Global Ghosts and Regional Hauntologies International Symposium,
June 18th and 19th
Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
St Teresa’s College, Ernakulum, Kerala, India
Keynote Speakers –
June 18th: Tabish Khair (University of Aarhus, Denmark)
June 19th: Melissa Edmundson Makala (University of Clemson, USA)
Global Ghosts and Regional Hauntologies invites writers, students and academics to consider the unique contribution that reading regional ghosts and absent presences tied to specific localities can make to cross-cultural exchange and understanding.
Papers from researchers at the two collaborating host institutions – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and St Teresa’s College, Kerala – will focus on how the many connotations of ‘hauntology’, a term Jacques Derrida coined in his Spectres of Marx (1993), might help frame regional ghost narratives and mythologies that invoke the spectral, monstrous or otherworldly. In so doing, contributors will explore the tension between what del Pilar Blanco and Pereen have described as “the ghost’s specificity and its localized futurities” (eds, The Spectralities Reader, 2013, p. 16) and the cross-cultural status of haunting as a mastertrope, which has represented trauma, ethical dilemmas, re-imagined futures, transgression, and much more, across nations and places globally.
Global Ghosts and Regional Hauntologies will be the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies’ first symposium to be organised in collaboration with St Teresa’s college, Kerala, bringing together research, scholarship and discussion on the regional hauntings of Britain and India. The symposium will be conducted across two half days to accommodate time zones and will include a mixture of invited guests and delegates working on hauntings in a variety of countries, cultures and contexts.
