Ghosting Through Our Ruins

Abstract

In this creative/critical paper, a recent migrant to the UK attempts to negotiate ideas of Africanness and Englishness through the rewriting of places linked by a statue in a small Northumberland village commemorating the death of a local officer killed in the ‘Anglo-Boer War.’ Drawing on two recent and influential theoretical developments, the ‘mobility turn’ within the social sciences and the ‘spectral turn’ in cultural criticism, this paper is a ficto-critical experiment in finding an appropriate creative form to test the generic implications of the major, and yet largely still unreflected, issue of migration and immigration/emigration in post-apartheid writing. It explores the unsettling ways in which places are not so much geographically fixed as implicated within complex circuits at once contingent and the product of material relations of power.