‘There’s Something in My House’:
Television and the Politics of the Paranormal
Heather
Nunn and Anita Biressi
This
chapter attends to this political dimension of the ghostly and the paranormal
by considering the ways in which ghosts and haunting in TV drama work to draw
attention to the those who are often disenfranchised, marginalised or
ill-treated; rendering them both visible and central to the culture and spaces
from which they have been earlier excluded. As María del Pilar Blanco and
Esther Peeren (2010: x) explain in their survey of the haunted spaces of
everyday culture, there are in fact two kinds of ghosts operating in culture:
the figurative and the non-figurative. The non-figurative is most commonly
understood as the soul or spirit of a deceased person and the figurative ghost
can be many things including a designation for social outcasts, the neglected
and the unwanted in the social realm. It is the interaction between the two
that works to reveal the silences and oppressions of the lived world and which
renders the invisible visible. In Nicholas Mizroeff’s (2002: 239) words:
..the
ghost is that which could not be seen...and it has many names in many
languages: diasporists, exiles, queers, migrants, gypsies, refugees…The ghost
is from one place among many from which to interpellate the networks of
visibility that have constructed, destroyed and deconstructed the modern visual
subject.
Focusing
on the BBC’s drama series Sea of Souls (2004-7), which deploys an
investigative paranormal format, our own analysis of popular TV aims to
illustrate how in many television treatments of the paranormal it is the ghost
– both figurative and non-figurative – that calls to account and makes visible
the ways in which their living counterpart has been mistreated, maligned or
misunderstood.
References
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