Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
With a foreword by Janice Radway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2nd edition 2008)
Ghostly Matters is about haunting, a paradigmatic way in which life is more complicated than those of us who study it have usually granted. The book asks how we can reckon with what modern history has made ghostly and looks for a language for identifying hauntings and for writing with the ghosts that any haunting inevitably raises.
“Avery Gordon seeks a new way of knowing, a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions, and portents.”
— Janice Radway
“Por la otra puerta, es el llanto con su consuelo dentro” and “The other door, its flood of tears with consolation enclosed,” trans. M. Rosario Martín Ruano and Africa Vidal Claramente. Published in Anna Botella Diez del Corrall, ed. El Pasado en el Presente y lo proprio en lo ajeno. Gijón: LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacíon Industrial, pp. 10-135 (2009).