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Ghostly Matters Haunting and the Sociological Imagination Avery F. Gordon |
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A new edition of this widely influential and innovative work of social theory—with a new introduction and foreword. In 1856, an escaped slave named Margaret Garner killed her daughter rather than see her taken back into slavery. One hundred and thirty years later, when Toni Morrison wrote Beloved, she used this event as the framework of a ghost story. In this unique and compelling book, Avery F. Gordon considers the cultural experience of haunting. Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Ghostly Matters demonstrates that past or shadowy social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Ghostly Matters points up significant limitations and oversights in the way social science is conducted and social life is observed and described. Gordon's analysis, accompanied by a wealth of compelling photographs, explores ghostly matters as diverse as the gendered origins of psychoanalysis; state terror and the phenomenon of "disappearance" in Argentina; and slavery and Reconstruction in the United States. Ghostly Matters scrutinizes the evidence of things barely seen for what they can tell about the relationship between knowledge, power, and experience. Gordon illustrates how haunting more fully registers phenomena like torture and slavery than do other modes of social experience. In addition, she shows that haunting and the ghostly aspects of social life have to be dealt with if these forces are ever to be minimized or eliminated. Uniquely cross-disciplinary and truly innovative, written with a power to match its subject matter, Ghostly Matters offers a new way of looking at the compex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief or shadowy manifestations. “What this review cannot capture is the eloquence of Gordon’s language, which at times approaches the poetic, and the insistence of her political engagement. Gordon sees with clarity the murkiness of the waters, but that murkiness serves not as an excuse to call off the search but, on the contrary, as an imperative to further investigation and, in addition, as an imperative to refine the modes of investigation themselves so as to appreciate, rather than to exclude, the murkiness. The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.” —American Studies International Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. She is coeditor (with Christopher Newfield) of Mapping Multiculturalism and (with Michael Ryan) of Body Politics (1994). Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University. 272 pages | 5 7/8 x 9 | 2008
TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword, Janice Radway ghostly matters Notes |
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$22.50 Paper