Progressive Hauntings

Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America, a revision of the author’s 1999 New York University dissertation, takes readers on a remarkable tour of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America’s affective and relational engagements, engagements embedded simultaneously in personal spiritual virtuosity and communal commitments to social reform and transformation. The book is highly original in its conception, reflects exhaustive archival research, and breaks new ground in its innovative reframing of the American Spiritualist movement in new and illuminating terms. Ghosts of Futures Past promises to make a significant and lasting contribution to the field of American religious history and to theoretically inflected work in the history of religion as a whole.

Ghosts of Futures Past makes an argument both multilayered and complex: it situates American Spiritualism, a movement that some might wish to push to the margins of American religious history as an embarrassing and perhaps even hysterical aberration, at the critical meeting point of a whole range of concerns that animated nineteenth-century American politics, culture, and religion. The movement, at an almost metaphysical level, sought to inaugurate a grand experiment that challenged conventional notions of temporality, linking a seemingly lost past to a vibrant present and promising future. (One wonders if this openness with respect to time was not a kind of uncanny echo of the spatial openness that westward expansion represented in the nineteenth-century American imaginary.) The technological innovations of the nineteenth century, especially the invention of the telegraph and photography, became conduits through which Spiritualism articulated its powers of mediation. Spiritualists sought to resolve the tensions that seemed to reside in the conflict between an emergent discourse of science and the long-dominant ideological frame of religion by claiming that their spiritual practice was, in fact, itself a science.

But the history of Spiritualism is also a history of sentiments, and as McGarry so eloquently argues, the movement helps us understand how many nineteenth-century middle-class white Americans sought to deal with the experience of loss and grief by creating a medium for mourning — by creating a place in their lives for mediums who had the capacity to channel the spirits of the dead. Yet the history of Spiritualism also reaches out into the culture and politics of its time, influencing numerous strands of nineteenth-century political and cultural history with Spiritualists’ involvement in everything from reform movements and abolition to women’s suffrage, free love, and advocacy for Native Americans. In McGarry’s retelling of the history of Spiritualism, we encounter a much more nuanced, layered, subtle portrait that moves far beyond many earlier scholarly explorations. McGarry shows us the forces of gender, race, sex and sexuality, colonial status, and technological innovation, all emerging as critical features of a religious movement that crystallized the most pressing issues and concerns of its time.

By the last chapter, McGarry brings the history of Spiritualism into conversation with the theme that has animated so much recent scholarly discussion of religion — that is, the category of secularism. The book offers a model for how theoretically engaged scholarship on a particular exemplar or empirical example drawn from the history of religion can open up a wide range of deeply compelling theoretical questions that extend far beyond the historical example itself. Ghosts of Futures Past should end up on the reading lists of every theory and method course in academic religious studies as an exemplary model for students trying to understand how theory works by supplementing the hard labor involved in any focused empirical study.

For readers of GLQ, chapter 5 (“Secular Spirits: A Queer Genealogy of Untimely Sexualities”) will perhaps be of most obvious interest. In this chapter, McGarry explores the interweaving of the history of secularism and the history of sexuality, tracing the intersections of discourses of difference — both religious and sexual difference — across a broad terrain of domains from medicine to law to poetry. If Spiritualists shared with their evangelical neighbors a belief in the perfectability...