Ghost Figures in World Literature

A ghost, Avery Gordon writes, “has a real presence and demands its due, your attention” (2008, Ghostly Matters). To answer this demand, our seminar invites submissions that turn their attention to literary and artistic ghosts. After all, ghosts are profoundly literary figures; like poetics, they are defined by their repetitions and returns, and constantly referring to something else, though failing to fully represent it. However, ghosts are not any literary figures. They are haunting, and although they have a strong presence they come into life in place of something absent. Moreover, in their haunting presence, they are signalling “repressed or unresolved social violence” (Gordon, 2008).

However, the question that is raised here is: what is lost, and what is haunting through the figure of the ghost? We aim to figure this out by raising more questions like: Is it lost pasts, or rather, as Mark Fisher (2014, Ghosts of My Life) argues, lost futures that always already affect our present? Is it the absent people, their memories, or memories about them? 

Leading with such questions, our seminar is open to broad interpretations and understandings of ghosts and their actions. Nevertheless, we highly prefer inquiries that not only stem from the perspective that ghosts have “a real presence” but also “that they produce material effects” and even have social and political agencies (Gordon, 2008). For example, such as in Sanabel Abdelrahman’s investigation into Palestinian magical realism, where “[g]hosts repeatedly appear […] not as passive byproducts of Israel’s settler-colonialism but as active agents of their own and their people’s liberation” (2023, “Approaches to Palestinian Liberation”). Hence, we ask not only what and whose absence they replace, but also who and why they haunt and how they act.

Furthermore, the seminar invites comparative approaches that look beyond the figure and term “ghost” to different forms of spirits, such as the critical difference of djinns that Shir Alon offers (2018, “Djinn Stories”), for example.

If so, we seek comparative, radical, critical, and acute explorations of ghosts’ appearances and poetics in all aspects of cultural production and g-local figurations, aiming at giving ghosts (and the living) the attention they demand. These explorations can be along the following lines, but not limited to:

Haunting temporalities: ghosts of lost pasts and futures
Specters as alternative realities
Ghost stories and oppression
Ghosts and resistance
Literary ghosts and ghosts as literary figurations
Ghostly poetics
Different ghost figures in World Literature