The 2008 economic collapse in Iceland sent its residents into a destabilising crisis with far-reaching, temporal and affective consequences. Haunting Futures explores how the complex relationships of this unstable past and the anticipatory modes of the ongoing present keep Icelanders and the Polish migrant community in their midst alert to looming futures in crisis. It offers insights into timely crisis-ridden impacts and imaginings, migration processes and social understandings and practices. Through its attention to how people engage with crisis temporally and affectively, the book presents the crisis not simply as an isolated and distressing event but as a spectre embodied in time through ongoing anticipation.

Ghosts and specters, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s, and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? This book seeks to answer these questions by examining the history of our fascination with the uncanny from the golden age of the Victorian ghost story to the present day. From Dickens to Derrida, MR James to Mark Fisher; from the rise of Spiritualism to the folk horror revival, Hauntology traces our continuing engagement with these esoteric ideas. Moving between the literary and the theoretical, the visual and the political, Hauntology explores our nostalgia for the cultural artifacts of a past from which we seem unable to break free.

This collection of writings by Mark Fisher, author of the acclaimed Capitalist Realism, argues that we are haunted by futures that failed to happen. Fisher searches for the traces of these lost futures in the work of David Peace, John Le Carré, Christopher Nolan, Joy Division, Burial and many others.

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

Acts of cross-cultural reading have ethical consequences. In Haunting Encounters, Joanne Lipson Freed traces the narrative strategies through which certain works of fiction forge connections with their readers across boundaries of difference. Freed uses the idea of haunting—an intense, temporary, and transformative encounter that defies rational understanding—as a metaphor for the kinds of ethical relationships that such works cultivate with their readers across boundaries of difference. Freed points out how such works as Toni Morrison's Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things strike a delicate balance between empathy and alterity. Their engaging narratives, Freed argues, bring unfamiliar characters and distant settings to life for readers who encounter them as "other," but they also highlight the limits of fiction, holding in check the impulse to colonize another's experience with one's own. Haunting Encounters is a sensitive and perceptive application of theory to real-world concerns. It draws together the fields of postcolonial fiction and narrative ethics and suggests original modes of engagement between readers and books that promise new ways of looking at the world.

The NFB’s mandate is “[t]o make and distribute films designed to help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts.” NFB Founding Commissioner John Grierson "It’s only by our lack of ghosts we're haunted. " Canadian poet Earle Birney Haunting Inquiry: Classic NFB Documentary, Jacques Derrida, and the Curricular Otherwise reintroduces significant, if sometimes forgotten, National Film Board of Canada documentaries into contemporary curriculum conversation. Author Robert Christopher Nellis employs an inflection of Derridean deconstruction to mobilize historical, political, and intellectual themes emerging from the films as elliptical, curricular opportunities. The work explores hauntings in and around the documentaries to open toward Others neither fully present nor absent within the Canadian imagination. They remain troublingly illicit, as is the character of haunting... This book’s contribution to the literature of curriculum is a unique and innovative conceptual framework, reintroduction of many classic NFB documentaries, and the use of a productive language and outlook to mobilize fresh perspectives and hopeful possibilities.

In Migrant Futures Aimee Bahng traces the cultural production of futurity by juxtaposing the practices of speculative finance against those of speculative fiction. While financial speculation creates a future based on predicting and mitigating risk for wealthy elites, the wide range of speculative novels, comics, films, and narratives Bahng examines imagines alternative futures that envision the multiple possibilities that exist beyond capital’s reach. Whether presenting new spatial futures of the US-Mexico borderlands or inventing forms of kinship in Singapore in order to survive in an economy designed for the few, the varied texts Bahng analyzes illuminate how the futurity of speculative finance is experienced by those who find themselves mired in it. At the same time these displaced, undocumented, unbanked, and disavowed characters imagine alternative visions of the future that offer ways to bring forth new political economies, social structures, and subjectivities that exceed the framework of capitalism.