Results by title

“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.

Since the Korean War—the forgotten war—more than a million Korean women have acted as sex workers for U.S. servicemen. More than 100,000 women married GIs and moved to the United States. Through intellectual vigor and personal recollection, Haunting the Korean Diaspora explores the repressed history of emotional and physical violence between the United States and Korea and the unexamined reverberations of sexual relationships between Korean women and American soldiers. 

Grace M. Cho exposes how Koreans in the United States have been profoundly affected by the forgotten war and uncovers the silences and secrets that still surround it, arguing that trauma memories have been passed unconsciously through a process psychoanalysts call “transgenerational haunting.” Tracing how such secrets have turned into “ghosts,” Cho investigates the mythic figure of the yanggongju, literally the “Western princess,” who provides sexual favors to American military personnel. She reveals how this figure haunts both the intimate realm of memory and public discourse, in which narratives of U.S. benevolence abroad and assimilation of immigrants at home go unchallenged. Memories of U.S. violence, Cho writes, threaten to undo these narratives—and so they have been rendered unspeakable.

At once political and deeply personal, Cho’s wide-ranging and innovative analysis of U.S. neocolonialism and militarism under contemporary globalization brings forth a new way of understanding—and remembering—the impact of the Korean War.

In her heyday, Martha Graham’s name was internationally recognized within the modern dance world, and though trends in choreography continue to change, her status in dance still inspires regard. In this, the first extended feminist look at this modern dance pioneer, Victoria Thoms explores the cult of Graham and her dancing through a feminist lens that exposes the gendered meaning behind much of her work. Thoms synthesizes a diverse archive of material on Graham from films, photographs, memoir, and critique in order to uniquely highlight her contribution to the dance world and arts culture in general.

 

In Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, people disappear, their bodies dumped in deserted city lots or jettisoned in the unforgiving desert. All too many of them are women.

More or Less Dead analyzes how such violence against women has been represented in news media, books, films, photography, and art. Alice Driver argues that the various cultural reports often express anxiety or criticism about how women traverse and inhabit the geography of Ciudad Juárez and further the idea of the public female body as hypersexualized. Rather than searching for justice, the various media—art, photography, and even graffiti—often reuse victimized bodies in sensationalist, attention-grabbing ways. In order to counteract such views, local activists mark the city with graffiti and memorials that create a living memory of the violence and try to humanize the victims of these crimes.

The phrase “more or less dead” was coined by Chilean author Roberto Bolaño in his novel 2666, a penetrating fictional study of Juárez. Driver explains that victims are “more or less dead” because their bodies are never found or aren’t properly identified, leaving families with an uncertainty lasting for decades—or forever.

The author’s clear, precise journalistic style tackles the ethics of representing feminicide victims in Ciudad Juárez. Making a distinction between the words “femicide” (the murder of girls or women) and “feminicide” (murder as a gender-driven event), one of her interviewees says, “Women are killed for being women, and they are victims of masculine violence because they are women. It is a crime of hate against the female gender. These are crimes of power.”

As atrocity has become characteristic of modern history, testimonial writing has become a major twentieth-century genre. Untimely Interventions relates testimonial writing, or witnessing, to the cultural situation of aftermath, exploring ways in which a culture can be haunted by its own history.