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Dans Le jour où je n’étais pas là, Hélène Cixous revient quarante ans plus tard sur la mort de son premier enfant, Georges : fils trisomique qu’elle avait abandonné aux bras de sa propre mère, Ève. Non seulement l’autrice-narratrice était absente au moment du décès de son enfant, mais Ève l’était également, faisant des circonstances de cette mort un secret bien gardé, dont il est impossible de témoigner avec certitude. L’autrice-narratrice entreprend donc de percer à jour l’événement que représente cette mort subite dans ce texte qui – à l’image du fils dont le spectre ne revient que pour mieux fuir – met en œuvre une faillite du témoignage traumatique. En effet, rêve et réalité, mensonge et véracité, hantise et flux de conscience se mélangent dans une prose poreuse qui ne saura tout à fait éclairer la cause du décès. Le présent article propose donc de montrer comment, dans cette œuvre, le deuil traumatique donne lieu à une écriture affabulatoire qui déroute le lecteur et qui illustre un échec du témoignage, dont la vérité se dérobe. Après avoir défini la notion de deuil traumatique, ainsi que les liens unissant les épreuves de deuil et de trauma, il s’agira d’analyser l’esthétique affabulatoire à travers laquelle l’autrice met en œuvre son deuil traumatique, s’efforçant moins de reconstituer l’exactitude des faits entourant la mort du bébé que d’imaginer, voire de nier, ce qui aurait pu s’être déroulé. In Le jour où je n’étais pas là, Hélène Cixous looks back, forty years after the event, at the death of her first child, Georges: her son with Down’s syndrome whom she had abandoned to her own mother, Ève. Not only was the author-narrator absent at the time of her child’s death, but so was Ève, making the circumstances of this death a well-kept secret, to which it is impossible to testify with certainty. The author-narrator therefore undertakes to untangle the events preceding this sudden death in a text which—like the son, whose specter only returns to better flee—sets in motion a collapse of the trauma testimony. Indeed, dream and reality, lie and truthfulness, haunting and stream of consciousness overlap in a porous prose that will not quite shed light on the cause of the death. This article therefore intends to show how, in this work, traumatic mourning generates an affabulatory writing which confuses the reader and illustrates the failure of testimony, from which truth constantly escapes. After having defined the notion of traumatic loss, as well as the links uniting the experiences of mourning and trauma, the article’s author will analyze this affabulatory aesthetic through which Cixous implements her traumatic mourning, striving less to piece together the facts surrounding her baby’s death than to imagine, or even deny, what might have happened.

This article suggests that the English Hours travel essays written in the 1870s were the crucible in which James perfected his technique of literary representation. Focusing on progress across space and tropes of liminality, the study highlights the presence, as of 1872, of the scenario of ghostly vision which dramatizes the shift from observation to reflection in the author’s fiction. It also shows how the 1877 essays mirror the novelist’s ethical concerns as he was working his way towards a poetical rendering of prosaic urban modernity. Cet article aborde les essais des années 1870 publiés dans English Hours comme le creuset dans lequel s’est élaborée la technique de représentation jamesienne. En analysant le parcours spatial et les lieux liminaux, il fait ressortir la mise en place, dès 1872, du scénario de vision spectrale figurant le passage de l’observation à la réflexion par le langage dans l’œuvre fictionnelle de l’auteur, et dans les récits de 1877, l’ouverture d’une voie permettant de concilier le prosaïsme de la réalité urbaine moderne et les exigences éthiques de l’art.

The article focuses on the manifold ways in which the spectre of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra manifests itself in Derek Walcott’s A Branch of the Blue Nile (1983), a play which is to a large extent about a Trinidadian theatre company’s attempt to put on a production of Antony and Cleopatra. It argues that this spectre circulates trauma but it is also part of a process of re-articulation of the stage as a place where the ‘familiar’ and the ‘foreign’ interrogate one another. In particular, by responding to the spectre, the play marks a movement from a ‘writing against or without’ Shakespeare to a more complex sense of writing with Shakespeare, which is not, however, an uncritical appropriation of the Bard.

Kamau Brathwaite’s genre-crossing piece ‘The Namsetoura Papers’ (2005) is a polemical and intensely lyrical intervention into an ecologically destructive instance of tourism development in present-day Barbados. It portrays Brathwaite’s struggle against eviction from his home in CowPastor in the south-east of the island due to the proposed construction of what he describes as an ‘unnecessary and unethical’ airport access road. Spurred by his visionary encounter with the ghost of Namsetoura, a slave woman who asks him to defend her burial ground, Brathwaite suggests that the proposed development of CowPastor threatens not only to transform the visible landscape but also to destroy a site of deep historical and spiritual significance. In this paper, I explore how Brathwaite’s representation of Namsetoura’s ghost complicates the implementation of ecologically destructive and historically insensitive development in postcolonial Barbados. By highlighting the importance of understanding the spiritual and sacred dimensions of landscape in relation to one of its previously silenced ghosts, Brathwaite insists on a mode of evaluating natural environments (and opposing unsustainable development) which reclaims some of the island’s buried histories. I address specifically how Brathwaite’s opposition to the proposed development is discursively reinforced by his inclusion of a photograph he has taken of Namsetoura which challenges reductively dualistic divisions between the visible and the invisible, the corporeal and the incorporeal. I proceed to suggest that Brathwaite’s poetic re-evaluation of local landscape and the spirits of its past paradoxically adds touristic value to the very site that is due to be transformed as a result of tourism industry demands. As such, the ghost of Namsetoura can be read as a powerful agent in the process of creating more sustainable tourism futures.

Though, as Gelder and Jacobs, have pointed out, ‘the ghost story in Australia is a minor genre, a marginal genre’, the semantic field of ghosts and haunting is repeatedly pressed into service whenever Anglo-Celtic Australia’s relationship with its colonial past is under discussion. It might legitimately be argued, in fact, that contemporary white Australia is haunted by its origins. Such was not always the case. The extremely violent nature of Australia’s colonisation was, until recent decades, concealed, glossed over, banished from the collective memory of the nation’s settler descendants. While the brutal dispossession of Aboriginal tribes and the frontier rhetoric that clamoured for the extermination of these ‘savage’ peoples were passed over in silence, the founding myth of Terra Nullius and the reassuring fiction that Australia was peacefully settled dominated historical accounts of the colonial era. But the past did not go away, it merely went underground, taking up residence in the white Australian subconscious. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of historians and a combination of historical circumstances (the ‘Mabo’ decision, the report on the ‘Stolen Generations’ and the launching of the Reconciliation process) have conspired to shatter ‘the Great Australian Silence’. Suddenly, repressed memories of rapine, theft and ‘dispersals’ have risen to the surface, disrupting settler descendants’ image of themselves as a civilised, ‘fair do’, egalitarian society. Among the recent literature that mirrors white Australia’s painful efforts to come to terms with the ghosts of its colonial past is Kate Grenville’s award-winning novel, The Secret River (2005), short-listed for this year’s Booker Prize. The paper I propose will analyse Grenville’s handling of her (real-life) convict ancestor’s experience of settling ‘vacant’ territory on the Hawkesbury River and the culmination of that experience in the massacre of an Aboriginal tribe—a fact-based fictional event that haunts both the novel’s main protagonist and the author’s imagination.

This paper takes as its starting point Derrida’s notion of spectrality, which ‘is at work everywhere’, and uses this theoretical concept to advance a new reading of The Diviners itself, one which sees it as a ghostlike manifestation of the other. The Diviners not only develops its own detailed blueprint of personal hauntings, but is also a broad philosophical meditation on the entire spectral process associated with the Canadian sensation of cultural unease. As part of this overview, Laurence devotes close attention to the question of literary hauntology, displaying considerable ambivalence towards it. I intend to track through these references and look at the issues—the prospect of losing our self and being taken by another, unfamiliar self, literary phantoms which haunt the Canadian imagination etc.— which they raise. But my central purpose will be to re-read the spectral condition of water on the base of Bachelard’s essay L’eau et les rêves. I will reflect on the importance of liquid images which represent the inner world of Canadian dreams, the socio-cultural spectres that return in a sort of a ghostly act of disfiguration with important consequences for the phantasmatic condition of Canada, in which representation is fragmented.

Nalo Hopkinson’s collection of short fiction, Skin Folk (2001) includes imaginative and innovative variations on classic fairy tales, including ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘The Fairies’ and ‘Bluebeard’. My contention is that as she rewrites these stories from a postcolonial perspective, Hopkinson inflects them to explore body politics as she combines issues of gendered and racial identity, encapsulated in the central metaphor of ‘skin’. Further, by submitting the European tale of magic to a process of cultural translation, Hopkinson practices a form of literary voodoo that gives it new life and bite by challenging the norms and values encoded in the traditional, and naturalised, versions. While her de-centering of Perrault’s literary tales (among others) enacts the struggle with the fairy tale canon represented by the French writer, she also invokes him as a ‘Papa Legba’ figure who opens up new possibilities and facilitates a dialogue between Europe and the West Indies, the dead and the living, past and present.

In this paper, I explore the phenomenon of public apologies for historical atrocities as a form of post-colonial exorcism. What does it mean for heads of state or churches to apologize for events in which they did not materially participate? What do such acts of apologizing tell us about the contemporary meaning of the events themselves, about a nation’s or church’s sense of corporate identity that extends to the past, and about the role of the aggrieved people in this discourse? One useful way of imagining this dialectic is for us to see these apologies as attempts to exorcise the ghosts of colonialism. The presence of ghosts is perhaps most symptomatic of unresolved lives, of failed closure, of the thwarting of the revelation of truth. Those who were wrongfully killed haunt the sites of their violation until the truth is revealed and their souls allowed to rest. This paper will examine a representative public apology in order to explore in what ways we can say who is haunted—the descendants of the victims or the descendants of the victimizers—and who benefits, and how, from a discursive act that simultaneously represents and exorcises the effects of the past.

This essay explores the rhetoric of the ghostly in postcolonial literary and critical contexts. With reference to the work of Simon Gikandi and Salman Rushdie, it considers, firstly, the ways in which the vocabulary of ghostliness has been used to expose the violent origins of modern subjectivity in the bloody business of colonialism. At the end of empire, the ghosts of colonialism return with ‘unfinished business’ to haunt the scene of subjectivity and point to shadowy histories of subaltern subjecthood. The essay then considers a second form of postcolonial ghostliness: the haunting presence of those lives attenuated by colonial modernity’s quest for legitimate identity—projected lives which have not been allowed to develop and might be thought of as raising up ‘business unbegun’. These forms of spectral subjectivity are articulated in the work of Jackie Kay, whose writings on adoption and race both build and set such subjectivities against the embodied legitimate identities of modernity. The essay concludes by engaging with Pauline Melville’s short fiction, where the difficult business is raised of raising the forgotten ghosts of modernity and colonialism while enabling their exorcism in order to begin a new future.

As liminal beings, ghosts seem particularly appropriate to define, question or challenge hybrid cultures where several, seemingly irreconcilable, identities coexist. The present volume wonders how they manifest themselves in the English-speaking world, and whether there is a specifically postcolonial kind of haunting. The twenty-two articles deal with textual, translational or historical ghosts, and take us to Canada, Australia, Africa, India or the Caribbean. Poems by Gerry Turcotte literally haunt the volume, which thus juxtaposes theory and practice in a dynamic and fruitful way. De par leur liminalité, les fantômes semblent particulièrement adaptés pour définir, interroger ou remettre en question des cultures hybrides où coexistent plusieurs identités apparemment inconciliables. Ce volume explore leurs diverses manifestations dans le monde anglophone, se demandant s’il existe une hantise proprement postcoloniale. Les vingt-deux articles nous présentent des fantômes historiques ou textuels, et nous emmènent du Canada à l’Australie, de l’Afrique à l’Inde ou à la Caraïbe. Des poèmes de Gerry Turcotte hantent littéralement le volume, qui juxtapose ainsi théorie et pratique de façon dynamique et féconde.

When it took over from colonial Rhodesia in 1980, Zimbabwe had to recover from decades of civil war aimed at overcoming a political system based on racial discrimination. But in observing the political evolution of the country in the last decade, we may now wonder whether Cecil Rhodes’s ghost is not still hovering over Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The object of this paper is to ask whether the political and ideological system of Southern Rhodesia has really been exorcised when independence was granted. Assessing the weight of Southern Rhodesia’s history on Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, this presentation proposes to study the phenomena through which the former colony’s ghost has revealed itself in the governance of the state since 1980. Indeed, the way Robert Mugabe conceives power and his own relation to power is still marked by a colonialist-inspired idea of what the ‘majority’ is, therefore preventing the emergence of a definition of the nation which would now be based on objective criteria. Still haunted by the ghost of its own past, contemporary Zimbabwe still has to undergo the catharsis of the colonial system which presided over it creation.

This essay looks to Amitav Ghosh’s generically-mixed text In an Antique Land (1992) in order to explore the ways in which the writer stages the conjunction of types of writing that seem to find their discursive origin within the disciplines of anthropology and history respectively. In this meeting of modes, it is argued, a haunted space is opened which speaks of the past but is always orientated toward an ethical revisioning of the present and, more significantly still, of the future. Ghosh’s engagement with ghosts within his accounts of twelfth-century cosmopolitan connections and of the realities of contemporary Egyptian rural life allows him to develop an oppositional stance that stands outside of modernity’s enforced divisions. In attempting to speak to the ghosts that cannot be contained in an easily imagined past, but become manifest instead in the present, he finds a way of writing about a lost history that is more than just nostalgia, and a way of presenting ethnography that is always marked by a disruptive potential set into motion by the problematised position of the recorder.

David Malouf’s writing, notably The Conversations at Curlow Creek and Remembering Babylon, is informed by the notion of exile and the opposition between centre and periphery, which are crucial issues in postcolonial societies. A sense of alienation pervades the texts, emphasising the difficulty of coming to terms with otherness. In Remembering Babylon, set in nineteenth-century Australia and the First World War, the experience of Gemmy—a white boy who shared the life of an Aboriginal community—illustrates the historical encounter between Aborigenes and Europeans, while his in-betweenness haunts the white settlers who come to interrogate their certainties about humanness and animality, the evolution of man and the primacy of whiteness. Malouf’s writing evokes the ongoing trauma of the beginnings of the colony. But if redemption is intimated by The Conversations at Curlow Creek, Remembering Babylon suggests that historical wounds are far from being exorcised, and that reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians will be a long and difficult process.

This paper examines a number of recent ghost stories produced by minority writers in Australia and Canada—from Tracey Moffatt to Thomas King—to highlight the way such tales have been used to interrogate dominant systems of control. If Derrida is correct that ‘haunting is central to any hegemony’, but also that we must learn to ‘talk’ with ghosts, then the way the spectres of minority and dominant structures are negotiated says a great deal about relations of power, especially in the context of race, ethnicity and whiteness. This paper argues that where once Indigenous and minority ethnic writers were metaphorised as spectral within dominant hegemonic structures in order to effect actual political disenfranchisement, contemporary writers and filmmakers have repossessed the spectres of nation to critique, interrogate and reverse such deterritorialising practices. The contestatory politics that have played out as a result of these strategic interventions have in effect ‘ghosted’ dominant players, highlighting the racial dimensions of whiteness and spectralising dominant agency in complex and intriguing ways. This paper will examine films such as Atanarjuat and Bedevil, and novels by Thomas King and Tomson Highway to consider the way this spectral discourse has come to dominate contemporary texts.

In his autobiography Apan Katha [my own words/stories] (1946), the renowned artist and writer Abanindranath Tagore (1871- 1951) imputes an amazing historicity to space. An ancestral home, writes Tagore, ‘lives’ only through the ‘company of people’. In his characteristic lyrical style Tagore further elaborates this connection between history and location. According to him when the people leave the house, the ‘cobwebs of memory’ fly away in the wind and it is then that the house ‘truly dies’. What can we make of this beautiful connection between location and history or space and time? In particular, what do we make of his transposing the organicity of living and dying onto space in this evocative manner? In this paper I am going to advance Tagore’s claim about this relationship between history and spatiality in the context of Calcutta as a colonial city. I am going to argue that spaces acquired a certain kind of past-ness or the patina of antiquity through a very specific rhetoric related to death and dying, that of haunting. We are going to look at haunted spaces as locations of history from two separate perspectives: British and Indian; this is so because each side was invested in sets of very different arguments about Calcutta’s status as a city with a past, or its respectability as an old city. Ghosts, both Bengali and British, we will argue, determined and/or disputed the antiquity of the city and in turn questioned or consolidated the future of British rule.

This paper is about the psychological, political, and artistic declinations of the figure of the ghost in Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg. By using as his center of intelligence the historical Dostoevsky at the time he was preparing to write The Possessed, a political novel about nihilism and revolution and by manipulating facts and fiction, Coetzee writes a dark and poignant tale which subtly investigates the complex relationship between reality and art, historical discourse and private drama. While hinging on the experience of mourning and guilt, in itself a Dostoevskian and a post-colonial epitomatic theme, the novel provides an indirect commentary on post-colonial South Africa in the throes of repressive authority and dangerous radicalism. The ghosts to exorcise in this novel are not just those of pre-revolutionary Russia which so closely resemble South Africa poised on the brink of upheaval, or those of fatherhood adumbrated in the theme of generational strife—the divide between a disillusioned and conservative father who rejects vengefulness and the Nihilist, radical and self-destructive views espoused by the young; they are those of a man who, distraught by remorse, in the end finds himself unable to wring meaning and redemption from his work.

In most ghostly fashion, the plot of this tetralogy presents vague and blurry contours, but its capacity to terrify its spectator remains potent. It tells of an afterlife journey on a river which seems always to lead farther than Hell, of reaching beyond our human, contingent experience, of a fragmentation of the individual being as we think we know him or her; it tells of an odyssey which stages protagonists who, to all intents and purposes, appear as apparitions. The said journey is also composed of memory traces which not only haunt the characters but seem to constitute them, so much so that they are finally bestowed in turn a spectral identity, that they seem both present and absent to the world, visible and invisible; their unstable ontology allows them to swap identities, along the lines of one of the main postcolonial literary themes. The present paper will attempt to show to what extent the tetralogy is inserted within a time that takes place after the disaster, a time that comes too late, and where only a ‘second death’ (it is the title of the third book in Palace of the Peacock) could take place to break up a time that seems perenially stopped. Such a time, which is merely that of lingering memories, is also that of intertextuality. Intertextuality densely proliferates in The Guyana Quartet, and works through embedding. Such a textual memory leads straight to the amnesia which lies at the core of the journey, which directs its course and may explain away its apparent failure. Indeed, this spectrality is also, and lastly, a reverie around a lost world: more so, perhaps, than any other Caribbean author, Harris interrogates the disappearance of the Indian world, he sets these hardly perceptible echoes, these pieces of a lost language, into texts. Intertextuality becomes a sheer substitute to a spectral idiom which no one can grasp any longer. The ‘namelessness’ which occupies the dark centre of these four texts might eventually be the most stable attribute of the ghost which passes through them.

Ghosts do not roam in limbo. They only come into existence when they are met. They have no other place than their apparition. When they disappear, they do so completely. They have no inner life, they do not have a life somewhere else, they have neither psychology nor memory. They do not suffer. They are born because we are haunted by them—we light them and blow them, poor, oscillating candles. They are only for us. Marie Darrieussecq. This collection of essays springs from an international co...

For Harris, all entities and identities are translational in the sense that they undergo constant transformation, and for human beings this necessarily involves processes of interpretation and expression. The translational nature of existence and human identity takes artistic form in narratives, or stories; folklore and myth, which bear witness to the past yet at the same time treat universal, timeless themes and evoke the perennial presences of the natural world, can function as translational vehicles that facilitate a movement across the gulf separating the past from the present and future. In Harris’s fiction the living regularly encounter the dead, who haunt the present in the form of traces, consequences, or ‘ghosts, ’ with which the contemporary generation must come to terms. The verbs translate, transform, and their variants occur repeatedly in Harris, and this essay turns to concepts of translation to analyze his visionary project, focusing on a lesser-known work that illustrates well his innovative splicing of New World and Old World folklore and myth. Translations between the living and the dead support a larger idea that his novels poetically reach toward: the interrelatedness of being and the obligation for each contemporary generation to come to terms with the past in order to continue the always unfinished making of the world.

This paper analyzes the use of the Indian ghost motif in Thomas King’s writings within the framework of postcolonial criticism about spectral narrativity, and in the light of both Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and Derrida’s notion of spectrality. King outlines a politics and poetics of haunting that wholly contradicts Canada’s alleged ghostlessness, as expressed not only by pioneer Catharine Parr Traill in her famous 1833 statement about the complete banishment of ghosts and spirits from a ‘too matter-of-fact country for such supernaturals to visit’, but also by Earle Birney, who concluded his poem ‘Can. Lit.’ asserting: ‘it’s only by our lack of ghosts/we’re haunted’. Unlike other instances of the genre, King’s textual hauntings are never horrific because the presence of spectral Native figures in his novels and short stories does not include any malevolent or macabre elements. Yet the subversive humor which often pervades these mysterious appearances and other fantastic manifestations in King’s poignant scenes of magic realism becomes an amazingly effective strategy to revise colonial history and raise important issues concerning the present day lives of Natives in North America, such as stereotyping, cultural appropriation and commodification, sovereignty, environmental degradation and territorial claims.

Does the fact that Commonwealth membership criteria now focus not only on a historic constitutional association with an existing Commonwealth member but on the respect of the Commonwealth’s core values—rule of law, democracy, human rights, human development—mean that all British imperial ghosts have been banished from the Organisation? Has the true transformation from the British Commonwealth to the Commonwealth of Nations really occurred? The emergence of Canada as an increasingly influential developed member in the Organisation, the affirmation of South-South diplomacy and the establishment of a successful Secretariat, based in London but apparently free from British dominance, seem to prove the point. Yet many of the values, institutions and modes of working of the Commonwealth are indebted to the British past of the vast majority of its members. This article will attempt to address these issues by focusing on the ambivalence at the heart of the Commonwealth’s diplomatic dynamics: while Commonwealth identity was built against British dominance and while the leaders of the new Commonwealth nations in the post-independence era strove to make it the negation of empire, the Commonwealth has kept alive a number of ideals that do seem to emanate from Britain. But the presence of ghosts does not necessarily mean that the Commonwealth is a form of neo-colonialism, even in disguise, as a comparison with the French post-colonial model might show. Ultimately, the objective here is to assess to what extent the Commonwealth has transformed colonial and post-colonial relations into a fully evolved form of multilateral diplomacy between independent States.

For Caribbean authors exploring new ways in their work of navigating the various hyphens and margins they straddle in their experiences of travel, displacement and exile, and of moving beyond the processes of colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, reincarnating Legba, a metaphorical correlate of ‘the crossroads, ’—the hybrid space of dichotomous experience— emerges as a mechanism through which the production of liminality and difference helps redefine and construct political and social Caribbean postcolonial identity. Legba’s reincarnates, these postcolonial ghosts, including the transvestite, transsexual, and the mixed ethnic, are emerging as haunting presences in contemporary Caribbean fiction. Like Legba, bridge between the powerful and the powerless, the aged and the young, the disabled and the strong, within these crossroads characters resides the power to mediate, regenerate, disintegrate and transform normalizing narratives of oppression into resistance strategies. As Caribbean subjects, both real and imagined, attempt to articulate and negotiate the relationship between territory/place, political structures, cultural traditions, and the national and cultural identity schisms that characterize the postcolonial experience, Legba becomes one of the primordial influences in the contemporary literary re-imaginings of these complex negotiations.

As that which keeps returning, the ghost is a highly suitable figure for thinking the postcolonial. However, the seminal theoretical text of contemporary ‘ghost studies’, Derrida’s Specters of Marx, does not include the postcolonial subject as an agent and places the ghost in a distinctly western tradition. This paper uses Ben Okri’s novel The Famished Road to argue for the need to explore the ghost as a culturally specific concept whose workings cannot be generalized. Although Derrida’s western notion of the ghost as a figure of temporal disturbance and disjointing is pertinent to Okri’s text, its African setting prompts a supplementary theorization of the ghost through the work of the Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe and his conceptualization of ghostly power and violence through the notions of living in death, specular experience, the wandering subject and necropolitics. Whereas Mbembe tends to present ghostly power as an oppressive force wielded by the state or the autocrat, The Famished Road illustrates in several ways how ghostly power is not invincible, but can be interrupted and turned against itself, precisely because of its ungraspable, shimmering status. In the end, therefore, neither Derrida’s nor Mbembe’s perspective on the ghost is fully vindicated by The Famished Road. Rather, the novel brings the two together in a syncretic move that preserves Mbembe’s idea that the ghost can be an oppressive, deadening force aligned with the state, as well as Derrida’s notion of spectrality as a resistive force and possible figure of justice.

This paper dwells on the multiple echoes and points of convergence between Atonement and The Turn of the Screw, a text which has been rather overlooked in the teeming intertextuality crisscrossing McEwan’s novel. Thanks to a sophisticated scenography, the English novelist, just like Henry James, explores both the avidity of the eye and the anxiety it faces in front of what turns out to be an in(de)finite object, the ob-scene that shatters the frame of the scene. Structured around dramatic visual encounters that result in a frenzied escalation, the narrative shows how the fierce determination to protect innocence leads to a crime: the English garden becomes the theatre in which the “romance of the nursery” turns to tragedy. McEwan’s novel, very much like James’s tale, explores the fearful and destructive power of a certainty that too easily wipes away the fogs of doubt; it invites us to think of the spectral not as a marginal phenomenon, but, in the line of “the spectral turn”, as what fractures the word and the gaze. In the wake of James’s tale, the ghostly in McEwan involves the person who lives to tell the story, whether she is engaged in vision or in re-vision. At the point where McEwan seems to part company with James and as the long path to atonement begins, the ghosts continue to unsettle the narrative. Cet article se propose d’étudier les multiples échos et points de convergence entre Atonement et The Turn of the Screw de Henry James, texte que la critique semble avoir peu pris en compte dans son examen de l’intertextualité foisonnante du roman de McEwan. À travers la scénographie sophistiquée qu’il met en place, le romancier anglais, à la suite de James, explore à la fois l’avidité de l’œil et l’angoisse qui surgit face à ce qui s’impose comme un objet in(dé)fini, l’ob-scène qui met à mal le cadre de la scène. Structuré autour de plusieurs mini-drames du regard qui s’enchaînent dans une tension grandissante, le récit montre comment la détermination féroce à protéger l’innocence mène au crime : le jardin anglais devient le théâtre où la « romance de la nurserie » tourne à la tragédie. Le roman de McEwan, à l’instar du conte de James, explore le pouvoir redoutable et meurtrier d’une certitude qui écarte trop facilement les brumes du doute ; il nous amène, dans la lignée du « tournant spectral », à penser le spectral non comme un épiphénomène, mais comme ce qui installe sa faille au cœur de la parole et du regard. Comme chez James, le spectral chez McEwan implique celle qui porte le récit, il affecte sa vision autant que son entreprise de ré-vision ; au point où l’on pourrait penser que McEwan laisse James derrière lui et là où débute un long chemin d’expiation, les fantômes persistent à troubler le récit.

L’intrigue de L’Enfant Volé, roman publié par Ian McEwan en 1987, repose sur la disparition brutale d’une enfant prénommée Kate dans un supermarché, à la vue de tous et en présence de son père Stephen. Au fil du roman, la nécessité de compenser cet échec fondateur de vision s’accompagne d’une tentative de re-composer un portrait mémoriel de Kate, qui reste cependant menacé par la fragmentation et la perte. McEwan opère un brouillage des limites entre l’absence de la disparue et sa mise en mémoire, qui mène à une spectralisation du souvenir, au sens étymologique du terme « spectre » (du latin spectare, « regarder »). Cette réminiscence spectrale entraîne alors des incursions narratives dans le registre fantastique, qui viennent à la fois perturber le régime réaliste de représentation du deuil et redéfinir la tonalité élégiaque du récit. L’insistance sur la dimension visuelle du roman est au cœur d’une composition (anti-)élégiaque qui interroge à la fois la possibilité de préserver le souvenir de l’enfant perdue et la quête de consolation du père endeuillé. Entre représentation de la perte et potentiel révélateur, la prévalence du voir au sein du roman est au cœur de l’entreprise narrative de consolation. The plot of Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time revolves around the sudden disappearance of a child, Kate, in a supermarket, in plain sight and in the presence of her father Stephen. The novel attempts to compensate for the grieving protagonist’s initial lapse of vision by re-composing Kate’s portrait through vivid, almost photographic or filmic (at times traumatic) memories. In McEwan’s tale of mourning, the limits between the vanished character’s absence and her memorial presence are blurred, leading to a spectralization of her memory, in the etymological sense of the word (from the Latin spectare, “to look at”). This spectral reminiscence allows for narrative incursions into the realm of the fantastic. By giving a continued existence to an invisible character, the novel both disturbs the regime of realism and rewrites elegiac conventions. The novel’s visual imagery is at the heart of an (anti-)elegiac poetics of mourning, which attempts to recover (also risking to re-cover) the missing girl’s memory all the while signalling the evolution of the grieving protagonist’s own recovery from debilitating grief. Building on theories of trauma, mourning and spectrality, the aim of this paper is to explore the ways in which the (anti-)elegiac process of consolation is both built into and set against the imagery of the novel. To what extent does the photographic or filmic nature of memory contribute to the recovery of the lost child (who literally disappears from her father’s view)? Does this in absentia portrait reverse or intensify her loss?

Some works in the British sphere have recently focused on refugees in the UK (Sahota, The Year of the Runaways, 2015) or Indian migrant workers in the UAE (Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, 2017). The former sheds light upon characters which have not often been staged in British literature, such as an “untouchable” who was forced out of the country or a man who was drawn to sell a kidney to pay for student visa. The latter, a collection of short stories, revives the ghost trope, suggesting that the often undocumented workers have spectral lives. I wish to reflect upon the representation of subaltern figures in literature and more particularly on the spectral metaphor. According to Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, the concept of “ghost” may refer to social outcasts, “impotent and ineffectual victims rather than powerful aggressors” (2010, x). Is the figure of the ghost in literature still empowering? Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s discussion on “marked” bodies (Strange Encounters, 46) and other theoretical works, this article discusses what literature performs on the lives, voices and bodies of marginalised figures and ponders over the ethics of writing and reading works focusing on such themes. Certaines œuvres littéraires anglophones se sont récemment penchées sur des figures de réfugiés au Royaume-Uni (Sahota, The Year of the Runaways, 2015) ou celles des travailleurs invités indiens dans les Émirats arabes unis (Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, 2017). Le roman de Sahota met l’accent sur des personnages qui n’ont pas souvent été représentés dans la littérature britannique, tel un Dalit qui a dû fuir l’Inde ou un homme indien forcé de vendre l’un de ses reins afin de pouvoir s’offrir un visa étudiant. Le second texte à l’étude est le recueil de nouvelles écrit par Deepak Unnikrishnan ; recueil dans lequel est revisité le trope du fantôme, suggérant que les personnages de travailleurs sans papiers ont des vies spectrales. L’article vise à réfléchir à la représentation de figures subalternes dans la littérature et à étudier plus particulièrement la métaphore spectrale. Selon Maria del Pilar Blanco et Esther Peeren, le concept de ‘fantôme’ peut renvoyer à des personnes marginalisées socialement (2010, x). On peut se demander si la figure du fantôme en littérature est encore susceptible de conférer une forme d’agency, de pouvoir, à ceux et celles qui se trouvent en situation de précarité. À l’appui des travaux de Sara Ahmed sur les corps étrangers (Strange Encounters) et d’autres travaux théoriques, il s’agira de discuter de ce que la littérature produit sur les vies, voix et corps de figures marginalisées dans le monde et de réfléchir aux positionnements éthiques liés à l’écriture et à la lecture d’œuvres littéraires ou artistiques portant sur des figures précaires.

Ce numéro est issu des travaux du colloque international “Invisibles Lives, Silent Voices in the British Culture, Literature and Arts of the 20th and 21st Centuries”, qui s’est tenu en ligne les 15 et 16 octobre 2020 et a été organisé par Alice Borrego (université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA) et Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon, IRHIM). Les articles rassemblés ici explorent les représentations complexes de l’invisibilité et du silence dans les œuvres artistiques et littéraires des xxe et xxie siècles. Du modernisme à la période contemporaine, les formes diverses d’expression (nouvelles, romans, récits autobiographiques et documentaires musicaux) qui font l’objet de ces études interrogent la possibilité de (re)donner une voix aux populations invisibilisées dans la société britannique. This volume offers a selection of the papers of the international conference “Invisibles Lives, Silent Voices in the British Culture, Literature and Arts of the 20th and 21stCenturies”, which was organised online on the 15th and 16th October 2020 by Alice Borrego (université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, EMMA) and Héloïse Lecomte (ENS de Lyon, IRHIM). The present articles offer new interpretations of the complex representations of invisibility and silence in artistic and literary works of the 20th and 21st centuries. From modernism to the contemporary period, the diverse forms of expressions (short stories, novels, autobiographical narratives and musical documentaries) analysed in these papers question the possibility of giving (back) a voice to the invisibilised populations of British society.

International audience; Rosamond Lehmann seems an unlikely candidate for the study of the voices and faces of the left-behinds since most of her novels deal with the unsatisfactory romances of women from the middle classes. Her short fiction—five stories written during WWII—is another matter. This is particularly the case of ‘The Gipsy’s Baby’, the longest piece of fiction in this collection, which revolves around ‘the logic of dispossession’ and can be said to show the processes of invisiblisation and silencing at work as far as the destitute are concerned: ostracization, humiliation, expertise, institutionalization, etc. On the other hand, the short story may be seen as a way for the grown-up narrator to give a voice to the most silent child of the poor family on which the short story focuses—the only one, however, who dared to ‘create’—and to write a verbal memorial to this girl, who becomes the spectral epitome of all the flotsam and jetsam haunting society and asking for recognition.; Le nom de Rosamond Lehmann ne s’impose pas de manière évidente lorsqu’il s’agit d’étudier les voix et les visages des démunis de la société dans la mesure où ses romans évoquent bien souvent des femmes de la classe moyenne et leurs amours malheureuses. Ce n’est toutefois pas le cas de ses nouvelles, au nombre de cinq, parues pendant la seconde guerre mondiale. La nouvelle intitulée « The Gipsy’s Baby », la plus longue de la collection, s’articule autour de la « logique de dépossession » et met en scène les processus d’invisibilisation et de muselage auxquels sont soumis les indigents : ostracisme, humiliation, expertise, institutionnalisation, etc. Toutefois, la nouvelle peut aussi être lue comme une tentative par la narratrice adulte de faire entendre la voix de l’enfant la plus silencieuse de la famille pauvre à laquelle s’intéresse le récit — la seule à tenter toutefois de se rebiffer en créant — et d’écrire un texte à la mémoire de cette fillette, désormais incarnation spectrale de tous les laissés pour compte qui hantent la société, demandant à être regardés et écoutés.

This article looks at three contemporary British speculative plays – Dawn King’s Foxfinder (2011), Stef Smith’s Human Animals (2016) and Alistair McDowall’s X (2016) – to show how their approach to the theme of transmission interrogates the simplified forms of contagion based on binary categories such as present/absent, before/after, cause/symptom, human/nonhuman. It is my belief that these plays’ conception of contagion, not as a mere epidemiological fact but as a metaphor for disruption and relationality, transformation and conformity, invokes a distinct utopian method of the twenty-first century, which is best characterised by uncertainty. Cet article examine trois pièces d’anticipation britanniques contemporaines – Foxfinder de Dawn King (2011), Human Animals de Stef Smith (2016) et X d'Alistair McDowall (2016) – afin de démontrer comment leur approche du sujet de la transmission interroge les formes simplifiées de contagion fondées sur des catégories binaires telles que présent/absent, avant/après, cause/symptôme, humain/non humain. Je suis convaincue que la conception de la contagion dans ces pièces, non pas comme simple fait épidémiologique mais comme métaphore de la rupture et de la mise en relation, de la transformation et de la continuité, convoque une méthode utopique propre au XXIe siècle, qui se caractérise par l’indécidabilité.

The spectre of the Anthropocene haunts Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing (2019). Already appearing in the opening paragraph of the first essay, the term announces the presence of some other time, marking an ambiguous temporality of things past and things yet to come. It is there in the rapidly eroding coastline that, on the one hand, reveals material traces of a long-lost culture, and on the other, disrupts human lives and augurs an imminent threat of cultural discontinuity. Bearing witness to environmental emergency, Jamie avoids solastalgic representations, revealing layers of inapparent meanings. An immediate consequence of climate breakdown epitomised in tundra fires, melting permafrost and rising sea levels, ecosystem distress coalesces with positive social processes as a damaged culture becomes revitalised. The essay focuses on the discussion of the representation of climate crisis, and that which surfaces, or emerges in its wake, and how it effects irreversible change. It proposes to examine Jamie’s depiction of loss and resilience that is both melancholic and hopeful, where grief blends with expectation of renewal, reverberating in the image of the Bering Sea merging with the American continent. Finally, it aims to explore the language of Surfacing, which records environmental emergency and witnesses its consequences to the non-human as well as human world. Cette contribution se penche sur le recueil d’essais de l’Écossaise Kathleen Jamie Surfacing (2019) pour en analyser le traitement de la temporalité, en particulier dans son rapport à la crise environnementale et à la résilience des milieux et des êtres qui les habitent.

Dans cet article, nous nous proposons de développer une théorie philosophique de la trace qui pourra, à partir de la lecture que fait Jacques Derrida de la psychanalyse, élaborer une esthétique « spectrale » qui surgit de l’occupation des villes ayant dû faire face à des violences extrêmes (notamment la disparition politique) par des images des corps dans quelques expériences artistiques, comme celles du Siluetazo (1983) argentin. Pour ce faire, il nous faudra essayer d’établir les rapports entre trace, archive, inscription, images techniques et innervations des corps. Tout ceci nous conduira à montrer comment l’art, quand il dépasse ses limites institutionnelles et acquiert le statut d’expérience collective, est à même d’accueillir les fantômes qui hantent nos sociétés et nos villes en exigeant justice.

Crimson Peak (2015) est un film que son réalisateur, le Mexicain Guillermo Del Toro, a volontairement rattaché à la tradition de la gothic romance. La capacité évocatrice de son titre, les murs décrépits de son décor principal tout comme ses couloirs sombres sont autant d’éléments qui confirment l’identité gothique autoproclamée de l’œuvre. Il est vrai que Del Toro n’a eu de cesse de revendiquer l’héritage d’artistes victoriens, parmi lesquels Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, les sœurs Brontë ou encore Charles Dickens. L’objectif du présent article est l’étude des principaux motifs gothiques du film (des personnages aux lieux, éléments de l’intrigue et conventions) mais également celle des dynamiques ambivalentes utilisées par Del Toro, dont le travail oscille constamment entre hommage appuyé au gothique victorien et réécriture transgressive de ses traits. D’une part, la mise en scène gothique du film traduit l’utilisation consciente de la photographie et des décors en tant qu’outils narratifs qui permettent à Del Toro de mêler anthropomorphisme et féminité lorsqu’il filme l’espace du manoir sémiotique. De plus, les jeux de pouvoir entre les deux personnages féminins principaux incitent à une relecture du motif du dopplegänger et à la remise en cause du scénario patrilinéaire (constante de la fiction gothique). Enfin, le jeu cinématographique sur le motif du fantôme nous apparaît comme révélateur de nouvelles dynamiques genrées, voire d’une réflexion sur l’émancipation féminine Released in October 2015, Crimson Peak is a movie written and directed by visionary Mexican filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, who codified his work to fit the gothic romance mode. Right from the powerful evocative capacity of its title to its decaying walls and vaulted corridors, the film clearly relies on a self-proclaimed gothic backdrop. As a matter of fact, Del Toro willingly attests that he was heavily influenced by many Victorian artists, among whom Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, the Brontë sisters or Charles Dickens. The point of this discussion will be to cover the movie’s main gothic motifs (from characters to settings, plots and conventions) and to highlight the ambivalent dynamics of the filmmaker, whose work constantly hovers between an undisguised homage to the Victorian gothic and a challenging rewriting of its traits. First, the gothic mise-en-scène (Lévy 1994, 1) of the movie testifies to Del Toro’s conscious use of colour coding and design as “story-telling tools” (Del Toro, “The Influences”), which enables him to conflate anthropomorphism and femininity through the staging of a feminized and semiotic space. Moreover, the interplay between the two main female characters allows for a questioning of the doppelgänger figure, and for a rewriting of the traditional patrilineage scenario that is typical of the gothic. Finally, this paper will discuss Del Toro’s toying with gothic motifs such as the ghost and the supernatural in general, which may suggest new gender politics and a reflection on female empowerment.

« Il faut voir l'Indien pour le connaître/ [The Indian] must be seen to be known » (232) : cet aphorisme figurait en 1830 dans un guide décrivant la Galerie des Archives indiennes du Ministère de la Guerre des États-Unis. Mathilde Arrivé nous rappelle que le monde amérindien existe avant tout par l'image et en tant qu'image, une image hypertrophiée dont son ouvrage expose les nombreuses subtilités. Le Primitivisme mélancolique d'Edward S. Curtis se donne en effet pour tâche de dénouer les fil...

Malgré les apparences de modernité auxquelles peut prétendre l’adaptation du roman de E. M. Forster par James Ivory en raison de son style et de son sujet, il est possible de l’envisager d’un point de vue déconstructionniste qui prête attention à la présence de thèmes et de figures de la spectralité. D’abord considérée comme une opposition entre des personnages qui incarnent des attitudes existentielles contrastées, la spectralité gouverne également—surtout—leur mode de présence et de présentation à l’écran. En fin de compte, cela révèle la manière subtile qui est celle d’Ivory d’indiquer la nature fugace de sa propre création en tant que simple projection. Despite its apparent claims to modernity in style and subject, James Ivory’s Howards End can be viewed in terms of a deconstructionist approach that pays attention to the presence of themes and figures of spectrality. First seen as an opposition between characters who embody contrasting existential attitudes, spectrality also—above all—governs their mode of presence and presentation on screen. Ultimately, this reveals Ivory’s subtle way to intimate the elusive nature of his own creation as mere projection.

Kisumu, troisième ville du Kenya située sur les rives du lac Victoria, présente un paysage funéraire dual, où s’opposent la concentration des tombes dans de rares cimetières au centre-ville et leur dispersion dans les faubourgs de la ville dans une multitude d’espaces domestiques. Nous proposons d’aborder cette dualité, dont la genèse se trouve dans la construction locale de l’État colonial, à partir de la notion derridienne de spectralité, que l’on comprend comme la manifestation de traces à la fois visibles et invisibles du passé dans le temps présent, qui réapparais­sent malgré leur refoulement leur occultation et la nature ponctuelle et inachevée de leur apparition. Bien plus qu’un sédiment du temps, cette dualité spatiale des pratiques funéraires est aujourd’hui mobilisée à mesure que la ville de Kisumu devient l’un des lieux où s’illustre la prolifération à l’échelle mondiale des agendas urbains centrés sur la compétitivité internationale. Les spectres des espaces colo­niaux sont alors convoqués dans les pratiques funéraires contemporaines. On lit à travers elles la manière dont les faces urbaines et rurales de la construction locale de l’État colonial fournissent un répertoire de discours et d’actions pour soutenir ou contester les politiques d’arrimage de la ville au monde. Cette référence coloniale – bien qu’occultée et refoulée par les acteurs en présence – projette les injustices et les conflits coloniaux dans le présent global, pour hanter la formulation d’un futur urbain qui n’arrive pas à se défaire d’un passé colonial qui le leste. Kisumu, Kenya’s third largest city on the shores of Lake Victoria, presents a dual funerary landscape, where the concentration of graves in rare cemeteries in the city centre and their dispersion in the suburbs of the city in a multitude of domestic spaces are opposed. We propose to approach this duality, whose genesis lies in the local construction of the colonial state, from the derridian notion of spectrality, which is understood as the manifestation of both visible and invisible traces of the past in the present time. Those traces reappear despite their repression, their occultation and the punctual and unfinished nature of their apparitions. Much more than a sediment of time, this spatial duality of funeral practices is now mobilised as the city of Kisumu becomes one of the places which illustrates the proliferation on a global scale of urban agendas centred on international competitiveness. The spectres of colonial spaces are then called into contemporary funeral practices. Through them we read how the urban and rural faces of the construction of the local colonial state provides a repertoire of discourse and actions to support or challenge the city’s projection into the globalisation process. This colonial reference – although hidden and repressed by the actors involved – projects colonial injustices and conflicts into the global present, in order to haunt the formulation of an urban future that is unable to get rid of a colonial past that weighs it down.