Esther Peeren

Introduction: Global Cultures of Contestation

From the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011, via the Spanish indignados and Occupy Wall Street to the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, recent years have seen major instances of popular contestation across the world. Moving beyond positions that present a singularly celebratory or dismissive account of this global protest “wave,” we advocate approaching each protest in terms of both its specificity and its tendency, in a context of advanced globalization and digitization, to connect to, learn from, or influence protests elsewhere. Outlining the volume’s focus on mobility, sustainability, aesthetics, and connectivity in this chapter, we ask: (1) How do the protests use mobility and immobility as part of their action repertoires and what forms of mobility are implied in the spread of protest waves? (2) How are issues of sustainability addressed in the various protests, and to what extent are the protests themselves sustainable? (3) What are the aesthetics of contemporary protest movements? (4) How do connective platforms facilitate today’s protests and shape their focus and dynamics?

The affective economies and political force of rural wildness

Abstract Although conventionally distinguished from the wilderness, the rural is nevertheless frequently perceived as a site of wildness, both in the sense of the uncultured/uncivilised and in the sense of the natural/authentic. Arguing that the politics of rurality have an important affective dimension that cannot be dismissed as illusionary or neatly separated from supposedly rational assessments, this article explores the affective economies that, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, cause particular feelings and values to become ‘stuck’ to the notion of rural wildness, influencing how it can be mobilised politically. Case studies of how rural wildness is harnessed as a political force in the self-presentation of the Countryside Alliance, a prominent British rural advocacy group, and in the successful 2013 Dutch documentary film The New Wilderness [De nieuwe wildernis] about a rewilding project in the Oostvaardersplassen reveal that, in both instances, the affective economies at play explicitly or implicitly support a conservative politics.

Peripheral Visions in the Globalizing Present

Peripheral Visions sheds new light on how today’s peripheries are made, lived, imagined and mobilized. Focusing on space, mobility and aesthetics, it argues that peripheries require more visibility, and are invaluable for creating alternative perspectives on the globalizing present.

Forms of Invisibility: Undocumented Migrant Workers as Living Ghosts in Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts

The undocumented migrant workers at the center of the two British films analyzed in this chapter, Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts (2006), are physically present and visible, yet remain unseen. They may thus be said to appear as living ghosts, with the comparison grounded primarily in the aspect of transitional invisibility, the way ghosts are not fully or consistently apprehensible. In this case, however, the lack of full visibility translates not into the desirable ability to see without being seen of Derrida’s visor effect, but into an extreme form of vulnerability. What is at stake is the disempowerment of being considered insignificant and expendable, and therefore overlooked. My analysis of the films focuses on the precise forms of invisibility this disempowerment evokes, its effects, and on the question of whether it can yield possibilities for agency, and if so, how this comes about. Is the solution to somehow assert one’s concrete presence and materiality or can one’s remaining unseen also be tactically employed to turn a disappearing, dispossessed ghost into an active haunting force, a site of spectral agency? In addition to discussing the diegetic representation of living ghosts, I consider the way the films themselves, as visual narratives participating in the genre of social realism, appeal to a rhetoric of revelation in their attempt to address the absenting of undocumented workers from British society.

Spooky Mediums and the Redistribution of the Sensible: Sarah Waters’s Affinity and Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black

The following conversation between a prison matron and Margaret Prior, a Lady Visitor to the women’s wing of Millbank penitentiary, unfolds in Sarah Waters’s 1999 neo-Victorian novel Affinity, set in 1870s London: ’sThis is a place for “palling up”, as the creatures call it; yet no-one has made a pal of her. I believe they are leery of her. Someone got her story from the newspapers, and passed it on — stories will get passed on, you see, for all our pains! And then, the wards at night — the women fancy all kinds of nonsense. Someone gives a shriek, says she has heard queer sounds from Dawes’s cell —’ Sounds…? ’sSpooks, miss! The girl is a — a spirit-medium they call them, don’st they?’ (43)

Ghosts of the Missing: Multidirectional Haunting and Self-Spectralization in Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park

Missing persons can exert a powerful haunting force on those searching for them. Like mediums, they constitute an enigma that inspires a mixture of fascination and fear. Yet with the missing, curiosity about what could have happened is dominated by the anxiety that the explanation for their disappearance is unlikely to be innocuous. Instead of producing a surplus of signification in the manner of the enthralling apparitions conjured by the medium, missing persons mark a lack of meaning and knowledge. To refer to them as living ghosts may seem a misnomer, since it is precisely their being alive that cannot be definitively confirmed or denied. At the same time, the elusive fate of the missing, even when their death is virtually certain, works to preserve and extend their lives in the minds of those left behind. Caught in a liminal zone, missing persons can live on while simultaneously becoming frozen in time; placed outside the everyday, progressive flow of temporality, they forever remain the age they were when they disappeared, growing older only virtually in mental images or digital composites. Their spectral lives are survivals characterized not by difference, potentiality and becoming, but by sameness and preservation. The ghostliness of the missing, then, is primarily predicated on their absent presence: they cannot be located and, as such, partake of Derrida’s visible in-visible.

Spectral Servants and Haunting Hospitalities: Upstairs, Downstairs, Gosford Park and Babel

In the two films discussed in Chapter 1, the status of the undocumented workers as living ghosts is predominantly a consequence of their legal position, yet it is aided by the lack of social capital associated with the jobs they perform. Jenny Wills even argues that, in Dirty Pretty Things, Senay is ‘objectified by […] the dehumanizing nature of her employment’ (117, emphasis added). The problem, however, is not that cleaning, sewing, driving taxis, packing meat or harvesting in themselves reduce people to living ghosts. This is achieved, rather, by the prevalent perception of these tasks as low-skilled, undignified and unimportant. Aguiar’s insightful analysis of the representation of cleaners in popular culture reveals how cleaning is either invoked as something to be left behind in American Dream-like tales of self-advancement or aestheticized into a general symbol of marginalization. Both possibilities deny the importance of cleaning services, refuse to constitute cleaners as knowable subjects with a valid perspective on the world, ignore the actual issues cleaners face on the job, including an ever-increasing work tempo, constant surveillance and a lack of stability, and disavow any sense of the cleaner as part of a work community. While Ghosts counters this trend by critiquing the working conditions and paltry wages undocumented migrants receive, and depicting the jobs themselves as worthy and involving skill, Dirty Pretty Things conveys a sense that Okwe and Senay are somehow ‘too good’ for the work they do.

Afterword: How to Survive as a Living Ghost?

In Tim Burton’s 1988 film Beetlejuice, Barbara and Adam Maitland, a young married couple, have a car accident. They find themselves back home and only realize that they have died when they cannot see themselves in the mirror and find a copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, instructing them that ‘functional perimeters vary from manifestation to manifestation.’ In other words, not all the deceased have the same capacities. When a family moves into their house and starts redecorating it in a way they consider tasteless, Barbara is dejected, but Adam’s spirits are raised when he realizes what they now are: ‘we’sre not completely helpless, Barbara. I’sve been reading that book and there’s a word for people in our situation [sounds and looks excited]: ghosts!’ Here, identifying as a ghost produces a sense of agency derived from the ghost’s assumed power to disturb the living. However, when the couple embraces this newfound status and stages some stereotypical scenes of haunting, including one where Adam displays his severed head, their targets turn out not to see them, leading Barbara to exclaim: ‘What’s the good of being a ghost when you can’st frighten people away?’ When they turn to their afterlife ‘case worker’ for help, she tells them to consult the Handbook’s ‘Intermediate Interface Chapter on Haunting’, insists that ‘haunted houses arenst easy to come by’, and advises them to start simply.

Introduction: The Spectral Metaphor

At the start of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Canterville Ghost’ (1887), the titular specter is firmly in charge. Lord Canterville tells Mr Hiram B. Otis, an American minister who wants to buy the ancestral home, that his family has not been able to live there’since my grandaunt, the Dowager Duchess of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never really recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her shoulders as she was dressing for dinner’ (191). Later on, the reader learns of the many other triumphal appearances of the ghost, Simon de Canterville, who murdered his wife and was killed by her brothers in revenge in 1584. He revels in taking on different spectral guises — Gaunt Gideon, the Bloodsucker of Bexley Moor; Dumb Daniel, or the Suicide’s Skeleton; Reckless Rupert, or the Headless Earl — in order to frighten Canterville Chase’s inhabitants and visitors, sometimes to death. Mr Otis, however, is not at all disturbed by the revelation that his new home is haunted. He asserts that he is from ‘a modern country, where we can buy everything that money can buy’, so that if ghosts did exist, they would long ago have been acquired for an American museum or road show (191). His faith in the substantiating power of capitalism and the laws of nature is tested when a blood stain is found on the library floor that, despite vigorous treatment with Pinkerton’s Stain Remover and Paragon Detergent, keeps reappearing.

Ghostly Generation Games: Multidirectional Hauntings and Self-Spectralization in Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park

This article analyzes the relationship between haunting, mourning and inheritance in Bret Easton Elliss novel Lunar Park, with a specific focus on gender. Read in conjunction with Derridas theory of spectrality and Abraham and Toroks concepts of the crypt and the phantom, Lunar Park is seen to transform the linear patriarchal economy of haunting featured in Specters of Marx by making haunting multidirectional and evoking the possibility of self-spectralization.