Ghosts and Their Hosts(English, Paperback, Blazan Sladja)

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Ghosts and Their Hosts(English, Paperback, Blazan Sladja) is written by Blazan Sladja and published by University of Virginia Press. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 0813952395 (ISBN 10) and 9780813952390 (ISBN 13).

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 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. 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.