Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

“Avery Gordon’s stunningly original and provocatively imaginative book explores the connections linking horror, history, and haunting. ” —George Lipsitz

“The text is of great value to anyone working on issues pertaining to the fantastic and the uncanny.”  —American Studies International

“Ghostly Matters immediately establishes Avery Gordon as a leader among her generation of social and cultural theorists in all fields. The sheer beauty of her language enhances an intellectual brilliance so daunting that some readers will mark the day they first read this book. One must go back many more years than most of us can remember to find a more important book.” —Charles Lemert

Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela (He Who Searches), Avery Gordon demonstrates that past or haunting social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Written with a power to match its subject, Ghostly Matters has advanced the way we look at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief and shadowy manifestations.

Avery F. Gordon is professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Janice Radway is professor of literature at Duke University.

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• In the Wake: On Blackness And Being
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies)
• Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (Routledge Classics)
• A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Forerunners: Ideas First)
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures