Resonance of Unseen Things

• Main Author: Lepselter, Susan (auth)
• Format: Electronic Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Ann Arbor University of Michigan Press 2016
• Subjects: Anthropology; Alien abduction; Captivity narrative; Unidentified flying object
• Online Access: OAPEN Library: download the publication; OAPEN Library: description of the publication

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.