| Summary: | This paper examines a number of recent ghost stories produced by minority writers in Australia and Canada—from Tracey Moffatt to Thomas King—to highlight the way such tales have been used to interrogate dominant systems of control. If Derrida is correct that ‘haunting is central to any hegemony’, but also that we must learn to ‘talk’ with ghosts, then the way the spectres of minority and dominant structures are negotiated says a great deal about relations of power, especially in the context of race, ethnicity and whiteness. This paper argues that where once Indigenous and minority ethnic writers were metaphorised as spectral within dominant hegemonic structures in order to effect actual political disenfranchisement, contemporary writers and filmmakers have repossessed the spectres of nation to critique, interrogate and reverse such deterritorialising practices. The contestatory politics that have played out as a result of these strategic interventions have in effect ‘ghosted’ dominant players, highlighting the racial dimensions of whiteness and spectralising dominant agency in complex and intriguing ways. This paper will examine films such as Atanarjuat and Bedevil, and novels by Thomas King and Tomson Highway to consider the way this spectral discourse has come to dominate contemporary texts.
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