This book explores how intercultural encounters can be understood as haunted liminal places, sites where participants confront ghosts of empire, race, and nationalism as they negotiate meaning and their relations with others.
The volume brings Claire Kramsch’s work on intercultural communication into conversation with Derrida’s hauntology and Turner’s liminality, reconceptualizing the “third place” as an ambivalent site shaped by historical legacies and ongoing contradictions. Uryu weaves together this framework with two datasets of naturally occurring conversation collected nearly two decades apart: a 2006 intercultural dinner conversation recorded during a meeting of an international spouses’ community and conversations recorded in the post-pandemic era involving both returning and new participants, after the community had dissolved.
The analysis traces how intercultural encounters change over time, haunted by historical ghosts and contemporary crises, as essentialist views of identity increasingly constrain communication, even as participants draw on hybrid cultural resources in an effort to sustain communicative relations. The book argues that while intercultural encounters are inevitably haunted, speakers bear ethical responsibility in how they respond. In so doing, Uryu points to language education as a site for confronting historical ghosts, questioning taken-for-granted meanings, and sustaining engagement across differences.
This book will appeal to scholars in intercultural communication, language education, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics.