Dr Chiara Giuliani, Dr Till Weingärtner, and the CASiLaC Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past research cluster invite you all to the upcoming seminar on hauntology and spectrality by Prof Esther Peeren from the University of Amsterdam on Thursday 28th January, 4 pm, on Teams (link below).
Click here to join the meeting
Prof Peeren’s abstract
In this presentation, I will briefly present the book chapter “Hauntings from the Future: Ghosts, Time Travellers, Extraterrestrials,” which explores what the ghost, in its particular temporality and materiality, has to say about our relation to the future, in particular a future dominated by the specter of environmental collapse. Besides discussing hauntings from the future, I will also touch upon the way processes of social marginalization produce “living ghosts” in the present. The focus will be on the living ghosts generated by the rural idyll, which, despite its inadequacy to rural realities, continues to dominate perceptions of rural life, especially in the UK. I will show how the popular television series Midsomer Murders reaffirms the rural idyll as a space of whiteness by reducing BAME characters to living ghosts that cannot exert a haunting force, and how the Welsh author Cynan Jones’ novel The Long Dry stages a posthuman idyll that stages the rural as a haunting realm of intra-action.