Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination by María del Pilar Blanco (review)

Material and immaterial, dead and alive, tangible and intangible: the ghost is an aporia that does not belong in the past or the present. Moreover, a single specter always conjures more of the like, and we are suddenly surrounded, haunted on every front. The paradoxical exercise of conjuring and exorcising apparitions has brought them to inhabit distinctive regions in literary scholarship. We think of ghosts, for instance, as characters belonging to specific genres and treat them as figurations of moral or psychological anxieties. In other words, specific theoretical tools are used to grapple with the specter’s disruption. María del Pilar Blanco’s Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination tests these tools and invites the reader to question some of these assumptions. Focusing on the depiction of haunted spaces in the works of José Martí, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Felisberto Hernández, Henry James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, Blanco urges us to think of haunting outside the safe boundaries of genre theory, psychoanalytical studies, and Derridean hauntology.

Ghost-Watching American Modernity suggests that ghosts—which should not be exclusive property of gothic, fantastic literature, real maravilloso, or magical realism—do not always signal the return of the past and do not simply materialize repressed memories. Ghosts and haunting are also “formal solutions,” according to Blanco. They are textual strategies deployed when writers face an object that eludes representation: “ghosts and haunting [are] narrative devices that set into motion a correspondence between simultaneous landscapes, which in turn tell stories of acknowledged and unacknowledged modernity” (159). The imperative to ghost-watch that drives this work therefore mandates that the reader remain attentive to hesitation, doubt, and a crisis of perception that can only be handled by a tour de force, by opening a crevice through which an unacknowledged face of modernity becomes momentarily (and ghostly) visible.

The focus of Blanco’s book is the representation of haunted spaces and concealed peripheral modernities in works published between the 1840s and the 1950s. Along with these, she analyzes Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter (1973) and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1970), films that reimagine the expansionist and civilizing projects of the era. As a study of spectrality and haunting, Ghost-Watching American Modernity is related to Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1993), and dialogues with Renée Bergland’s The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (2000), Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2005), and David Ratmoko’s On Spectrality (2005), among others. Expanding on this tradition, Blanco calls attention to ghosts that—unlike the Derridean revenant—belong to the present and the future and haunt the modern landscape. By pointing to the emergence of the specter at a moment when the United States, Argentina, and other nations were “constructing a sense of autochthony and broadcasting it within and outside the nation” (11), this book extrapolates haunting to the field of hemispheric studies and presents an alternative way of understanding the effects of nineteenth-and twentieth-century modernization in the imagination of urban, rural, and frontier spaces across the Americas. Although Blanco analyzes tensions similar to those identified by Deborah Cohn, James Dunkerley, Kristen Silva Gruesz, Anna Brickhouse, Anita Patterson, Laura Lomas, Russ Castronovo, Susan Gillman, and other scholars of hemispherism, her book does not trace literary influences. Instead, it leans toward the more nuanced idea of a simultaneous historical experience, which allows her to create connections between writers who are not often read side by side.

Throughout the introduction and opening theoretical chapter, Blanco sets the conceptual basis for the meticulous close readings that constitute the core of her study. In sum, the author relates haunting, which transcends the boundaries of traditional genres, to doubt and simultaneity: crucial components of the modern experience. Haunting is...