Ghosts and Their Hosts
The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America
Sladja Blažan
Series:
subjects:
Ghost stories as a window on the American settler psyche
In this innovative book, Sladja Blažan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a medium for framing political ideologies, philosophical thought, racial anxieties, and social concerns. Ghosts and Their Hosts analyzes American ghost stories, considering their role as a settler colonial tool that emerged to help justify land appropriation and human labor exploitation. Blažan breaks with the long tradition of reading ghosts as harbingers of justice, arguing that early American ghost stories worked instead to suppress the presence of non-Europeans through fantasies of European transcultural incorporation. Images of sentient forests and nature possessed by spirits helped develop fixed racial, gendered, and sexualized categories, while authors used ghosts to affirm existing hierarchies and establish new ones. Focusing on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century, Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.
Blazan's work is timely and original, offering an important corrective to well-worn assumptions about ghosts and race in American Studies and Gothic Studies alike, and is further enhanced by a masterful integration of ecocritical concerns and scholarship. The cultural history that the author sets out to tell is gripping and makes for a compelling reading experience. This is going to be an important and influential book.- Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, University of Lausanne, author of The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Ghosts and Their Hosts advances a truly eye-opening and radically transparent approach to understanding one’s positionality vis-à-vis our nation-specific and past-specific ghosts. We live the consequences of our sociopolitical decisions, and as Blažan’s book thoroughly shows: Some of those consequences can and do come back to haunt us, forcing us to rethink not only who we are and what we’ve done, but also how—perhaps not so uncannily—the two are inextricably linked.- Sandy Alexandre, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of The Properties of Violence: Claims to Ownership in Representations of Lynching
- Literature & HistoryBy exposing the underexplored instrumentalisation of ghost stories to reinforce colonial power structures, Ghosts and Their Hosts fills a critical gap in current scholarship. Its ecocritical and comparative approach offers a powerful framework for rethinking the entanglements of literature and history, the human and the spectral, and the politics of the invisible.
Sladja Blažan is Visiting Professor of English at the University of Marburg and the author of Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman.
