Spooks and Holy Ghosts: Spectral Politics and the Politics of Spectrality in Hilary Mantel's 'Eight Months on Ghazzah Street'

This article maps the complex interactions between the political and the spectral in Hilary Mantel’s critically neglected novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, charting the complex and sometimes paradoxical relationships between agency, invisibility, spectrality, and power that are present in this text. By mobilizing the work of Jacques Rancière alongside the thinking of Jacques Lacan, this article establishes Eight Months on Ghazzah Street as a text driven by the need to articulate the politically charged nature of the liminal space wherein individuals and events can be rendered spectral.