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Haunted Families and Temporal Normativity in Hispanic Horror Films
Troubling Timelines
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Book Presentation:
This book examines the interactions between ghosts and families in three recent horror films from the Spanish-speaking world that, rather than explicitly referencing recent political violence, speak to the societal conditions and everyday normative violence that serve as preconditions for political violence. This study deconstructs intersectional processes of racially and sexually normative subject formation―and its oppositional other, ghostly erasure―that are framed by a common temporal logic, wherein full citizenship is contingent upon a nation's dominant notions of contemporaneousness and whether individuals properly inhabit prescriptive timelines of (re)productivity.
St-Georges’s study explores ways in which ghosts and families are manipulated in each national imaginary as a strategy for negotiating volatility within symbolic order: a tactic that can either naturalize or challenge normative discourses. As a literary and cinematic trope, ghosts are particularly useful vehicles for the exploration of national imaginaries and the dominant or competing cultural attitudes towards a country's history, and thus, the articulation of a present political reality. The rhetorical figure of the family is also key in this process as a mechanism for expressing national allegories, for expressing generational anxieties about a nation's relationship to time, and for organizing societies and social subjects as such, interpellating them into or excluding them from national imaginaries. By proposing these specific coordinates―ghosts and families―and by mapping their relationship between Spain and Latin America, Troubling Timelines proposes a study of a temporal framework that, besides bridging the traditional area-studies divide across the Atlantic, creates a space for interdisciplinary inquiry while also responding to increasing demand for studies that focus on intersectionality.
About the Author:
Charles St-Georges is assistant professor of Spanish at Denison University.
Press Reviews:
"Haunted Families is likely to prove useful for scholars of gender and queer studies, perhaps even more so than for scholars of Hispanic genre cinema. It also offers fascinating engagement with both Freud and and Lacan with regards to various normativities, be they gendered, sexual, racial, or temporal" ―Chasqui: Revista de Literature Latinoamericana
"Haunted Families is an excellent addition to the expanding corpus of scholarship about Latin American and Spanish horror cinema. The book’s focus on temporality constitutes an original approach to Latin American and Spanish horror. Prima facie, the book’s focus on three films may appear to be limiting. However, the attention to three films enables a rigorous examination of each film and illustrates how movies, specifically ones that belong to a disreputable genre such as horror, can engage with theory. The book will be ideal for scholars interested in horror as well as questions of memory, gender and sexuality, disability, and race and ethnicity. Moreover, given the contextual work that the author performs in each chapter, the book will be useful in undergraduate and graduate courses." ―Revista de Estudios Hispánicos
"This book is an innovative, engaging, productive and pertinent book, with the potential to reach a broad readership within a variety of scholarly fields." ―Juliana Martínez
See the publisher website: Lexington Books
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