Spectral Cities: Where the Repressed Returns and Other Short Stories

Abstract

Ghosts of the living and dead alike, of both individual and collective spirits, of both other selves and our own selves, haunt the places of our lives (Michael M Bell, 1997: 813). The experience of ghosts in particular places, whether these ghosts be sacred or profane, individual or collective, dead or alive, mine or yours, human or animal, past or present or future, is not happenstance. Ghosts have good reasons to haunt the specific places they do (Michael M Bell, 1997: 831). The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition (Avery Gordon

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