The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory

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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.

Reviews

From Freuds and Adornos rejection of the occult, to Derridas rehabilitation of the spectral turn, this volume presents a compelling argument for a continued interest in the noisy ghosts of our culture. Not content to limit their remit, the editors have chosen brilliant extracts that explore trauma, memory and history, tracing the spectral through literary theory and criticism, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and economics. It is a book which is strong enough to include an auto-critique of its structuring concept, while showing why that concept still remains vital today. An invaluable collection on the uncanny and the ghostly which should haunt its readers for years to come. * Dr. Pamela Thurschwell, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Sussex, UK *
In this compelling anthology, editors Mara del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren bring together core texts on the study of ghosts, spectres, and haunting as cultural manifestations ... A dynamic corpus of perspectives that challenges, and delights, with its range and depth -- Kirsten Mllegaard, University of Hawaii at Hilo, USA * Folklore *
The Spectralities Reader is a welcoming invitation to the recent sance with our unfinished past. Its editors prove to be perfect spirit guides, providing steely clarity to a realm that often befuddles and bewitches. -- Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, UK

Author Bio

Mara 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.