Walking among the ghosts of colonialism. The haunting onomastic of Palermo

Abstract

Speaking of cities is always speaking about ghosts because every current period is simultaneously linked with past and present. Ghosts, even when transformed into a conceptual metaphor, question the formation of knowledge, and invoke what has been silenced, excluded from the archive of His- tory. They want to be a part of the political discourse to (re)imagine the present and the future. The aim of this contribution is to use some aspects of these ghosts, such as their liminal position between visibility and invisibility, between life and death, and between materiality and immateriality, to take a stand in the social, ethical, and political issues of the postcolonial today in a western city. Finally, as Vanolo1 wrote, the metaphor of the ghost is ambiguous, located in an in-between space character- ized by the oscillation between memory and fragmentation.