The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny
Susan Lepselter, "The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny"
English | ISBN: 0472052942, 0472072943 | 2018 | 176 pages | PDF | 2 MB
English | ISBN: 0472052942, 0472072943 | 2018 | 176 pages | PDF | 2 MB
The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory.