"In this unique and compelling book, Avery F. Gordon considers the cultural experience of haunting. Drawing on a range of sources, including the fiction of Toni Morrison and Luisa Valenzuela, Ghostly Matters demonstrates that past or shadowy social forces control present life in different and more complicated ways than most social analysts presume. Ghostly Matters scrutinizes the evidence of things barely seen for what they can tell us about the relationship between knowledge, power, and experience. Gordon illustrates how haunting more fully registers phenomena like torture and slavery than do other modes of social experience. Genuinely cross-disciplinary and truly innovative, written with a power to match its subject matter, Ghostly Matters offers a way of looking at the complex intersections of race, gender, and class as they traverse our lives in sharp relief or shadowy manifestations."