Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

As if to San Juan Capistrano, historians return with regularity to the missions of American spiritualism and radical reform. Each topic has long been assumed to say something important about the other, and the result of so many writers focusing so intently for so long has been an increasingly rich bird's eye view, not only of a distinctive American religious practice but also of the shifting practices of gender and race, and of popular perceptions of science and medicine. Molly McGarry steers this literature in an exciting new direction with her intriguing new book, Ghosts of Futures Past. McGarry begins with a familiar discussion of the role of spirit communion in midnineteenth-century mourning culture. Spirit communion, she says, allowed participants to “create a religious and social movement based on a reimagining of the corporeal,” a movement in which women literally took center stage and spoke on more than just spiritual matters (p. 49). In successively stronger chapters, she ventures onto newer terrain, analyzing the role of Indians and Indian rights in spiritualist religion; examining the medical pathologization of spirit mediumship; and undertaking a queer reading of mediumship. Grappling with the theory of secularization, she asks whether “religious belief [can] be understood as a transformative and progressive project, as opposed to escapist consumerism and entertainment or always already a form of revivalism” (p. 14).