The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PERMISSIONS Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities PART ONE The Spectral Turn 1 The Spectral Turn / Introduction 2 Spectrographies 3 État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms 4 from Introduction: The Spectral Turn 5 Preface: On Textual Haunting 6 from The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the “Spectral Turn” PART TWO Spectropolitics: Ghosts of the Global Contemporary 7 Spectropolitics : Ghosts of the Global Contemporary / Introduction 8 from Her Shape and His Hand 9 from Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola 10 Spectral Housing and Uurban Cleansing : Notes on Millennial Mumbai 11 from ( ) of Ghosts PART THREE The Ghost in the Machine: Spectral Media 12 The Ghost in the Machine : Spectral Media / Introduction 13 To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision 14 from Introduction to Haunted Media 15 from Modes of Avisuality: Psychoanalysis – X-ray – Cinema 16 Preface: Radio Phantasms, Phantasmic Radio 17 from Chair Creaks, But No One Sits There PART FOUR Spectral Subjectivities: Gender, Sexuality, Race 18 Spectral Subjectivities : Gender, Sexuality, Race / Introduction 19 from Ghostwriting1 20 Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past 21 Introduction: Raising the Dead 22 from Indian Ghosts and American Subjects PART FIVE Possessions: Spectral Places 23 Possessions : Spectral Places / Introduction 24 Buried Alive 25 To Give Memory a Place : Contemporary Holocaust Photography and the Landscape Tradition 26 A Geography of Ghosts : The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts 27 On the Uuses and Disadvantages of Living among Specters PART SIX Haunted Historiographies 28 Haunted Historiographies / Introduction 29 A History of Uunrest 30 The Other Country : Mexico, the Uunited States, and the Gothic History of Conquest 31 Seeing Ghosts: The Turn of the Screw and Art History INDEX