Spectral encounters: the Latin American immigrant and other ghosts of EnglandTools Delgado, Oscar (2020) Spectral encounters: the Latin American immigrant and other ghosts of England. PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
AbstractThis novel and its critical companion express the unacknowledged presence of the Latin American immigrant in England in terms of the ghost. Penumbra is the story of Samuel, a Costa Rican immigrant settling in contemporary England, and narrates his encounters with literal and figurative ghosts. My research draws from the Derridean concept of hauntology and the critical approach developed from it to specify the challenges the ghost can pose to the dichotomies of presence and absence, as well as past and present. I map these challenges within the encounters of the Latin American immigrant with different cultural subjects in England to point out instances of Othering and postcolonial melancholia. What the novel depicts is a complex modern globalised England that tends to romanticise its Victorian past, that clings to certain aspects of this particular era. In Penumbra, these ideas filter through the everyday experiences and fantastical visions of a foreign narrator who struggles to reconciliate his confounded expectations with the reality of the country. This project has a microsociological focus. Its subject is a migrant individual adjusting to ghostliness in England, rather than Latin America as an ethnic group. The fiction explores the mechanisms of the Latin American protagonist for coping with such ghosts and emphasises the relevance of his anecdotical narrative for breaking it. My treatment of the spectre as a metaphor for the Latin American exposes the practices and everyday-life occurrences that make this subject invisible, voiceless, and liminal. This series of ghostly encounters pace the development of the main character, but what moves the plot forward is the protagonist’s awareness of his own ghostliness.
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