1st Edition

Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory

By Martyn Hudson Copyright 2017
216 Pages
by Routledge

216 Pages
by Routledge

216 Pages
by Routledge

This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising ‘social haunting’: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again. Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social... Read more

Introduction

Chapter 1. Ghost Armies: Memory, Landscape and Social Haunting

Chapter 2. Dark Caves: Prehistory and the origins of social ghosts

Chapter 3. Revolutionary Spirits: Marx, Engels and Catastrophe

Chapter 4. Excavating Spectres: Haunting and Psychoanalysis

Chapter 5. Night spaces: The Haunted House

Chapter 6. Zong Spectres: Ghosts of the slave system

Chapter 7. Ghastly fictions: Writing the catastrophe

Chapter 8. Nightvisiting Songs: Performing the dead

Chapter 9. Spectral Machines: Seeing social ghosts

Chapter 10. Conclusions: Arrivals from the future

Index

Biography

Martyn Hudson is Associate Researcher and Project Coordinator at Newcastle University of the Co-Curate North-East project, and author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity and Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World.

'This wide-ranging study of haunting as a social practice carefully excavates and illuminates the dazzling array of literal and metaphorical landscapes – from the prehistoric to the (post)colonial and from the musical to the digital – in which ghosts are sedimented, ready to re-emerge as social forces in the present.' - Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

'Hudson sets out to write a sociology of haunting, to delineate the "social power of the ghost". Using an associative logic that glides like a spectre through disciplinary boundaries, this book puts Marx, Brecht, Rilke and David Mitchell together, teases ghost stories from ancient landscapes and haunted houses, and even gets grumpy materialist Theodor Adorno together with wide-eyed spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge to meditate on the capacious possibilities bound up with ideas of social haunting. An absorbing, challenging read.' - Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck University of London, UK