Table Of ContentPopular Ghosts
This page intentionally left blank
Popular Ghosts
The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture
edited by
María del Pilar Blanco
and Esther Peeren
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
www.continuumbooks.com
Copyright © 2010 by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the
publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Popular ghosts: the haunted spaces of everyday culture / edited by María del Pilar
Blanco and Esther Peeren.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6369-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-6369-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6401-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-6401-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ghosts. 2. Haunting. 3. Popular
Culture. 4. Everyday Life. I. Blanco, María del Pilar. II. Peeren, Esther. III. Title.
BF1461.P67 2010
133.1--dc22
2009028514
Typeset by Free Range Book Design & Production
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Introduction ix
María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren
Part One Genealogies of the Ghost 1
1 Ghosts: Of Ourselves or, Drifting with Hardy,
Heidegger, James, and Woolf 3
Julian Wolfreys
2 Beckett’s Ghost Light 19
Martin Harries
3 Uncanny Marxism: Or, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Lenin? 35
Peter Hitchcock
4 Where Are the Dead? A Genealogy of Mediumship
in Victoria Glendinning’s Electricity 50
Justin Sausman
5 The Skeptical Ghost: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others
and the Return of the Dead 64
Colin Davis
Part Two Spectral Politics of the Contemporary 77
6 National Hauntings: Specters of Socialism in
Shree 420 and Deewar 79
Caroline Herbert
7 Shadow of the Colossus: The Spectral Lives
of 9/11 94
Georgiana Banita
8 Everyday Ghosts and the Ghostly Everyday in
Amos Tutuola, Ben Okri, and Achille Mbembe 106
Esther Peeren
v
vi PoPular GHoSTS
9 The Gentle Irruption of the Hereafter in This Life:
Jean Echenoz’s Au piano and Robin Campillo’s Les revenants 118
Michael Cuntz
10 Specters of the U.S. Prison Regime:
Haunting Tourism and the Penal Gaze 133
Benjamin D’Harlingue
Part Three Chasing Ghosts In(to) the Twenty-first Century 147
11 The Liveness of Ghosts: Haunting and Reality TV 149
Karen Williams
12 Ghost Hunters: Simulated Participation in
Televisual Hauntings 162
Alissa Burger
13 The Haunted Lecture Theater: Ghosts in the
Academy in the BBC’s Sea of Souls 175
Catherine Spooner
Part Four Other Ghostly Spheres 185
14 Genius Loci: Memory, Media, and the Neo-Gothic
in Georg Klein and Elfriede Jelinek 187
Arno Meteling
15 Haunted Habitability: Wilderness and American
Haunted House Narratives 200
Christine Wilson
16 Gothic Affects: Digitally Haunted Houses and the
Production of Affect-Value 213
Bruno Lessard
17 Ghosts in the Machine: The Body in Digital
Animation 225
Alla Gadassik
18 The Ghost Worlds of Modern Adolescence
Pamela Thurschwell 239
Part Five Ambient Ghosts: Spectral Images, Sounds, and Bodies 251
19 The Haunting of the Everyday in the
Thoughtographs of Ted Serios 253
María del Pilar Blanco
20 “Following the Ghost”: The Psychogeography
of Alternative Country 268
Anthony Hutchison
Contents vii
21 Haunted by a Melody: Ghosts, Transgression,
and Music in Twin Peaks 282
Isabella van Elferen
22 Occultic Inscriptions: The Modern Ghost-Tattoo in
Japan, from Kyôsai to Horiyoshi III 296
Sean Somers
Select Bibliography 311
Contributors 321
Index 325
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren
… every period has its ghosts (and we have ours), its own experience,
its own medium, and its proper hauntological media.1
Well, what do you know? The place is haunted.2
It seems that ghosts are everywhere these days. Whether in rock songs, Internet news
feeds, or museum exhibits, we appear to have entered an era that has reintroduced the
vocabulary of ghosts and haunting into everyday life. The drafting of this introduction
happened to coincide with the appearance of the inaugural issue of a British magazine
called Ghost Voices: The Magazine of All Things Haunted. The discovery of such a
publication on the shelves of a popular newsagent in northern England represents an
unabashedly paramount moment in the history of the topic we set out to explore in this
collection. When ghosts, and the search for ghosts, reach such a level of popularity
qua normality, or – better put – when the word “ghosts” is seen alongside magazine
covers featuring topics as far ranging as politics, brides, horse riding, and fashion, we
can assume that a very important recognition has been established. This recognition
is that ghosts, which, along with fantastic stories, the Argentine author Adolfo Bioy
Casares rightly referred to as “old as time itself,” have entered, and are indeed part
of, the popular realm.3
If ghosts are old, they are certainly not tired. While Ghost Voices features articles
on what we could call “good, old-fashioned haunting” (haunted houses, mediums, and
so on), we can also speak of new etymologies and epistemologies of haunting that are
endemic to our global times. In April 2009, for example, the FBI caught a ring of Puerto
Rican and Dominican identity thieves who had managed to infiltrate public schools
to steal copious amounts of children’s personal information (including social security
numbers and dates of birth) to produce false immigration documents for Dominicans
trying to enter the U.S. Identity theft is our contemporary crime of “ghosting” others
to unblock global passages that would otherwise remain unsurpassable. The idea that
one person from a specific nationality can become the operative “ghost” of another (in
this case a Puerto Rican child) in order to gain access to a new way of life independent
ix
