School of Culture and Creative Arts - Glasgow Theatre Seminar
Date: Tuesday 18 March 2025
Time: 17:30 - 19:30
Venue: 217A Gilmorehill Halls
Category: Public lectures, Academic events
Speaker: Clare Finburgh Delijani

Ghouls, Ghosts, Spirits and Spectres: Future-Oriented Haunting in Postcolonial Studies - Clare Finburgh Delijani

Gothic ghosts, ghouls, phantoms, spectres and skeletons represent, according to Tabish Khair’s The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere (2009), a double, or shadow of the European fear of the foreignized ‘other’. But ghosts are also central to postcolonial performance, serving crucial political, ethical, spiritual and dramaturgical functions. Ghosts are, in fact, so pervasive across postcolonial creative production today – one might think of Kara Walker’s Fons Americanus (2019) at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall; or Julien Creuzet’s installation for the France Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2024) – that we might allude to a ‘spectral turn’. In this paper I examine in particular ghosts, spirits and spectres in contemporary theatre in France.

Setting aside superstition, the supernatural and religion, we can understand ghosts as vital conduits both of mourning and commemoration, and of justice. Fiona Barclay, referencing Edward Said, highlights the ‘contrapuntal’ effects of haunting, where ‘[t]he past […] becomes a ghostly presence, a palimpsest whose marks remain distinguishable beneath the surface of the present.’ (Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature and the Maghreb, 2011) Ghosts can highlight how the aftermaths of European colonialism, begun half a millennium ago, persist today; that for some, the past has not passed. Michel de Certeau questions the ‘initial act of division’ in modern western conceptions of history, which considers the past to be ‘dead’. (The Writing of History, 1975) Paradoxically, rather than progressing ineluctably from the past towards modernity, former colonial empires have perpetuated cycles of oppression which haunt postcolonial nations with racial and social injustice. This haunting dissolves the perceived continuum of historical time, destabilising European Enlightenment claims to clarity, reason and chronological linear progress. In this paper I propose five manifestations of the ghost: mourning the dead; colonialism’s afterlives; justice for ghosts; spirits and ancestors; and what I’m provisionally terming trickster spectres. I ask why, and how we must allow ghosts to haunt us, and in what ways contemporary theatre in France heeds this exhortation.

 Clare Finburgh Delijani works at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has written many books and articles on theatre from the French-speaking world and UK, including special issues of Théâtre/Public on postcolonial theatre (2023); Watching War on the Twenty-First-Century Stage (2017); Ecology, the Environment and the Greening of the Modern Stage (2015, with Carl Lavery) and Jean Genet (2012, with David Bradby). She is editor of A New History of Theatre in France (2024) and is currently holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship, during which she is writing on theatre that addresses France’s colonial past, and postcolonial present.

This hybrid event will be simultaneously livestream - to join us online, visit: https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/j/89873232683?pwd=cbV7piaECelAKtWLtb9EO7m9BRCHa1.1