Current scholarship has dealt with ghosts and haunting in terms more temporal than spatial,
perhaps as a prolongation of Derrida’s decision in his seminal Specters of Marx to flesh out
Hamlet’s famous haunted observation, “the time is out of joint.”
        Alongside the poststructuralist emphasis on the ghost as a figure of relentless repetition
and temporal disturbance, psychoanalytic critics have theorized ghosts through an alignment of
their apparitions with theories of the reactivation of trauma, the return of the repressed (e.g.
Abraham and Torok, Avery Gordon, R. Bergland and others). While this scholarship has helped us
understand the ghost in its irrevocable connection with the realms of memory, history and the
workings of language, we have yet to consolidate the methods used to define the ghost in order
to discuss it in spatial terms, as a physical occupation of everyday sites that emphasizes the
materiality of the ghost and defines its agency as grounded in a particular locale, in a
disturbance of space as much as of time. How may the spatial dimension of the ghost
reconfigure it as a figure of futurity rather than as one of pastness? What kind of spaces does the
ghost haunt (in addition to the well-known trope of the haunted house)? What does the ghost do
to its haunts? Is haunting necessarily transformative, and by extension, what does it mean to
think of spectrality as caught up with the most seemingly banal routines?
        We are specifically interested in contributions exploring the haunted spaces of popular
culture (and popular culture as itself a ghostly space), since the ghost’s most common
appearance is as a figure of so-called “low” culture entertainment in (horror) films (The Ring,
The Sixth Sense, Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice), television series (The Ghost Whisperer, Medium,
Psych, Most Haunted, Afterlife), cartoons, pop music and pulp fiction. This space of the ghost
remains remarkably undertheorized. We would like to ask what happens to current theorizations
of the ghost when they are brought into dialogue with this cultural realm, where the ghost
certainly does not roam unproblematically, but poses new questions and opens up new avenues
of research.
        We are thus seeking papers that deal with the spatiality and physicality of ghosts and
haunting in the popular imagination, particularly in the present moment, where the ghost
appears to be experiencing a resurgence. What popular cultural spaces does the ghost occupy
and what does it do to these spaces? What are the reasons for its predominance in popular
culture? Why does it re-appear with greater insistence at certain times (of which our time is
definitely one)? How has the ghost evolved in terms of the actual everyday places it inhabits, and
how might this question allow us to consider the future(s) of haunting? In intersecting ghosts,
space and popular culture, we are seeking to read ghosts and haunting in their present-
progressive possibilities, rather than as figures repressed and past. We are also interested in the
way ghostly spaces in popular culture are used to reflect on issues of gender, race and sexuality
(as, for example, in the updating of the tradition of the female medium in the television shows
Medium and The Ghost Whisperer).

Possible areas might include:

- the relation between ghosts, corpses and graves in popular culture (e.g. forensic detectives as
“ghostbusters”)
- the haunted house as a changing popular cultural trope
- popular culture as a haunted realm (e.g. the ghostliness of remakes, sequels, prequels, spin-
offs)
- the relation between the ghost and other popular cultural figures of liminality such as zombies,
vampires, werewolves, etc.
- ghosts and the space of technology in the popular imagination (e.g. the Internet as a haunted
realm, ghosts as materially embedded on videotapes, in radio and television broadcasts, etc.)
- the visual and aural dimensions of popular spatial haunting
- the genealogies and transformations of popular genres of haunting
- haunting and/of the banal in popular representation, past and present
- intersections of gender, sexuality and haunting in popular culture
- race and the spaces of haunting in everyday culture
- the televisual documentation of ghost-hunting

Please send 500-750 word abstracts to both Dr. María del Pilar Blanco (mnb_at_aber.ac.uk) and Dr.
Esther Peeren (e.peeren_at_uva.nl) by 1 April 2008. Finished papers are also welcome.

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Received on Fri Feb 15 2008 - 03:05:19 EST