A Sociolinguistics of the Spectre

This volume takes the ghost as a starting point for inquiries into violence, its histories and present effects, in articulations of the material, discursive and affective. It reveals how places of mass violence, such as battlegrounds or genocide sites, continue to evoke intense feelings long after the events have concluded, even where few, if any, material reminders remain. It is these gaps, traces, and echoes, and their haunting effects that form the focus of inquiry for this book.The contributions explore the spectral in relation to concepts, themes and approaches drawn from diverse disciplines, which include diatopic hermeneutics, phenomenology, semiotic landscapes, human and more-than-human relationalities, critical feminist, southern, Indigenous, and decolonial theories. The contributors develop or use concepts such as listening and hearability, absencing, languaging as sirening, intra-action, haunting, necropolitics, and orders of (in)visibility. Research from Kosovo, China, Spain and Portugal to Zanzibar, the UK and Sweden illuminates the fragile presences of the past in shadows, traces of sound or script, fleeting encounters, and buried histories.Bringing insights from anthropology, human geography, memory and heritage studies to the study of violence and erasure in sociolinguistics, this volume advances our understanding of the historical and contemporary forms of dispossession that manifest themselves in spectral murmurs.