Blurring TimeScapes, Subverting Erasure: Remembering Ghosts on the Margins of History

Social scientists, historians, and literary critics have increasingly turned to the concept of “haunting” as a way of acknowledging and attempting to describe what cannot be known, but is felt and experienced nonetheless. The ghostly or spectral allows us to compress time and experience the fourth-dimension. We can time travel in our minds and with our emotions. Such imaginings are not merely fanciful, but are meaningful ways for us to engage with the people of the past in the present and future. This is what we mean by blurring timescapes. This volume is an attempt to go beyond the casual experience of place and time. To allow ourselves to become, temporarily, possessed by the past that is imprinted on places or people. To go beyond our normal sensory experience or “affect” to connect to people (real or imagined) through empathetic imagining.