| Abstract | Justin D. Edwards's political reading of the haunted spaces of Postcolonial, Global, Popular and Eco Gothic informs this article on the use of spectrality in Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza's film Sicilian Ghost Story (2017). As the self-reflective title suggests, the film deploys a popular paradigm of the Gothic, the ghost story, and an intricate set of global cultural influences, to address a distinctly regional history and locale. In its application of the gothic fairy-tale aesthetics and themes to Sicily's lesser-known woodland and mountains, the film's combination of real and fantastic narrative modes challenges conventional ways of seeing – and imagining – the island's landscape, its historical past, and political and environmental narratives. Foregrounding resistance to the enforced invisibility and voicelessness of mafia crime victims, the film's use of spectrality redeems the ghost from the dark and rebukes the glamorisation of mafia in popular culture and tourism. The film proposes, instead, a notion of haunted ecology, and significantly echoes with recent cultural interventions producing a form of environmental resistance through the literal re-possession of land previously under the ‘invisible’ control of the mafia. |
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