Full 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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Permissions
María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities
I. The Spectral Turn
María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, The Spectral Turn / Introduction
Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Spectrographies
Colin Davis, État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, from Introduction: The Spectral Turn
Julian Wolfreys, Preface: On Textual Haunting
Roger Luckhurst, from The Contemporary London Gothic and the Limits of the "Spectral Turn"
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 Turn of the Screw and Art History
Index
