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

Preview

Text Ghosting_Through_Our_Ruins_Green_MATATU_submission_reformatted.pdf - Accepted Version Download (135kB) | Preview

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.

Actions (login required)

View Item

Downloads