Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World (Writing the Early Americas) - Hardcover

Sladja Blaan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813952387 ISBN 13: 9780813952383

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2025

Synopsis

Ghost stories as a window on the American settler psyche

In this innovative book, Sladja Blaan explains the foundational role of ghost stories in fostering the cultural imaginary, offering a literal 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. Blaan 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, Blaan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

About this title

About the Author

Sladja Blaan is Visiting Professor of English at the University of Marburg and the author of Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813952387
• ISBN 13: 9780813952383
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 330