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.