This wide-ranging study of haunting as a social practice carefully excavates and illuminates the dazzling array of literal and metaphorical landscapes from the prehistoric to the (post)colonial and from the musical to the digital in which ghosts are sedimented, ready to re-emerge as social forces in the present.
Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Hudson sets out to write a sociology of haunting, to delineate the social power of the ghost. Using an associative logic that glides like a spectre through disciplinary boundaries, this book puts Marx, Brecht, Rilke and David Mitchell together, teases ghost stories from ancient landscapes and haunted houses, and even gets grumpy materialist Theodor Adorno together with wide-eyed spiritualist Sir Oliver Lodge to meditate on the capacious possibilities bound up with ideas of social haunting. An absorbing, challenging read.
Roger Luckhurst, Birkbeck University of London, UK
Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory
This book is a groundbreaking attempt to rethink the landscapes of the social world and historical practice by theorising social haunting: the ways in which the social forms, figures, phantasms and ghosts of the past become present to us time and time again.
Examining the relationship between historical practices such as archaeology and archival work in order to think about how the social landscape is reinvented with reference to the ghosts of the past, the author explores the literary and historical status and accounts of the ghost, not for what they might tell us about these figures, but for their significance for our constantly re-invented, re-vivified, re-ghosted social world. With chapters on haunted houses and castles, slave ghosts, the haunting airs of music, the prehistoric origin of spirits, Marxist spectres, Freudian revenants, and the ghosts in the machine, Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory adopts multi-disciplinary methods for understanding the past, the dead and social ghosts and the landscapes they appear in.
A sociology of haunting that illustrates how social landscapes have their genesis and perpetuation in haunting and the past, this volume will appeal to sociologists and social theorists with interests in memory, haunting and culture.
Martyn Hudson is Associate Researcher and Project Coordinator at Newcastle University of the Co-Curate North-East project, and author of The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity and Centaurs, Rioting in Thessaly: Memory and the Classical World.
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Series Editor:
Stjepan G. Mestrovic, Texas A&M University, USA
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both classical and modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or school to our understanding of it.
The series considers significant newappraisals of established thinkers or schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches. Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts.
Liquid Sociology
Metaphor in Zygmunt Baumans Analysis of Modernity
Mark Davis
Torture, Intelligence and Sousveillance in the War on Terror
Agenda-Building Struggles
Vian Bakir
The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization
Edited by Kieran Keohane and Anders Petersen
Utopia
Social Theory and the Future
Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester
Fall Girls
Gender and the Framing of Torture at Abu Ghraib
Ryan Ashley Caldwell
Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory
Martyn Hudson
First published 2017
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2017 Martyn Hudson
The right of Martyn Hudson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-23453-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-30667-4 (ebk)
The development of this book rests on conversations and collaborative work with a significant number of colleagues and friends including Julie Crawshaw, Fran Rowe, Eric Cross, Amelia Knowlson, Gavin Parry, Ben Reche, Mick Garratt, P.A. Morbid, Michele Allen, Ben Jones, Mike Woolley, Ian Hodgson, Bob Howe, Keith Wilson, Bref ORourke, John Bowers, Tom Schofield, Ben Freeth, Rob Airey, Olivia Hudson-Carder, Dougald Hine, Sean Milburn, Tina Roberts, Ian Hughes, Grahame Whitfield, Sarah Palmer, Sean McCusker, Maggie ONeill, Jane Dudman, Harriet Manning, Rob Wooffitt, David Petts, Pete Widlinski, Tim Kell, Quentin Lewis, Tim Shaw, Tess Denman-Cleaver. I would particularly like to thank the Newcastle Institute for Creative Arts Practice and the Digital Cultures group at Newcastle University. Many of the ideas in the book had their origin in my engagement with Race and Class and the Institute for Race Relations and with my original work for Alun Munslow and Rethinking History. I would also like to note the support of Chris Piuma and Eileen Joy for their collaborative work in a partner project. I would also like to thank Peter Sharp and Isiseko Senkonjane and Ian Hunter and Celia Larner of the Merz Barn project. Thanks are very much due to Neil Jordan and Shannon Kneis of Routledge, and to Angus Barclay for his work on the index. Thanks also to R.C. Smith and the Heathwood Institute and to Nick Stone and Invisible Works. I owe a huge debt to my friends and comrades in the Smelly Helly group, particularly our organiser Bill Pennell we have run through many haunted landscapes! None of this work would have been possible without the inspiration and support of John Berger many years ago and of Jean Mohr in recent years. Neither would it have been possible without early mentors such as the late Colin Tipton and his advice to read Cornelius Castoriadis. Almost the entirety of this book takes its main ballast from the conversations and collaborative reading with Neil Jenkings over the best part of 25 years. It wouldnt have been possible without his constant presence. I would like to thank Penguin Classics for their permission to use parts of F.J. Lamports translation of Schillers
