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cover of episode Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)

2025/6/8
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New Books in Critical Theory
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Miranda Melcher
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Sladja Blajan
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Miranda Melcher: 我认为鬼故事可以从文学角度考察早期美国殖民历史中的政治意识形态、种族焦虑和社会问题。通过研究这些故事，我们可以更广泛地了解当时社会所关注的各种问题。 Sladja Blajan: 我认为鬼魂不仅仅是超自然现象，它们在跨文化背景下具有更深层的意义。鬼魂可以表达那些难以言表的情感和历史经历，尤其是在涉及奴隶制和殖民主义等问题时。我对鬼魂作为一种常见的、日常的形象，而非壮观的超自然现象，如何在文学中被使用非常感兴趣。此外，我也想了解为什么在启蒙运动时期，当鬼魂似乎已经过时的时候，作家们仍然选择使用它们。

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Chapters
This chapter explores the unexpected survival of ghosts in literature despite their decline in religious doctrine, focusing on their use in early American literature to subtly address political ideologies, racial anxieties, and social concerns of the settler colonial period. It questions why writers continued to use ghosts as a powerful narrative tool and reveals how these stories often served to excuse colonial social structures.
  • Ghosts' persistence in literature despite Enlightenment challenges.
  • Use of ghosts to convey inexpressible aspects of colonial history.
  • The political function of ghosts in excusing colonial structures.

Shownotes Transcript

In Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America) (University of Virginia Press, 2025), Dr. 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. Dr. 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, Dr. Blažan deploys a groundbreaking ecocritical and comparative approach to shed light on this haunting subject.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose* book*)* focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher), wherever you get your podcasts*

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