Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory

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.

• Introduction: Ghosts, landscapes and social memoryChapter 1. Ghost armies: Memory, landscape and social hauntingChapter 2. Dark caves: Prehistory and the origins of social ghostsChapter 3. Revolutionary spirits: Marx, Engels and catastropheChapter 4. Excavating spectres: Haunting and psychoanalysisChapter 5. Night spaces: The haunted houseChapter 6. Zong spectres: Ghosts of the slave systemChapter 7. Ghastly fictions: Writing the catastropheChapter 8. Nightvisiting songs: Performing the deadChapter 9. Spectral machines: Seeing social ghostsChapter 10. Conclusions: Arrivals from the futureReferencesIndex

'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, U.K"Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory offers wide-ranging sociological analysis of ghosts and the places in which they appear. Unlike other volumes specializing in literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic reflections on ghosts, Hudson links their ephemeral appearance with rootedness in the social context of landscapes. […] Hudson mirrors the difficulties that the living face in trying to grasp and describe the social power of ghosts. The experience of being haunted by ghosts in certain places is difficult to pin down. Hudson is to be commended for an original, interdisciplinary analysis of social ghosts and landscapes that will be of interest to readers in sociology, memory studies, philosophy, cultural studies and literature." – Siobhan Kattago, Memory Studies