Guest program. Lancement de l'ouvrage Matières Spectrales

In this unique and fascinating book, Avery F. Gordon examines the sociological experience of “haunting” drawing on both literary and political references. Haunting refers to a system that alters the experience of a linear life and distorts the way we usually sequence the past, present and future. 

By taking the novels of Toni Morrison or Luisa Valenzuela as a basis and confronting them with more traditional sources of sociology (press articles, legal reports, investigative reports), Matières spectrales demonstrates that social structures inherited from the past influence more present life than most researchers in the humanities assume. In order to show how ghosts haunt the present, the author sifts through part of the history of psychoanalysis, before examining episodes in history such as slavery in the United States or mass disappearances during the military dictatorship in Argentina, where laws prohibited the population from speaking about the disappeared. Deeply interdisciplinary and truly innovative in its approach, Matières Spectrales is written with a power that matches its subject, and offers a fresh vision of the complex intersections of race, gender and class.