Haunted Space Research Articles

The hauntology of climate change: glacier retreat and dark tourism

In recent decades, glaciers have become infamous symbols of climate change, and as they thaw and retreat, they leave behind haunted spaces favorable for the development of dark tourism practices. Commemorative plaques and funerals, but also comparative before-and-after photographs, on-site interpretative boards indicating where glaciers used to be 20, 50 or 100 years ago, as well as more recent developments of virtual reality (VR) tools all participate in the production of specters of vanished glaciers. These all constitute practices where gone glaciers must live in the present. In parallel, little empirical evidence demonstrates if tourists engaging in glacier tourism develop follow-up pro-environmental behaviors, and if they do, if this lasts in the long-term. In this conceptual article, we contend that reframing glacier tourism as a form of dark tourism may transform people relationship with glaciers and speed up conservation efforts. Our analytical basis is grounded in Derrida’s framework of hauntology, wherein glaciers are considered as geographical specters (or ghosts), neither invisible nor visible, dead nor alive. This work critically explores the complex connections between dark tourism, glacier retreat and spectral geographies, and argues that framing glacier tourism as dark tourism can improve tourists’ pro-environmental behavior changes, as well as expand climate change discourses, ethics, and politics.

Place, Space, and the Affordances Thereof: Bly Manor as Depicted in Three Adaptations of The Turn of the Screw

This paper looks at the representation of Bly Manor across different adaptations of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). The focus is on adaptations that emphasize Bly as an intricate space that limits the possibilities of actions that the main characters have. The theory of affordance states that places “afford” different uses of the space. Locked inside a place with uneasily determined affordances and clearly established rules, the main characters of these adaptations experience how different intersections of identities are afforded differently within the stately home. The paper traces the intertextual conversation through adaptations such as Jack Clayton’s film The Innocents (1961), the readaptation of James’s premise in Ruth Ware’s novel The Turn of the Key (2019), before ending with the intertextual and temporal dimensions of haunted space in Mike Flanagan’s streaming miniseries The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020). These iterations of the story showcase the voyeuristic elements of Bly as the characters are repeatedly watched by those who have come before them. At the same time, they show the ongoing appeal of James’s story as its legacy continues into the twenty-first century.

Walled up alive: The Uncanny and Gender haunted spaces in Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House

Gothic literature is frequented by haunted texts particularly outlining a ruinous spatial relationship between the female and the haunted spaces. Using Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House as primary text, this paper studies how haunting spaces, underlying anxieties, and prejudices against women manifest the dark atmosphere that threatens and eventually engulfs the female. Chapter by chapter, the spatial hauntings are coupled with supporting ideas of the uncanny. The article explores how the uncanny exhibits itself in a haunted space and how gender is connected to suppressed fears in women. The conclusion drawn lays emphasis on the recognition of reasons backing gendered hauntings and how women extract fears from their repressed past and embed them within domestic borders. Though the hauntings that happen around women are not untrue, this article argues how women are more likely to suffer from hauntings due to repressed traumas and fears.

Letter to Jim: Four Poems of Water and Soul

This letter to the author’s Jungian therapist discusses the process by which therapy and the practice of writing align in a mysterious connection between upwelling unconscious and the divine interaction with human creativity. The attendant four poems investigate the haunted spaces of the psyche where self-hatred and physical harm jostle with the insistences of soul. The frame of depth work, a writing practice, and thousands of hours spent physically engaged with the world’s waters were combined to create a wide and ongoing inquiry into the nature of the writer’s inner life and the invisible archetypal pressures that bear down on awareness. The resulting letter and poetry show a developed sense of the mysterious connection of things seen and unseen, and relatedness with an invisible, instructive framework that allows the writer to live within body, and express via word. The final judgment is that the author writes herself into being each day; that practice keeps her wide and sensitive, supple and alive.

Phantom Limbs, Embodied Horror, and the Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide

Abstract The affective horrors of the Armenian genocide leave traces upon the living. Most pilgrims who visit sites of mass killing in contemporary Syria and Turkey note that they feel a profound sense of sadness and are overcome with tears of mourning while visiting the sites. This essay explores these experiences along with two anomalous cases of visitors who had an altogether different experience of the uncanny including physical ailment. Semerdjian suggests that some who visit spaces where Armenian genocide atrocities were committed a century ago are unsettled temporally, geographically, and bodily because they are visitors to haunted spaces or what Roma Sendayka has called “non-sites of memory.” How do communal memories of horrific bodily violence sometimes result in embodied hauntings? How have visitors historically enacted rituals—including collecting bones of martyrs—in an attempt to vacate the affective necrogeography of ghosts by naming the unnamed dead?

The Evolution of Haunted Space in Scotland

This article explores the popularisation of the concept of haunted space in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scotland. While earlier ghost stories were usually about the haunting of people, the rise of Gothic and Romantic literary aesthetics fuelled a new interest in both the Scottish landscape, and the dramatic potential of lurking spectres. Amid the upheaval of industrialisation and the Highland Clearances, and in a period when Scots were still wrestling with the implications of the 1707 Union, authors recorded stories of wandering ghosts as part of a broader movement to fashion a distinctive identity rooted in a specific cultural context. Against the frequently broad scope of academic literature on spectrality, this article draws attention to the crucial significance of contextual nuances and specific historical and social circumstances. In particular, it points to the fraught politics of loss and repossession in relation to the Highlands’ history of depopulation and modernisation, casting a fresh light on the historical events that have given shape to Scottish haunted space.

Spectres and (Queer) spectrality in Wuthering Heights and Portia Coughlan

ABSTRACT This article examines Derridean hauntology/spectrality in relation to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996). Of central concern is how both texts use the figure of the spectre/revenant to deconstruct stable conceptions of temporality and futurity. Common tropes such as repetition, doubling, and wild landscapes will also be considered as being of vital importance to a twinned analysis of these two texts. It is the first sustained consideration of the intertextual links between Brontë’s novel and Carr’s play. A Derridean reading of Portia Coughlan will further emphasise and illuminate the haunted space that is contemporary Irish theatre and consider its preoccupation with the past and its relevance to the present and to an undecidable/queer future to come.

Another Image of 'Community' at the South End Museum

This paper considers some of the curatorial devices used in exhibitions at the South End Museum in Gqeberha (formerly Port Elizabeth). The South End Museum, which opened on 3 March 2001, is modelled in several respects on the District Six Museum in Cape Town: it, too, is an urban-based, self-defined 'community museum' constituted around the histories of the apartheid Group Areas Act and the implementation of forced removals. Like many post-1994 museums in South Africa, the South End Museum relies on photographs for their displays, whilst also making use of maps, a mural and reenactment. The paper considers the ways in which these different displays touch, recall, reflect and activate one another. Keeping in mind that the notion of 'community' in South Africa bears the burden of being raced by its apartheid and colonial pasts, and abiding by the spectrality that is constitutive of the image, the paper grapples with the haunted space of 'community museums' in the Eastern Cape. While the South End Museum deploys some of the same curatorial devices as the District Six Museum, and deals with related histories of forced removal, South End, it is argued, brings the relation between race, indigeneity and 'ruin' within 'community museums' into fleeting focus.

“Traces of the exotic” in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover”

ABSTRACT Okehurst – the stately home in Vernon Lee’s “Oke of Okehurst; Or, The Phantom Lover” – is the epitome of English architecture, dating back to “Norman or Saxon” times. Yet inside, the house is populated with far-flung objects and traces of the exotic: Persian rugs, majolica ornaments, and “rose-leaves and spices put into china bowls.” The house and its contents are intoxicating, and nothing is more exotic, perfumed, or exquisite than Alice, who with her husband (and cousin) William Oke are the last members of the family’s line. Okehurst also reverberates with the presences of its previous inhabitants which drive the current Okes to repeat the family’s history of madness and murder. The haunting of Okehurst is particularly interesting when considered alongside material from Lee’s archive. This paper will consider the traces of Lee’s own complex ancestry and the problems of empire and matrilineal ancestral wealth and inheritance, whilst utilising correspondence from Lee to her mother, and her partner, Mary Robinson to suggest the possible inspiration for Cotes Common and Okehurst Manor. Throughout this consideration of haunted spaces – both inside and outside – this paper will also make reference to the 1886 manuscript of “Oke of Okehurst,” which has never previously been studied.

In Search of a Dérive: for Alternative Media Narratives of Management and Organization

Many recent publications hold a dark view of contemporary business administration and its context. Th e current state of capitalism and corporate management is described as zombie (Harman, 2009), ghostly (Roy, 2014) or, in the most benign appraisal, sick but not dying (Tomlinson, 2010). At the same time, business schools, textbooks and popular management books remain wedded to a re-ductive view of social interactions, drawing inspiration as well as authority from a century of socioeconomic triumph as well as from the rigid defi nitions of management relations as handed down by the founding fi gures of the discipline. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's (1969) refi g-uring of Charles Baudelaire's fl âneur, we revisit the haunted spaces of popular management books, using the situationist method of derive to invoke the ghosts of foundational thinkers for inspiration and, possibly, exorcism. Th e aim of this excursion is to propose strategies for communication about some old ideas of management which still can be regarded as vital, even though the contemporary forms may have become morbid (Fleming, 2017).

Ultraviolent Gothic Visions: Lucio Fulci's ‘Gates of Hell’ Trilogy as Derridean Cinematic Haunted Spaces

This article examines films produced by the Italian director Lucio Fulci between 1980 and 1981: City of the Living Dead/Paura nella città dei morti viventi (1980), The Beyond/L'aldilà (1981), and The House by the Cemetery/Quella villa accanto al cimitero (1981). Unofficially termed the Gates of Hell trilogy, the films stress a distinctive gothic sensibility brought together by the vivid and extreme subjects of decay and unflinching depictions of ultraviolent death and bodily destruction. The article explores the gothic motifs of the film series from the perspective of the work of Jacques Derrida. It argues that Fulci establishes a unique and highly stylized neo-gothic vision in his ‘trilogy’ that reflects a hauntological ethos, and effectively a distinctively Derridean evocation of the gothic, but with a sustained focus upon Derrida's deconstructive concept of ‘Undecidability.’ In the Gates of Hell trilogy the idea of undecidability is a persistent and compelling subject actively woven into the narratives through the gothic elements that infuse their extreme violence, the supernatural, the irrational, and the frequently surreal cinematic visions that Fulci conjures.

Affective spectrality in therapeutic space

Spaces for therapy and counselling are haunted spaces, spaces whose physical characteristics can manifest past inhabitation and cue connections to trauma. This paper explores findings from a research project which aimed to understand the perceptions of spatiality of individuals who self harm, and the role of the built environment in supporting therapeutic processes and experience. The data collection and analysis were designed to preserve the integrity of the voices of mental health service users who self harm and communicate their self-reported spatial perceptions. Comparisons between lived/embodied experiences, analysis of intrinsic properties of accounts and exploration of therapeutic sites underpinned the findings relative to the psycho-cognitive geographies of experiences. This paper explores how individuals who self harm experience particular connections between physical and psychological spaces, how their self-reported encounter with interior space is overlaid with the inhabitation of past occupants and memories, which reduces opportunities for access to the therapeutically supportive dimensions of the space, and exercises in self production. This paper first defines ‘haunted space’ ‘trace’ and ‘trauma’; secondly reviews existing literature on affective spectrality, atmospheres and materialites; thirdly discusses the methods used in the study reported in this paper; and finally, explores the relationships between sensory encounters, affective traces, signifiers, felt architecture and the therapeutic function for which spaces are designed. The paper concludes with implications for future research and practice.

From Tuxedo to Gown: Dietrich's Haunted Dressing Room(s)

From Tuxedo to GownDietrich's Haunted Dressing Room(s) Bridget Sundin (bio) The Haunted Queer Body—An Introduction Although many feminist film scholars have written about Marlene Dietrich's body through the lens of feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and semiotics—particularly in the 1990s1—there is a current gap in performance studies literature regarding ways in which Dietrich's always already femme fatale body is haunted not only by her celebrity, but by her previous roles as a stage cabaret performer, which contain explicitly queer content. My essay joins the ongoing conversation about queer embodiment by braiding together three strands of theory in regard to Marlene Dietrich's theatrical performances on screen: performance phenomenology, haunting/ghosting, and queer futurity. In order to create a fuller understanding of the potential of the queer body to resist, subvert, invent, and become, I position the dressing room as both a metaphorical and literal space of transformation. This article focuses on Marlene Dietrich's queer female embodiment and her theatrical use of tuxedo-and gown-drag, specifically situating this theatrical site of gender transformation to be the dressing room space in Josef von Sternberg's 1930 film Morocco.2 To theorize Dietrich's queer-haunted embodiment in this space, I lean on Marvin Carlson's theory of ghosts and hauntedness as a method for grounding the intertextuality of Dietrich's body as she changes from tuxedo to gown.3 I utilize my own performative queer voice in this essay as a deliberate addition to the academic archive. Embodied experiences, particularly those of marginalized populations, have historically been omitted from the archive.4 By discussing Dietrich's queer embodiment using my own queer embodied voice, [End Page 109] I join scholars who are also creating new forms of theorizing queer embodiment as well as creating new methods of queer historiography. The Dressing Room: A Haunted (Queer) Space for a Haunted (Queer) Body Have you been in a dressing room before? Can you remember how it looks? How it smells? Can you go a little further and feel backward5 affectively through time to an instance when you sat at a mirror putting on stage makeup, glancing over at a bouquet of flowers an admirer sent you, and maybe—if you try hard enough—can you even read the little rectangular card that says, "Break a leg!"? As I begin the body of my essay, I hope you are with me in this dressing room where the power of potential transformation buzzes in the air. Yes, there is a particularly embodied and heightened energy that takes place in a dressing room prior to a performance that involves a performer managing material objects and harnessing an array of converging internal conditions before taking the stage. The dressing room is a space unlike other theatrical spaces, in which bodies can transform into beings that have only existed in the imagination. It is here that audiences and performers alike expect the actor's embodiment to shift from ordinary to extraordinary through the use of costuming and makeup. Depending on the theatre's architecture and/or the context of a performance itself, a dressing room experience can run a wide range. A performer may encounter everything from a no-frills makeshift curtain hung from PVC pipe in an offstage corner next to the prop table to a luxurious private dressing room complete with upscale furniture and warm, cozy lighting. As a performer moves incrementally toward the heart of a performance—from the street outside, through the stage door, into the dressing room, then off to the wings, and finally onto the stage itself—an actor uses these spatial markers to transition from their personal identity into the identity taken on in the performance onstage. The average person does not often (or ever) see this journey toward the stage. However, Marlene Dietrich starred in many films that grant us access to this journey. In these films, audiences are allowed a glimpse at such a theatrical transformation as layers are peeled back from both the on-and off-stage embodiment of a cabaret performer. It seems only fitting at this time to invite the ghost of Marlene Dietrich, dressed as Amy...

Tropical Imaginaries in Living Cities

This is the second part of the eTropic special issue theme on Tropical Imaginaries and Living Cities. While the first part of this series concentrated predominately on concrete cities and the material imagination, this second issue explores notions of the tropics and cities through literary and artistic works. Thus in this collection of papers the tropical imaginary comes to the forefront while the metropolis provides the space or canvas for the imagination.Many of the cities called up in this collection have physical presence, places such as Darwin, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Havana, and Kuching. Other cities conjured here may morph into various otherworldly forms such as haunted spaces or spaceships; or dissolve into a hazy backdrop as memory and imagination take the stage. Yet these urban spaces are nevertheless always alive, their virtual presence becomes the matrix that holds the imagination. The literary and creative works examined here flow from martial arts, through literary works including novels, short stories, poetry, and speculative fiction, and then transition into visual art through science-fiction magazine covers, art on walls and heritage arts spaces, to come to a close with film.

City of (Post) Memory: Memory Mapping in Nona Fernández's 2002 Mapocho

In Mapocho (2002), Nona Fernández depicts the ghostly topography of post-dictatorship Santiago, Chile. Only the equally ghostly protagonist, la Rucia, an exile who returns to her childhood home in the liminal space between life and death, can conjure forth the memories of historical injustice guarded by neglected sites of memory. The novel traces la Rucia's movements through a city transformed by the forces of neoliberalism, modernization, and trauma, traversing the layered history of structural injustices in the traditionally indigenous and working-class neighborhood, la Chimba. The protagonist challenges the state's betrayal of local, grounded history as she digs beneath the modernized surface of the city to unbury suppressed subaltern histories. Can fiction open up new ways of inhabiting these haunted spaces? This work invites an analysis of second-generation memory, post-memory, and memory "transfer," arguing that fictional urban space allows for memory to be read topographically.

The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low genres in the Australian horror tradition

ABSTRACTThe horror genre is a particularly fraught category in academic and mainstream critical discourse about Australian film genres. Australian horror films are often framed as either ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation,’ terms that prioritise issues of national identity, class and taste rather than genre. The oppositional relationship of these terms presents an obstacle to the widespread acceptance – both scholarly and popular – of local horror films. This is illuminated by a comparison of two recent Australian horror releases and their domestic receptions, Wolf Creek 2 (McLean, Greg. 2014. Wolf Creek 2. Film. Adelaide: Duo Art Productions and Emu Creek Pictures) and The Babadook (Kent, Jennifer. 2014. The Babadook. Blu-Ray DVD. Melbourne: Umbrella Entertainment). Wolf Creek 2 was one of the most lucrative Australian films of 2014, however it was critically panned in large part due to its perceived commercialism and low-genre status. By contrast, The Babadook was the most critically praised Australian film of 2014, however the film received a limited domestic release. This paper explores how both The Babadook’s meagre domestic release and its near-universal critical praise can be related to its association with the high-art Australian Gothic tradition. Yet the film unsettles firmly entrenched art/genre, nationalism/commercialism dichotomies.

Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas: The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit

Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas: The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit Andrea Pauw (bio) Cosponsored by the Society of Early Americanists and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Washington, DC, and University of Maryland June 2–5, 2016 The Fourth Early Americanist “Summit” brought together more than 150 scholars to discuss the theme of “Translation and Transmission in the Early Americas.” The four-day, multilingual occasion featured three keynote addresses and forty panels led by experts in the fields of anthropology, history, linguistics, and literary studies. The event emerged on the Twitter stratosphere with its very own “hashtag.” Conference attendees could share their thoughts before, during, and after the event, such as Marie Taylor’s optimistic reaction, “Feeling energized to write after a great conference #UMDColonialTranslation” and Alejandra Dubcovsky’s praise of a fellow attendee’s presentation: “@Jillio brilliant comment to ‘task of translator’ panel #UMDcolonialTranslation ‘translation as a haunted space.’” This interface transported discussions beyond the walls of Tawes Hall so that even those who regretfully missed the conference (“Wish I had been there #UMDColonialTranslation”) could take part in the dialogue. Indeed, praise for the conference and for fellow participants was not confined to Twitter. When asked about her impressions of the summit, one participant remarked on the highly collegial atmosphere sustained throughout the weekend. Seasoned attendees greeted familiar colleagues and welcomed new faces. In addition to the friendly and supportive environment of the conference, I also appreciated the early American “field trips” to local cultural attractions. Co-organizers Ralph Bauer and Allison Bigelow facilitated outings to downtown Washington for Davíd Carrasco’s and Michael Witgen’s keynote addresses at the Mexican Cultural Institute [End Page 257] and the National Museum of the American Indian. The long bus rides into DC did not bother conference participants, providing a chance to reflect on stimulating panel presentations or simply to catch up with friends. Throughout the summit, scholars repeatedly called attention to the interpretive and ideological hazards of translation. Panels fostered interdisciplinary dialogue concerning the problematic issues raised by the practice of translation in the early Americas and beyond. Examples of translation in religious, scientific, literary, and political discourse offered a wide variety of complex cases to consider. With titles such as “Languages of Belonging and Exclusion in the Early Modern Circum-Caribbean,” “Talking Books: Alphabetic Literacy in Colonial Encounters,” and “Translating Nature: A Transcultural History of Early Modern Science” among others, panels and especially the participatory roundtables allowed for open discussion and creative brainstorming among conferences attendees. Many panelists prefaced their work by asking for constructive criticism from the audience during question-and-answer sessions. As noted in the Twitter comments, the conference was a useful place to present incipient research projects in order to receive alternative perspectives from collaborative participants. Panels deliberated on the issues of transmission and religion—evidenced in the militant theology used to indoctrinate newly converted Christians in sixteenth-century Brazil, in Peruvian criollo Fray Jerónimo de Oré’s evangelistic texts, and in the significant role of Jesuit translators in eighteenth-century Yucatan. Roundtables addressed literary questions of translation such as early modern theorizations of horizontal and vertical translation, the Othering language of Abel Posse’s twentieth-century retelling of colonial shipwrecks in El largo atardecer del caminante, the “contagion” of sentimentality in eighteenth-century French texts produced in Spanish Louisiana, and the defiant graffiti of conquistadores in colonial Mexico. Other sessions considered scientific knowledge in translation such as Álvaro Alonso Barba’s advocacy of Quechua mining techniques in seventeenth-century Spain, as well as the pervasive contemporary privileging of European Enlightenment epistemologies that “accommodate” indigenous knowledge. The downtown outings provided access to relevant venues that promoted further reflection on the issues discussed during roundtables throughout the day. On Thursday evening I was enthralled by Roberto Cueva del Río’s colorful murals as I climbed the winding staircase to hear [End Page 258] Davíd Carrasco’s keynote address at the Mexican Cultural Institute. Carrasco introduced the theme of translation with his fascinating story of the discovery and restoration of the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan Número 2. He highlighted two of the recurring themes prevalent throughout the conference: the...

Specters of Mark: The Second Gospel’s Ending and Derrida’s Messianicity

This article engages Mark 16:1–8 with Jacques Derrida’s concept of the messianic as elaborated, primarily, in his 1993 volume Specters of Marx. Working with the concept of a circular Markan narrative, the tomb is explored as a haunted space in which readers are invited to return to the beginning of the story with an eye toward its spectral bodies. Indeed, the absence of a raised body in the sepulcher, coupled with an injunction to return to Galilee introduces a temporal disjunction by invoking the narrative past and exploring the incalculability of a future. While the other three canonical Gospels privilege the presence of a material body in their resurrection scenes, a Derridean analysis of this passage allows for an even more expanded notion of what a body might look like and opens the possibility for the immanence of justice to-come: justice that comes for the marginalized in the Second Gospel.

Visualizing trauma – Marc Recha’s Dies D’agost

Abstract Catalan director Marc Recha’s Days of August (Dies d’agost, Recha, 2006) is true to his usual aesthetic and themes. Minimal plots walk a problematic line between narrative and documentary; fiction and reality; past and present. In the rechian universe, cinema’s classical concepts and expectations are challenged and obliterated in an unresolvable chaos of sophisticated styles, media and references. Plots change, but what holds is the succession of dissociated and tenuous scenarios in haunted spaces where messages fail to be transmitted yet human enquiries persist. In Agost, the rechian style turns into a precise idiom to embody what has been forgotten and to communicate what has been left unsaid. Specific challenges stem from Recha’s desire to film our inability to grasp our past. Briefly, tentatively, spectators might understand that unless we tend to our wounds, no one will understand our personal and collective traumas.

On the Movie Theater as Haunted Space: Spectral Spectatorship and Existential Historiography in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008)

On the Movie Theater as Haunted Space: Spectral Spectatorship and Existential Historiography in Abbas Kiarostami's Shirin (2008)