based on these peoples' experiences, I examine the Tredwell house within a museological framework of, what I term, haunted intimacy, that keeps the house in vital relation to the family.

This article investigates remediations of the Flying Dutchman legend – the story about a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans forever – in English and Dutch sources from the nineteenth and twentieth century. It explains the popularity and... more

This article investigates remediations of the Flying Dutchman legend – the story about a ghost ship doomed to sail the oceans forever – in English and Dutch sources from the nineteenth and twentieth century. It explains the popularity and wide dissemination of the Flying Dutchman by interpreting the story, firstly, within the context of Anglo-Dutch colonial competition and, secondly, within the context of new technological developments, paying particular attention to the moments when the Flying Dutchman seems to lose its spectral character and becomes a real object or person. Of the two interpretations of the spectre put forward here – staging colonial history versus staging technological advancement –, the second seems to be the more dominant throughout the history of continuous remediation and adaptation of the Flying Dutchman. When the ghost materializes, temporality is reversed: the focus shifts from the present's fraught relation to the past to the present's imagination of the future. In the dissemination of the figure itself however the colonial dimension is often still present.

Morte e Espectralidade nas Artes e na Literatura reúne um conjunto de ensaios nos quais se reflecte sobre as problemáticas da espectralidade e da morte nos campos da produção e da teorização das artes. Na primeira parte, procede-se à... more

Morte e Espectralidade nas Artes e na Literatura reúne um conjunto de ensaios nos quais se reflecte sobre as problemáticas da espectralidade e da morte nos campos da produção e da teorização das artes. Na primeira parte, procede-se à questionação e à análise de algumas configurações que o tópico da morte conheceu na literatura, na fotografia, no cinema, na literatura e nas artes de palco no decorrer dos últimos dois séculos. Num segundo momento, trata-se a espectralidade enquanto problema inerente à fotografia e ao pensamento crítico em torno desta arte, interrogando diversos pressupostos da representação realista que lhe são comummente associados.
Este volume tem origem em dois encontros organizados no âmbito do projecto “RIAL – Realidade e Imaginação nas Artes e na Literatura”, sedeado no Centro de Estudos Comparatistas da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, designadamente a Jornada “Máscaras de Cera: O Espectáculo da Morte na Literatura e nas Artes dos Séculos XIX e XX” (2017, em colaboração com a linha de investigação “Teatro e Imagem” do Centro de Estudos de Teatro da FLUL) e o Seminário “O Realismo Espectral da Imagem Fotográfica” (2018).
Os ensaios reunidos são da autoria de Amândio Reis, Ana Campos, Fernando Guerreiro, Filipe Figueiredo, Golgona Anghel, José Bértolo, José Duarte, Kelly Basílio, Luís Mendonça, Margarida Medeiros, Patrícia Soares Martins e Susana Lourenço Marques.

Joy Division, relative to their Manchester Post-punk contemporaries have often been seen in proximity to industrial music, a perception reinforced by Genesis P-Orridge’s claims that Curtis was a Throbbing Gristle fan particularly... more

Joy Division, relative to their Manchester Post-punk contemporaries have often been seen in proximity to industrial music, a perception reinforced by Genesis P-Orridge’s claims that Curtis was a Throbbing Gristle fan particularly appreciative of the former’s track “Weeping” from their DOA: Third and Final Report album. P-Orridge returned this fandom by referring directly to Ian Curtis in Psychick TV’s later track “I.C. Water” and reiterating their personal connection in several interviews and other texts. This paper will argue that beyond this purported connection between the two groups and individuals the resonances between Joy Division and industrial music run deeper in the ways both were haunted by post-industrial cityscapes, modernist literature (especially Ballard and Kafka but also the proto-modernist Gogol, author of Dead Souls) and especially a shared interest in Esotericism and the occult. In fact Joy Division’s track “Dead Souls” has less to do with Gogol’s satirical portrayal middle class corruption and spiritual ennui, than with being haunted by past lives, an abiding interest of the vocalist: “Someone take these dreams away/That point me to another day”. This paper will argue that more generally Joy Division were haunted by the ruins of modernism whether in the form of decaying urban environments, or literary modernism, in ways that correspond closely with the ways similar environments haunted industrial groups like Throbbing Gristle, and perhaps with greater proximity, Sheffield’s Cabaret Voltaire. In both cases, we are confronted by “missions of dead souls” (the title of the live album of TG’s final performance in 1980) with profound resonances.

Bodies that Monetize is an exhibition and thesis document that investigates the harms caused to Indigenous bodies and how they address such harms in the Canadian state. The document identifies how the Canadian state perpetrates harms to... more

Bodies that Monetize is an exhibition and thesis document that investigates the harms caused to Indigenous bodies and how they address such harms in the Canadian state. The document identifies how the Canadian state perpetrates harms to Indigenous bodies through the TransCanada Mainline. I argue that the Mainline causes boil water advisories and results in the creation of what Mbembe coins, “death-worlds” and what I call “harms” caused to Indigenous bodies. Indigenous bodies resist these violences by utilizing the horror genre for artistic expression, the practice of hauntings and ghosting, and the gendered use of resentment. My own method of resisting this violence includes making memes to utilize their ability to display the intangible and detongue the unspeakable. This includes discussions on mental health, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. Through the process of creating these memes as a method of resistance, my exhibition highlights the struggles of Indigenous bodies.

Haunting dominates Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's debut novel, Dust (2013). In this paper, I discuss this theme using four overlapping lenses: the individual, the familial, the national, and the transnational. My primary argument is that Dust... more

Haunting dominates Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor's debut novel, Dust (2013). In this paper, I discuss this theme using four overlapping lenses: the individual, the familial, the national, and the transnational. My primary argument is that Dust belongs to a group of recent texts that seek to resist historical erasure in Kenya. I contend that at its core, Dust tackles the realities of the amnesia that pervades not just Kenya as a nation but also Kenya as an assortment of families and individuals. This paper draws a connection between the motif of haunting in the novel with recent Kenyan history to illustrate how the book effectively positions itself as both critique and a form of remedy.

There have always been those with a desire to study spontaneous phenomena, for as long as mankind has been reporting ghostly encounters there have those who have sought to examine the subject for themselves. These days it seems that... more

There have always been those with a desire to study spontaneous phenomena, for as long as mankind has been reporting ghostly encounters there have those who have sought to examine the subject for themselves. These days it seems that almost everybody wants to be a ghost hunter. A straw poll of the internet I carried out in 2017 using Google and searching only for UK based paranormal teams resulted in more than 900 active groups being identified. This was most certainly not a definitive survey and the actual number is likely to be higher. Ghost hunting is a cool way to spend a Saturday night with friends; battling against evil possessing demons, listening attentively to the disembodied voices of the dead and watching through bleary eyes for the flashes of multicoloured lights as they react to the presence of a nearby spectre. Of course, I am generalising. There are some investigators who have dedicated themselves to the serious study of the subject and who work to the highest standards, not only in the manner in which they collect and consider the information they obtain. Not every investigator is fortunate enough to spend their leisure time battling demons or lucky enough to hear the anguished pleas of the undead on that latest item of ghost tech as shown on the season finale of their favourite ghost hunting show. Many investigators have to make do with or even prefer using those good old fashioned methods that have always proved so unreliable in the past. In 2018, table tipping, dowsing and mediumship remain as popular as ever. Paranormal investigators have always been a creative and inventive bunch of folk and many things have been pressed into service to aid their quest for proof of the existence of ghosts and related phenomena. Items including smartphone apps, broken radios, flickering torches and stuffed toys filled with flashing lights and parts taken from electromagnetic meters have all been pressed into service and subsequently offered up as absolute proof of the existence of ghosts and sometimes, increasingly frequently, demonic entities. Besides the equipment, there also exists a multiplicity of methods and techniques. These derive from a whole host of theories, ideas, notions and beliefs. Some may appear bizarre whilst others seem to be more credible, sometimes even plausible. All to often, the results obtained from the equipment and methods that are being employed are questionable at best and some undoubtedly also have serious ethical issues that can affect not only those who call upon the services of the investigators but in some instances, for the investigators themselves. Ethics, when it is even considered by the investigator, is often just paid lip service. More often it is overlooked entirely by investigators in their haste to confront tormented souls and increase the number of likes and shares on their social media pages. One needs only to flick through the television channels, read almost any of the daily newspapers or scroll through the social media sites to realise that there is a strong and sustained general interest in the paranormal within society, particularly when it relates to ghosts, hauntings and other forms of spontaneous phenomena. Hardly a day goes by with a headline grabbing photograph, video clip or audio file being offered up as challenging proof for the existence of the otherworld. The internet has allowed everyone an unparalleled ease of access to a vast spectrum of unregulated information and since the millennium, the development of social media since has encouraged this newest generation of investigators to share and swap their discoveries and personal ideas as never before.

The monsters that anthropologists encounter in their field sites differ significantly from those portrayed and analyzed in the thriving interdisciplinary literature—anthropology's monsters haunt off the pages of books and screens of... more

The monsters that anthropologists encounter in their field sites differ significantly from those portrayed and analyzed in the thriving interdisciplinary literature—anthropology's monsters haunt off the pages of books and screens of televisions. These monsters come in all sorts of (non-gothic) guises, and their presence is inextricably intertwined with the lives of those they haunt. Offering a dialogue between anthropology and literature, media, and cultural studies, this book presents fine-grained ethnographic vignettes of monsters dwelling in the contemporary world, from Aboriginal Australia in the Pacific to Asia and Europe.

The author is trying to show the idea of unhygienic literature

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media... more

Hauntology is a trend in music, and more broadly in culture, defined by Mark Fisher, Simon Reynolds and Adam Harper. It is linked with who are artists interested in exploring memory and its close connections with the transmission of media (hence its frequent references to radio and television). This paper is an attempt to summarize the phenomenon in the form of an alphabetic breakdown, taking into account both the main inspirations behind the movement and profiles of the artists in it.

During the 19th century, sublime depictions of North American mounds captivated Euro-American colonists and Romantic travelers. Settlers frequently embedded farms and homesteads into the material fabric of these Indigenous ruins across... more

During the 19th century, sublime depictions of North American mounds captivated Euro-American colonists and Romantic travelers. Settlers frequently embedded farms and homesteads into the material fabric of these Indigenous ruins across the American Bottom region and surrounding uplands, uncovering traces of antiquity in the process. Focusing on the Emerald mound site and broader mound discourses, I examine how material intimacies underlying this 19th-century phenomenon periodically corrupted Romantic sensibilities. Specifically, I highlight aspects of archival and spatial data that capture fleeting moments when mound intercourse generated uncanny affects and queer temporalities. I argue that in moments when uncanny affects haunted colonial homes, Indigenous histories queered the tense of settler colonialism.

in SOUTHWEST JOURNAL OF CULTURES (April 2009).

The Conjuring Universe Currently consisting of seven (eight if one counts The Curse of La Llorona) interconnected films with additional entries in the pipeline, The Conjuring universe (2013-present) serves as one of the touchstone horror... more

The Conjuring Universe Currently consisting of seven (eight if one counts The Curse of La Llorona) interconnected films with additional entries in the pipeline, The Conjuring universe (2013-present) serves as one of the touchstone horror franchises of the modern era. Despite rising to industry prominence as one of the most profitable horror franchises of all time and one of the few properties to effectively execute a shared universe story world, The Conjuring universe has only been the subject of a few studies where it is often assessed alongside analogous, but thematically different, films such as Paranormal Activity (2009) and Insidious (2011). To fill this gap, the proposed collection will offer the first in-depth academic analysis of The Conjuring universe, its constituent films, and its mythology.

{Paddy Qiu, University of Kansas} I. Supplication. Our first bus ride took us to Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. As we rode closer to the epicenter, the white ghosts, bai gui, dissipate. Their slick-shined shoes shuffling off one by one,... more

{Paddy Qiu, University of Kansas} I. Supplication. Our first bus ride took us to Chinatown in Flushing, Queens. As we rode closer to the epicenter, the white ghosts, bai gui, dissipate. Their slick-shined shoes shuffling off one by one, my eyes darting towards the exit. Patiently waiting for supplication, I questioned whether I should have left with them. When my father and I got to our stop, I stomped on the foot of a Chinese grandmother.

This essay will concern itself with exploring the nostalgia wave present in popular culture beginning with the 21st century, while exploring more in deep the internet born electronic music micro genre called vaporwave. Of vaporwave, I... more

This essay will concern itself with exploring the nostalgia wave present in popular culture beginning with the 21st century, while exploring more in deep the internet born electronic music micro genre called vaporwave. Of vaporwave, I will be conducting a philosophical analysis through the lens of hauntology as coined by Jacque Derrida and later popularized by Mark Fisher. Furthermore, in the second part of the essay I will also pinpoint several causes to the nostalgia and hauntological wave that characterize our century using again Mark Fisher’s ideas and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology, more precisely his ontological determinism. The main focus of the essay is popular culture, especially music, from the western hemisphere (USA and UK).

Jan Kott in his seminal work Shakespeare, Our Contemporary quotes S. J. Lee’s aphorism on the nature of haunting, ‘The sequence of time is an illusion… We fear most the past that returns’. Kott’s statement contains the essence of... more

Jan Kott in his seminal work Shakespeare, Our Contemporary quotes S. J. Lee’s aphorism on the nature of haunting, ‘The sequence of time is an illusion… We fear most the past that returns’. Kott’s statement contains the essence of Guillermo del Toro’s approach to his Spanish Civil War films in which the dead definitely do return and indeed have never left. This paper will explore how in Pan’s Labyrinth del Toro’s use of Hamlet as an archetypal ghost story has facilitated an exploration of the unresolved legacy of the Spanish Civil War following the creation of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory), in 2000. Since the early days of cinema directors have used fantasy to express political concerns; one need only look to Weine’s Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Lang’s Die Nibelungen in the politically unstable Germany of the 1920s for the origins of this tradition. Del Toro’s fantasies delve into the impact of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime on the family, the personal and the national psyche; they deal with unresolved grief and the repression of remembrance. Haunted or cursed families, phantoms and psychological ghosts recur repeatedly; a sense of the unresolved, unabsolved or unredeemed haunt his films. An exploration of these themes will demonstrate how del Toro’s understanding of Shakespeare’s Gothic sensibilities provide him with the language to create new visions and interpretations which are yet deeply rooted in the genre.