eBook - ePub
Ghosts and Their Hosts
The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America
- 330 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
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.
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.
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Yes, you can access Ghosts and Their Hosts by Sladja Blažan in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Publisher
University of Virginia PressYear
2024eBook ISBN
9780813952406Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Spectral Narratives
- 1 Instrumentalizing Ghosts: “Free Philosophy” in the Seventeenth Century
- 2 Counter-Enlightenment: Ghosts and Morality
- 3 The Voice of Conscience: Settler Colonial Ghost Whisperers
- 4 The Politics of Absence: Race, Land, and Ecogothic Ghosts
- 5 The Voice of Nature: The Invisible World and the Great Spirit
- 6 Feminist Colonialism: Emancipation and Cultural Appropriation
- 7 The Politics of Presence: Ghosts in Slave Narratives
- Conclusion: Beyond the Humanist Imagination
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index