Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780813952390)

Ghost stories as a window on the American settler psyche

In this innovative book, Sladja Blazan 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. Blazan 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, Blazan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

Author: Sladja Blazan
ISBN-10: 0813952395
ISBN-13: 9780813952390
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Language: English
Published: 12/30/2024
Pages: 330
Format: Paperback