Ghosting Through Our Ruins

Green, Michael (2019) Ghosting Through Our Ruins. Matatu - Journal for African Culture and Society, 50 (1). pp. 28-47. ISSN 0932-9714

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1163/18757421-05001011

Abstract

This creative/critical paper explores the implications for the postcolonial of what John Wylie calls a ‘spectral geography’. ‘Spectrality’ Wylie defines as ‘the unsettling of self, the haunting taking-place of place’; it ‘demands new, themselves haunted ways of writing about place, memory and self’. The critical self-reflexivity implicit in such a perspective is brought to bear on a recent migrant to the UK attempting to negotiate ideas of Africanness and Englishness through the rewriting of places linked by a statue in a small Northumberland village commemorating the death of a local officer killed in the ‘Anglo-Boer War’. The inclusions and exclusions inscribed into intersecting contemporary and historical landscapes haunted by a heritage of Empire result in the subjectivity of the writer being tested against his taking shape, materialising, in relation to material that is in itself fluid in terms of its expression of place, the past, and identity.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: practice research; creative/critical; Empire; Anglo-Boer War; commemoration; landscape; identity; spectrality
Subjects: W800 Imaginative Writing
Department: Faculties > Arts, Design and Social Sciences > Humanities
Depositing User: Becky Skoyles
Date Deposited: 28 Nov 2018 11:43
Last Modified: 31 Jul 2021 11:01
URI: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/36946

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