Sladja Blažan, "Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America" (University of Virginia Press, 2025)
53:18 Share

You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that. You can Venmo this, or you can Venmo that.

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank, and a pursuant to license by MasterCard International Incorporated. Card may be used everywhere MasterCard is accepted. Venmo purchase restrictions apply.

This Father's Day at Lowe's, score free gifts for the greatest dad. Right now, get a free Blackstone 8-piece accessory kit when you buy a Blackstone 28-inch griddle. Plus, get two free Select Craftsman V20 tools when you buy an RP Brushless Drill and Impact Driver Combo Kit. Shop these deals and more this Father's Day at Lowe's. We help, you save. Valid through 6-15, while supplies last. Selection varies by location.

You may get a little excited when you shop at Burlington. Burlington saves you up to 60% off other retailers' prices every day. Will it be the low prices or the great brands? Burlington. Deals. Brands. Wow. I told you so. Styles and selections vary by store.

Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Slaja Blajan about her book titled Ghosts and Their Hosts, The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025.

This book takes us into ghost stories in sort of colonial early United States history and examines them to some extent from a literary perspective, as one might expect of looking at ghost stories, but also thinking a lot more broadly about what's happening in terms of political ideologies, what's happening in terms of racial anxiety, what's happening in terms of social concerns at a key period of settler colonialism in the United States.

with a bunch of other things going on, obviously, as well. So it turns out there's a lot we can find out by looking at ghost stories about all of these concerns. So, Sláinte, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it. Hi, everyone. Thank you for listening and thank you so much for inviting me, Miranda. I'm very pleased to have you. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Mm-hmm.

Okay, so my name is Slaja Blajan. I'm a writer and a professor of anglophone literatures and culture. I'm currently based in Berlin in Germany.

grew up in former Yugoslavia, which is a country that doesn't exist anymore. But this country absolutely determined who I am today and who I will be in the future. So there you go. This is already about the past that has been erased, but continues to determine the future. And I feel like it's always been a most significant part of my life. So yeah,

And I wanted to highlight that because it's a very particular way of looking at ghosts and as a presence that is always there. So how I decided to write this book, just after I finished my PhD, I began teaching classes on so-called ethnic literature.

And this was presented as an odd niche back then, but in fact, it includes almost all of US American literature. I particularly loved the book Beloved by Toni Morrison, and I was interested and intrigued when I understood how much the writer could convey through seemingly simple figuration of a ghost. This book, I'm not, maybe some

Listeners haven't read it. It's a book about slavery, and there the ghost of a child who was killed by her enslaved mother returns to haunt her. So she had killed the child to prevent her from a life in slavery. And the pain of this person is really something that is inexpressible.

And yet somehow the ghost manages to convey at least the weight of this historical personal experience. So this made me really curious and I started digging a little bit deeper and realized that many novels that are set in a transcultural realm include ghosts or at least ghostliness without necessarily reverting to the gothic horror or even the supernatural. They were

Seeking to express something that seemed inexpressible and a ghost as a visible or audible figuration of something invisible and immaterial seemed perfect for that. So, yes, I wanted to understand how ghosts can do that. Yeah.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that ghosts are something very natural. Especially in these settings, they're far from the spectacular white sheet and clanking chains or however people would imagine them. Just like if a person close to you dies, of course, you continue talking to this person, feeling the presence of this person. And even if immaterial, it determines how you shape your day and your nights, right?

So ghosts have this power over one. I was really interested in ghosts as a common, everyday, almost banal rather than spectacular figuration that is and can be used in literature apart from the Gothic and horror framing. And after all, every culture and every period has had their fair share of ghosts. So this alone is fascinating.

Yeah, I mean, that's already so many things that are interesting to explore in this context. So how, I suppose, did you narrow it down to the specific questions in the book? Can you kind of tell us what they are and how you got from all of these explorations to that sort of more specific focus? Yeah.

Well, first of all, I wanted to understand how ghosts survived the Enlightenment. You know, Martin Luther questioned the concept of purgatory in 1517 already. And by the 1530s, most Protestant churches abandoned the doctrine. Yet then we have Shakespeare, who goes on and writes Hamlet, centering the play on the appearance of a ghost exactly at a time when they were supposedly discarded.

even ridiculed. And this is a play that we are still reading today. Clearly, the ghost had something to say and it could say it in a very powerful way.

So this is just a general question that I wanted to see. Why did writers at a time when ghosts were out of fashion, why did they use ghosts? And this is a very powerful example. And I understood that ghosts indeed introduce psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, thematic death, etc.

And of course, also theatrical spectacle. So they're extremely useful for telling a story and writers wouldn't let go of that. Then my next question was, how was this extremely useful narrative tool used in early U.S. American literature? And I was totally surprised to... So this was really unexpected story.

to see that there are not many ghosts for me to study. I mean, this is at a time when Americans were reading lots of European literature and ghosts were all the rage in Europe. In France, you have Jacques Cazotte, who initiated a whole literary movement that wrote ghost stories focusing on the devil in the shape of a woman. So a meta-narrative that still haunts French literature and culture. And also in Germany, you have E.T.A. Hoffman, the author of The Sandman,

At the time, he was dubbed Gespenster Hoffmann, which means ghost Hoffmann because of his fascination with ghosts and the uncanny in his writing.

And, and also, by the way, because I just mentioned The Sandman, the narratives that I'm looking at in my book are almost all still popular today. The Sandman is a great example as it was popularized in the US with Neil Gaiman's graphic novel and then the more recent Netflix adaptation. So we're still telling and retelling the same stories. One of the questions is why? What makes them so attractive?

But to get back to this idea that ghosts were missing from the US-American scene, when I started looking for ghost stories in the US from this period, Washington Irving was clearly the most prominent voice. And again, his tales are still popular today. If you think of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, most people know at least the film adaptation with Johnny Depp.

Or it's still taught in classes. So I realized that in the most prominent ghostly writer's work of this period, namely Irving, it is always the land that is haunted. And in tale after tale after tale, the ground of New England in Irving's writing is described as haunted by indigenous spirits.

You know, it always goes on like something like it was asserted that, and this is a quote, that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the evil spirit, unquote. This is Irving to explain why the land is haunted. So naturally, one would expect that ghosts that appear to be

of indigenous provenance as well. Yet that is not the case. And in this particular story, it is the ghost of a Hessian soldier, so a German, who then gets to materialize in the tale. And in other tales too, instead of materializing, indigenous spirits are replaced, tale by tale by tale, with ghosts of Dutch settlers. So this is what really got me started with

And, you know, I just looked more into what this framing, what we see in these early texts are usually male outcasts of European descent who surround themselves with the dispossessed.

with African-American men and children, always already dead indigenous people, gossiping European-American women. And in this way, readers in the early republic could enter through the supernatural portal into the everyday life in the colonies, facing these characters without feeling the historical weight of being the perpetrator. This is why they were so important, and this is why they were so popular.

Instead, they could identify with sympathetic young Dutch settlers who are friends of racialized characters and lead what Irving over and over again terms in his writing as Indian lifestyles. But without departing from white normativity and racial stereotypes of blackened people and racially subservient positions.

So the insistence on the founding of wealth through slavery, which is thematized in these tales, on violently appropriated land, all of this is in these tales, but it is transferred to someone else, somewhere else, different period. It is the rich who are doing it. It is the English colonizers, not the Dutch, who are doing it, etc. And the scholarship on this writer's work is complicit with this exculpation project as Irving, apart from two publications, remains celebrated.

So, yes, I realize that who gets to appear in spite of being invisible, who gets to materialize, who gets to leave a trace in spite of being dead, and who gets to retell alternative gossipy histories, all these are highly political issues, particularly if you consider that we are still retelling these stories.

And I began to be more aware of the colonial framing of ghost stories and of the settler colonial function that they have had. I think this is extremely important because we need to be more aware of replicating imperialist imaginaries in popular culture today.

Clearly, looking at the state of the world today, we did not do a good job so far. So I want to argue with my book that ghost stories still fulfill this function of excusing colonial social structures as we are still retelling the same stories.

Very clear link there then to the present and obviously a lot of different aspects of the kind of earlier United States history mentioned there. So to make sure that we kind of have a clear foundation for the rest of our discussion, can you just clarify the time period that you're focusing on particularly and kind of why you decided on that scope?

Yeah, that was a little bit, that was a lot of work because I, you know, I kept going back in time. In the end, I begin with the quarrel some English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who dedicated a whole chapter on a book on state philosophy to demonology, which, you know, was curious to me. So he was fighting ghosts, but in the end, he arrives at questions of imagination and the power of fiction.

So I consider the discussion on ghosts and imagination and Leviathan from 1651 to be the beginning of ghost studies and the modern ghost story. But like I said, what I really wanted to explore is the late colonial period and the period just after the independence, which in fact also is the colonial period because it's a period when Europeans officially colonized North America by creating their own country.

So I quickly understood that I would not be able to make my point and politicize the genre unless I go back to the Puritan culture, because this is the source for settler colonial spectral tales. That's why I go back and begin in the late 17th century and the writings after introducing the

this important text by Thomas Hobbes. I think about how it influenced writing by Puritan ministers, particularly increasing cotton matter, father and son, to see how they were involved in the modern ghost discourses. Why these two? Because this is a time that everyone associates with spectral matters because of the famous Salomon witch trials from 1692.

So what's important to understand here is that for ghosts to be recognized as such during this period, they need to materialize either by borrowing the body of another human or object or by making themselves perceptible to someone by appealing to their senses. So whereas witches are imagined as embodied and we talk a lot about witches from this period and the silent witch trials, we don't talk so much about ghosts.

But ghosts rely on a borrowed physicality. So it's important that we inquire and take a closer look at whose bodies do or do not materialize within these Puritan spectral narratives. And of course, I found that these are racialized bodies and that ghosts have much more to do with the invention of race than has been acknowledged so far. Hmm.

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today.

I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch.

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it, and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit LifeLock.com slash podcast for 40% off. Terms apply.

Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or a growing enterprise managing vendor RIST, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here.

Get started at vanta.com. All right, that's a very helpful now foundation around the time period, the ideas, the different way that they're connected. I think that lets us then get into more detail about some of the things that you've mentioned so far. So I want to start, as you do in the book, with the early American Puritans. And can you tell us more about how they're thinking about ghosts? Because one of the things around their thought is that it leads to this

if I'm understanding it correctly, interesting idea that they are conceptualizing racialized bodies as being inherently in some cases, or at least more likely to be satanic and linked to the devil. So how does that work? How are they making these connections? Yeah, this is a very important question. American Puritans lived by, for my discussion, very important doctrine, namely the invisible world. This is what they called it.

It was one of the central concepts at the time that linked material and immaterial dimensions through an intricate web of signs, of gories, omens, portents. And in his The Wonders of the Invisible World, it's already in the title, this is the title of the book,

Cotton matter offers the exegetic practice as the primary purpose of the invisible world. So it's a source of restoration as well as obligation.

He writes, we're safe when we make just as much use of all advice from the invisible world as God sends it for. So you're always on the lookout for some signs that God might be sending you. And there is, I mean, it's almost like a manual, this book, you know, where Kato Mata then writes that...

If God Almighty permits any spirits from the unseen region, there must be a reason and you have to inquire into that reason. So you have to talk to each other, you have to understand what the reason is. And you have this culture of interpreting and back-checking on each other. What I demonstrate in my book is that this invisible world that was visible to Puritan settlers was

not only in natural phenomena such as floods or atmospheric disturbances, which is very common, but also in figurations of, and this is a quote from a Cotton Mathers book, a black man that resembles an Indian. And this figuration of something that is called a black man and something that often resembles an Indian in these descriptions is

leaves scars on young women's bodies that are considered then to be the work of the devil. So clearly these women were abused. I look into these ghost stories and I try to trace the invention of race and such narratives, but also conceptualizations of gender, because I want to argue and I do argue that these scars needed to be produced in order for the invisible world to be established.

So, yes, you see, positioning ghosts and spirits as part of a national fantasy in pre-revolutionary North America, for me, places operational concepts away from questions of belief and disbelief. I don't think it was about belief or disbelief, because these are very profane and earthly functions that are embedded within increasingly secular narratives.

Yeah, no, that helps us, I think, understand kind of what sorts of discussions are being had and what kinds of things are being linked, which is really key so that we don't kind of end up thinking that ghosts are only happening in sort of certain kinds of conversations, if that makes sense. It's much more broad, broader than that. And in fact, that leads me very nicely to my next question, because I admit, I wasn't hugely surprised to open the book and read about Puritans. I was like, okay, I can see how they have something to do with ghosts. Fine.

I was kind of surprised to then turn the page and be like, oh, now we're talking about Kant. Okay. Why does he have a theory about ghosts? What is his theory about ghosts? I was kind of not expecting that here. But it goes nicely to the theme we're establishing around kind of things being a lot more connected around ghosts than maybe we would otherwise think. So can you tell us about Kant?

Yeah, I mean, you know, once you start scratching the surface, you realize, oh my goodness, I mean, we really do talk to each other through the goals. It's another great question, particularly why did he have one?

After all, you know, Kant was, like you said, it's very surprising he was dubbed the most human proponent of reason. And reason, Kant's theory, enables us to act on principles that we can share with other rational beings. So it creates a community of thinking beings. It's connected to the concept of freedom and so on. And why ghosts? Where do ghosts fit into this whole narrative?

But as ghosts, you know, during the Enlightenment retreated further and further into the human mind, their presence was solidified as an aspect of human interiority. So it becomes psychological. And I think it's maybe only natural that it would be important for Kant to look into this, this psychologizing of ghosts. It also sparked a lively public transatlantic debate within which ghosts, in fact, found an entry already into European moral theory.

And if ghosts are part of our psychological makeup, you know, philosophers and scholars and writers started thinking, what does this mean for our society? So Kant actually joins this discussion, but with a publication that he was ashamed of. So in 1766, he published, that's an early text, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, anonymously.

And it was to be a hypothetical treatise of ghosts that he's very dismissive of it and kind of like, you know, let's pretend like there is such a thing that so many people think that they know something about. What would that look like? I don't believe that there is, but I'm going to pretend like I do just for this publication.

And I often read that this early publication of Kant's was not important, which is one of the reasons why I have a chapter in there where I demonstrate that it was very important and that the language that he developed in this treatise, in fact, reappears in his most important work as writing on moral theory.

a moral theory that is still in use today. So this connection ultimately exposes ways in which a still influential moral theory was shaped in relation to spirituality.

But what's much more important to me is I flesh out echoes of Kant's pre-critical writing, pre-critical writing. So before on spirit seeing within his later critical work on moral philosophy, not only to demonstrate the relation between moral theory and the supernatural in the late 18th century, but also the Eurocentrism of philosophy.

a moral theory that was presented as universal. Because in this early text, Kant is much more explicit about the community of all thinking beings that does not include all human beings. While all human beings have the capacity for reason, only some activated within the thinking community that Kant even spells out in this early text by calling it One Great Republic.

And those who are part of this republic, he then goes on to call citizens. So it's actually a very exclusive thinking community that supposedly, you know, later on in moral theory is to include all human beings. And that's what I wanted to explain.

explore more. Yeah, no, thank you for helping us understand that and the ways in which ghosts are doing all sorts of connective work in at least to me very surprising sorts of ways. But what if this sort of has an impact even beyond understanding, for example, Kant better? Like how were his ideas around ghosts influencing other writers who were doing things in the US settler colonial context? Yeah.

Right. That is absolutely the case. So it wasn't only important for Kant. I argue that texts such as Kant's or particularly Kant's theory and also his theory of ghosts, but Kant's

moral theory that was influenced by his theory, of course, initiated an intellectual exchange in Germany and subsequently the United States, which in turn put a spectral presence, or in Kant's language, he calls it the secret power at the center of subjectivity, theory and literature and culture on both sides of the Atlantic. So Kant's text had

And this is, you know, this is clear from the scholarship that we already have. It had a direct impact on very influential German romantic writers, Christoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Schiller, Kai Tan-Ching.

But it is these writers who were read and admired in the early republic by the writers who I analyze. So there is a chain reaction here at the source of Witches' Cunt, which is why I needed the chapter in order to write about this early American literature. And yeah, maybe I'll leave it at that. Now that we've sort of established the...

Theories about ghosts, kind of the different places that they're coming from, the ways in which they're connecting sort of more things than we might expect and how that's influencing people who are writing literature. It's really incredibly powerful and impactful and popular in the sort of settler colonial US population.

How does this then relate to what you were telling us earlier about ghosts converging with indigenous characters in these pieces of literature that people are reading so much? Thank you. Thank you very much for this question. Yes. So the demonization of the indigenous population was common in Juridon writings, like I said. But the convergence with ghosts...

It was never consistent. We have to remember that this is only the settler-colonial perspective. And unfortunately, when early American literature is evoked, this settler-colonial perspective becomes representative for the whole country.

But it's certainly not representative for indigenous writers, nor for African-American writers, Asian-American writers. But ghosts did converge with indigenous characters in the writings of the first generation of settler colonial writers who called themselves for the first time American writers. And this is important to me that, you know, we talk about American writers.

writers, but it's only a few writers that we talk about over and over again. And this, René Bergland is a scholar who already highlighted a long time ago that all representations of, so this is Bergland's vocabulary from back then, Native Americans by European settler writers, are

rely on the language of ghostliness. And so authors of Anglo-Saxon descent call indigenous characters demons, apparitions, shapes, specters, phantoms, ghosts. They insist that they're able to appear, disappear, suddenly, mysteriously disappear.

that they're ultimately doomed to vanish. And in my book, I extend this thesis by exploring where this notion comes from and what we have done today with that notion. So just to give you a striking example, the poem, The Indian Student or The Force of Nature, one of the chapters I call The Force of Nature, it's from this poem,

by the most read poet of this time, Philippe Frenon. This is from 1787. An indigenous student abandons his scholarly career in order to die in the forest due to the titular force of nature. So this is one of the poems that is like at the center of early American literature that is still told today that we still celebrate.

Establishing and solidifying the myth of what in scholarship was called the vanishing Indian, the spectralization has been a colonial strategy of replacing the indigenous population with Europeans.

And like I said, this has been addressed in scholarship before, but what has not been addressed, or much less discussed, I don't know, is the fact that suppose the disappearance of the native population is paradoxically grounded in the material presence of natural elements. They disappear into the forest in these poems and these novels, and they leave the forest behind.

And here again, we return to questions of land that is now cleansed and ready for the colonizer to take without the problem of guilt because the indigenous population is acknowledged as present while absent as ghosts.

That's really interesting to understand kind of how and why I suppose that's happening. So given the dominance then of these accounts, can you tell us about the extent to which we see counter narratives becoming popular in response and maybe help us understand why the forest turns up so much in these debates? Let's start with the forest because this is key. The codification of the

wilderness, before it was forest, as a space of terror, was in fact a carefully constructed narrative strategy. When you think of someone like Samuel Danford, who was a minister in Massachusetts, he was also an astronomer, very influential in the American colonies. He wrote a very famous Jeremiah in the 1670s, a sermon in which he famously called upon all his followers to

to stir us all up to attend and persecute our errand into the wilderness. Because this woody, retired, and solitary place is even worthy of Jesus, who went there for contemplation. And then here you see that depictions of wilderness were central to positioning Europeans within what was termed the New World from the time the first settlers arrived on shores of the North American continent.

It's interesting then to see that only some 20 years later, the same wilderness and cotton matters, the wonders of the invisible world, is completely converted into the devil's territories. There it is already a place where New Englanders, who are a people of God, settled in those which were once, and that's his words, the devil's territories.

So if you were to ask this prominent New England Puritan minister, who supposedly wrote over 400 works and was very outspoken politically and very present, it is only decent to cleanse these wild lands from the satanic presence, who to him was the indigenous population.

So the seemingly effortless transformation from an environment worthy of Jesus to devil's territories exemplifies how nature, that is presented as wild or hostile, is directly implicated in the modern world's violence and oppression. Now, it's important to understand, too, that demonizing the indigenous population is a very common settler-colonial strategy that's widespread and practiced until today.

And it was practiced before the Puritans too. Normally we don't compare colonial Spanish America to the arrival of the pilgrims to New England.

One were English Calvinists, they cannot be compared to Spanish Catholics, so the history lesson teaches us. But if we do dare to compare, we would see that this tradition of demonizing the indigenous population or satanization even in the settler colonial constellations is very similar in both cases. It's been a cultural colonial practice before the Puritans and they simply continue the already established tradition.

And this tradition is still very much alive, which is why I write about this history. Think of British settler colonialism in Australia and New Zealand, of French settler colonialism in Algeria.

Dutch settlers in South Africa, the British in Kenya, the dehumanizing language that is used to frame resistance in Palestine. As Rashid Khalidi writes, radical social engineering at the expense of the indigenous population is the way of all settler colonial movements. So, yeah.

Now to the counter-narratives, and here it becomes really complicated because the counter-narratives are not real counter-narratives. They're deeply embedded within this tradition that was dramatically initiated in Puritan texts.

that demonize the indigenous population and their habitat. And like I said, this is a very firm narrative that exists throughout the world in settler colonial contexts.

So now we have this first generation of American writers and wilderness was recast by revolutionary American writers in a more tame diversion as a space where First Nations were agreed to die supposedly of their own accord. I already gave you Frenot's example, the example of Frenot's poetry,

Another good example is the poem on the emigration to American people in the Western country, which is another poem that is still taught in classes today, where you find the quotation marks. This is because this is a quote from the poem Unsocial Indian, unquote.

who simply retreats into ever darker forests, never to be seen again. And this image has been repeated over and over again throughout not only early American literature. And I followed this trace and I asked, but what happened to these bodies? They are recast in this poetry as nature. And it is the image of nature that is still in use in literature and culture today. Hmm.

Oh, it's such a clutch pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom, too. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the GOAT. The GOAT. Save up to 50% with minimum purchase at Blinds.com.

Rules and restrictions may apply. The NBA playoffs are here, and I'm getting my bets in on FanDuel. Talk to me, Chuck GPT. What do you know? All sorts of interesting stuff. Even Charles Barkley's greatest fear. Hey, nobody needs to know that. New customers bet $5 to get 200 in bonus bets if you win. FanDuel, America's number one sportsbook.

The land has been thrown into disorder.

Are you feeling a touch lost right now? Like global institutions don't work and politicians aren't collaborating to solve the world's most pressing issues? There is this big space of disorder and we're just kind of holding up our hands and going, well, don't know what we could do. Then the Disorder Podcast is the right place for you. My name is Jason Pak.

I worked in D.C. during the first Trump administration, lived in Libya during the revolution against Gaddafi, been kidnapped twice in Syria. So it's fair to say that I've lived through just a wee bit of disorder. So I want to work on understanding how did we get to here? Why is the global enduring disorder spreading? And more importantly, how do we restore a semblance of order to our mad, mad, mad

mad world. Democracy has to be defended every single day in a proactive way. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.

Yeah, some very clear links there between what you're telling us of the early sort of colonial period and where we're at now, starting to make those connections quite clearly. If we're talking then about counter narratives and the forest, can you tell us more about feminist additions to this sort of literary sphere and to what extent they're countering some of these settler colonial tropes of ghosts?

Yes, you would think that they are countering these tropes. And in fact, they didn't tend to, but they failed. That's important to me to highlight because stories of emancipation are in fact often solidifying an injustice, right?

And, you know, here you're addressing something that I was really hoping to do with this book. What I'm concerned with is shedding light on discourses that claim to grow in the name of equality and emancipation, but clearly fail to do so. And I think we need to talk more about this. Obviously, we have been creating and repeating and thus solidifying narratives that did not lead to a more just world, more peaceful society or more equity.

So it's for this reason that I highlight how even feminist texts have contributed to the cultural literature of indigenous voices. And this is, and particularly to this figuration of the forest that is still in use today. And this is by way of inclusion rather than by way of ignoring or erasing them. So my example, I take my example from a very, very popular writer, Lydia Maria Childe,

Because she understood her profession as a writer to be a form of social activism and a tool for an alternative form of nationalism.

And she was very engaged in, you know, she would say that her writing includes rather than excludes the original inhabitants and its makeup. And it's in this way that she set out to explore the viability of cultural influences.

This was a big topic at the time, and it was a big topic in her writing. And according to Carolyn Karshard, it was promoted by the French and supposed to present an alternative to the genocide practice by the English.

So Child joined the growing number of writers that were engaged in recoding this demonized Puritan wilderness and challenging the dominant vanishing Indian myth by prominently placing a narrative centered on miscegenation between a Puritan woman and her pick-hole lover.

And within the story, Wilderness is tamed by way of magic. It's transformed into the heroine's safe space. She can leave the settler community. She can go into the forest and she then practices her magic there and that gives her a

feeling of freedom. And, you know, when you think about it, what this means, it's also rewriting the witchcraft narrative that was so dominant in Puritan settings, etc. So this really is emancipation on her side.

However, I challenge the interpretation common in current scholarship of Child's narratives as simply progressive by offering a careful analysis of the often-employed trope of the transfiguration of characters that are marked as indigenous into trees and flowers. So in Child's most famous novel, Hobomock, the main character, even though it is the titular character, the novel is called Hobomock,

He disappears, Hobomoc, in the forest, never to be seen again. And this is how he dies. He simply disappears, evaporates into thin air, aka the forest. And before that, he even reads out his own eulogy. This is the very narrative the child actually sought to avoid. But so busy writing a story of emancipation of the Puritan woman, she

She forgot to write a story of emancipation of the indigenous men. So, yes, we need to question not the narratives we celebrate as much as those that are open. I mean, we need to question the narratives that we celebrate as much as those that are openly xenophobic and misogynistic and racist, because there is a lot of problematic material in there that needs to be

discarded of, that needs to be discussed, that needs to be thought about. Yeah, we need to obviously take a critical lens, not just to the things that most obviously seem to need it, but sort of more generally as a practice and way of thinking.

So I wonder if we can then turn that idea of a critical lens to the sort of concept of the American Gothic novel, the genre of it, given that, as you've told us about so far, there are so many ways in which kind of anything generally thought to be within that category is so heavily framed in white settler colonial ways. How might we kind of rethink that category? For example,

Are there gothic novels that are written by non-white Americans? Is the racial element of this a key part of the genre? Mm-hmm.

Well, my answer to this question is yes. And here I argue against some scholars who propose that because enslaved or formerly enslaved writers could not publish without a white mentor, they were bound to write for a white readership and are restricted to the topic of slavery, which is horrific in itself and does not meet the Gothic genre, etc. Bruce Castronovo, Daniel Hack called the Gothic a white genre.

And I deliberately demonstrate that the American Gothic borrows from West African or particularly Yoruba animism and that it's also influenced by the Lakota tradition of ancestral spirits. And the reason is, so race has always been central to U.S. American literature in general, and it has shaped this literature in a way that

all of it became somewhat gothic. That's a mantra that we tell each other at literature conferences since the 1970s. But then when a formerly enslaved person writes a novel that employs gothic elements, I find it highly problematic that some argue that this is not gothic because it was written by a former slave, but that it's rather a critical aesthetic response to the everyday horrors of slavery.

Gothic writing is often exactly that, a critical aesthetic response to the horrors of everyday life. Consequently, even if the slave narratives are narratives that were written by formerly enslaved people about that experience and that were published in the mid-19th century.

And I think they should not be an exception. If a central trope of the US American Gothic has always been slavery, as Teresa Goddou and many others have argued, it should be possible to consider intentionally Gothic structures of slave narratives.

And I argue that rather than a simple framework that secures cultural legibility, the Gothic is a mode of expression that can be used by anybody. You know, the racial conflict might have haunted settler colonial writers, but as Robert Levine already remarked, there is no reason to believe that African-American writers couldn't be haunted by race as well.

the Gothic mode is very suitable for capturing this form of being haunted on both sides of the spectrum. Yeah, that's definitely quite interesting to think about sort of who is included and who is not and what sorts of assumptions are leading to those decisions. That definitely seems to be a key thing for people to take away from the book as well as some other things we've been mentioning in terms of how much these things from sort of

a few hundred years ago still seem to influence the kinds of things that we read today. Are there any other key things that you hope readers of the book or listeners to this discussion take from your research?

Well, my hope and the reason why I wrote this book is to raise more awareness of how we, those who participate in the Anglophone transatlantic culture, no matter how open-minded and how historically on the right side we are, we all grow into this story world or storied world, a world that's imperial, colonial, capitalist, anti-Black, transphobic, etc.

and a world that shapes us in this way, if we like it or not. So I hope that my book can raise awareness for the necessity to open up to questioning the cultural imagery that we surround ourselves with. I also never was interested in ghosts before. I never really read ghost stories, and I'm afraid of horror films sometimes.

But once I started thinking about what a usable category that is, I also saw in...

And, you know, it's been used and abused from all sides. And I just by chance started looking into it. So I'm consciously saying that we surround ourselves with these stories because I'm talking about the images and stories that we choose, that we love, that we cherish. I want us to question those more instead of just pointing fingers. Yeah.

Well, I think those things have definitely come through in our discussion. So lots for listeners to take away. But before I let you go back to the rest of your world, is there anything you're currently working on that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?

It took me a very long time to write and research, to write this book and research for this book. So I'm now actually finishing a novel that I'm writing in German. And it's fiction and it's about a girl who stops talking and thinks about welding. It's very elemental.

But I also started my next academic book where I'm trying to come up with the theory of the self. And this is, you know, through this work on ghosts, I had to work a lot on, I'm not a philosopher, but I had to read a lot of philosophy of the self and work on subjectivity itself.

And I want to continue this work and come up with a theory of the self that acknowledges the radical dependence on others, human and non-human. There is no self without the other. So how come if we know that and if we know to treat ourselves well, why does this not include the other?

So for this, I'm looking into many, many, many traditions that I've already taught through the shared self. Eastern cultures influenced by Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism that tend to emphasize collectivism. I look into Nepantla, a Latinx concept of in-betweenness and similar. And I want to see if I can come up with a fusion of all these that is usable for us today and these strange times that we live in.

I think it would be really helpful for all of us to become a little bit less human in the face of what has been considered the non-human. I think that would be good. Well, clearly thinking about big topics then. Both of those projects. So best of luck continuing with both of them. Thank you very much. And thanks so much for having me.

Well, any listeners who want to get more into what we've been discussing can, of course, read the book titled Ghosts and Their Hosts, The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2025. Sláinte, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you, Miranda. Thank you for having me. And thanks, everybody, for listening.