ABSTRACT
According to Jacques Derrida, specters are the materializations of those who have been repressed and excluded from history but return so that we can accept their existence and give them the justice they deserve (Specters of Marx xix). In the same line of thought, Avery Gordon suggests that the term ‘ghost’ refers to “a case of haunting, a story about what happens when we admit the ghost—that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present—into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world” (24). 1 Echoing Derrida and Gordon’s claims, this study analyzes the demand for ethical recognition made by Chus Gutiérrez in her 2008 film Return to Hansala, highlighting how the work attempts to address the specters of the past by drawing attention to their haunting nature and their refusal to disappear. 2 The film goes beyond established concepts of cultural “Otherness” by building a bridge between two continents traditionally divided by social, ethnic, religious, and historical tensions. Return to Hansala suggests a bidirectional encounter that serves to blur the geopolitical borders between Morocco and Spain, while attempting to offer ghosts of the past some level of justice. This study will begin by analyzing the narrative function of ghostly apparitions that address the voices of the past. Next, it will examine the intercultural exchange that takes place in the film, which challenges conventional notions of exclusionary borders. Finally, it will question society’s fear of the ghosts that continue to haunt and explore what these apparitions imply for Spain’s future.
