Ghosts have long been understood as figures of return, haunting the present with unresolved histories (Derrida 1993; Gordon 1997; Sconce 2000; Zietlin 2007; Chen 2022). This panel shifts the focus from ghosts as narrative figures to ghosting as a media process. It asks how infrastructures, technologies, and forms of mediation produce spectral modes of perception that render voices, bodies, labor, environments, and histories simultaneously present and elusive. Rather than treating spectrality as a metaphor for historical absence, we approach it as a perceptual condition actively produced by media: one through which forms of life and knowledge persist at the threshold of audibility, visibility, legibility and recognition.

We invite papers on cinema, sound, oral traditions, artificial intelligence, literature, and media infrastructure across global Asia. How do changing technological and material conditions reorganize relationships between voice and body, sound and image, memory and futurity, or presence and disappearance? How might uneven synchronization, remediation, algorithmic speech, archival erasure, or infrastructural breakdown produce spectral effects? And how do these effects challenge established boundaries of knowledge, inscription, political recognition, and the nation? Possible topics include spectral images and the politics of cinematic visibility; disembodied voices, sonic archives, and acousmatic traces; machine memory and AI-generated bodies; cables, platforms, networks, and archives that distribute presence unevenly; colonial and postcolonial afterlives; suppressed forms of knowledge; and ecological ghosts, extractive landscapes, as well as imperceptible non-human lives.

The panel aims to bring media studies, film history, sound studies, literary studies, and environmental humanities across global Asia into conversation around the limits of perception, investigating new ways to understand media technology and infrastructures beyond what can be recorded, transmitted, and preserved. We especially welcome papers that understand “ghosting media” not simply as a condition or residue of mediation, but as a generative force, one capable of making elusive lives and minoritarian positions perceptible while producing alternative ways of sensing, knowing, remembering, and imagining otherwise.

Reference:

Chen, Jack W. 2022. “Poetry, Ghosts, Mediation.” Qui Parle 31 (1): 7–26.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.

Gordon, Avery F. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Zeitlin, Judith T. 2007. The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.