Dr. Sladja Blažan publishes Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America

Dr. Sladja Blažan, instructor of literature at Bard College Berlin, has published the book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America. Why are ghosts so popular in film and literature? In the innovative book from University of Virginia Press (2025), Blažan explores this question in the context of colonial and postcolonial United States.

Ghosts and Their Hosts considers the use of ghost stories as a settler colonial tool. In this way, 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. She focuses on the cultural exchanges between Germany, England, France, and the United States around the turn of the nineteenth century.

In an interview for UVA Press, Blažan explains her inspiration for the book: “I came to ghosts via migration studies. I was drawn to migrant writing that attends to the irrational, the animist, the ecological and I realized that ghosts play an important role in such narratives… I quickly realized that every culture and every period in history has had their fair share of ghosts. So, in fact, it’s a transcultural concept that connects us all.”

As for her next projects, she shares, “I am writing a book on intersubjectivity, how to account for a shared narrative perspective, particularly one that involves the nonhuman… I believe that the nonhuman will revolutionize the way we tell stories.”

Ghosts and Their Hosts is available for purchase from University of Virginia Press here.

Post Date: 01-10-2025