Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives ed. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Peterson

2018; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Volume: 184; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsf.2018.0065

2165-6185

Eunice Rojas,

Latin American Literature Studies

Reviewed by: Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives ed. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Peterson Eunice Rojas Ribas-Casasayas, Alberto and Peterson, Amanda L., editors. Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. 243 pp. ISBN: 978-16-1148-738-1. Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives provides a selection of studies that examine the spectral in contemporary Spanish-language cultural production from both sides of the Atlantic. As the first volume-length work in this area, it offers a selection of rigorously researched and thoughtfully analyzed chapters that study the concept of haunting in the cultural production of a wide swath of the Spanish-speaking world. Divided into four thematic sections, the chapters in Ribas-Casasayas and Petersen's edited volume study films, traditional literary texts, and texts with photographic components that use haunting and spectrality to engage with a silenced or forgotten collective history, to reconcile past trauma, or to represent the dehumanizing effects of the neoliberal policies of late capitalism. While neither of the editors are authors of the chapter contributions, the editorial management of the volume is apparent in the consistent level of quality both in terms of writing and content. Moreover, the editors provide not only an engaging introduction on a history of spectral criticism in the Transhispanic context, they also introduce each section of the volume with an explanation of the ways in which spectrality is studied in the chapters that comprise that unit. Further evidence of the careful selection of contributors and organization of the volume, each of the four sections includes at least one chapter dealing with Latin American texts and one covering Peninsular texts, giving the entire work a balanced Transhispanic coverage. Moreover, the editors include an extensive bibliography of theoretical sources for spectral criticism used throughout the volume. During the twenty-first century both Spain and numerous Latin American nations have been grappling with unhealed cultural wounds arising from episodes of violence and dictatorship that occurred during the twentieth century, and many of the texts and films studied in this volume present hauntings that evoke the silenced or disappeared victims of that violence. The section entitled "Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories" features chapters that examine the historical dimension of haunting in both Spain and Latin America. Megan Corbin's chapter on "Spectral Presences and Metaphoric Re-memberings" deftly discusses the testimonial power and phantasmal presence of objects and body parts belonging to the disappeared in Argentina and Chile's military dictatorships as evidenced in different types of cultural production from the two countries. Similarly, Susana S. Martínez studies novels in which haunting manifests as a [End Page 183] means of bearing witness to the state-sponsored violence experienced in Guatemala by prior generations. Isabel Cuñado's chapter crosses the Atlantic to analyze the evolution of ghostly figures over the course of several decades of Javier Marías' fiction, tracing the increasingly political representation of the spectral in Marías' writing and aligning it with a growing preoccupation in recuperating the memory of Spain's Civil War and Francoist dictatorship. The second section of Espectros turns from the broad cultural approach to the spectral to focus instead on the psychological and personal experience with past trauma as manifested in hauntings by ghosts or other spectral beings. In this section Charles St-Georges' chapter on the specters of trauma and their relationship to time in the Spanish-Argentine film Aparecidos stands out as particularly insightful. St-Georges carefully differentiates between ghosts and specters in order to distinguish the spirits of victims and perpetrators in the novel and the relationship of each to temporality. Both Sarah Thomas's chapter on the spectral presence of children Spanish films and Karen Wooley Martin's chapter on spectrality in Argentine novels of the disappeared compare two similar works involving anthropomorphic ghosts of past trauma. Juliana Martínez's chapter, examines spectrality with geographic and spatial manifestations in Colombian literature and film with the purpose of engaging critically with Colombia's culture of violence rather than viewing it as spectacle. Espectros's third section contains two chapters dealing with the oftentimes controversial spectrality of still images in literature. N...