Avery F. Gordon

A really moving and important look at haunting as methodology, and for exploring haunting as a mode of identifying how systems of power and sociality coexist in the current day. I'll note that I read "A Glossary of Haunting" by Eve Tuck and C. Ree before I read this book, so my reading was pretty heavily colored by that essay (which I strongly recommend to everyone ever all the time.) I particularly enjoyed chapters three and four, as I thought they lent themselves most strongly to what I do as a historian, so obviously ymmv on that point. Her weird obsession with haunting being fixed by justice, and as a means towards a solution (or a signpost towards that solution) was very odd to me given what "Glossary" has to say, and I'm still teasing out how I feel about that (can we give ghosts justice? Will ghosts just go away?)

The book is very beautifully written, though, and I will no doubt mine it heavily for quotations in the future! I'd definitely recommend this to anyone thinking about haunting as a theoretical concept for their work… (mehr)

As individuals are haunted by the traumatic incidents their psyches repress, so are cultures haunted by the histories of violence and subjugation they suppress in the name of "civilization." This in turn has consequences for the health of individual psyches. Some cultural productions manage to capture this haunting; Gordon is right to focus on them, although no skilled exegesis is necessary to prove Toni Morrison's Beloved is a novel about being haunted by the consequences of slavery. A great and useful central idea burdened with the disjunctive, fake-poetic, molehills-into-mountains exposition style of much postmodern critical theory.… (mehr)