Introduction xi

Mieke Bal notes, “[e]ven those concepts that are tenuously established, suspended
between questioning and certainty, hovering between ordinary word and theoretical
tool, constitute the backbone of the interdisciplinary study of culture – primarily
because of their potential intersubjectivity. Not because they mean the same thing for
everyone, but because they don’t.”6 The ghost, which itself hovers between different
realms and meanings, might be seen as an exemplary cultural concept that we will
unpack in a deliberately intersubjective and interdisciplinary manner, tracing its
travels (Bal speaks of traveling concepts) in time and space through various media
and theoretical paradigms.
Jacques Derrida, whose Specters of Marx (1994) perhaps makes him the most
indelible recent theorist of haunting, has argued that each age has its own ghosts. Upon
describing the (limited) possibility of demarcating the historical, philosophical, and
social “singularity” of haunting, however, he pushes for a near immediate reinsertion
of such explorations into what he calls a “much larger spectrological sequence.”7 This
is in part due to Derrida’s insistence on haunting as a temporal, rather than spatial,
phenomenon, where the ghost is not tied down to an idea of physical location. Popular
Ghosts seeks to redress the balance by situating ghostly appearances in time and space,
in line with Roger Luckhurst’s critique of the spectral turn in cultural criticism as
“symptomatically blind to its generative loci.”8 The way the hauntological machine
of what Luckhurst calls the “London Gothic” (the locus of his critique) comprises
divergent visions of haunting, some popular and some aligned with a certain cabalism
among the writers and readers of the city’s haunted topography – a “just between you
and me” relationship between “visionary” and complicit reader (532) – is obscured in
“the generalized economy of haunting” (534). This economy, of which Derrida is the
main representative, forgets about the specificity of ghosts, the fact that they appear in
specific moments, and specific locations, and also forgets that ghosts are “symptoms,
points of rupture that insist their singular tale be retold and their wrongs acknowledged”
(542).
Where Luckhurst describes the London Gothic and Julian Wolfreys has noted a
“London-effect” of haunting in his Writing London, whereby aspects of everyday life in
this city gain increasing subterranean and haunted meanings,9 we seek to open pathways
to an understanding and critique of a global effect of haunting, not to argue that all ghosts
are now the same, but to establish a more rigorously comparative approach. Rather
than privileging only Western, urban, high-literary examples of the ways in which our
everyday lives have taken a turn toward the spectral, the essays compiled in Popular
Ghosts expand discussions about ghosts and haunting to different geographies, as well
as diverse fields of popular knowledge and communication. We are interested in seeing
what the different ghosts of our era look, sound, and feel like, as well as what functions
they have in our cultural imagination, without losing sight of the ongoing revisions and
revitalizations of previous spectral turns.10 Our understanding of the contemporary – the
realm in which we emphatically place the idea of the ghost – engages with multiple
manifestations of haunting in the present, but also asks how we can look at certain
cultural moments in the past to shed light on our current theorizations of the ghostliness
of globalized everyday life and its popular cultural products.