Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives eds. by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas, and Amanda L. Petersen (review)

A consistently illuminating collection of essays, Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives is the first critical anthology about the figure of the ghost and the aesthetic of haunting to focus on narrative, film, and photography produced in Latin America, Spain, and the Latino Diaspora.

The twelve chapters that make up this volume take on the challenge of exposing the disruptive power of spectral theory, anchored in the Derridean concepts of the specter and hauntology, while reconsidering traditional readings, providing new concepts and associations, and reassessing cultural production. The collection begins with an introduction by Ribas-Casasayas and Petersen that establishes a lucid and persuasive theoretical foundation, which moves away from solely Euro-American conceptualizations. Organizing their discussion around principles elaborated by prominent specialists in Hispanic cultural studies, such as Nelly Richard's aesthetic of the fragment and rupture, Cristina Moreiras's theory of interstitial residues, and Jo Labanyi's aesthetic of haunting, they effectively elucidate how these approaches offer a platform to assess spectrality in the specificity of the Transhispanic context by challenging the limits of politics and symbolic representation.

Following the general introduction, the volume is divided into four sections. The first section, "Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories," examines the various ways in which the traumatic past of post-dictatorial societies haunts their present. In chapter 1, Megan Corbin studies the powerful presence of the brutal past in contemporary Argentina through objects—several shown in photographs—left behind by prisoners in illegal detention centers. With the same sensitivity and critical insight, she also analyzes the Chilean documentary film Nostalgia de la luz, showing how the haunting presence of material objects interpellates any attempt at forgetting. In a similar vein, in chapter 2, Isabel Cuñado describes how Javier Marías's novels unveil the politics of memory in relation to justice and ethics through the presence of the ghost, the double, and the particular objects haunting these narratives. In chapter 3, Susana S. Martínez examines the impact of trans-generational trauma in two novels about the Guatemalan civil war, which put emphasis on absence as a source of a ghostly presence. Martínez complements her readings with a poignant analysis of Jonathan Moller's black and white photographic collection about mass-graves exhumations. The inclusion of several of these images underscores the terror of the past, the overwhelming need for justice, and the enduring bond between the living and the dead.

The second section, "The Persistence of Violence: Trauma as Haunting," addresses the concept of "retraumatization," as past trauma affecting a second generation in relation to the theme of los desaparecidos. With keen perceptivity, in chapter 4, Karen Wooley Martin assesses the figure of the phantom as a metaphor for the missing and the psychological wounds of those searching and grieving in two novels: Perla and Purgatorio. In chapter 5, Charles St-Georges discusses the film Aparecidos, stressing how its cinematography borrows from the aesthetic of horror films to develop an allegory of the Dirty War. In chapter 6, Sarah Thomas exposes a theme often neglected, as is the systematic abuse of children of Republican families during the Franco dictatorship, by studying the trope of the child, the orphan, and the ghost in two films: El espinazo del diablo and El orfanato. Disclosing a shift in aesthetic practices, in chapter 7, Juliana Martínez explains how two novels by Evelio Rosero and two recent films avoid violence as a mere spectacle and, instead, resort to strategies that emphasize a topography of ambiguity and desolation, a "spectral spaciality," that brings to the forefront the predicament of the disappeared in Colombia.

The third section, "Still Images: The Living and the Dead," is composed of two chapters and discusses the interaction between photography, death, and narrative. In chapter 8, N. Michelle Murray deconstructs Ramito de Hierbabuena calling attention to the trickery a spectral representation grounded in the paradoxical field...