The Edinburgh Companion to

Globalgothic

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 The Edinburgh
Companion to
Globalgothic

Edited by Rebecca Duncan

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 Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK.
We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the
humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high
editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance.
For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

© editorial matter and organisation Rebecca Duncan, 2023

© the chapters their several authors, 2023
Cover image: Shutterstock.com
Cover design: Andrew McColm

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The right of Rebecca Duncan to be identified as the editor of this work has been
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the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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 Contents

Acknowledgementsviii

Introduction: Globalgothic beyond Globalisation 1

Rebecca Duncan

Part I: Approaches
1. Decolonial Gothic 23
Sheri-Marie Harrison
2. The World-System of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird 38
Stephen Shapiro
3. Economy of Shadows, Work of Death: Necropolitics, Slavery, Zombi/e 53
Fred Botting
4. Gothic and the Black Diaspora 70
Maisha Wester
5. Engendering Globalgothic: The ‘Hideous Progeny’ of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein84
Monica Germanà
6. Queering Globalgothic Ecologies 100
Gregory Luke Chwala
7. Anthropocene Gothic, Capitalocene Gothic: The Politics of Ecohorror 114
Rebecca Duncan
8. Extractive Gothic 131
Sharae Deckard

Part II: Issues

9. US Imperial Gothic 151
Kevin Corstorphine

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 vi contents

10. Globalgothic and War 166

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet
11. Terrorist Gothic 179
Steffen Hantke
12. Neoliberal Globalgothic: The Trump White House, the Alt-Right and
the Long-Heralded Death of the Dream 193
Linnie Blake
13. New Weird Technologies: Subverting Neoliberal Globalisation
through Hybridity 206
Elsa Bouet
14. Uncanny Globalgothic Ecologies: Animate Intimacies 221
Chloé Germaine
15. Pandemics and Globalgothic 236
Johan Höglund
16. Medical Globalgothic: Organ Harvesting and the Red Market 250
Laura R. Kremmel

Part III: Modes

17. Globalgothic Translations and Migrations: From Britain to Brazil 267
Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos
18. Gothic Literary Travel and Global Tourism 280
Lucie Armitt
19. Gothic and Global Travel Writing 295
Sofia Aatkar
20. Folk Horror and the Globalgothic 309
Timothy Jones
21. Brexit Gothic 322
Roger Luckhurst
22. Online Gothic 337
Xavier Aldana Reyes

Part IV: Regions and Geographies

23. Gothic and the Global South 353
Rebekah Cumpsty
24. Migration and the Gothic: Border Gothic 367
Enrique Ajuria Ibarra
25. Globalgothic Americas: Consuming and Consumed Bodies in
Twenty-First-Century Narratives 380
Inés Ordiz and Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno

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 contents vii

26. Tropical Gothic: Plantation Ecology, Commodity Frontiers and

the Aesthetics of Excess 395
Esthie Hugo
27. Asian Gothic: Asian Folklore and Globalgothic 411
Katarzyna Ancuta
28. Desert Globalgothic 425
Rune Graulund
29. Queer Gothic Narratives of Palestine in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani
and Ayman Sikseck’s Tishrin440
Karen Grumberg
30. Nordic Gothic 455
Yvonne Leffler
31. ‘In Brussels no one can hear you scream’: EU Gothic 468
Barry Murnane

Coda
Planetary Gothic: An Invitation 485
Rebecca Duncan
Notes on Contributors 495
Index502

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 Acknowledgements

T his collection was developed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, and
I would like to begin by expressing my deep gratitude to all of the contributors, as
well as to the editors and staff at Edinburgh University Press, for their commitment,
enthusiasm and flexibility while working under conditions that were at the very least
unfamiliar and uncertain. For inspiring conversations on topics that lie at the heart of
this book (some of them many years ago now), my thanks to Lobke Minter, Rebekah
Cumpsty, Rune Graulund, Johan Höglund, Dale Townshend, Madelyn Schoonover,
Esthie Hugo, Nanna Nerenst and Karl Emil Rosenbæk. I am grateful also in this
respect to the members of the ‘Aesthetics of Empire’ Research Cluster at the Linnaeus
University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, and to the
Centre itself: this encouraging and creative research environment has provided the
context in which I have been able to take my ideas in new directions.
I have been supported, during the process of bringing the collection to press, by
a Project Grant from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and I acknowledge this here with
sincere appreciation.
Finally, thank you to Justin D. Edwards, in whose memory this collection is dedicated,
and without whom it would not exist.

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 In memory of Justin D. Edwards

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8133_Duncan.indd 10 31/05/23 4:33 PM
 Introduction: Globalgothic beyond
Globalisation
Rebecca Duncan

I n the decade since Glennis Byron published her edited volume Globalgothic
(2013), to date the most influential account of gothic fiction in the international
context, the sense of ‘the global’ has shifted. For Byron, and the contributors to her
collection, the ‘global’ was largely synonymous with ‘globalisation’, and specifically
with ‘globalisation’ as a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. Hence, ‘globalgothic’
was theorised in respect to what, at this time, was taken to be the emergence of a ‘new
world order’ (Byron 2013, 3), one that superseded and complicated a pre-existing set
of global relations configured under the auspices of Western imperialism. In place of
older critical discourses describing predatory transnational vectors of exploitation
and domination, there appeared a different theoretical vocabulary, which focused
on such issues as the transnational mobility of people and commodities; intertwining
advancements in technology, media and global communication; the rise of immate-
rial work and speculative finance capital; and newly conspicuous forms of cultural
hybridity and multidirectional exchange. Shaped by these ideas, globalgothic came to
be understood as the product of a novel and multipolar geopolitical landscape, both
reflecting new pluralities and intersections of cultural voices, and at the same time
articulating anxieties that emerged from the disturbance of established identities and
traditions. Above all, globalgothic appeared in the context of a world characterised,
as Byron put it, by ‘flows’ (3) – flows of people, money, goods and cultures – the fluid-
ity and complexity of which seemed to nullify now apparently too simplistic accounts
of imperial capitalist expansion.
It may already be clear from this brief synopsis that the vision of the world under-
pinning globalgothic no longer maps seamlessly on to the global situation. At the time
of writing this, just over two years into the Covid-19 pandemic and amid spiralling
transformations to the Earth’s biosphere, the trenchancy of ‘old’ lines of power is
starkly and grimly evident. Covid and climate change need, importantly, to be under-
stood as two linked dimensions of the same planetary shifts, since as Andreas Malm
has pointed out, the instance of ‘zoonotic spillover’ (2020, chap. 2) out of which
the novel coronavirus emerged is itself the effect of commercial deforestation across
Southeast Asia, which – driving biodiversity loss and destroying habitats – channels
novel pathogens directly towards humans as the most prominent remaining species.
Also accounting for these origins, the philosopher Srećko Horvat argues that the pan-
demic has functioned as an apocalyptic event, where apocalypse is taken in its original
sense to mean ‘revelation’ (2021, 12). What has been exposed is a radically unequal

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 2 rebecca duncan

global geography, across which poverty – a relative state, always contoured by race
and gender (among other categories) – is everywhere an index of environmental and
social vulnerability, and where increasingly militarised national borders curtail the
possibility of escaping such unliveable conditions.
Thus, the pandemic can be considered in Horvat’s terms as a ‘sort of . . . X-ray
that . . . unmasked a global system based on a vicious cycle of extraction, exploitation
and expansion’ (2021, 9). It has made available a global picture that markedly differs
from the vision of transnational flows, and which in fact corresponds far more closely
to mid-twentieth-century accounts of dependency and underdevelopment,1 on the dis-
missal of which much influential globalisation theory was predicated. For Immanuel
Wallerstein and other thinkers associated with the world-systems analysis approach,
the ‘claim that it is only in the twentieth century that capitalism has become “world-
wide”’ is fundamentally misleading (1974, 401). This is because it obscures a much
longer transregional history of capitalism, in the context of which late-twentieth-
century shifts appear neither anomalous nor wholly unprecedented, as I will discuss
below. This history begins in the ‘long’ sixteenth century, when the powers of Western
Europe set out to expropriate the resources of the so-called New World, and did so by
harnessing the labour first of its Indigenous populations, and then of captive African
people transported to the colonies as slaves. For Wallerstein, this dynamic of expan-
sion, exploitation and uneven accumulation demonstrates what remains the definitive
gesture of capitalism as a ‘world-system’: namely, the production of an ‘axial division
of labour’, which links economically strong ‘core’ zones to the regions they peripher-
alise, and on whose cheapened labour power and raw materials they feed (2004, 17).
Though, as Bryan S. Turner notes, one ‘early driving force of . . . globalisation
theories was dissatisfaction with . . . world systems theory’ (2010, 4), critical work in
this latter tradition continued in other fields – including in gothic studies, as Stephen
Shapiro demonstrates in this collection and elsewhere (2008) – and the salience of
such scholarship is arguably growing as the academy seeks to address the racialised,
gendered and ecological unevenness of the present. Feminist historian Sylvia Federici
(2004) has, for example, outlined how the early modern transformation of women
into unwaged domestic labourers underpins the development of the world-system,
enabling the production of an exploitable masculinised proletariat, first in Europe
and then in the colonies. Addressing the persistence of racial inequality in the nomi-
nally postcolonial present, the decolonial philosopher Aníbal Quijano (2000) argues
that, because the modern conception of racial difference was invented to serve the
first transoceanic division of labour – to construct a colonised and enslaved work-
force in the Americas – race is baked into the world-system, and thus continues to
function as an identifier for the peripheralised lives on which capitalism depends.
Building on these perspectives, and implicitly synthesising them, the environmental
historian Jason W. Moore has influentially reframed the world-system as a ‘world-
ecology’ (2015, chap. 1), the point being that Wallerstein’s division of labour is not
only social, but also ecological. Hence, Moore argues that categories of gender and
race are operatively inseparable from the Enlightenment conception of nature as
external to society, which – as in Federici and Quijano – is deployed to make the
world legible to capital, specifically by transforming the biosphere into a plunderable
resource (2016, 79). These accounts bring into focus how, across five centuries and
into the present, capitalism operates through processes of exploitation and extraction,

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 introduction 3

mobilising heteropatriarchal categories of gender, colonial conceptions of race, and

instrumentalising notions of extra-human nature, to bind certain regions of the world
together unequally with others. They thus provide the critical tools with which to
conceptualise and understand the uneven distributions of socio-ecological precarity
in the present, in a way that narratives of globalisation cannot.
In her illuminating study of the global novel, Treasa De Loughry argues that the mis-
match between now-hegemonised theories of the global and our current global reality
is severe enough to constitute a set of ‘disciplinary crises in literary studies’ (2020, 15).
The aim of this collection is to address and move beyond this impasse in the context
of gothic criticism. Without turning away from late-twentieth-century globalisation
entirely (but seeking to contextualise it in the longer history of capitalism), the vol-
ume asks how gothic fiction engages with, or witnesses, global relationships, processes
and phenomena, and how it does so in locally particular ways from different vantages
around the world. Eschewing a focus on distinct national gothic traditions, contribu-
tors to the collection instead work with regional paradigms, thus acknowledging the
transnational vectors of power and production in the context of which all nations are
placed, and by which they are shaped. In taking these approaches, chapters in the vol-
ume frequently move beyond the established critical lexica for examining gothic in
international contexts, forging new theoretical approaches – rooted in decoloniality,
for example, extractivism, non-Western cosmology, or the plantation system – which
help to elucidate how the fraught actualities of the global present are imaginatively
negotiated in gothic texts. Indeed, gothic emerges across the collection as a discourse
especially finely attuned to the social and environmental upheavals of the present, a
point that gains new salience if we recall that it was during an earlier moment of vast,
capital-driven socio-ecological restructuring that gothic first appeared in Britain, then
on the eve of industrialisation.
I will say more about this relationship between gothic and conditions of socio-eco-
logical instability later on in this introduction. In what immediately follows, I return
to Byron’s conception of globalgothic, in order to locate the late-twentieth-century
moment of globalisation from which it takes its cue in the longer and wider histori-
cal context of the world-ecology. As we shall see, doing so raises important ques-
tions over existing accounts of globalgothic aesthetics and concerns, which may in fact
chiefly pertain to fiction from certain, largely Northern regions, while at the same time
curtailing opportunities to examine how gothic addresses the material or ecological
dimensions of global realities. I conclude by engaging with Fred Botting and Justin D.
Edwards’s theorisation of globalgothic, which – sensitive to the regionally differenti-
ated experience of global capitalism – lays the foundation for a reconceptualisation of
globalgothic as gothic fiction which seeks to retrieve, make visible and at times inter-
rogate the transregional histories and relations that contour the locus at which any
instance of gothic production takes place.

Gothic Fiction, Globalisation and the ‘New World Order’

Globalgothic, as Byron explains in her introduction, is a collection motivated by the
observation that the term ‘gothic’ was, around the turn of the millennium, increasingly
being applied to fiction from beyond the genre’s traditional Anglo-American purview.
This development, Globalgothic proposes, is connected to the late-twentieth-century

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 4 rebecca duncan

‘development of an increasingly integrated global economy’ (2013, 1), though Byron

herself consciously leaves aside the knotty matter of defining globalisation (2012,
371–2). Taking a general approach, she points only to that sense, already highlighted
above, of a novel transnational geography characterised by ‘flows’, where ‘people and
products move with increasing ease and speed across national borders’ (371). Botting
and Edwards, in their contribution to Byron’s volume, provide some theoretical and
historical background, examining the globalised world as an effect of socio-economic
shifts at the end of the twentieth century – of ‘collapsing blocs and borders, the emer-
gence of transnational economic unions’ (2013, 12). These developments are cotermi-
nous, they note, with ‘new technologies, media exchanges and financial fluidity’ (18),
which together reflect newly abstract and instantaneous forms of economic activity,
where ‘objects and things are rendered secondary to flows of information, signs and
services’ (15). Emerging from all of this, a rapidly operating and frequently demateri-
alised form of ‘transnational capitalism’ is identified, which ‘respects no borders in its
pursuits of profit and markets’ (13), while simultaneously ‘discover[ing] profit beyond
material goods’ (15). ‘This new market’, Botting and Edwards continue, ‘is, in our
thinking, a new world order that can no longer be simply aligned with . . . modern –
Western or US – capitalism’ (13).
For Byron, such a new world order shapes gothic production in three key senses
(Botting and Edwards provide a slightly different theorisation, to which I will return).
In the first instance, the regional expansion of the market – at the same time an expan-
sion into the immaterial domain of signs and images – provides the distribution
channels through which gothic acquires global circulation as a cultural commodity.
‘[G]othic tropes and narratives travel with the movement of people and the flows of
cultural production,’ Byron writes (2013, 6), and importantly it is not only the case
that Western forms are distributed elsewhere. Gothic ‘counterparts in other cultures’
(3) also enter the cultural economy, so that there is a ‘confluence, in globalised space,
between divergent cultural traditions’ (4).
Secondly, globalgothic sits in an ambivalent position to these circumstances,
because it is often critical of the very market that has facilitated its production. As
Byron puts it, ‘globalgothic frequently exploits the flows precisely to give form to
anxieties attendant upon the processes of globalisation’, and most notably to those
which arise as national and cultural stability is rendered fluid, and thus apparently
compromised. The result is a gothic literature that critically represents globalisation
itself ‘as monstrous, spectral, cannibalistic’ (5). Finally, because globalgothic is a prod-
uct of ‘multidirectional cultural exchanges’ (3), it should be considered, Byron writes,
as ‘dislocated from specific regions and places’, consisting instead chiefly in ‘new tran-
sregional or transnational alliances’ (6).
This last is perhaps the most striking feature of Byron’s account: ‘what is identified
as gothic today is something increasingly detached from any specific, historical, social,
and cultural “origins”’ (2012, 371). The point, as I have already mentioned, is that as
gothic circulates through a newly expansive market of cultural commodities, it loses
its national specificity, acquiring traits drawn from multiple supernatural traditions
around the world. And yet, there is also a deeper question here which pertains to the
regional vantage from which late-twentieth-century shifts to the global order are being
perceived. Where must one stand to catch sight of a global situation defined chiefly by
cultural intersections that dissolve old social formations and categories? From what

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 introduction 5

position in the world-system, in other words, might it feasibly seem as if a mode of

capitalism has appeared, which operates not by exploiting certain people and extract-
ing value from biophysical nature as it has historically done, but primarily through
a free-floating market’s circuits and flows? Another way of formulating this thought
would be to ask in which parts of the globe it was possible to experience the world
order of the late twentieth century as unequivocally new.

Globalisation in Context
Returning to Moore’s conception of the world-ecology will help to shed light on these
issues, in part because this longue durée perspective reveals that the shifts identified
with globalisation over the last several decades have a number of precedents across
the history of capitalism. To grasp this point, it is also necessary to grasp that crisis
and global transformation are not anomalous to capitalism, but integral and cyclically
occurring features of the world-system. This is because capitalism works by corroding
its own conditions of possibility, in that it exploits given world-ecological ‘complexes’
of labour and resources to the point of exhaustion (Moore 2015, chap. 6). At such
moments, which Moore names ‘ecological revolutions’, capital regroups by pursuing a
frontier strategy – exemplified paradigmatically by formal processes of imperial expan-
sion – in which new sources of (relatively) uncapitalised work/energy are drawn into
the system at very low cost, with the effect that conditions for profitable extraction
and exploitation are reinstated (Moore 2015, chap. 6). Writing with Giovanni Arrighi,
Moore identifies two phases in each of the four ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ that
have taken place since the inauguration of the world-system in the long sixteenth
century: namely, ‘a phase of material expansion’, in which new plunderable sources
of labour and biophysical nature are constructed and appropriated, and a phase of
‘financial expansion’ (Arrighi and Moore 2001, 56), which responds to the declining
availability of these material resources, by temporarily relocating the possibility of
accumulation in speculative ‘financial deals’, until a new wave of material expansion
can begin (61). Importantly, these two phases are ‘overlapping’, as Moore emphasises
(2015, chap. 5); this means that the latter does not mark the end of extractivism, but
is instead accompanied by its emergence in newly intense forms – more on this shortly.
It is already possible, in this short summary, to discern key elements of late-twentieth-
century capitalism – specifically, the extension and dematerialisation of market
flows. As Arrighi and Moore point out, the financial stage of the last systemic cycle,
which concludes around the end of the nineteenth century, was also accompanied by
analyses that interpreted the turn to finance capital as representing ‘a new phase of
capitalist development’. ‘The language and concepts have changed’, they write, ‘but
the idea that finance capital constitutes a new, latest, highest phase or stage in the
history of capitalism is at least as widely held today as it was a century ago’ (2001,
57). Thus, while it is certainly distinct, the most recent new world order may not
be entirely new. Accounting for this is important, since, as Arrighi and Moore note,
the ‘discursive recurrence’ of financialisation as a novel capitalist form potentially
‘conceals its factual recurrence within a cycle too long to be detected within the time
horizon ordinarily deployed in the analysis of capitalist development’ (57). A closer
– or perhaps wider – look at the late-twentieth-century moment in which ‘globalisa-
tion’ is born will elucidate the point.

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 6 rebecca duncan

The most recent emergence of a newly extensive and speculative global market
needs to be understood as an effect of the neoliberal economic agenda, infamously
spearheaded by Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Reagan in the United States.
This in turn should be contextualised in relation to the crisis that gripped the world-
economy in the early 1970s – emblematised by the infamous oil shock of 1974–75
– and which corresponds, in Moore and Arrighi’s terms, to the terminal phase of mate-
rial expansion associated with Fordism, or the post-war boom. Neoliberalisation may
have delivered certain regions of the world from this deepening recession and into a
period of relative economic stability at the end of the twentieth century; however, it did
so by implementing profoundly unsustainable asset-stripping strategies, which David
Harvey describes as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2005, 145–52). These work by
bringing into the domain of the market regions, assets and sources of labour that had
previously been unavailable to capital investment, thus providing stagnant funds with
new avenues for growth. The late-twentieth-century globalisation of the market is a
direct result of this project, which everywhere also involves the privatisation of previ-
ously publicly owned institutions, the concomitant rolling back of social provision or
welfare, and the deregulation of both finance and labour.
This said, neoliberalisation needs, crucially, to be understood as a regionally spe-
cific programme. In the core economies of the Global North, accumulation by dispos-
session was coupled, as we have seen, to financialisation, but this acted in tandem
with deindustrialisation, which precisely involves the closure of material production
sites – of the factory, the mine – thereby releasing workers into a newly competitive
job market, with the result that domestic wages are depressed. Importantly, however,
production does not disappear. As Moore writes, ‘the falling rate of profit in American
industry . . . led American and other capitalists to move rapidly towards the “global
factory” in the 1970s’ (2015, chap. 9). In the same moment, in other words, that
Northern powers were financialising and deindustrialising, they were also outsourc-
ing industry to other, cheaper (or rather artificially cheapened) parts of the globe.
These destinations lay across the Global South, and frequently in recently postcolonial
nations, which – largely as a result of underdevelopment during colonialism – found
themselves urgently in need of cash. Leveraging this situation, institutions of interna-
tional finance rooted in Northern economies extended credit throughout the (to this
day heavily indebted) postcolonial world, on condition that Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) were deployed by newly independent states to bring themselves
in line with foreign capital’s demands. These included demands that labour remain
cheap, resources accessible, and consumer markets open to imported goods.2 A key
result of SAPs, and the industrialisation of the Global South more generally, was the
production of a ‘global proletariat that dwarfed any other that had come before it’
(Moore 2015, chap. 9), a development which undergirds the global surge of consumer
goods for which the late twentieth century is infamous.
As they work together to address the declining phase of twentieth-century material
expansion, financialisation, deindustrialisation and the intensified shifting of produc-
tion and extractive industries to the Global South demonstrate that – in Moore’s suc-
cinct phrasing – ‘Wall Street [i]s a way of organising nature’, where ‘nature’ entails both
human lives and the rest of the biosphere (2015, intro.). If we account for this situation,
the novelty of late-twentieth-century globalisation is called into question in two key
senses. On the one hand, this is because it highlights how the economic prioritisation

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 introduction 7

of market flows has recurred across the four systemic cycles of the world-system, in the
way Moore and Arrighi show. On the other – and importantly – it also reveals that, for
regions across the Global South, the effect of the ‘new world order’ was to entrench –
rather than transform – their pre-existing world-systemic positioning. As Neil Lazarus
explains, ‘SAPs . . . became a means of ensuring that postcolonial states retained their
peripheral status’ (2011, 9, emphasis mine), continuing to occupy the same role in
respect to the world’s core economies as they had during the formally colonial period.
This shows in turn that ‘globalisation’ cannot be considered a globally uniform phe-
nomenon: what might have appeared from the Global North to be the dissolution into
flows of an older, industrial socio-ecological configuration doubtless looks different
from the vantage of the former colony, where SAPs functioned to intensify colonial
modes of extraction and exploitation. Thus, though the financialisation of the market
may be a globally obtaining development, the underlying unevenness of these regional
conditions also means that the speculative economy is experienced differently across
different locations in the world-system.

Globalgothic and Disciplinary Crisis

All of this has a bearing on the conception of globalgothic as a form of cultural
production dislocated from any particular social or regional origins. For, if we situate
globalgothic chiefly in the version of the world presumed by this definition – in that
novel global landscape characterised by multidirectional flows of goods, people and
culture – then the above discussion shows that the term’s ‘global’ element will be
substantially restricted, if not eradicated entirely. Located in this way, ‘globalgothic’
would in fact appear to refer mainly to gothic texts that reflect a perspective available
from regions undergoing deindustrialisation and financialisation – those largely
Northern places where material production, and the social structure attendant on it,
had indeed been transformed to the point where they might be said to have disappeared.
If this is correct, then what has been called ‘globalgothic’ might better be named ‘post-
industrial gothic’, and this has important consequences that relate to the disciplinary
crisis we have seen De Loughry identify above.
Key among these is a curtailing of globalgothic’s capacity for addressing unfold-
ing shifts in the biosphere – including the complex of planetary transformations rep-
resented by the term ‘climate change’. As Fredric Jameson argued in the essay on
which his formative Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was
based, ‘the conventional feelings of First World subjects that they really do inhabit
a “postindustrial” society’ (1984, 91) emerge from the disorientating effect of late-
twentieth-century consumer culture. In this context, a deluge of commodities saturates
reality, with the effect that this comes to be structured by ‘the frantic economic urgency
of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods’ (56). As a result, ‘the
past as “referent” finds itself bracketed, and then effaced altogether’ (66), while ‘the
present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness’ (73). Building on
Jameson, Malm points out the difficulty this situation poses for efforts to engage with
global warming: in a version of the world where there is no history there can also be
no climate change, since this is – as Malm puts it – the effect of ‘historical fires’. It is
‘cumulative emissions, the pulses of CO2 stacked on top of each other’ that have raised
atmospheric temperatures to the degree that the Earth System is destabilised, meaning

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 8 rebecca duncan

that, ‘[i]nsofar as extreme weather is shaped by basal warming, it is the legacy of what
people have done’ (Malm 2018, intro.).
Something of the presentism that characterises Jameson’s nominally post-industrial
society is discernible in accounts of late-twentieth-century globalisation that identify
this with a new world order. The point has been made directly by Timothy Brennan,
who notes that the inclination towards novelty is a general ‘feature of capitalist societ-
ies’, which tend to understand ‘each moment as the only reality while expunging the
past in a gesture of calculated anti-historicism’ (2007, 38). In the particular case of
globalisation theory, this gesture works by severing the decades preceding the millen-
nium both from the longer, cyclical history of capitalism, and from the geopolitical
landscape of formal colonialism, which is taken to have concluded around the middle
of the twentieth century. The latter disarticulation specifically obscures the continu-
ing peripheralisation of postcolonial regions, while also giving credence – in the way
Jameson suggests – to the notion that industry and extraction have been wholly super-
seded by a transnational and increasingly dematerialised market economy. The erasure
of history is thus inseparable from the erasure of material production, and concomi-
tantly from production’s cumulative ecological effects. It is in this sense, then, that ‘the
seamless surface of the globalised world’ – to use Malm’s phrasing – cannot conceptu-
ally accommodate escalating environmental breakdown (2018, intro.).
The point sheds light on the predominantly cultural register in which globalgothic
fiction has thus far been conceived, as demonstrated both by Byron’s emphasis on the
cultural hybridity of globalgothic forms, and by the nature of the anxieties such texts
are taken to encode – including ‘new kinds of disturbances to identities and borders’
(2012, 376), and those relating to ‘the stability of local or national . . . cultures’ (2013,
5). These are ‘impacts of transnational capitalism’ (5), where capitalism is conceived
chiefly as a sophisticated global marketplace, its sprawling circuits and channels cutting
across national boundaries to deposit in any given location (cultural) commodities and
images from different parts of the world. To restore capital’s socio-ecological dimen-
sions to this picture requires, as we have seen, renewed attention to the geography of
production, and thus to the late-twentieth-century moment as one of historical conti-
nuity with the colonial past, as well as one of transformation. This in turn will mean
taking an approach to gothic fiction that is attuned to the regionally specific operation
of neoliberalisation – to the uneven distribution of de/industrialisation and its socio-
ecological consequences – and which is thus able to move beyond the critical impasse
that emerges from generalising a ‘post-industrial’ perspective. It is to this reconceptuali-
sation of globalgothic that I will now turn.

Flows and Regionality

Botting and Edwards’s theorisation of globalgothic lays the foundation for such a revi-
sion. Though their assessment of globalisation’s novelty differs from my own analysis – a
point to which I will return – these authors ground their conceptualisation of globalgothic
in an account of late-twentieth-century economic shifts that takes in the extent to which
these are experienced differently across different regions of the world. As we have seen,
Botting and Edwards prioritise a ‘global market, in which cultures produce, consume,
appropriate and transform stories, images, and characters’ (2013, 12). Acknowledged
alongside this, however, are ‘the “structural adjustments” that have imposed global

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 introduction 9

forces on developing nations’ (14), and which generate a situation in which effectively
‘every member of Western culture is . . . expropriating the resources and labour of other
countries’ (20). This sense of the unevenness of the late-twentieth-century global order
underpins a conceptualisation of globalgothic that is similarly attuned to how different
local vantages afford different perspectives on transnational shifts and processes from
the late twentieth century. ‘Global manifestations of the gothic’, Botting and Edwards
write, ‘touch on the sense of the unnerving, unpredictable and uncontrollable scale of
world changes that impinge diversely and relentlessly on different locales and peoples’
(14, emphasis mine).
To illustrate this definition, the authors turn to the anthropologists Jean and John
Comaroff’s influential account of xenophobia, witchcraft and zombie-making in mil-
lennial South Africa, all of which – the Comaroffs argue – need to be understood as a
response to the neoliberalisation of the post-apartheid economy. As Lazarus demon-
strated in a 2004 essay, South Africa’s neoliberal turn effectively enacted a form of self-
imposed structural adjustment. On the one hand, the nation’s incorporation into the
increasingly financialised and globalised market is experienced as ‘sudden infusions’ of
foreign commodities and speculative wealth into the newly postcolonial state (Comaroff
and Comaroff 2002, 782). On the other, it is expressed by the casualisation and frag-
mentation of the national workforce, a form of accumulation by dispossession intended
to lower production costs through a shift to ‘part-time piece work . . . [and] relatively
insecure, gainless occupation[s]’ generally (781). It is amid these circumstances that the
Comaroffs locate a rise, among the nation’s poorest, in xenophobic violence, which is
directed at immigrants from elsewhere on the continent, on the grounds that they are
ostensibly stealing gainful forms of work from South African citizens. This grim devel-
opment is linked, they argue further, to the popular identification of illegitimate labour-
ers of a different, more sinister kind. ‘Long-standing notions of witchcraft have come to
embrace zombie-making,’ they write, which involves ‘the brutal reduction of others . . .
to insensible beings stored, like tools, in sheds, cupboards, or oil drums at the homes of
their creators’ (787). As this exposition suggests, such zombies bear little resemblance
to the cannibalistic hordes of mainstream contemporary horror cinema, but are instead
undead workers: victims of occult murder, whose corpses are reanimated and put to
work for the enrichment of their makers, using nefarious magical means.
Like the job-thieving immigrant of the xenophobic imaginary, the murderous zombie-
making witch should be understood – the Comaroffs argue – as an attempt to resolve the
‘contradiction at the heart of neoliberal capitalism in its global manifestation’, namely
‘the fact that it appears to offer up vast, almost instantaneous riches’ to certain people,
‘and simultaneously to threaten the very livelihood’ of others (2002, 782). Both figures –
demonised migrant and zombie labourer – thus fulfil an interpretive function in respect
to late-twentieth-century shifts in the world-system, as these appear from a postcolonial
vantage. They offer hyperbolised figures of threat in answer to the question of how
new wealth is rapidly accumulating, under material conditions where work is ever more
arduous, precarious and poorly rewarded. In this way, the intertwining narratives of
zombies and immigrants exemplify globalgothic as Botting and Edwards see it: they
witness and articulate, in a local cultural idiom, the particular regional experience of
wider global transformations. ‘In attempting to broach the scale of change’, the authors
summarise, ‘the globalgothic mode registers an ill-formed grasp of the consequences
attendant on the dissolution of old securities . . . and comforting boundaries’ (2013, 14).

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 10 rebecca duncan

It is worth pausing here over the phrase ‘ill-formed’, to examine how it can be seen
to apply to the narratives of zombies and xenophobia described above. In one sense,
it is clear that these interpretations of neoliberalising South Africa get something very
wrong: it is neither immigrants nor witches – disproportionately taken to be elderly
women – who are responsible for intensifying exploitation, or for the conspicuous
appearance of new and inaccessible forms of wealth. Indeed, as with all instances of
‘moral panic’,3 these supposed villains are likely to be themselves especially seriously
affected by deepening inequality in the post-apartheid nation. For Botting and Edwards,
importantly, this kind of misreading is a fundamental function of globalgothic more
widely, which, they write, ‘constructs an otherness that screens out the . . . anxiety’
(2013, 23) produced on the advent of ‘a new world order’ – one which ‘is mediated,
networked, militarised and corporatised but offers no clear-cut image of itself’ (18).
Thus, what the tales of witches and demonised migrants only imperfectly grasp – and
in this way ‘screen out’ – is a global system of rapid and dematerialised flows, which
is taken to supersede older ‘active imperialisms witnessed in tangible and positioned
structures’ (17), and which becomes in the process near-unthinkable in its complexity.
And yet, as we have seen with Moore above, the late twentieth century is not only
a moment of rupture and novelty, but also one characterised by a deepening of the
extractive and exploitative relationships developed during formal colonialism. Viewed
with this history in mind, another perspective on the zombie in particular begins to shift
into view, one that foregrounds the sense in which narratives around this figure seem to
provide a grimly accurate analysis of neoliberal transformations to the South African
economy. For is there not, we might ask, some truth in the pervasive suspicion that to
be poor in the post-apartheid nation is to risk being treated as an expendable body?
Botting and Edwards take care to point out that encoded in frightful tales of zombies
and witches is the ‘tangible . . . distress and anxiety of a globalised system’ (2013, 12).
However, their prioritisation of the sublimely complex new world order means that they
overlook, or dismiss, the interrogative possibility of this narrative function, which in
no small part inheres in the challenge it mounts precisely to that vision of the global as
a frictionless and dematerialised space of transnational commodity and cultural flows.
The figure of the undead labourer – indexing a vulnerability to deleterious conditions
of work – asserts that, in the Comaroffs’ phrasing, ‘there is no such thing as capitalism
sans production’, and thus tacitly insists that the ‘neoliberal stress on consumption . . .
is palpably problematic’ (2002, 782). In his own analysis of the contemporary African
occult, David McNally phrases the point more strongly still:

The new genre of African witchcraft refuses bourgeois narratives in which capital-
ist wealth gives birth to itself through a self-reproducing machinery that knows
neither victims nor losers . . . A hermeneutics of suspicion animates these folktales,
a thoroughgoing mistrust of the claim, popular among postmodern theorists of the
so-called information economy, that we have transcended the economics of mate-
riality. (2011, 201)

As it underscores, in this way, the persistence of an ‘economics of materiality’, the

figure of the African zombie also makes visible the continuity between colonial and
globalised world orders, exposing the extent to which the latter relies on the intensifi-
cation of the same relations of extraction and exploitation as the former. The point is

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 introduction 11

confirmed, in fact, by the longer history of zombie lore, upsurges of which, both the
Comaroffs and McNally note across their respective pieces, have accompanied the
implementation of capitalist relations on the continent, at least since the inauguration
of the last systemic cycle of material – imperial – expansion in the nineteenth century.
Throughout this trajectory, McNally observes, the peculiarly corporeal vocabulary of
occult narratives and practices – including zombification, but also ritual murder and
forms of vampirism – can be understood as an effort to give tangible bodily shape to
the experience of capitalist production, which, even when not literally violent, from
the workers’ perspective entails artificial temporalities and absurdly repetitive and
apparently pointless activities that together generate a mystifying feeling of violation
which ‘they cannot see or touch’ (2011, 200). This, as McNally writes, ‘is doubly so’
in the present era of finance capital, where – as the Comaroffs have also noted – the
enduring relationship between production and consumption, work and wealth, is ren-
dered intensely obscure (201). Hence, he concludes that the African occult tales under
consideration ‘seek to map an archaeology of the invisible in capitalist modernity . . .
In their hunt for the bodies that are being harmed and the blood that is being sucked,
these stories seek out traces of the corporeal power upon which capital feeds’ (201).
Something critical is thus lost if we consider such narratives – and globalgothic
more widely – as responses to globalisation. Botting and Edwards substantially nuance
the landscape of flows, accounting for the variegated experience of late-twentieth-
century capitalism across de/industrialised regions, and thus unlocking the possibility
of reading globalgothic texts not as dislocated cultural hybrids, but rather as locally
rooted – though perhaps culturally complex – mediations of the uneven global system.
Nonetheless, they themselves ultimately position globalgothic chiefly in relation to a
newly immaterial and fluid global landscape, with the effect that the stress in their
argument falls on the impossibility of grasping this complexity, and figures such as the
African zombie largely become imperfect representations, which at root demonstrate
the inevitable failure of efforts to conceptualise – and thus to adequately critique or
resist – the numinous degradations of a new world order. What this reading passes
over too quickly, I have suggested above, is the sense in which globalgothic forms
encode the real violence of transregional capitalist relations, as these act on and shape
a particular regional context in both new and historically redolent ways. In doing so,
such figures of dread and threat enact a proto-critical gesture, precisely by exposing
– rather than ‘screening out’ – the conditions of precarity and disposability on which
capital continues to depend. This critique acquires particular valency in the context of
accounts that see the global present as an age of spectral capital and immaterial labour
as McNally has shown, but it pertains equally to the history of the world-system more
widely. It is also, notably, a mode of interrogation that both entails and surpasses
Byron’s account of globalgothic’s ambivalent critical positioning: what is being skew-
ered here exceeds threats to cultural stability under global market conditions, relating
also to the deeply felt destruction of livelihoods that – though regionally specific –
everywhere undergirds this global market.

Globalgothic beyond Globalisation

I will propose across what remains of this introduction that while globalgothic incar-
nations of world-systemic violence can produce the kind of othering and moral panic

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 12 rebecca duncan

demonstrated by the entanglement of zombies and xenophobia in post-apartheid

South Africa, they might also generate more critical forms of consciousness, which
seek out the structural relationships and histories from which the experience of vio-
lence emerges. Because they give this experience tangible form, figures such as the
undead labourer might also prompt a reflection on the origins of violence, thus
enabling, as Jameson writes in his essay on ‘cognitive mapping’, ‘the whole architec-
tonic of . . . global space to rise up in ghostly profile’ (1988, 352). Indeed, Jameson’s
famous description of conspiracy theory as a distorted effort to locate the social levers
of power is relevant to a discussion of globalgothic: the mistrust that underpins the
conspiracy analysis – what McNally calls ‘a hermeneutics of suspicion’ – can be turned
to ends other than the identification of demonised ‘others’. It can be pressed into the
service instead of mapping the world-system within which categories of otherness are
mobilised for the structural peripheralisation of certain lives and environments.
This possibility has been examined by critics working with the Warwick Research
Collective’s (WReC) influential theorisation of ‘world-literature’, by which they intend
literature that registers how, on a world scale, ‘capitalist social relations are “lived”
– different in every instance for the simple reason that no two social instances are the
same’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 12). Since, as Moore has shown, all capitalist social rela-
tions are also ecological relations, world-literature should be understood not only as
the literature of the world-system, but also – Michael Niblett writes – ‘of the capitalist
world-ecology’: ‘world literature will necessarily register ecological regimes and revo-
lutions . . . since these organise in fundamental ways the material conditions, social
modalities, and areas of experience on which literary form works’ (Niblett 2012, 20).
Both the WReC and Niblett pay particular attention to what – following Michael
Löwy – they call ‘irrealist’ forms of cultural production: modes of narrative – like the
gothic – which contain elements of ‘fantasy, the oneiric and the surreal’ (Niblett 2012,
21), and which can be understood as reflecting the experience of those moments in
the history of capitalism when the established patterning of socio-ecological relation-
ships falls into crisis, prompting shifts of the kind discussed by Moore and Arrighi in
their account of financialisation and renewed material expansion. As Niblett explains,
the transition from one phase of accumulation to the next ‘destroys the pre-existing
social [and ecological] unities that might have provided the unified referent required
by “realist” representation’ (2012, 21). As the lineaments of a familiar reality become
destabilised in this way, irrealist representations appear with particular force, captur-
ing the ensuing sense of disorientation in figures drawn from folklore, the occult or
urban legend.
There is clear resonance between this argument and Botting and Edwards’s thesis
examined above, in which the authors position globalgothic as a misinterpretation of the
local effects of ‘world change’ (2013, 14). Niblett, too, draws attention to cultural pro-
duction that registers the shifting world-ecology only ‘negatively through its absence’,
thus providing accounts such as the xenophobic narratives discussed above (2012, 19).
However, he also highlights fiction that deliberately activates irrealist aesthetics in order
to capitalise on their interpretive function, and thus ‘grasps towards its [the world-
ecology’s] mapping as the condition of possibility for making some ultimate sense of
social experience’ (19). In these latter instances, irrealism becomes ‘critical irrealism’,
which the WReC describe as ‘the self-conscious transformation by authors’ of folkloric
or supernaturalised figures and poetics for the ends of performing a ‘critique of the

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 introduction 13

world historical order’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 97). Such texts thus repurpose McNally’s
hermeneutics of suspicion, so that these no longer indict vilified (local) ‘others’,
but function instead to identify and interrogate the systemic drivers behind deleterious
socio-economic/ecological transformations, as these are experienced at a given regional
location in the world-system.
Considered with this distinction between irrealist and critical irrealist cultural pro-
duction in mind, the term ‘globalgothic’ takes on two distinct but related significances.
In the first place, it designates a critical approach, which functions by situating a given
regional instance of gothic fiction in the wider historical and geographical context of
the world-ecology. As with Edward Said’s famous injunction to read ‘contrapuntally’
(1994, 59, emphasis in original) – the approach through which the Antiguan sugar
plantation is exposed as Mansfield Park’s suppressed condition of possibility (69–70) –
a globalgothic reading practice might be applied even to narratives that seem to engage
predominantly with local realities, in order to make visible what such texts witness
‘only negatively’, or – in Botting and Edwards’s formulation – what they ‘screen out’.
In the second instance, ‘globalgothic’ refers to a critical gothic poetics, the purpose of
which is to chart, from a certain regional perspective, the transregional dynamics and
connections that give rise to the moments of social and environmental destabilisation
to which gothic responds.

Outline of Chapters
Contributions across this collection engage in a range of ways with these two dimen-
sions of globalgothic beyond globalisation, and attend in each instance to a particular
theoretical or conceptual lens, global issue, mode of writing or regional positioning.
These four focuses inform the organisation of the volume into sections dedicated to
‘Approaches’, ‘Issues’, ‘Modes’ and ‘Regions and Geographies’, although, as the reader
will find, there is much dynamic dialogue between contributions across the collection
as a whole. The first section brings together contributions concerned with elaborat-
ing the critical perspectives from which globalgothic fictions might be read, opening
with Sheri-Marie Harrison’s ‘Decolonial Gothic’. Harrison’s chapter outlines an ethic
of incommensurability which distinguishes decoloniality from other approaches to
colonial history and power, and analyses gothic fiction as a mode in which persistent
conditions of material inequity might be addressed in a way that refuses a too-easy
politics of resolution. Stephen Shapiro’s ‘The World-System of Global Gothic, Horror
and Weird’ follows with a framework, grounded in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein,
for reading a cluster of speculative forms related to (and including) the gothic. Shapiro
draws from world-systems thinking to excavate the distinct ideological and political
underpinnings of the gothic, horror and the weird, while also positioning the approach
offered in the chapter as a means for productively rethinking the established histori-
ography of gothic literature. In ‘Economy of Shadows, Work of Death: Necropolitics,
Slavery, Zombi/e’, Fred Botting examines the multidimensional figure of the zombie
in the historical context of globalised capitalism, which is framed in the chapter with
recourse to Achille Mbembe’s conception of the necropolitical. Botting traces a theo-
retical trajectory that runs from the Haitian plantation economy, where the zombi
emerges as a revolutionary figure, to a neoliberal present increasingly characterised
by a condition of generalised zombification, in which ever more facets of existence

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 14 rebecca duncan

are saturated capitalist processes. Maisha Wester’s ‘Gothic and the Black Diaspora’
also turns to the relationship between gothic forms and histories of racialised power
and oppression, examining how Black diasporic writers reappropriate and mobilise
vocabularies related to gothic fiction, in order to register and contest forms of cultural
and epistemic colonisation. Wester highlights how gothic is used in the fiction under
consideration to make visible the limits and contradictions in Eurocentric knowledge,
attending also to the resistant possibilities of the folkloric imaginaries through which
gothic in Black diasporic writing is remade.
In ‘Engendering Globalgothic: The “Hideous Progeny” of Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein’, Monica Germanà foregrounds the significance of gender and sexuality in gothic
fiction that registers and engages global relations and systems. Generatively following the
afterlives of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Germanà’s analysis highlights how the figure of
the composite monster has been taken up across a transregional selection of contempo-
rary fiction to interrogate and imagine beyond vectors of heteropatriarchal power. The
chapter takes care to acknowledge the tandem operation of gendered oppression and
related forms of colonial and environmental violence – intersections that are also central-
ised in Gregory Luke Chwala’s ‘Queering Globalgothic Ecologies’. Reading the work of
Jamaican-American author Michelle Cliff, and drawing on queer theory, ecocriticism and
decolonial thinking, Chwala elaborates a conception of gothic as a lexicon for imagining
decolonial queer ecologies, in which the socio-ecological relationships instantiated under
formal colonialism are both brought to light and reconfigured.
My own chapter, ‘Anthropocene Gothic, Capitalocene Gothic: The Politics of
Ecohorror’, builds on the expanding body of work that identifies gothic and hor-
ror as key idioms for articulating anxieties around unfolding climate breakdown, but
proposes that within the broad category of emergency-related ecogothic production,
different aesthetic impulses are discernible, which belie different climate politics in
each case. Accordingly, the chapter defines Anthropocene and Capitalocene Gothic
aesthetics, excavating and critiquing the distinct origin stories of planetary crisis these
encode. The final chapter in this section, written by Sharae Deckard, also engages
with ecogothic production, approaching this through the lens of extractive cultures
and technologies. From Deckard’s readings, which encompass a diverse and regionally
differentiated body of texts in a range of media, ‘Extractive Gothic’ emerges as fiction
which either hinges on ecophobic tropes that tacitly legitimate the plundering of bio-
physical nature, or – especially in peripheralised or postcolonial regions – operates in
an anti-extractivist register that entails the symbology of exhaustion – of, in Deckard’s
words, ‘draining, sucking and pulverising’.
The second section of the volume, ‘Issues’, includes chapters that identify key
concerns in contemporary globalgothic fiction, beginning with Kevin Corstorphine’s
‘US Imperial Gothic’. Here, Corstorphine demonstrates the value of a gothic studies
approach to US narratives around the invasion and occupation of Iraq, reading across
different media and narrative forms to highlight how horror and gothic can be pressed
into the service of active imperial agendas. Beyond this function, however, the chapter
also considers how such agendas’ weak points and contradictions might be exposed
in criticism and fiction that is sensitive to gothic’s long-standing function as a vocabu-
lary for anxieties around imperial fragility and decline. Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet’s
‘Globalgothic and War’ examines a diverse selection of texts in which militarised con-
flict is addressed via gothic figures and devices, noting that in certain respects gothic

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 introduction 15

literature has always been ‘a child of global war’. Tracing the significance of this point
in the present, the chapter attends to the sinister effects of technological mediation in
the warzone context, the gendered and ecocidal effects of conflict, and the complex
intersection in War Gothic texts of gothic forms with those drawn from other cultural
traditions of the supernatural. In ‘Terrorist Gothic’, Steffen Hantke examines the rela-
tionship between gothic and representations of terrorism in a selection of US popu-
lar culture texts, and also gestures beyond these to other potential areas of analysis.
Taking an approach that underscores symmetries across gothic strategies and narra-
tives of terrorism, the chapter outlines – but also interrogates – gothic constructions of
terrorist activity, noting how these can be mobilised in support of multiple, conflicting
political agendas. Linnie Blake’s ‘Neoliberal Globalgothic: The Trump White House,
the Alt-Right and the Long-Heralded Death of the Dream’ locates gothic production
in the context of rising ethnonationalism, associated with the emergence and legacy
of the Trump regime in the US, itself a conservative political response to the deleteri-
ous effects of decades of neoliberalisation across North America and elsewhere. Blake
reads across a number of US films and narratives to highlight gothic impulses which
appear unable to throw off the ideological infrastructure of the socio-economic status
quo, while also pointing to emerging work that mobilises gothic differently, in an
effort to imagine collective resistance.
Gothic encounters with neoliberal hegemony beyond the United States are exam-
ined in Elsa Bouet’s ‘New Weird Technologies: Subverting Neoliberal Globalisation
through Hybridity’. The chapter identifies a gothic-inflected idiom of the New Weird
in contemporary British and diasporic fiction, and considers how this is deployed to
interrogate globalisation as a deeply uneven, technocratic world order, undergirded
by systems of resource imperialism that replicate colonial histories in the present. In a
chapter that partly shares Bouet’s focus on Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016), Chloé
Germaine combines insights from ecocriticism and ‘new animist thinking’ to examine
a preoccupation with more-than-human lifeworlds visible across a range of diasporic
gothic texts. ‘Uncanny Globalgothic Ecologies: Animate Intimacies’ identifies this
emerging focus in gothic production, but also synthesises an innovative framework for
reading postcolonial ecogothic texts, which draws from accounts of African epistemol-
ogies, alongside those of non-anthropocentric ontologies forged within a European
critical tradition. Also positioning itself in part on ecogothic terrain, Johan Höglund’s
‘Pandemics and Globalgothic’ examines gothic’s relationship to tropes of pandemic
across the full spread of the genre’s history. The chapter identifies three ‘strains’ of
globalgothic pandemic narrative, which – respectively – tack into the logic of empire,
resist coloniality and seek to move beyond the human. Throughout this discussion,
Höglund keeps front and centre the systemic exploitation of certain lives and envi-
ronments from which the emergence of novel pathogens has often been inseparable
– including in the context of Covid-19. Laura R. Kremmel’s ‘Medical Globalgothic:
Organ Harvesting and the Red Market’ similarly emphasises how states of medical
vulnerability apprehended in gothic texts are contoured by vectors of race, gender
and class. Focusing on representations of the global organ trade in gothic fiction,
Kremmel’s chapter distinguishes the fiction under consideration from sanitised narra-
tives of organ ‘donation’. Because these rely on the silence of the exploited body for
their coherence, such discourses are challenged – as Kremmel shows – in gothic texts
that expose the violence of the ‘Red Market’.

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 16 rebecca duncan

‘Modes’, the third section of the volume, assembles chapters that examine differ-
ent formal impulses of globalgothic production, focusing also on historical trajecto-
ries, migrations and disseminations of gothic aesthetics. Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos
opens the section with a chapter entitled ‘Globalgothic Translations and Migrations:
From Britain to Brazil’, which outlines how elements of the gothic novel are trans-
lated into the novelistic tradition that emerges in Brazil after independence from
Portugal, and which seeks to participate in the imagining of a national identity. The
chapter maps out the distinct socio-economic conditions under which gothic is incu-
bated across these two regions, arguing ultimately that gothic elements in the salient
Brazilian fiction articulate local realities – and specifically the institution of slavery –
for which the new national consciousness could not directly account. Also providing
insight into the historical possibilities of globalgothic as a category, Lucie Armitt’s
chapter – ‘Gothic Literary Travel and Global Tourism’ – begins from the premise that,
at least since Radcliffe, gothic has always been centrally concerned with travel. To
address this preoccupation, Armitt examines gothic narratives which stage artificial
and uncanny tourist encounters, framing her analysis with the observation, drawn
from imperial gothic fiction, that a (colonial) traveller might return to the metropole
carrying with them the threatening strangeness they perceive in the colonies. Address-
ing travel writing from the (post)colonial Caribbean, Sofia Aatkar’s chapter – ‘Gothic
and Global Travel Writing’ – considers how elements adapted from, or related to,
gothic imaginaries participate in a project of writing back to the imperial centre. This
strategy unfolds through a demystification of Vodou practices and a defamiliarisation
of figures that populate canonical gothic writing, but is also further complicated and
enriched, as Aatkar argues, in travel writing that mobilises gothic tropes of haunting
to materialise a lived historical connection to the Caribbean.
The construction of belonging is addressed in a different register in Timothy Jones’s
‘Folk Horror and the Globalgothic’, which considers British folk horror narratives
since the 1970s as responses to the local effects of globalisation. Jones shows folk
horror to be a mode reliant on invented tradition, mobilised in the British context
to suggest an autochthonous national identity that supposedly pre-dates the age of
global connection. Noting how this constructed relation lends itself to processes of
othering, Jones concludes by positioning the contemporary rise of folk horror in the
context of the UK’s exit from the European Union – a development that is central also
to the subsequent chapter. In ‘Brexit Gothic’, Roger Luckhurst identifies a selection of
gothic tropes that recur across contemporary English literary production and public
discourse, and which – Luckhurst argues – encode a structure of feeling particular
to the social and political climate in which the 2016 referendum took place. Rather
than reading for Brexit metaphors in contemporary fiction, the chapter thus identifies
Brexit horror as a mobile aesthetic, and outlines how this relates both to gothic as
a mode and to the politics underpinning the movements to leave the EU. In ‘Online
Gothic’, the last chapter in this section, Xavier Aldana Reyes examines a selection of
late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century gothic texts that take the internet as a
key site of horror. The chapter begins by noting that, though it has transformed social
existence on an enormous scale, the rise of the internet and associated technological
developments has taken place at such a pace that these changes, and the new forms of
threat they represent, have yet to be fully processed or assimilated. They are voiced,
however, in Online Gothic, which, as Aldana Reyes shows, is structured by a set of

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 introduction 17

recurring tropes and concerns, including those relating to isolation, surveillance and
‘the irrevocable immediacy made possible by wide bandwidth data transmission’.
The fourth and final section of the volume, ‘Regions and Geographies’, opens with
Rebekah Cumpsty’s account of ‘Gothic and the Global South’. The chapter takes a
productively critical approach to this latter category, noting that – despite its frequent
usage in gothic studies and elsewhere – it carries with it the risk of replicating dis-
courses that problematically essentialise so-called ‘developing’ nations. Cumpsty thus
refines and nuances the terminology in question, ultimately suggesting that reading
gothic fiction in light of the hemispheric divide demands a critical sensitivity to the his-
tories and relations of capitalism and colonialism that shape a given region, and con-
nect it with others. Putting this thesis into practice, the chapter examines a selection
of postcolonial ecogothic tropes, deployed in fiction from the (Southern) frontlines of
planetary emergency to address its unrepresentable scales and temporalities. Enrique
Ajuria Ibarra’s ‘Migration and the Gothic: Border Gothic’ also complicates received
categories for analysis – namely those that descend from conceptions of frictionless
globalisation. Ajuria Ibarra reads across a selection of Mexican fiction, in which the
Mexico-US border is presented as a site of gothic violence and anxiety. Such nar-
ratives, the chapter shows, resist globalgothic readings that prioritise cultural flows
and heightened mobility, because they foreground instead the experiences of those
for whom global interconnections are experienced as detainment or endless waiting.
‘Globalgothic Americas’ are also the focus of the subsequent chapter by Inés Ordiz
and Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno. Subtitled ‘Consuming and Consumed Bodies in
Twenty-First-Century Narratives’, this contribution examines a regionally diverse
selection of American fiction in which gothic forms make visible and interrogate
the gendered production of exploitable lives under neoliberal capitalism. Ordiz and
Casanova-Vizcaíno draw from the work of Sylvia Federici – among other Marxist
feminists – in order to map out a politicised aesthetics of horror, which indexes the
heteropatriarchal violence underpinning the contemporary consumer economy.
In ‘Tropical Gothic: Plantation Ecology, Commodity Frontiers and the Aesthet-
ics of Excess’, Esthie Hugo also considers fiction from Latin America, but places this
region in conversation with the Philippines to examine how notions of ‘the tropical’
descendent from colonial discourse are interrogated in gothic forms. Hugo’s chapter
builds on, but also rethinks, established analyses of ‘tropical gothic’, suggesting that
key tropes characterising such fiction can be understood as registering socio-ecological
anxieties unfolding from the violent (post)colonial transformation of equatorial
regions into sites of primary commodity production. In ‘Asian Gothic: Asian Folklore
and Globalgothic’, Katarzyna Ancuta examines a corpus of literary and cinematic
texts from regions across Asia, highlighting the foundational role in all of these narra-
tives of local folkloric imaginaries. Ancuta’s chapter foregrounds concerns with gender
and ecopolitics, and concludes with a discussion of how a global appetite for Asian
Gothic fiction is reshaping cultural production across this region in the age of digital
streaming services.
The following chapter turns to the geography of the desert – a perhaps unlikely
locus for the gothic imaginary, given, as Rune Graulund points out, the absence in such
spaces of gothic’s signature darkness and decay. In ‘Desert Globalgothic’, Graulund
shows, however, that gothic strategies are nonetheless illuminating in respect of – and
have at times been integral to – the construction of the desert in literary narrative. The

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 18 rebecca duncan

chapter takes in three phases of Desert Gothic production, beginning with the colonial
trope of terra nullius which represses Indigenous presences and ecosystems, and from
there moving on to postcolonial desert fiction in which such presences are retrieved
in uncanny haunting forms. Graulund concludes with an account of Desert Global-
gothic as a planetary imaginary – a terrible forecast of the world to come if practices
of extraction and exploitation are not arrested. Karen Grumberg’s chapter, entitled
‘Queer Gothic Narratives of Palestine in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani and Ayman
Sikseck’s Tishrin’, examines how gothic forms in the two fictions under consideration
are deployed to engage with Israeli and Palestinian identity, functioning to destabilise
and interrogate hegemonised accounts of regional history by drawing attention to the
violent possibilities and limitations of narrative itself. The chapter argues ultimately
that these texts contribute to the queering possibilities of gothic tropes and devices,
exposing complex links between heteronormative patriarchy, national identity and
discourses of the land.
Focusing on the nations of Sweden, Denmark and Norway, Yvonne Leffler’s ‘Nordic
Gothic’ traces out currents in the literatures of this region, which combine tropes drawn
from the canon of anglophone and European gothic with local issues and aesthetic tradi-
tions. Leffler’s chapter outlines a trio of recurrent concerns that structure Nordic Gothic
writing – namely those relating to the welfare state, gender inequality and ecological
destruction – and positions these in relation also to wider processes of globalisation,
of which they can be understood in part to be regional expressions. The last chapter in
this section is written by Barry Murnane, and defines ‘EU Gothic’ as a fictional mode
that responds to tensions within the EU’s history and politico-economic agenda. Key
preoccupations of EU Gothic include nationalist impulses and national traumas, which
both define and resist EU integration, as well as the spectrality of the EU itself, which, as
Murnane shows, is always caught between the national and the post-national. In an
extended engagement with the ‘Greek Weird Wave’, the chapter reads narratives of
familial abuse and transnational vampirism as encoding anxieties around the effects of
austerity and ‘fortress Europe’, and touches on the leveraging of gothic tropes by popu-
list movements from Golden Dawn in Greece to UKIP in the UK. Such gothic figures,
Murnane demonstrates, reveal the contradictions and grim consequences of EU biopower,
and so function critically in respect to the EU as an institution.
Together, the contributions to this volume move decisively beyond the rhetoric
and categories of globalisation, approaching ‘the global’ as inseparable from colonial
history, racialised oppression, heteropatriarchy, the plundering of the biosphere, eth-
nonationalism and inequality on a world scale. In the coda which provides an outlook
for collection, I reflect on how these concerns, and the aesthetics and forms to which
they give rise, might be collected via a new conceptual vocabulary, and consider the
affordances of ‘the planetary’ in this respect. ‘Planetary Gothic’, I suggest, can be
understood as a particular complex of preoccupations and formal strategies – namely
those that excavate an ‘Earth-System unconscious’ which subtends narratives of glo-
balisation. However, the term is also intended in a more open sense, designating a
set of approaches to gothic fiction which locate this in the context of the (racialised,
gendered) transregional relationships that organise human societies and the rest of
nature. Planetary Gothic is in this sense an invitation, extended also to the reader, to
participate in an emerging conversation around the politics and possibilities of gothic
imaginaries, which, as all the contributors here show, constitute a key register for
articulating the challenges of the global – or planetary – present.

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 introduction 19

Notes
1. Walter Rodney’s classic How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) provides an apt exam-
ple here; Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s ‘Dependency and Development in Latin America’
(1972) offers another.
2. A concise overview of structural adjustment can be found in the introduction to Neil Lazarus’s
The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011), especially pp. 8–9.
3. I use this term in the sense intended by Stanley Cohen: ‘a condition, episode or group of
persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests’ (2002, 1). For
an illuminating repurposing of Cohen’s concept in the gothic context, see Maisha Wester’s
article entitled ‘The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century
Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils’ (2022).

References
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Botting, Fred and Justin D. Edwards. 2013. ‘Theorising Globalgothic.’ In Globalgothic, edited
by Glennis Byron, 11–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brennan, Timothy. 2007. ‘Postcolonial Studies and Globalization Theory.’ In The Postcolonial
and the Global, edited by Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley, 37–53. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Byron, Glennis. 2012. ‘Global Gothic.’ In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David
Punter, 369–78. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2013. ‘Introduction.’ In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 1–10. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique. 2015 [1972]. ‘Dependency and Development in Latin America.’
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Wiley-Blackwell.
Cohen, Stanley. 2002 [1972]. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers. London: Routledge.
Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2002. ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millen-
nial Capitalism.’ The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4: 779–805. https://muse.jhu.edu/
article/39105.
De Loughry, Treasa. 2020. The Global Novel and Capitalism in Crisis: Contemporary Literary
Narratives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deckard, Sharae et al. [WReC]. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Federici, Sylvia. 2021 [2004]. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation.
London: Penguin.
Harvey, David. 2005. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Horvat, Srećko. 2021. After the Apocalypse. London: Polity.
Jameson, Fredric. 1984. ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.’ New Left
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fredric-jameson-postmodernism-or-the-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism.
———. 1988. ‘Cognitive Mapping.’ In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 347–60. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois
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Lazarus, Neil. 2004. ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism.’ The South
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———. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism.
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———. 2020. Corona, Climate and Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First
Century. London: Verso. Ebook.
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital.
London: Verso. Ebook.
———. 2016. ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature.’ In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History,
and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 78–115. Oakland: PM Press.
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Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.’ Nepantla:
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Rodney, Walter. 2018 [1972]. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso.
Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.
Shapiro, Stephen. 2008. ‘Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity.’
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Turner, Bryan S. 2010. ‘Theories of Globalization: Issues and Origins.’ In The Routledge Interna-
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3–22. London and New York: Routledge.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System:
Concepts for Comparative Analysis.’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4:
387–415. https://www.jstor.org/stable/178015.
———. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC, and London: Duke
University Press.
Wester, Maisha. 2022. ‘The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-
Century Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils.’ Gothic Studies 24, no. 3, 228–45. https://
doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0139.

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 Part I:
Approaches

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 1

Decolonial Gothic
Sheri-Marie Harrison

T he persona of Louise Bennett-Coverley’s 1966 poem ‘Colonization in Reverse’

describes the arrival of the Windrush generation in England as a ‘joyful news’, but
by the end expresses comedic concern for this mass migration’s potential for creating
‘a devilment a England’ (Bennett 1983, 238). In one sense the source of the mischief
is a struggle for resources. As Bennett-Coverley muses, ‘Oonoo see how life funny, /
Oonoo see da tunabout, / Jamaica live fe box bread / Outa English people mout.’ There
is also mention of the burden on public resources from scenarios in which ‘some [of the
new migrants] will settle down to work / and some will settle fe de dole’ (238). These
humorous lines are an ironic reflection on the extractive character of colonisation,
and how in the immediate period after 1945, with the migration of the Windrush
generation to England, this extractive relationship reverses. In the poem, the Jamaican
speaker displays a comedic sense of satisfaction that after centuries of exploitative
relations, colonial subjects get to migrate to the metropole and benefit directly from
state resources in a manner that was viewed as stealing resources from legitimate
British citizens.
While not a gothic text, ‘Colonization in Reverse’ is certainly a decolonial one, in
the sense of a text that is concerned with the material workings of decolonisation. I
will say more about this shortly, but for now, I begin with Bennett-Coverley’s poem
because I think it reflects an anxiety surrounding invasion and contamination from the
colonies that also finds its way into late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic texts
and continues to characterise the gothic until well into the twenty-first century. Maisha
Wester notes that the gothic is ‘a discourse rather than just a fixed novelistic mode’, a
‘series of tropes and themes used to meditate upon a culture’s various anxieties, par-
ticularly through discourses of Otherness’ (Wester 2012, 229). For H. L. Malchow,
whom Wester is discussing, the gothic is ‘a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety,
blind revulsion, and distancing sensationalism’, a ‘language of terror’ that can also ‘be
found throughout the discourse on racial difference’ (Malchow 1996, 4–5, emphasis
in original). According to Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, this language of terror came into
being in the late eighteenth century: ‘By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize
that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who
would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe,
bring freshness and variety to the genre’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 229). Indeed, ‘[w]ith
the inclusion of the colonial, a new sort of darkness – of race, landscape, erotic desire
and despair – enters the Gothic genre’ (229).
In his Candid Reflections . . . upon the Negro Cause (1772), Edward Long, never far
from the expressions of eighteenth-century anxieties about colonial darkness – anxieties

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 24 sheri-marie harrison

that in turn shape the ideologies and discourses that justify colonisation – articulates
English fears about miscegenation and what it portends for colonial power, the potential
for Black insubordination, and the spread of anti-colonial and anti-religious sentiment
throughout the colonies. These concerns subsequently infuse colonial gothic horror,
whether set in the colonies or, in perhaps the most famous example, the Northern Eng-
lish countryside of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre. Brontë’s novel augurs later devel-
opment in which ‘colonial darkness’ leaves its fixed geographical position elsewhere and
invades the metropole, as in the work published exactly a half-century after Jane Eyre,
Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula (Arata 1990, 634).
This literary history explains the glee with which the persona of Bennett-Coverley’s
poem delivers the ‘joyful news’ that ‘Jamaica people colonizin Englan in reverse’. We
might also consider this glee alongside Jean Rhys’s Antoinette walking down a dark
passage of Thornfield Hall with a flickering candle, thinking ‘[n]ow at last I know why
I was brought here and what I have to do’ (Rhys 2016, 171). Indeed, from the perspec-
tive of the colonised subject, the prospect of reversing colonial extraction, the oppor-
tunity to ‘tun history upside dung’ or burn an English manor to the ground, is both
delightful and decidedly subversive. But if the poem begins joyfully for the colonial
subject, it ends – as I have mentioned – with a reflection on this particular migratory
moment as one of ‘devilment a Englan’, speculating in turn about whether or not the
country that has for so long feared invasion by the darkness it has managed to keep
confined in colonial outposts will survive said invasion. And of course, Thornfield Hall
does not survive Bertha’s imprisonment there.
I should pause here, at the destruction of property acquired via colonial extraction,
to outline the conversations that inform this essay’s understanding of decolonial work.
The decolonial in contemporary scholarship designates a contentious discourse that
seeks to understand matters of sovereignty and personhood beyond traditional dis-
courses of decolonisation associated with postcoloniality and anti-racist theorisations.
According to Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh,

Decoloniality denotes ways of thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with,
but also precede, the colonial enterprise and invasion. It implies the recognition
and undoing of the hierarchical structures of race, gender, heteropatriarchy, and
class that continue to control life, knowledge, spirituality, and thought, structures
that are clearly intertwined with and constitutive of global capitalism and western
modernity. (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 16)

Conversations about the decolonial typically occur within the settler-native-slave

triad. Among the problems decolonial critiques have with postcolonial theorisations,
for example, are the latter’s tendency towards what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call
‘moves to innocence’, which they define as the ‘attempt to reconcile settler guilt and
complicity, and rescue settler futurity’ (Tuck and Yang 2012, 5). In their expansive
discussion of why scholars must see decolonisation beyond its easy, metaphorically
enabled absorption into human rights and civil rights approaches to equity, Tuck and
Yang describe how moves to innocence represent ‘settler [and postcolonial] fantasies
of reconciliation’ and by extension secure settler futurity (5).
Tuck and Yang are criticised by Tapji Garba and Sara-Maria Sorentino, though,
for the ways ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor’ collapses the settler-native-slave

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 decolonial gothic 25

triad into the settler-native dyad, in a manner that ironically reduces slavery itself to
a metaphor. ‘By citing Black scholarship with little and often no elaboration,’ Garba
and Sorentino suggest, ‘Tuck and Yang exemplify how anti-Blackness is theoretically
engulfed by the settler colonial paradigm’ (Garba and Sorentino 2020, 765). ‘Seen as
derivative, rather than essential to the constitution of the triad,’ Garba and Sorentino
write, ‘the figure of the slave is transubstantiated into either a colonized or proto-
settler position. That is, under the weight of the settler colonial structure, the equality
of the triad transmutes into the hierarchy of a binary’ (765). Despite this disagreement
with Tuck and Yang, however, Garba and Sorentino share the former authors’ aver-
sion to resolution. Thus, where Garba and Sorentino hope their observations help
settler colonial studies to ‘move beyond appeals to re-establish conversation en route
to a synthetic resolution of positions’ (777), Tuck and Yang ‘argue that the opportuni-
ties for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across
these efforts’ (2012, 28). This common commitment to non-equivalence is important
to how I understand what makes some gothic texts decolonial in their critiques.
My understanding of the decolonial gothic takes this ‘ethic of incommensura
bility’ as a defining ethos of how such texts explore contemporary fears and anxiety. For
Tuck and Yang, such an ethic ‘guides moves that unsettle innocence, stands in contrast
to aims of reconciliation, which motivates settler moves to innocence. Reconciliation
is about rescuing settler normalcy, about rescuing a settler future.’ Reconciliation, they
suggest, ‘is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will
happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?’
Incommensurability, instead, ‘acknowledges that these questions need not, and perhaps
cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist as a framework’ (2012, 35).
For David Scott, the questions we need to be asking as critics are those that unsettle ‘the
settled settlements of . . . postcolonial sovereignty itself’ (Scott 1999, 204). As an aes-
thetic whose chief vehicle is that which is unsettling, the gothic continues to lend itself
well to the resistant work of incommensurability and unsettlement.
This in part explains why the gothic has also been important to postcolonial discourses.
As Sarah Ilott indicates, ‘postcolonial authors have frequently adopted the Gothic as a
mode well-suited to registering colonial violence and critiquing colonial discourse’ (Ilott
2019, 19). Postcolonial gothic writes back to a body of imperial gothic literature that
supported the colonial project through the othering of colonised peoples. It is about how
the Frankensteinian monster-makers are themselves monstrous. What exactly is regis-
tered in the distinction between the postcolonial gothic and the decolonial gothic, though,
and what is the utility of registering both as discrete – albeit interrelated – entities? To
my mind it is important to register how in the twenty-first century gothic narratives, par-
ticularly those by diasporic writers, have disinvested from linear identarian narratives of
national progression. In its ethos of incommensurability, irresolution and uncertainty, the
decolonial becomes an apt way of signalling this particular disruption within postcolonial
discourses. That is, the decolonial gothic also functions to critique the nationalist invest-
ments of postcolonial discourses. As I hope to demonstrate shortly, genre, both the gothic
and the Bildungsroman in particular, are crucial to this critique because of their centrality
to the history of postcolonial nationalist narratives.
Returning, with all this in mind, to Bennett-Coverley’s poem and the ways it makes
light of a moment when colonial gothic fears are realised, decolonial gothic centres
migration and the persistence of fears surrounding invasion and dispossession. The

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 26 sheri-marie harrison

continued centrality of the haunted house in the gothic genre across centuries meta-
phorises the relations between the foreign and the domestic, with the former persisting
as the source of the horror that invades the latter. Monsters and the uncanny continue
to serve as central vehicles of the decolonial gothic, both functioning in their capacity
to evoke the familiar in a manner that alerts readers to new conditions. The eruption
of horror in the gothic also plays a metafictional role, metaphorically disrupting the
tendency of the postcolonial novel to foreground identarian concerns at the expense
of material ones. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, what distinguishes the deco-
lonial gothic from other gothic forms is its globality.
To the extent that, as Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards suggest, globalisation
‘engenders a context of unbelonging through the ruptures of communities’, the global-
gothic concerns itself first with registering ‘the anxieties that arise from national, social
and subjective dissolution, including an endless media-critical interrogation of identities,
genders, races and classes’ (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23). Additionally, the global-
gothic ‘constructs an otherness that screens out the excess of anxiety while turning the
mirror back on itself . . . globally, darkly, monstrously’ (23). Finally, the ‘[g]lobalgothic
registers the effects after the interpenetration of global and local has rendered the separa-
tion of both poles redundant, thus exploding the myth of pure globality and shredding
the nostalgic fantasy of return to an untrained local culture’ (18). Decolonial gothic texts
work to make visible the decentralised contours of contemporary life, around the world,
for those who exist precariously as a result of conditions that continue to be informed
by colonial power relations. These are the fuzzy and undefined yet powerful conditions
that create refugee and financial crises, enable genocidal ethnonationalism and fascism,
and heat the warming waters of climate change.
While I do not have space in the current essay to give a full aesthetic account
of all the iterations of decolonising gestures in globalgothic texts, I hope through a
discussion of specific gothic tropes (the haunted house, the uncanny, and new and
newly repurposed monsters) to demonstrate the ways the decolonial gothic registers
the anxieties of our present by reflecting the ‘dark and shadowy contours of a new
world order that is mediated, networked, militarized and corporatized but offers no
clear-cut image of itself, flickering between a series of dissolutions and displacements’
(Botting and Edwards 2013, 18). To the extent that the stakes of decoloniality find
their fulfilment in the repatriation of land, the decolonial gothic explores the anxieties
of being dispossessed from the land by invading others who were themselves displaced
and dispossessed in the service of imperialist accumulation.
Where ghosts offered productive sites for postcolonial gothic practices, the contem-
porary moment throws up monsters that are no longer confined to one haunted place
but are migratory. Ilott writes that

what is endemic to the figure of the ghost . . . is that it is rooted in a particular

space or object . . . As such, the ghost is a useful vehicle for unearthing occluded or
repressed histories, but its histories are localized, moored or fixed to a specific place
in a way that forecloses systemic structural critiques. (2019, 28)

The decolonial gothic, by contrast, makes its monsters migratory, in ways that disrupt
the foreclosure of systemic structural critiques in its productive destabilisation of the
opposition between the local and the global.

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 decolonial gothic 27

In contemporary gothic films like Remi Weekes’s His House (2020) and Jayro
Bustamante’s La Llorona (2019), for example, newly repurposed monsters (as Ilott
first describes them) like the Sudanese apeth or night witch and the Latin American
crying woman migrate from the sites of their indigenous origin to places of refuge in
metropolitan centres. In Weekes’s film, the apeth travels with the Sudanese asylum
seekers Rial and her husband Bol, who are resettled in London. We learn over the
course of the film that Rial and Bol secure their escape from their war-torn home
country by snatching a child, Nyagak, from a crowd of other hopeful escapees. The
assumption is that as a family with a child, they should be given a space on an already
crowded bus. As the bus departs the conflicted area they watch as Nyagak’s mother
is murdered as she screams for her child. Nyagak later drowns in the ocean crossing
to Europe, as Bol struggles to save Rial. The apeth travels with them into the state-
sponsored home where they are resettled, demanding of them the return of the flesh
they stole. In Bustamante’s film, meanwhile, La Llorona arrives in Guatemala City
and slips into the home of a former Guatemalan dictator Enrique Monteverde (a char-
acter based on Efraín Ríos Montt), who is on trial for orchestrating the genocide of
native Mayans between 1982 and 1983. Though the general is convicted, the ruling
is later overturned. As members of Monteverde’s family are confined to their homes
in the aftermath of this decision because of mass gatherings of protesters, the general
is haunted at night by the sound of a crying woman. La Llorona invades the home in
order to orchestrate justice of her own for the Indigenous people murdered and bru-
talised by Monteverde’s army. Though set in different parts of the world, with different
historical and political antecedents, both films illustrate the decolonial gothic’s sense of
the horrors of the postcolonial state and its genocidal potential as something that does
not remain safely in place. The mobility of these films’ monsters also represents geopo-
litical continuities in depicting genocide as something simultaneously local and global,
historically specific in each iteration yet widespread as a phenomenon. Weekes’s film
takes this up directly in its final scenes, where even though the apeth has been defeated,
the spirits of others who died in other migrant crossings, the world over, continue to
haunt Bol and Rial’s state-funded house.
What does it mean that even though the monster is vanquished, ghosts remain?
This, I think, offers a precise metaphor for how the decolonial gothic engages with the
anxieties and precarities of our postcolonial present, via an ethic of incommensurabil-
ity and irreconcilability. As already mentioned, among the things that are consistent
across decolonial gothic texts are monsters from localised folklore that migrate from
their places within colonial cultures into sites of colonising power. I examine these
particular travelling monsters to show how globally minded decolonial gothic writ-
ing generates a form of the uncanny that exploits our familiarity with gothic tropes
in order to produce a mode of confusion about the distinction between the real and
the unreal, in a manner that lays bare the material impacts of enduring coloniality in
late-stage capitalism. In derealising existing conditions, they establish the possibility of
thinking beyond taken-for-granted power relations. Like its late-eighteenth- or early-
nineteenth-century predecessor, that is, the contemporary globalgothic both addresses
the legacy of the past in the current moment and helps to clear space for a new social
order – this time not an emergent capitalism competing with the remnants of feudal-
aristocratic society, but a decolonial order in the midst of declining but still powerful,
and thus all the more dangerous, empires.

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 28 sheri-marie harrison

Diasporic artists like Helen Oyeyemi and others employ various iterations of the
spectral to depict the movement and dispossession of people across the globe. Indeed,
this transnational, transmedia body of work might be understood as participating in
a global resurgence of the gothic, one which, critics like Ilott have suggested, marks
a clear break from the politics and aesthetics of twentieth-century postcolonialism.
Postcolonialism, of course, had its own engagements with the gothic – perhaps most
famously Jean Rhys’s 1966 rewriting of Brontë. But such rewriting is, I think, distinct
from the decolonial concerns of the globalgothic. Where the postcolonial gothic sought
to resurface the repressed horrors of the imperial era, decolonial gothic functions as a
way of registering diasporic subjects’ imbrication in a planetary web of violent dispos-
session, formed by the relationships among contemporary nations and global capital-
ism. It is less interested in the horrors wrought by the West, that is, than in clearing
space for what comes after.
It does this by employing the uncanny to self-reflexively defamiliarise what we
think we know about migratory postcolonial subjectivity. More often than not, what
literary critics understand about postcolonial subjectivity comes via narratives that
conflate self-discovery with sovereignty. Decolonial gothic’s self-reflexivity, by con-
trast, critiques discourses of authenticity that conflate self-knowledge with freedom
and autonomy, within contexts where the problems for the formerly colonised are
more material than epistemological. Authors of the postcolonial gothic write back to
a body of imperial gothic literature that supported the colonial project through the
othering of colonised peoples, registering a boomerang effect that renders the monster-
makers themselves monstrous. ‘If’, as Ilott suggests, ‘postcolonial gothic was defined
by its negotiation of epistemic violence (how to speak the unspeakable; how to uncover
repressed histories; how to challenge structures of knowledge that fix the colonized/
enslaved as monstrously Other)’, then the decolonial gothic might be conceived as tak-
ing up the material concerns that continue to shape the putatively postcolonial world
(2019, 22). It approaches these concerns, in large part, by self-reflexively critiquing
the idealistic solutions proposed by postcolonial literature and literary criticism that
centre the nation as the only viable outlet for sovereignty.
In what remains of this chapter, through a more detailed discussion of Helen
Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl and White Is for Witching, I pull together the ideas in the
preceding pages to demonstrate how in these texts Ilott’s sense of ‘new monsters’ or
‘newly repurposed monsters’ and metafictional explorations of the uncanny enable
decolonial engagement (2019, 28). That is, to the extent that ‘decoloniality has a his-
tory, herstory, and praxis of more than 500 years’, La Llorona and the apeth, alongside
Oyeyemi’s mischievous abiku and white soucouyants, taken together denote ‘ways of
thinking, knowing, being, and doing that began with, but also precede, the colonial
enterprise and invasion’ (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 15, 16). In Oyeyemi’s novels,
the presence of menacing child ghosts, haunted houses and a whole family of white
soucouyants, among other creatures, demonstrates not only the fracturing impacts
of nationalism, colonisation and immigration, but also the trauma of globalisation
itself. Postcolonial immigrant fiction’s concerns with identity and alienation are also
significant here. The uncanny in Helen Oyeyemi’s work facilitates what can be read as
inaccessibility in which what we think should be familiar about this work is not at all
familiar. It is almost as though Oyeyemi’s books work actively to baffle their readers,
in large part by employing familiar techniques that seem to elicit predictable paths of

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 decolonial gothic 29

critical analysis but don’t actually have any pay-off. Thus, one might get excited when
one realises that characters recur throughout the short-story collection What Is Yours
Is Not Yours, or that the story is structured by a motif of locks and keys, but then
might feel deflated once one realises that beyond casting disparate stories, characters
and locations as encompassed in the single world of the collection’s pages, there does
not seem to be any larger point to these patterns. But perhaps coherent meaning is not
what we’re supposed to be looking for.
One response to this eschewal of clarity is to question whether or not Oyeyemi’s
writing is any good, but in the spirit of asking different kinds of questions, ones that
favour unsettlement and irreconcilability more, one might also ask about immigrant
fiction’s (in particular Black immigrant fiction’s) reliance on realism.1 This opens up
another set of questions about the aesthetic value judgements that are often affixed to
particular kinds of fiction. And this in turn raises yet another set of questions about
the aesthetic criteria we use to judge fiction, and how these vary according to authors’
biographical particulars – gender, race, sexuality, citizenship – and the fiction’s subject
matter, for example. In the case of Oyeyemi, the identity politics that shape the recep-
tion of work by immigrant women of colour often prescribe specific gendered, raced
and geopolitically oriented political imperatives for their writing. Stories of struggles
with adjustment, alienation and assimilation abound among this cohort from the late
twentieth century forward.
Among the presumptions for immigrant female writing, for example, is the incor-
poration of biographical details, especially in first novels, which lend the authenticity
of experience to fictional narratives. Jamaica Kincaid, for instance, famously uses the
personal struggles between herself and her mother as metaphoric fodder for the struggle
between former colonies of the British metropole. In her early fiction, Oyeyemi seems
to follow this autobiographical convention, but to different ends. Oyeyemi moved with
her parents from Nigeria to London as a child, and much like her protagonist in The
Icarus Girl (2006), Jessamy Harrison, she struggled bitterly with being neither fully
Nigerian nor British. Oyeyemi describes herself as ‘[having] the muddled perspective
of someone who is in a Nigerian cultural framework but not of it, being carried along
by a culture at a distance from its source and its pervading influence’ (Oyeyemi 2005).
Indeed, her representations of Yoruba mythology in this first novel, particularly in
the blurring of the lines between ogbanje and abiku spirits, reflect both this confusion
and frustration with being unwillingly imposed upon by a far-away culture. Critics of
the novel are often concerned with whether or not it is authentic in its treatment of
Yoruba culture and cosmology. For Bruce King, the novel’s ‘hodgepodge of Nigerian
customs’ indicates Oyeyemi’s uncertainty or perhaps even ignorance of Nigerian culture
(2005, 73). For others like Kim Anderson Sasser, it is debatable whether or not this
‘hodgepodge’ is even ‘intentional’ (2014, 191). As Jane Bryce suggests, however – and I
concur – the confusion about Yoruba mythology that is reflected in the novel ‘can be
read as a transformation of sorts’, in how national and cultural authenticity are figured
in contemporary immigrant fiction (Bryce 2008, 59).
I think this is where reading the gothic elements in Oyeyemi’s work is useful for
understanding its transformative functions, particularly as these relate to the man-
ner in which postcolonial writing narrows decolonial prerogatives. Sarah Ilott and
Chloe Buckley, for example, focus on how The Icarus Girl blends the gothic with the
postcolonial Bildungsroman, in a manner that privileges the abject, ‘both in terms of

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 30 sheri-marie harrison

physical abjection mapped onto bodies and places, and in the way writing functions as
abject supplement’ (Ilott and Buckley 2016, 403). More specifically, Ilott and Buckley
suggest, ‘[w]hen bodies, borders, and writing disintegrate, the reading of the novel
becomes a difficult process, one not easily co-opted into a critical discourse that tends
to value a psycho-symbolic reading of the postcolonial gothic Bildungsroman and to
promise a positively transformed postcolonial identity’ (403). Indeed, in its refusal to
offer a comfortably exorcised ghost or a properly assimilated postcolonial subject, The
Icarus Girl, much like His House, ‘is unable to find comforting resolutions, disrupt
oppositional structures, and create a utopian hybrid space or to bring about a unified
sense of self, meaning that it resists a redemptive or cathartic ending’ (403). Moreover,
insofar as ‘the representations of the abject allow for the expression of fear and desire
for stable identification, it does not lead to renewal, reconfiguration, or becoming’
(404). This indeterminacy in subject formation is definitive to the decolonial gothic
because it forestalls the certainties inherent in progressive postcolonial narratives.
The Icarus Girl stalls nationalism’s progressive narratives of becoming through its
portrayal of the psychic crises suffered by a biracial English child – Jessamy – that are at
times facilitated/enabled by her spirit friend Titiola/TillyTilly. We can think of TillyTilly
as a repurposed monster, and I will return to this with more specificity shortly. When
we meet Jessamy, a highly intelligent though troubled eight-year-old girl who lives with
her Nigerian mother and English father in London, she is hiding in a linen cupboard
and ignoring her mother’s calls. We learn that Jessamy hides in the cupboard because
the world outside it ‘made her feel as if she was in a place where everything moved
past too fast, all colours, all people talking and wanting her to say things’ (Oyeyemi
2006, 4). Jessamy finds the world outside the cupboard and the expectations of others –
including her parents – to be overwhelming. While in the cupboard, she says quietly to
herself, ‘I am in the cupboard. She felt that she needed to be saying this so that it would
be real. It was similar to waking up and saying to herself, My name is Jessamy. I am
eight years old’ (3). The cupboard offers her a singular space that is grounded in the
present, where she can affirm herself. She is Jessamy and she is in the cupboard. This
simple state of being contrasts with what she sees as her reality: a half-black, half-white
child who experiences the Nigerian culture she knows little about as long armed and
overbearing, but who also feels guilty about rejecting its suffocating embrace in favour
of Englishness.
As immigrant narratives have taught us, psychic wholeness, for the alienated
protagonist, can only come with the ability to reconcile the various and sometimes
competing facets of self into a singular and autonomous identity – more often than
not a hyphenated one. The inability to resolve what she sees as competing parts of
herself is the source of Jessamy’s ontological struggle. In school, she is given to fits
of screaming – ‘at least one serious tantrum in school per week’ (85). As she tells the
head teacher, ‘Sir, . . . I hate being in that class, but I have to go to school, so I might
as well not complain’ (86). As a classmate surmises, though, ‘Maybe Jessamy has all
these “attacks” because she can’t make up her mind whether she’s black or white!’
(85). Returning to the desire to expel or prevent the invasion of the other that is at
the root of the Western gothic tradition, as a mixed child, Jessamy is the paradox of
the English self and foreign other being embodied in one individual. She cannot be
expelled from the nation because, as Helen Cousins observes in her discussion of the
Yoruba gothic, Jessamy is both the foreign other and the English self. For this reason,

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 decolonial gothic 31

the ‘novel . . . is unable to resolve its crisis of “invasion” by expelling those who
threaten a pure Englishness’ (Cousins 2012, 54).
Whereas in some postcolonial narratives, hybridity functions in a positive and
recuperative way as a mode of accessing inclusion within an unwelcoming nation,
in Oyeyemi’s novel, it is a symbol of immigration’s threat to Englishness. Along with
her tantrums, TillyTilly functions as a doppelgänger, in her manifestation around
Jessamy’s psychic crises. Titiola appears to Jessamy as a little girl at the beginning of
the novel, when Jessamy visits her family in Nigeria for the first time, and she even-
tually shows up in London once they return. No one but Jessamy can see her new
friend. Over the course of the novel, seemingly harmless though magical antics like
entering locked rooms and homes whose occupants cannot see them escalate to acts
of revenge in which TillyTilly ‘gets’ people who make Jessamy angry: her teacher, her
only other friend, Shiv, and even Jessamy’s father after a spanking. But TillyTilly is
not some positive figure of cultural authenticity wreaking the vengeance that Jessamy
cannot. Eventually, TillyTilly takes over Jess’s own body and sends her disembodied
into a dark netherworld of immateriality – the bush – from which the novel implies her
grandfather tries to rescue Jessamy by bringing an ibeji carving to the hospital room
where she lies in a coma after a car accident. The novel ends inconclusively; the reader
doesn’t know definitely if her grandfather’s efforts save her life.
Within Yoruba mythology TillyTilly resembles an abiku, or the spirit of a child
who died before puberty. According to Christopher Ouma, abiku are ‘children who
die and are believed to come back again, tormenting their mothers. They are said to
occupy multiple worlds (the bush, the spirit world, and the earth)’ (Ouma 2014, 188).
After temporarily taking over Jess’s body for the first time, TillyTilly explains her own
presence in Jess’s life by revealing to her that her

twin’s name was Fern. They [Jess’s parents] didn’t get to choose a proper name
for her, a Yoruba name, because she was born already dead, just after you were
born. You have been so empty, Jessy, without your twin; you have had no one to
walk your three worlds with you. I know – I am the same. I have been just like you
for such a long time! But now I am Fern, I am your sister, and you are my twin.
(Oyeyemi 2006, 170)

If the reader were inclined to read the novel through the lens of Yoruba mythology, she
would understand TillyTilly’s presence as a result of not following tradition in Fern’s
interment. But Oyeyemi is not so much after a proper mode of organisation for Jess’s
struggles – whether British, Yoruban or some hyphenated combination of both – as she
is concerned to say that the proper mode does not yet exist.
In the decolonial gothic, doubling and abjection of the sort that Jessamy experiences
function to disrupt the essentialist absolutes upon which nationalist understandings
of self depend. Though she is not Jess’s dead twin Fern, we can nonetheless think of
TillyTilly as Jess’s doppelgänger/double, both through the repetitive name Jessamy
gives her (because the Yoruba name Titiola is hard for her to say) and through the
trope of twins on which the novel’s mystery relies. Doppelgängers or doubles generate
the uncanny, the strange, the mysterious, the unsettling in many gothic narratives.
As Wester tells us, ‘in the British tradition, the uncanny surfaces in a variety of ways
and signals a variety of repressions including drives and desires repressed according

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 32 sheri-marie harrison

to social mandate’ (Wester 2012, 12). For Julia Kristeva, ‘it is not lack of cleanliness
or health that causes abjection, but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does
not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’
(Kristeva 1982, 4). As a state of in-betweenness and ambiguity, abjection is threatening
and thus rejected, yet ironically is also desired – because, as Jerrold Hogle suggests,
what we abject ‘both threaten[s] to reengulf us and promise[s] to return us to our
primal origins’ (Hogle 2002, 15). In the traditional sense of Western gothic, Jessamy’s
mixed-race identity makes her a textbook candidate for abjection.2 The introduction of
TillyTilly as a doppelgänger complicates this, though, in the sense that Jess’s abjection
is the source of her greatest anxieties surrounding belonging; TillyTilly offers her a
position from which she can assert herself in the face of debilitating xenophobia.
In the novel this takes shape in her conflict with Colleen McLain, the child who tells
her she has anxiety attacks because she cannot figure out what race she is. In response
to Colleen’s jibe that Jess’s family is weird because it is made up of an English man and
his immigrant wife, Jessamy retorts with clandestine knowledge she gains while prowl-
ing invisibly in Colleen’s house with TillyTilly: ‘There must be something weird about
your family, Colleen, to make you wet yourself every day, and there must be something
weird about your mum that makes her go berserk about it and push your wet knick-
ers in your face. If I’m weird, you’re weirder, so shut your big, fat, ugly, baby mouth’
(Oyeyemi 2006, 114). With her inflammatory rejoinder, Jessamy challenges Colleen’s
sense of what is abject in family formations, revealing the shaming child abuse Colleen
suffers as a defining contrast for what exactly constitutes destructive familial struc-
tures. But again, it is important to emphasise the ways in which the decolonial gothic
defamiliarises predictable explanations and resolutions in order to highlight the larger
contexts of irreconcilability. In the same way that Jess’s hybridity does not purchase
her any smoother assimilation into either an English or a Nigerian identity, there are
limits to TillyTilly’s ability to facilitate Jess’s transformation into a stabilised sense of
self. At least, to the extent that that is a goal in assimilationist postcolonial narratives.
Which returns us to the function of writing in articulating whole and sovereign
subjects within postcolonial fiction and the ways decolonial gothic narratives like
Oyeyemi’s work to disrupt the certainties and purported possibilities of such narra-
tives, despite the challenges of globalisation’s material inequities. That is, among the
concerns that repurposed monsters like TillyTilly bring to the fore is the role of writ-
ing in framing progressive narratives of sovereignty and belonging. Oyeyemi’s nov-
els in general are often well-contextualised in various literary milieus, reflecting their
concerns with the work of writing and its possibilities for disruption, resolution and
catharsis, particularly in embattled postcolonial contexts. The Icarus Girl, for exam-
ple, announces itself as a gothic text through its epigraph from Emily Dickinson about
being alone in the company of ghosts. In this novel there are actual ghosts and the
ghostly haunting of writing. Jess’s mother Sarah is a writer, and Jessamy herself works,
often feverishly, throughout the novel on poems, haikus and corrections to books that
treat characters shabbily for no reason. Similarly, Jessamy is alerted to TillyTilly’s pres-
ence through writing. In the abandoned boy’s quarters at her grandfather’s house in
Nigeria, ‘on the surface of the tabletop, someone had disturbed the dust. Scrawled in
the center in lopsided lettering were the words “HEllO JessY”’ (Oyeyemi 2006, 44).
If the unexplained appearance of letters on a dusty table in an abandoned building
isn’t unsettling enough, the narrative compounds it by mixing capitalisation. But why

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 decolonial gothic 33

do these different appearances of the written word in the novel matter? Much like
Jessamy scratching out and revising the passages of Alcott’s Little Women that offend
her, TillyTilly’s mis-capitalisation also signals a degradation of writing in the Bakhtinian
sense. And this marks a crucial turn: whereas Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘degradation of
form’ is a destructive force, it is also one of regeneration.
It is here – in the oscillation between degeneration and regeneration – that we can
find the prevailing ethos of the decolonial gothic’s relationship with writing. Where
degradation is typically associated with negative terms such as humiliation, monstros-
ity and ugliness, Bakhtin suggests a paradoxical generative component. ‘To degrade’
form ‘is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously in order to bring forth something
better . . . [Degradation] has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regener-
ating one’ (Bakhtin 2009, 21). In Oyeyemi’s writing, crucially, degraded writing offers
neither remediation nor recovery, but rather the creation of texts that might demon-
strate how, according to Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman, narrative fails ‘those whose terms
of existence are tethered to structural loss – to forms of civil and social death and to
the persistent likelihood of their own untimely demise’ (Abdur-Rahman 2017, 688).
In many ways, Jessamy’s status as abiku – a child born to die – thus parallels ‘the dis-
integration of the Bildungsroman project, as the novel manifests a deep anxiety about
the act of writing’ (Ilott and Buckley 2016, 410). Oyeyemi’s repurposing of the abiku
contrasts with and thus highlights some of the contemporary ways marginality and
vulnerability become naturalised for some subjects, based on race, gender and/or citi-
zenship, and the ways narrative fails these subjects. The decolonial gothic thus opens
a separate, uncanny, yet intervening space where the well-worn and kindred terrains
of alienation and dispossession are depicted as indeterminate, yet instrumental, rather
than easily apprehensible. For the protagonist of The Icarus Girl, this space is a mani-
festation of the multiple in-between spaces she occupies as the mixed-race daughter of
a Nigerian woman and her English husband.
The soucouyant – a shape-shifting vampiric creature from Caribbean folklore – is
another of Oyeyemi’s repurposed monsters in the novel White Is for Witching. As Ilott
suggests, ‘unlike the ghost, [the soucouyant] is associated both through its actions and
its history with journeys, making it more suited to the registering of an increasingly
globalized present and systemic, rather than localized acts of violence’ (Ilott 2019,
28). Whereas in Caribbean literature the soucouyant typically signifies the abject fem-
inine, however, the soucouyants in Oyeyemi’s novel are not what we have come to
think of as abject. To understand the startling significance of whitening soucouyants,
as Oyeyemi does, it is important to address briefly how the soucouyants function
in African diaspora literary discourses. Giselle Liza Anatol, for example, reclaims
the much-maligned soucouyant as a symbol of Black femaleness (Anatol 2015). By
detailing how British texts from the long nineteenth century in particular contribute
to notions of Black womanhood as inherently vampiric, Anatol traces the movements
of this particular vampiric trope across time and distance in order to reveal previously
obscure links among a network of images and ideologies that coalesce around the
Black female subject in resistant and revolutionary ways.
Oyeyemi’s portrayal of a family of white English soucouyants is thus ironically
subversive on the face of it. White Is for Witching not only alludes self-reflexively to
the diaspora literature at the centre of Anatol’s work that claims the soucouyants as
symbolic of resistant Black womanhood, but also participates in a sort of ‘colonization

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 34 sheri-marie harrison

in reverse’. Within the context of the poem’s description of colonial subjects flocking
to the colonial metropole, through its incorporation of the soucouyant into the story
of a missing woman, Oyeyemi traces historical journeys across the globe, as they are
prompted by war, employment or migration – demonstrating in the process that it is
not only ‘tousans’ of Jamaicans who are ‘Englan boun’, but also the monsters once
thought to only reside in the colonies.
White Is for Witching is a beguiling novel that begins with and is ultimately shaped
by three opening questions: ‘Where is Miranda?’, ‘Is Miranda alive?’ and ‘What hap-
pened to Lily Silver?’. After a long bout of mental illness, brought on by her photojour-
nalist mother Lily’s death – which occurs when she is hit by a stray bullet while taking
pictures in Haiti – Miranda disappears. Each question alerts the reader to the mystery
at the centre of the novel, with the final one signalling that Miranda’s maternal gene-
alogy will help us to understand where she is and what happened to her. As they are
posed, the three questions are answered by three different characters who serve as
third-person narrators in the novel: Miranda’s friend from Cambridge and lover Ore
(a Nigerian woman who is adopted by a white English family); Elliot (Miranda’s twin
brother); and Miranda and Elliot’s maternal home, 29 Barton Road. To the question
of ‘where is Miranda?’, Ore says, ‘Miranda Silver is in Dover, in the ground beneath
her mother’s house. / Her throat is blocked with a slice of apple / (to stop her speaking
words that may betray her) / her ears are filled with earth / (to keep her from hear-
ing sounds that will confuse her) / her eyes are closed, but her heart thrums hard like
hummingbird wings’ (Oyeyemi 2014, 1). Meanwhile, to this same question 29 Barton
Road says, ‘Miranda is at home / (homesick, home sick) / Miranda can’t come in today
Miranda has a condition called pica she has eaten a great deal of chalk – she really
can’t help herself – she has been very ill – Miranda has pica she can’t come in today;
she is stretched out inside a wall she is feasting on plaster she has pica’ (3). To the ques-
tion ‘is Miranda alive?’, Ore says, ‘probably not –’ and 29 Barton Road says, ‘She has
wronged / me I will not allow her to live’ (4).
Miranda’s entrapment in the walls of the house of 29 Barton Road bears the
ambiguity of other gothic classics such as Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and
Perkins’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ that explore such themes as mental frailty as a char-
acteristic of womanhood, the ambiguity of suicide, and a kind of living dead confine-
ment inside the literal walls of a house. Indeed, if 124 Bluestone Road in Morrison’s
Beloved is possessed by the rage of a toddler whose mother would rather she die by her
own hands than live under slavery, 29 Barton Road is possessed by the spirit of a xeno-
phobic white nationalism that would rather trap its female progeny within its structure
than allow her to love someone outside of her race. Anna Good, Miranda’s great-
grandmother, loses her husband in World War II – and is the Goodlady, the maternal
spirit that possesses 29 Barton Road. As a young woman, Anna played Britannia in
a school pageant that aired on national television, coming to embody Britannia itself.
But at the end of the twentieth century she finds herself asking, ‘how had Britannia
become embarrassing and dangerous?’ ‘It was the incomers,’ she concludes. ‘They had
twisted it so anything they were not part of was bad’ (135). Anna’s husband dies while
flying a plane to Africa to fight the Germans, and her grief hardens her xenophobia:
‘“I hate them,” she said. “Blackies, Germans, killers, dirty . . . dirty killers. He should
have stayed here with me”’ (137). Her solution to keeping her family safe, predictably
and symbolically, is keeping them inside the house and not allowing foreigners in.

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 decolonial gothic 35

But Lily’s husband, and Elliot and Miranda’s father, Luc, a French incomer himself,
in transforming the house into a bed and breakfast, much like present-day England,
‘keeps letting people in. To keep himself company, probably, because he knows he is
not welcome . . . they shouldn’t be allowed in though, those others, so eventually, I
make them leave’ (137). And we do see the haunted house making others leave – from
the family from Azerbaijan that was employed there in the beginning to Miranda’s
visitor Ore.
When the house – and the Good women who haunt it – sees that Ore is who
Miranda is in love with, though, it expresses racialised revulsion. Even as she grows
sicker and sicker from her continuous consumption of chalk, the house notes, when
Miranda whispers to it that she is in love, ‘we saw who she meant. The squashed nose,
the pillow lips, fist-sized breasts, the reek of fluids from the seam between her legs. The
skin. The skin’ (223). ‘Disgusting,’ it concludes. Further, the house tells us, ‘I would
save Miranda even if I had to break her . . . It would not have taken much to kill
Miranda . . . if she continued as she was that would be soon. Then in the moment after
that I resolved to take her away’ (223–4). And so, we have an answer of sorts to where
Miranda is and what happened to her. At its simplest, Miranda’s pica, which manifests
in her eating chalk, is a disease that literally makes her eat whiteness. Chalk is what
makes the cliffs of Dover – where the novel is set – white. Dover, too, is a gateway
to England. Not to put too fine a point on it, Miranda is ill because she compulsively
consumes and is confined by whiteness. But, like any empire, Miranda, as Britannia’s
white and direct descendant, also craves blackness in the novel. In one of few moments
where Oyeyemi’s symbolism is on the nose, just before Miranda meets Ore, she is
munching on flakes of onyx. We see this too in her desire to bite into Ore’s flesh and
to occupy her skin like a soucouyant does. We also see this less literally in the ways
Black and brown labour underpins the capitalist power of empires. The novel joins
mid-century anxieties surrounding post-war migration to contemporary ones through
its setting in Dover, where there are Kosovan refugees as well as the proximity of the
English Channel and Calais. This isn’t only about continuity, though. It is also about
registering the globalised nature of systemic violence in an implicitly local context.
And what better form to represent the anxieties that attend global transformations via
the movement of commodities and bodies across borders than the gothic?
The gothic convention of the haunted house in Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching,
then, reflects the anxieties of an English nation amidst the contemporary refugee crisis.
It demonstrates how these anxieties are part of a larger historical trajectory that joins
voyeuristic approaches to the ongoing crises in the Haitian nation with colonialisation
and with the global theatres of World War II. In many ways this is the transnational,
transgeographical and transhistorical scope that the decolonial gothic understands is
unassimilable and unresolvable. As Oyeyemi’s metafictional allusions to other classic
gothic narratives and processes of writing make clear, the stakes of the novel also lie
in how narratives tend to flatten these interconnections. As Illot notes, contemporary
gothic literature

bears witness to the changing world of the twenty-first century by registering the dis-
tinctive aftershocks of European colonialism on the contemporary moment. These
aftershocks have included, but are not limited to, the global reach and unequal experi-
ence of the financial crisis of 2007–8; continued struggles for Indigenous sovereignty;

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 36 sheri-marie harrison

the impact of climate change, particularly on the Global South, in generating war and
human migrations; 9/11, the consequent ‘War on Terror’ and increased Islamophobia;
and resurgent nationalisms with their literal and ideological fortification of borders
and associated refugee crises. (Illot 2019, 23)

If there is a singular ethos of the decolonial gothic, it is how to represent all these
things simultaneously, without flattening them, or reducing them to the politics of rec-
onciliation. As I have suggested here, the chief way of doing so is to make the monsters
travel and take up residence in the coloniser’s house.

Notes
1. While I use realism here in opposition to the gothic, it’s important to note Anna Kornbluh’s
recent argument that realism itself has always been less concerned with mimetic repre-
sentation than with imagining new social possibilities; see Kornbluh 2019. In particular,
Kornbluh’s account of materialism as something that takes place within discourse, and is
foundational for any form of social organisation, shapes my own.
2. Ilott and Buckley’s argument, too, hinges on abjection in this novel as a mode of disrupting
the sense of promise that is often inherent to the postcolonial Bildungsroman. What I want
to register here are the ways this is in keeping with decolonial politics.

References
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682–703.
Anatol, Giselle Liza. 2015. The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of
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——— and Chloe Buckley. 2016. ‘“Fragmenting and Becoming Double”: Supplementary Twins
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theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/02/hearafrica05.development2.
———. 2006. The Icarus Girl. New York: Anchor.
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Radford, Clare Louise. 2018. ‘“The Desert Is Our Neighbour”: A Postcolonial Feminist Ethic
of Narrative Encounter in Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox.’ Literature and Theology 32, no. 2:
193–210. https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fry006.
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University Press.
Spooner, Catherine. 2019. ‘Unsettling Feminism: The Savagery of Gothic.’ In The Gothic and
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Stephanou, Aspasia. 2014. ‘Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching and the Discourse of
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Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. ‘Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.’ Decolonization:
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——— and Xavier Aldana Reyes. 2019. ‘Introduction.’ In Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edin-
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 2

The World-System of Global Gothic,

Horror and Weird
Stephen Shapiro

A ny discussion of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird (GoHoW) needs to

address, at least, two basic questions. First, how can we avoid the bias of Amero-
Eurocentrism that considers texts throughout the world only as derivative of preceding
works from the metropolitan core? Second, how can we balance the drive to link a
text to a cluster of other works through similarity of plot or figuration, what might
be called the act of genre-ification, against our desire to give every document its own
specificity of meaning and particularity of historical, social and geographical context?
The intersecting challenges of decolonising and de-derivatising texts may well stand as
the basic problematic for the emerging domain that we are here considering as Global
GoHoW.
The persuasive goal of this chapter is to argue that a world-systems analysis –
outlined in more detail below – ought to be fundamental to any consideration of
GoHoW as one way to answer the above questions. Here I want to briefly outline
what is meant by a world-systems analysis, and then suggest some ways that Global
GoHoW can be considered in terms of its cultural objects of analysis, temporality and
geography through a world-systems approach. I will argue that GoHoW studies still
leans too heavily on a binarised outlook that is a legacy of centrist liberalism and its
false promises of developmental equality. Once we move away from this framework
of othering, we can also perceive a non-linear history of cultural production and realm
of GoHoW creativity beyond the West/North’s metropolitan control. Below I will sug-
gest that world-systems provides a different set of ways of looking at GoHoW, even
‘unthinking’ some otherwise commonly accepted viewpoints. The point here is not to
provide simply ‘new’ outlooks on GoHoW, but to radically and thoroughly transform
them for greater emancipatory action.
World-systems analyses are most well known through the works of Immanuel
Wallerstein and their editorial work on the journals Review (1976–2015) and Journal
of World-Systems Research (1995–present). Though Wallerstein was a prolific and
learned scholar who wrote in an accessible prose, it does nothing to diminish their
achievements to note that readers who focus only on their work will not see the wider
horizon of world-systems approaches. Wallerstein insisted that world-systems was not
a methodology, but a perspective. World-systems approaches are not a mechanism to
deliver relatively predetermined answers, but a way of asking questions. Later in their
career, Wallerstein shifted the emphasis to call world-systems analyses a knowledge
movement to highlight its role as seeking the unthinking of many presuppositions and
frameworks that distort our teaching and research. This unthinking is the result of

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 39

collective efforts by individuals who bond together through shared motivations, rather
than prescribed ideas, and it is an approach, therefore, comfortable with its own ongo-
ing transformation and expansion into new topics (Wallerstein 2012).
Wallerstein and others have given several overviews of world-systems (Hopkins
and Wallerstein 1982; Wallerstein 1983; Wallerstein 1991, 266–272; Shannon 1992;
Goldfrank 2000; Wallerstein 2004; Goldfrank 2014). It primarily arose to confront
ideas of economic development that use a history of social stages in order to pres-
ent the industrialised West/North as the pathfinder for all human experience and a
model that other nations and peoples must follow. Against developmentalism, ‘world-
systems analysis was born as a moral, and in its broadest sense, political, protest’. It
is ‘a protest against the way in which social scientific inquiry was structured for all of
us at its inception in the middle of the nineteenth century’ (Wallerstein 1991, 237).
Consequently, although the keyword was not in common use when Wallerstein wrote,
world-systems analyses are intrinsically decolonising and anti-colonising in purpose, as
they argue against the idea that recently independent nations had to develop economi-
cally and culturally towards the West/North, while also insisting that the epistemological
frameworks and assumptions that structure our way of knowing the world are likewise
compromised by the past’s legacy of inequality. Although the broad camps of Marx’s and
Foucault’s students are often antagonistic to one another, the world-systems knowledge
movement is one space where the insights of both Marx and Foucault can be equally sum-
moned, as it has an account of both capitalist accumulation and knowledge-power as a
technique to control the ‘dangerous classes’ throughout the world. Although Wallerstein’s
comments are usually directed towards the formation of the social sciences, it does not
need much effort to transfer their application to literary and cultural studies, as it, too, is
largely a product of the same nineteenth-century set of prejudices and presuppositions.
Global GoHoW studies may be well placed to help establish a new field, and one that is
significantly different from Euro-American literary studies, which often remains beholden
to the limits placed on it by older frameworks.

Modes of Regime: Mini-System, Empire, Capitalist World-System

World-systems approaches argue that three main kinds of social organisation exist or
have existed: mini-systems and two kinds of world-system, world-empires and world-
economies (primarily the capitalist world-system). Mini-systems contain within them a
single cultural framework and simple divisions of labour. ‘Such systems are found only
in very simple agricultural or hunting and gathering societies’ (Wallerstein 1979, 5),
and they are ‘small both spatially and temporally’ and had ‘no method of recording
their life-history’ (Wallerstein 1991, 231). Wallerstein argues that these groups may
largely exist in the mythological fantasies of anthropologists, as most mini-systems
were actually part of a world-empire, and, in any case, these groups barely exist today.
World-empires were historically the most common social-form. They have a single
political centre, even as they allow their constituent regions a fair amount of cul-
tural autonomy. World-empires have tributary economies that appropriate surpluses
towards the centre through taxation or food and natural resource redistribution from
their subaltern lands. As a result of their reliance on upwards redistribution, they
are vulnerable to middle-level warlords and administrators hiving off funds, and are
fragile in the face of disruptive crises involving famine, disease or the threat of another
rising world-empire, especially when these threaten access to the required sources of

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 40 stephen shapiro

territory-bound, coerced labour. Historically the fall of one world-empire is followed

swiftly by its replacement with another that operates in a similar way, but merely with
a different cast of characters.
In Europe, however, the Roman Empire was not replaced with another strong
world-empire, but a weaker, more administratively decentralised form of rule, one
which is often called feudalism. Yet even this European variant of the world-empire
form fell into a conjunctural crisis from the thirteenth century onwards, due to an
overlaying of ecological pressures, disease, increased military costs to protect against
lordly competitors using these conditions to opportunistically raid each other, and,
consequently, increased peasant revolts, as a response to the greater pressure placed
on agricultural workers to make up for the lost wealth-creation. From this system’s
disassembly, a group of aristocrats and merchants developed a historically new and
different form of social organisation, a world-economy, of which there has only been
one example, the capitalist world-system.
A capitalist world-system is not like a world-empire, which combines multiple
societies within a single political rule. Instead it has multiple societies with multiple
political entities held together within an inter-state system of competition among a
set of leading nations (the ‘core’) that was built upon resources drawn from a set of
structurally subordinated lands and peoples (the ‘peripheries’). This systemic inequality
was created to produce and ensure the continuation of capitalism’s endless accumulation
for accumulation’s sake. A capitalist world-system also creates semiperipheries (from
here on called zemiperipheries, for reasons explained below) in addition to the unequal
exchange between the core and peripheral regions; combines waged and non- or weakly
waged labour (including slavery); creates and recreates status divisions, through the
implementation of racism and sexism (and other forms of discrimination); generates
‘antisystemic movements that simultaneously undermine and reinforce the system’; and
has a ‘pattern of both cyclical rhythms and secular trends’ created by the rise and fall of
profitability intrinsic to its operation (Wallerstein 1991, 267–8).
Yet unlike imperial crises, which replace the same with a different same, capi-
talist crises are resolved by changing the hierarchy of its collective players through
the advent of new technologies that change patterns of labour’s exploitation and
the shape of the world-market’s exchanges. The capitalist world-system is con-
stantly expanding across the globe, since in order to survive it must increasingly
appropriate new zones of labour and natural resources from which to profit. The
expansion of a world-empire, on the other hand, often lays the foundation to its
over-extension and eventual collapse. For Wallerstein, a capitalist world-system
does not mean the planet, but a system that forms its own world, one that may
have an outside, although today little of the planet remains outside or free from the
capitalist world-system’s grasp.
This is a sparse introductory description of world-systems terminology and analy-
ses, but its skeleton offers material enough to consider the utility of a world-systems
knowledge movement for any discussion and treatment of Global GoHoW.

GoHoW’s Objects of Analysis

World-systems adopts Marx’s understanding of historical capitalism as crossing a
threshold from having periodic and short-lasting emergences to its becoming a more
durable system of interlinking parts during the course of the late fifteenth century.

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 41

Following Marx’s notion that capitalism lived through its ‘infancy’ until the last third
of the eighteenth century, when it ‘only attains a full development’ (Marx 2010, 327),
the world-systems knowledge movement sees the onset of the first large-scale capitalist
crisis during the late eighteenth century, when capitalism began to fully consolidate.
This moment is here understood to be likewise the time of emergence of what we largely
consider to be actual GoHoW expressions. As explained below, GoHoW cultural forma-
tions do not have an internal and untroubled development from non- or weakly literate
transmissions (‘oral folklore’) in the early modern period. Instead they appear as part of
the responses to the eighteenth-century crisis within a changing capitalist world-system.
Wallerstein argues that the combined effect of the American, French and Haitian Revolu-
tions, along with the indigenous people’s rebellion in South America associated with Tupac
Amaru II, and others in Ireland and Egypt, established two new social truths (Wallerstein
2003). The first was that ongoing social and historical transformation was now recog-
nised as a normal constant feature. Older beliefs in an eternal time of world-empires, and
dreams of restoring something like the Roman Empire, became untenable after the age
of circumatlantic revolutions and uprising elsewhere. These rebellions emerged not as a
reaction to pre-capitalist formations, but as a response to the limits created by the first
centuries of capitalism’s onset. ‘Liberty, equality, and fraternity is a slogan directed not
against feudalism, but against capitalism’ (Wallerstein 1991, 79).
The second truth was that there would now be the inevitable transfer of power from
aristocratic sovereignty, based on the shock and awe of the monarchy-Church complex,
to democracy and popular rule. A response to these two inescapable transformations
came in the form of three new ‘ideologies’, by which Wallerstein means institutionalised
political tactics to these aforementioned changes, rather than frames of thought and
experience. The first two ideologies were conservatism and (centrist) liberalism. By the
1840s, radicalism (socialism/Marxism) emerged as the third ideology.
The conservative response to the erosion of sovereignty was the attempt to deny and
limit these transformations, especially by glorifying what were considered pre-revolution-
ary institutions, such as the (patriarchal) family; ideas about ‘community’, ‘custom’ and
‘tradition’; religion; and deference to the remaining aristocracies (Wallerstein 1991, 16).
The radical response was to accelerate and amplify change and popular rule, especially
through abrupt breaks, i.e. revolution. Liberalism takes a centrist position as it accepts
the inevitability of popular transformations, but seeks to regulate their tempo in order to
safely manage the pace of change. The chief mechanisms for decelerating the rate of alter-
ation were to be the gradual expansion of voting suffrage and access to higher education,
the institution that certifies inclusion within the newly empowered set of bureaucratic
managers of society. Of these three options, centrist liberalism became so dominant over
time that it forced the other two to adopt and adapt to its position.
Liberalism primarily regulated change by constructing a series of binary oppo-
sitions that often focused on the grounding distinction between citizen subjectivity
and the social death of those considered as exchangeable objects. Yet, as Wallerstein
explains,

when equality became the official norm, then it was suddenly crucial to know who
was in fact included in the ‘all’ who have equal rights, that is, who are the ‘active’ citi-
zens. The more equality was proclaimed as a moral principle, the more obstacles—
juridical, political, economic, and cultural—were instituted to prevent its realization.
The concept, citizen, forced the crystallization and rigidification—both intellectual

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 42 stephen shapiro

and legal—of a long list of binary distinctions which have formed the cultural under-
pinnings of the capitalist world-economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
bourgeois and proletarian, man and woman, adult and minor, breadwinner and
housewife, majority and minority, White and Black, European and non-European,
educated and ignorant, skilled and unskilled, specialist and amateur, scientist and
layman, high culture and low culture, heterosexual and homosexual, normal and
abnormal, able-bodied and disabled, and of course the ur-category which all of these
others imply—civilized and barbarian . . . To be sure, the concept of citizenship was
meant to be liberating, and it did indeed liberate us all from the dead weight of
received hierarchies claiming divine or natural ordination. But the liberation was
only a partial liberation from the disabilities, and the new inclusions made sharper
and more apparent the continuing (and new) exclusions. Universal rights turned
out in actual practice to be somewhat of a linguistic mirage, an oxymoron. The
republic of virtuous equals turned out to require the rejection of the non-virtuous.
(Wallerstein 2011, 146–7)

These distinctions provide a loose mechanism for differentiating Gothic, Horror and
the Weird from one another, even while we acknowledge their overlap, interweaving
and continuities. Each of these categories emerges historically with reference to one of
these ideologies and their own form of resistance to the dominant social structure of
centrist liberalism.
Here the problematic of ‘gothic’ is conservatism’s ideology and conservatism’s
attempt to undermine the liberal individual’s rationality. Gothic often depends on
psychological derangement caused by costumed figures, landscapes and material envi-
ronments (manors) that operate as spectral figurations of an imagined aristocratic
past, where terroir becomes terror. The liberal subject is placed under pressure by
its evaluative cognition’s failure to assert control in the face of the pre-revolutionary
past’s revivification. To say that gothic’s problematic is conservatism is not to insist
that these narratives’ cultural politics are always, or even necessarily, conservative.
Instead, it is to consider that conservatism’s encounter with historical transformation
and popular rule, carried in the key word, modernisation, stands as gothic’s organising
principle and generator of its narratives (Botting 2012).
If gothic stages the confrontation between past authority and liberal expertise, then
horror has a different centre of gravity. For the problematic of horror is liberalism
itself and liberalism’s various attempts to maintain the separation between the citizen
subject and the objects of social death, be these women, children, non-whites, and
so on. If gothic pits the liberal individual’s talent and cognitive acuity against quasi-
aristocratic forces, then horror’s medium is the tortured and bleeding body (Storey
and Shapiro 2022). The body in distress, rather than the confused mind, is highlighted
in horror because liberalism’s binaries depend on forms of embodied exclusions,
where to ‘have’ a body is to be disempowered (as plebeian and proletarian, gendered
non-male, ethno-racialised non-European, and so on) and always to be vulnerable
to having one’s skinside turned out and one’s stuffing splattered across the field of
vision. Horror’s gore reveals an inconvenient truth about liberalism’s claim to oper-
ate on the basis of disembodied universalism. Horror reveals that liberalism’s civil
society depends on a necessary and structural presence of violence, which emerges as
the force dealt to those seeking new inclusion into citizen rights, but also from the fits

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 43

of bitter revenge by those contained within social death. Horror is often described as
emanating from the breakdown of boundaries and presence of otherness (Wood 2018;
Lowenstein 2022). These descriptors, however, are too vague and non-historical, since
horror tales emerge at specific moments when particular constituencies demand inclu-
sion with liberal suffrage. The ‘Final Girl’ stalker and slasher films, for instance, are
linked to the rise of 1960s/70s feminism, and so on (Clover 2015).
If gothic is organised around conservatism, and horror around centrist liberalism,
the weird’s problematic is radicalism’s celebration of the popular mass and change
through revolution. Despite the false etymology of the weird as related to the three
fates’ winding of destiny’s threads, the weird exemplifies awareness of the onset of
historical transformations caused by the rise of the formerly disempowered, and its
theme is not the failure of critical reason or ideals of disembodiment, but the creeping
awareness of liberalism’s inability to stop the onset of collective, revolutionary changes
(Shapiro 2016; Shapiro and Barnard 2017; Shapiro 2021). Unlike gothic or horror, the
weird often emerges alongside speculative fiction’s ‘space operas’ of large-scale forces,
since the weird often stages the dismantling of liberalism’s notion that the individual is
the basic unit for society, rather than a mass collective. Hence the weird often carries
within it the undertones of mass emancipation, so that Cthulhu, for example, can be
seen not merely as a figure of cosmic indifference to humanity, but also as icon of deco-
lonial resentment, where a ‘Black Planet’ strikes back at white settler colonial rule.
Conceptualising GoHoW as a tripartite engagement with conservatism, liberalism
and radicalism offers a better way to balance the presence of a text’s generic con-
versations and its socio-historic particularity. A world-systems framework also helps
to explain why certain kinds of these tales appear at certain times and places, as a
response to specific tensions within the capitalist world-system.

Unthinking Genre and Disciplinary Categories

Such an approach also brings with it an insight into the evaluation of categorisation
of GoHoW as paraliterature or genre. For one feature of liberalism’s dominance was
how it reorganised the university’s machineries of knowledge as the older faculties of
law, theology, medicine and philosophy were ‘disciplined’ so that knowledge became
split into the property of different departments. For the social sciences, politics was
given the State as its domain; economics, the market; history, temporal narratives
of (national) development; sociology, the study of ‘developed’ (Western/Northern)
nations and peoples; anthropology, the study of the non-developed, the ‘rest’ to the
‘West’, and Orientalism, the study of non-European empires that had ‘fallen’ (China,
India and even African empires), where these were separated from Classics, as the
study of ‘European’ empires that had declined. These disciplinary knowledge-domains
each developed its own methodology that was used to legitimise its study (Wallerstein
1991, 96).
Though Wallerstein’s focus was the social sciences, we can note similar forms of
divisions in the humanities. So, for instance, Art History is granted the medium of
the static image; Film and TV, the moving image; and various literature departments,
the textual apparatus buttressing the conflation of territory, language and culture to
establish nationalist imaginary communities. The cultural form that most successfully
housed liberalism’s tensions was the ‘novel’, especially as it yoked individual genius

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 44 stephen shapiro

and private development (Bildung) with public commodification in cultural markets

and nationalist identities. The novel also became the focus of the methodology that
was taken to legitimise literary studies: ‘reading’ and the hermeneutics of interpretive
suspicion. Yet if the consecrated novel comfortably resided overwhelmingly within
liberalism, GoHoW has had a more eccentric position as it variously responds to a
wider spectrum of conservatism, liberalism and progressivism. In this way, GoHoW
has fitted poorly into the normative categories of ‘the novel’ and ‘novel theory’ that
were developed to legitimise liberalism. Here world-systems analyses propose a differ-
ent understanding of works consigned as genre, paraliteratures or pulp. Rather than
considering these works as negative or diminished versions of the single-authored novel
of distinctive uniqueness, GoHoW works appear generic solely because the dominant
methodology of literary interpretation was not designed to handle most works outside
of a liberal horizon.
In this way, genre is not a feature of typological homogeneity, or checklist of for-
mal characteristics, even when such recurrences exist. Genre is the category for works
that do not easily fit into the ideological slots and ‘disciplines’ developed in the wake
of the eighteenth century in response to tensions and conflicts within the capitalist
world-system. From this perspective, GoHoW does not need to be evaluated in con-
trast to the terms of the (realist, naturalist) novel, but as a contemporaneous response
to the emergence and rise of these ideologies themselves. If critics today often resist
treating genre dominantly through allegorical models (x is y, zombies are that), this
reluctance comes because allegory is considered a weak version of the novel’s herme-
neutics and consequently to rely on its tactics seems to be a self-admission of cultural
inferiority. Instead, GoHoW works should not be considered allegorical (even when
allegory is used) because they should not be considered as novelistic, since they do not
placidly internalise and reinforce liberalism’s assumed dominance within the post-
revolutionary ideologies.
Because GoHoW does not fit with the university’s centrist liberal knowledge forma-
tions, these works often likewise fail to remain diligently within a single department,
as their forms often do not easily slot neatly only into the textuality of literary depart-
ments or the visuality of image-based ones. GoHoW’s indiscriminate use of mixed
media is neither a deficiency nor a weakness. Rather, it evidences how GoHoW works
as a set of alternatives that have become difficult to discern because of the overwhelm-
ing dominance of novel-liberalism complex. But rather than see GoHoW as damaged
or inferior to ‘the novel’, we should see it as a resource for perceiving alternative
knowledge perspectives, even if these remain fragmentary and still contained within
the capitalist world-system’s structure and power hierarchies.

GoHoW in the Times of the Capitalist World-System

Why do GoHoW texts often seem to have discernible clusters of appearance? Survey-
ing the GoHoW texts often assigned and taught, even when considering a globally
enlarged field, there often seem to be long passages of relatively fallow production and
then ones of hothouse creation. Tied to this is the awareness that certain figurations
often suddenly appear explosively present and then fade away until they return; zom-
bies are ‘in’ and then they are not, and then they are again. What does a world-systems
analysis have to say about these pulses of GoHoW? The first insight comes more from

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 45

a Raymond Williams-inspired cultural materialism, which would argue that there is

no such thing as a cohesive GoHoW tradition or lineage. One challenge for us has
been the trap of overly formalist pursuits of typological purity, category policing and
boundary supervision that insists on the presence of a prescribed list of textual or
visual elements that texts must have in order to be certified as GoHoW. Rather than
looking at formal elements, cultural materialism favours a more relational analysis as
it instead asks about the relationship of changed experiences within a capitalist world
to cultural registration. Why do certain figurations and narratives become dynamic
and charged with meaning in relation to times of social transformation?
Rather than perceive an uninterrupted tradition that flows from one text to
another, it makes better sense to consider a particular moment as a curation of rela-
tively obsolete or forgotten elements, which resurrects a constellation of symbolic
utterances and then adapts and reorganises them as a way of searching to find an apt
articulation of subjective experience in the moment of their restaging (Shapiro 2014).
Yet as time goes on, and the conditions alter, this cluster of symbols becomes demag-
netised and discarded. When analogous conditions later emerge, it is often the case
that past groups of symbolic interaction that have fallen into relative disuse are taken
up again, especially if the later period has conditions that are similar enough to an
earlier one. For instance, Michael Taussig argues that older examples of devil mythol-
ogy were used by contemporary South American peasants in the mines who were
forced from a peasant mode of production and sent into a capitalist one. Thereafter
‘the subjects crossing that threshold produce devil-beliefs as a means of registering
“the process of the proletarianization of the peasant and to the commoditization of
the peasant’s world”’ (Shapiro 2008, 31–2; Taussig 1980, 18).
Here it helps to review Gramsci’s argument that cultural texts are legible across time
because of their translatability. Gramsci asked why twentieth-century Italian working-
class readers preferred to read nineteenth-century French novels, like Dumas, Balzac,
Sue and Verne, rather than contemporaneous Italian writing (Gramsci 1985, 345–85).
His answer was that Italian labourers found French nineteenth-century texts magnetic
because they treated conditions similar to those the Italians were experiencing in the
twentieth century, while contemporaneous twentieth-century writing in their own lan-
guage was often preoccupied with seeking the approval of international literary elites.
Italians did not read the older French novels because they felt culturally inferior or
because they assumed that they needed to follow French development. Instead, the
experiential lifeworld of an older French time spoke to the conditions of the present.
In like ways, the tales of Euro-American gothic might be taken up elsewhere in the
world, not because of any cultural priority, but simply because the analogous experi-
ences stand as a recognisable index to what others experience in their own situation.
In this way, rather than claiming a smooth, always already linear passage of
GoHoW, it may be more effective to consider it as opportunistically episodic, in the
positive sense of appearing at moments of dense similarities of conditions, but also
used to convey their own times as well (Shapiro 2014). Because no time is exactly the
same as a past period, no unadulterated repetition of past figurations in expression is
possible, and older elements are often altered to register the contemporaneity of crisis.
Hence the zombies of the 1960s add cannibalism to the older depictions, which had
removed mention of cannibalism from earlier accounts of Haitian occult practices, and
zombies become fast in the 1990s (Shapiro 2022).

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 46 stephen shapiro

Here it is important to see that GoHoW texts are not only reactive and fearful of
change, but are also productive and creative responses to crisis. Mark Fisher is known
for amplifying the claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end
of capitalism (Fisher 2009, 1). Yet another perspective is that apocalyptic tales are
ones that, in fact, perceive the truth of capitalism in crisis and respond to it by propos-
ing alternatives. For instance, much recent zombie television reiterates the role of the
so-called platoon movies of the mid-century US. As the mass volunteer army of World
War II brought together American men (mainly, but not solely) from what were still
relatively separated regions, ethnicities and labour occupations, a mode of represen-
tation was needed to make these social changes ‘normal’ and acceptable. In this way
filmic representations of the ‘platoon’ of different identities were a mechanism for
viewers to believe the US as actually a liberal melting pot of pluralist consensus, unlike
the tyranny of homogeneity found in other lands. Cultural diversity was also a key ele-
ment in legitimising post-war American global leadership, especially as a contrast to
the mythology of Soviet socialism as enforced similarity. Today, the zombie apocalypse
films function in a similar fashion as they throw together a seemingly random assort-
ment of survivors in order to show viewers the possibilities of different kinds of race,
class and gender solidarities. The alibi of extreme conditions allows the middle-class
viewer a training ground for accepting other kinds of affiliations and alliances, like
ones with members from the working class, as a way of forwards-looking in a time
when increasing precarity for the middle class is causing them to consider different
kinds of new social allegiances.
In this way a world-systems analysis is useful for understanding GoHoW’s tempo-
ralities. World-systems sees the organic composition of capital as generating recurring
periods of economic expansion and contraction. The most common of these phases is
the rhythmic cycle of the so-called Kondratieff wave of roughly forty to sixty years.
Named after the Soviet economist who first argued for its existence, a Kondratieff
wave is the term given to the recurring unit of mid-term cycles of capitalist boom
and bust. While the primary factors that catalyse the expansion and contraction of
the K-waves remain a topic of debate, all of its proponents acknowledge their peri-
odicity exists as a means of maintaining capital’s structural coherence through crisis
across time. The commonly accepted dates for transitions between K-waves reveal a
close correlation to the times of renewed GoHoW production (Wallerstein 1974). One
reading of this pairing would then be that GoHoW emerges primarily at times when
capital’s rhythmic alterations force changes and increase pressures within the capitalist
world-system (Shapiro 2008).
Beyond the K-waves, another time unit has been the so-called hegemonic cycles of
about 100 years in length that trace a single nation state’s rise and fall as a leading capi-
talist land. Such an approach is most well known through Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long
Twentieth Century wherein Arrighi compares fifteenth-century Genoa and Venice to
sixteenth-century Spain, seventeenth-century United Netherlands, nineteenth-century
Britain and twentieth-century USA (Arrighi 1994). This approach, however, may be
less useful for Global GoHoW for several reasons. First, as it extends backwards to
the fifteenth century, we would be obligated to consider the advent of GoHoW far
before the eighteenth century, and this produces argumentative incompatibilities with
the approach described above. Second, the model also has difficulty in explaining why
some hegemonic nations have recognisable deep investments in GoHoW productions,

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 47

such as Britain and the US, while others, like Genoa and the Netherlands, do not, or
at least, not to the degree and density of the others. Finally, the framework has not
yet been proven to function beyond its European limits, especially as it repeats the
sequence that Marx listed in the first volume of Capital. Yet in the draft notebooks
for Capital, Marx had also included Constantinople (Istanbul) as a place of capitalist
manufacturing (Marx 2010, 328). Why Marx left this city out in the final version is
unclear, but it suggests his initial understanding of capital’s emergence beyond Chris-
tian Europe. Hegemonic cycles criticism, however, has not yet shown it can similarly
escape the pull of Eurocentrism.
A final, even longer, time period is the ‘secular trend’ of roughly 200 years. Waller-
stein argued that one such trend began in the late eighteenth century, and is now
coming to an end. If we are entering a new secular trend that can be described as
post-centrist liberalism, then the cultural functions associated with centrist liberal-
ism, conservatism and radicalism will also need to change. Above I have suggested
that aspects of GoHoW, and horror in particular, have focused on tensions within
liberalism’s division between the citizen subject and the object bearing social death.
If that division is collapsing, then it suggests one reason why contemporary – and
global – GoHoW genuinely feels different from how it has in the past. For one of
the more noteworthy ongoing events is that genres previously dominated throughout
the twentieth century by white, heterosexual and male-identified creators and con-
sumers have undergone a radical revision as the centre of gravity has passed to a far
greater involvement, if not dominance, by women, the gender-expansive and people
of colour, including those in regions outside of North America and Europe. In this
cultural revaluation, GoHoW studies will need to address the question of what kind
of relationship there will be to its former productions. Without hazarding any predic-
tion, we might initially say that GoHoW will have significantly different audiences
and creative procedures than it has had in the past, and that this, in turn, will require
new critical approaches, such as those explored elsewhere in this edition.

GoHoW’s Geography within the Capitalist World-System

Is there a cultural geography for GoHoW? A world-systems approach involving the
presence of a core, peripheries and zemiperipheries suggests that there is. For world-
systems approaches, the distinction between the core and the peripheries is relatively
easy to perceive. The core is not a single nation state (even if a particular one may
clearly be a leading hegemon), but a cluster of nation states that recognise each other’s
sovereignty over their policed borders, enclosed territorial subjects and commodity
exchanges. This is a region typified by relatively highly waged workers; heterogeneity
of commodities; labour processes that are often ‘value-added’ through secondary fin-
ishing, informatics and marketing; and a comparatively strong State with fiat money,
bureaucratic oversight and established educational institutions. These core nation
states are often called ‘the West’ (even when nations like Japan are included) or ‘the
North’, and so on.
The peripheries are often regions that have been colonised and are located in the
‘Global South’ or the ‘rest’ (outside the ‘West’). These are regions with weak State
bureaucracies, limited trading options (that are usually determined by their former
coloniser) and lower-waged work in monocultural crop production or mineral or

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 48 stephen shapiro

energy extractive industries. Yet a world-systems approach differs radically from

other kinds of core-periphery or metropole-(post)colony approaches as it depends
on a third category, the semiperiphery (here called zemiperiphery). Wallerstein con-
siders the zemiperiphery to contain a mixture of core-like and periphery-like pro-
ductions, but not to have its own distinctive production process. Furthermore, the
zemiperipheries are often the regions that are given the task of enacting the core’s
dictates on the peripheries as core nations do not wish to ‘dirty their hands’ by doing
it themselves. These tasks are accepted by the zemiperipheries because individual
members hope to become promoted to core status, even as they fear falling back into
a peripheral one.
Yet, in contrast to Wallerstein’s initial definition, these regions might be thought of
differently than as a ‘semi’ simply in-between the core and the periphery. They can be
reconsidered in at least three ways captured by renaming them as zemiperipheries. First,
the zemiperipheries can be seen as locales of heightened socio-cultural production.
While modernisation studies has traditionally focused on core metropoles, it is rather
the zemiperipheries that are the zones of the advent of the new (Shapiro 2008; Shapiro
and Barnard 2017). On the one hand, the zemiperipheries are the regions where weakly
literate folklore from the hinterlands meets the advanced communication and distribu-
tion networks of the core as a result of the movement of peoples from the hinterlands
into zemiperipheral ports and harbour towns, and new cultural figurations are required
to enable the catachresis of a periphery and core. For example, Count Dracula lands
not in core London, but in zemiperipheral Whitby. If the zemiperipheries are the cotter
pins and shock absorbers of tensions within the world-system, then when the world-
system alters its shape during K-wave transitions, the zemiperipheries become the zones
that bear the greatest tension as they must keep the world-system from snapping under
the pressures of alteration. In these times, the zemiperipheries develop new cultural
registrations in advance of the cores, as they first experience the required shape of the
world-system’s new configuration before either the core or the peripheries. As new nar-
ratives are necessary to suture together the world-system’s commodity chains, it is often
through the revision of generic tales that we first see how the world-system’s agents use
the past for resources of expression to imagine the incipient future.
The second reason to focus on the zemiperipheries is that while the zemiperipher-
ies connect core and periphery, they also form a circulatory network unto itself that
communicates with all the other zemiperipheral nodes. Hence culture circulates not
only between a core and its peripheries, but also laterally from one zemiperiphery to
another. Hence a core can receive culture from a periphery that is not its traditional
one (from colonisation) as it has been transmitted via the zemiperipheral network.
This is how culture actually becomes ‘globalised’, not directly from the cores, but
laterally through the mediation of the zemiperipheries.
The third aspect of the zemiperiphery is that while it may not have a ‘distinctively’ dif-
ferent set of production processes, the zemiperipheries do tend to have labour processes
that have a higher concentration of ‘household’ conditions that combine a greater mix-
ture of waged, weakly waged and unwaged labour than is found in either the core or the
peripheries. Since zemiperipheral household labour is highly gendered and racialised, it
can be argued that the modern conceptions of race, sex-gender and other status-identities
emerge primarily in the zemiperipheries. Similarly, tales of terror about these identities
likewise come out of the zemiperipheries before they are received in the core.

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 49

These three aspects have significant effects on how we approach the question
of Global GoHoW in a non-Eurocentric or developmentalist fashion. If GoHoW
responds to alterations in the world-system, then it is the global zemiperipheries, not
the core, that are the forge of GoHoW. An illustration of this claim comes with Franco
Moretti’s charting of the locations mentioned in late-eighteenth-century gothic tales
(Moretti 1998, 16). Moretti’s chart shows the presence of a zemiperipheral arc for
anglophone (England-centric) gothic that locates tales in the neighbouring zemiper-
ipheries of Germany, Scotland and the colonial and newly independent United States.
One explanation for this zemiperipheralisation is that competitive tensions between
core nations are rarely expressed directly, but are displaced on to the zemiperipheries.
This projection occurs because the zemiperipheries are the zones of deposit for inter-
core tensions as well as the main locations of GoHoW productions that also register
the zemiperiphery’s own concerns.
The late-eighteenth-century gothic tales tend not to emerge in those nations in
which (bourgeois) revolutionary upheavals actually occur, despite Ronald Paulson’s
argument that gothic is a French response to its own revolution (Paulson 1983).
Rather, as suggested above, gothic tales are often created in regions with a weak bour-
geoisie that is close enough to witness middle-class ascent and the overthrow of the
aristocracy occurring elsewhere, like in France, but is not itself powerful enough to
repeat this victory over conservative interests in their own regions. The frustration
at being so close, yet so far from the establishment of liberal centrism, such as in the
zemiperipheries of Scotland, Germany and even the fragile newly independent US,
means that GoHoW emerges as an index of these regions’ thwarted desire for a more
thorough (bourgeois) transformation of their societies.
Here the zemiperiphery functions in ways similar to Gregory Bateson’s and
R. D. Laing and Aaron Esterson’s notion of the double-bind as a way of understand-
ing the social conditions for schizophrenia (whether or not this model has any actual
clinical relevance) (Bateson et al. 1956; Laing and Esterson 1964). Bateson, Laing and
Esterson argued that schizophrenia emerges when subjects face contradictory demands
for actions in order to be rewarded with love. Under these conditions, individuals
strategically, with various degrees of self-awareness, divide their self by splitting the
psyche into parts, in order for each fragment to be used to satisfy different demands.
Hence, if Scotland becomes a chief generator of GoHoW, this is the result of a
zemiperipheral registration of the contradictory desire to participate in a modernising
Enlightenment that is countered by the recognition that these movements are brought
into Scotland by colonising English authorities. On the other hand, the desire to be
free of the English crown cannot easily resort to Scottish nationalism, since that is still
marked by otherwise distasteful and desired to be made obsolete aristocratic para-
phernalia (clans, kilts, etc.). As Scottish creators are caught in the riptide between
competing and mutually exclusive identities, it is not surprising that figures associated
with the region produce Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type narratives. Or similarly that
Irish refugee Oscar Wilde turns to GoHoW, in tales like The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890/91), to convey the claustrophobic experience of the sexual closet, even in what
was otherwise meant to be liberating London.
If zemiperipheral GoHoW is almost a tautology, this claim may also explain why
varieties often emerge in the recently decolonised lands that have similar competing
wishes to be simultaneously national and international, even when participation within

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 50 stephen shapiro

a capitalist world-system throws a recently decolonised nation back into a system that
is still dominated by former imperial powers. Or why women, people of colour and
non-heterosexual identifying writers here turned to GoHoW to register the desire to
achieve citizen equality and disembodiment, while also insisting on representing the
historical trauma that their bodies have suffered. Slasher films can be read as a para-
doxical expression by groups, like women, who experience neither core citizenship nor
peripheral social death, but a zemiperipheral in-betweenness.
One other aspect of world-system cultural geography that pertains to Global GoHoW
is the recognition that these cartographies should not be seen as homogeneous within a
nation state. At each geographic level, a version of core-zemiperiphery-periphery con-
stellations exists, so that zemiperipheral experiences can be found even within the core
nation states. If a standard formal requirement for many GoHoW tales is the introduc-
tory need to position their characters outside of or away from communicative grids that
may provide succour, these contact voids can be seen as fulfilling the formal necessity of
an embedded zemiperiphery, combining the natural and supernatural in order to convey
the links between the core and peripheries. If questions of sex-gender, ethno-racial dis-
tinctions and other forms of ability are often foregrounded within GoHoW, this is also
an indication of the zemiperipheral matrix that highlights the presence of household
labour, weakly waged and super-exploited even within the cores.
The recognition of nested zemiperipheries can reorient our perspectives on GoHoW
in other ways. For instance, an earlier binary model of core and periphery argued that
American Southern Gothic was intrinsically the result of the core capitalist North’s
modernising society of waged-labour confrontation with the peripheral South’s obso-
lete reliance on slave labour. This dominant model has been challenged in two substan-
tive ways. First, the new history of American capitalism has overturned the simplistic
assignment of capitalist modernity to the North and faux feudalism to the South
(Beckert 2014; Baptist 2014). We now better understand how the cotton commodity
chain was rightly entangled with global capitalist markets, so that the Civil War is
seen less as capitalism’s supersession of the non- or weakly capitalist South than as the
confrontation between two variants of zemiperipheral capitalism, a fight that ended
with the North’s rise to eventual core status by pushing the South further down the
ranks of the zemiperiphery.
Hence, the older framework for Southern Gothic is made untenable when we situate
the American South not as a periphery, but as a zemiperiphery. But if the world-system’s
frame of core and zemiperiphery requires the structural presence of a periphery, then
where is this element to be found? The answer, of course, is the Caribbean generally
and the figure of Haiti, and its revolution, specifically. Southern Gothic as a category
becomes more viable when it is recognised that the South was caught in the pincer
movement between the North and continual fears of a Black revolution from Haiti that
would be carried out on Southern soil through the access portal of New Orleans. The
achievement of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (originally titled Dark House)
lies in how he uses the figure of Sutpen to indicate the fear of the Haitian Revolution on
American territory by Sutpen’s compulsive re-enactment on his American plantation of
his prior hand-to-hand combat against uprising Haitian slaves in the Caribbean.
In this sense, a world-systems approach can explain Faulkner’s relevance for South
American writers. South American writers do not approach Faulkner as a figure of the
superior ‘North’ that must be emulated. Instead, they see in Faulkner a writer who has

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 the world-system of global gothic, horror and weird 51

illustrated the conditions of a zemiperiphery trapped between the capitalist North and the
Haitian Revolution (now configured for later South Americans as the Cuban Revolution
of Fidel and Che). In an analogous fashion, Faulkner’s GoHoW also finds magnetic attrac-
tion in post-war Europe caught between the US and the USSR. Faulkner’s pre-eminence
in the post-war canon is here conceived less as a figure of American economic hegemony
than as a usable resource for all zemiperipheral writers. In this way, if GoHoW becomes
produced throughout the globe, it should not be seen as evidence of Euro-American pri-
ority and influence, but of how older GoHoW tales are deployed to convey contempora-
neous experience of peoples throughout the capitalist world-system. GoHoW studies can
enable a decolonial and anti-colonial academy by learning to unthink some of its initial
predicates that helped to establish whatever hard-fought-for authority it holds today.
Challenging these initiating claims for GoHoW may be painful at first, but discomfort, as
every GoHoW tale tells us, is the path forwards.
I have briefly charted out some uses of the world-systems knowledge movement for
Global GoHoW. These are, however, merely first steps and far more work and discus-
sion is necessary. In this project, as with all other kinds of collective intellectual and
social endeavours, we make the road by walking.

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Gothic Studies 10, no. 1: 24–47.
———. 2014. ‘Zombie Health Care.’ In The Year’s Work at the Zombie Research Center, edited
by Edward P. Comentale and Aaron Jaffe, 193–226. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. 2016. ‘The Weird’s World-System: The Long Spiral and Literary-Cultural Studies.’
Paradoxa 28: 256–77.
———. 2021. ‘Woke Weird and the Cultural Politics of Camp Transformation.’ In The American
Weird: Concept and Medium, edited by Julius Greve and Florian Zappe, 55–71. London:
Bloomsbury.
———. 2022. ‘Decolonizing the Zombie: I Walked with a Zombie’s Critique of Centrist
Liberalism.’ In Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film,
and Media, edited by Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas and Stephen Shapiro, 40–58.
London: Bloomsbury.
——— and Philip Barnard. 2017. Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-
Systems Culture. London: Bloomsbury.
Storey, Mark and Stephen Shapiro. 2022. ‘Introduction: American Horror: Genre and History.’
In The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark
Storey, 1–11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taussig, Michael T. 1980. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins
of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press.
———. 1979. The Capitalist World-Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 1983. Historical Capitalism. London: Verso.
———. 1991. Unthinking Social Science: The Limits of Nineteenth-Century Paradigms.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
———. 2003. ‘Citizens All? Citizens Some! The Making of the Citizen.’ Comparative Studies in
Society and History 45, no. 4: 650–79.
———. 2004. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Durham, NC, and London: Duke
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———. 2011. The Modern World-System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914.
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———. 2012. ‘World-Systems Analysis as a Knowledge Movement.’ In Routledge Handbook of
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 3

Economy of Shadows, Work of Death:

Necropolitics, Slavery, Zombi/e
Fred Botting

Écoutez monde blanc

Les salves de nos morts
Écoutez ma voix de zombie
En l’honneur de nos morts
(René Depestre, ‘Cap’tain Zombi’)

Play of Shadows

N ecropolitics casts shadows on modern biopolitical orders, a darkness in pow-

ers of light, death permeating knowledge of life. The necessary antithesis to and
stain upon calculations promoting the health, hygiene and vitality of populations, nec-
ropolitics arises when life protects itself at any cost (Foucault 1976, 137). Death condi-
tions biopower’s emergence, the point at which the sovereign right to take life and let
live is displaced in favour of ‘making live and letting die’, an imperative ‘to foster life or
disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 2003b, 247; 1976, 136–8). Calibrating life
in systems of measurement, control, forecasting and demographics, biopower embraces
science, politics and society and is ‘an indispensable element in the history of capitalism’
(Foucault 1976, 140–1). Marginalised, death never disappears, becoming ‘something
permanent’ that gnaws at life and serves as a justification for the ‘murderous function
of the State’ (Foucault 1976, 138; 2003b, 244, 256). Informing decisions on ethics,
research, investment and training, biopower inhabits every aspect of modern existence:
policing borders and disciplinary norms; activating the sovereign extra-legal powers of
a ‘state of exception’ against real and perceived threats of invasion, terror or infection.
Shadowy, faceless and even fictionalised enemies sustain the urgency of exceptionality,
doubling similarly crepuscular and spectral powers of biopolitical sovereignty (Hardt
and Negri 2000, 2; 2006, 7; Mbembe 2019, 70). Distinctions between life and death,
biopolitics and necropolitics are neither fixed nor secure: ‘bios’ can readily turn into
‘thanatos’ (Agamben 1999, 82, 131). Some lives have value and can be sacrificed, while
others may be killed: ‘bios’ (life rendered meaningful in political and symbolic terms)
and ‘zoe’ (‘bare life’ excluded from value and meaning) continually remodulate each
other without external or transcendent authority in a ‘zone of indistinction’ that is also
a ‘shadow ground’ (Agamben 1998, 2, 105–6).
Shadows of, between and within life and death outline the operations of biopower
and its necropolitical double. Mushroom clouds, mass graves and deadly organisms

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 54 fred botting

mark extensions of biopolitics, while colonial occupation and slavery test its organ-
ising principles. For Achille Mbembe, the slave trade presented the ‘nocturnal face
of capitalism’ and the ‘baptismal fonts of modernity’ (2017, 127, 13). Its mecha-
nisms serve production and manifest a ‘state of exception’ negating personhood and
divesting bodies of autonomy, humanity and rights to become the ‘perfect figure of a
shadow’ (Mbembe 2019, 74). Colonised peoples are turned into ‘shadowy creatures’
and ‘dead souls’ by the ‘human’ colonisers whose humanity and mastery is established
on the basis of monstrosity and slavery. Shadows, however, stir in times of national
liberation, inverting, so Jean-Paul Sartre argues, the blank image of humanity and
monstrosity: ‘in these shadows from whence a new dawn will break, it is you who are
the zombies’ (Fanon 2001, 11–12).
No one escapes biopolitics or its necropolitical shadows: negated – ‘not a man’ –
the black man, according to Frantz Fanon, is situated in a ‘zone of nonbeing’, not
properly alive, without recognition and without dignity (Fanon 1986, 10). Just as life
is reflected in respect of death or raw life, and mastery in regard to slavery, black is
defined in subaltern, negative relation to white: ‘the Negro is not. Any more than the
white man’ (Fanon 1986, 120, 231). Negation divests the other of humanity, history
and reality, simultaneously stripping colonisers of any assurances of self and substance.
The slave becomes the ‘ghost’ of modernity, itself a nocturnal and spectralising regime,
‘a phantom-like world of horrors’ (Mbembe 2017, 129; 2019, 75). With colonialism
and slavery, a ‘play of shadows’ shrouds everything: representation and devastation
collide and collude in an insubstantial realm of nightmare and horror where selves
are doubled and reduced to things and figuration only intimates more terrible ghostly
powers beyond (Mbembe 2019, 119; see also 2017, 138–9; 2001, 145–6). Power
works in and with shadows, ‘acquired and conserved owing to its capacity to create
changing relations with the half-world of silhouettes, or with the world of doubles’
(Mbembe 2017, 131). Like Marx’s phantasmagoria, wherein commodities become
animated and working-bodies are reduced to soulless thing-machines (‘wage-slaves’),
the play of shadows extends from the slave trade to colonialism and all other realities,
cultures and histories.
With biopower, the racism serving colonisation, capital and commerce penetrates
modernity: ‘the ever-present shadow hovering over Western political thought and
practice’ (Mbembe 2019, 71). Transportation and plantation removed bodies from
legal and social ties to be no more than things of back-breaking systems of production.
‘Enlightened’ philosophy enacted a range of strategies that effectively occluded slavery,
‘veiling’ its economic and social determination (Mbembe 2017, 67). Rousseau and
Voltaire, philosophically opposed to the slave trade while averting their eyes from the
ongoing traffic in bodies, made slavery ‘a metaphor for the condition of human beings
in modern European society’ (Mbembe 2017, 67). Hegel too (Buck-Morss 2009).
Silence shadows slavery and the humanity it informs: ‘the more European merchants
and mercenaries bought and conquered other men and women, the more European
philosophers wrote and talked about Man’ (Trouillot 1995, 75). Though becoming a
‘root metaphor’ of Enlightenment thought, there was no acknowledgement of black
slaves (even as they declared their own freedom in Haiti) (Buck-Morss 2009, 21).
Slavery became a metaphor and served as the negative of an ideology of free labour,
its difference crucial to the ‘fiction’ of voluntary servitude (Buck-Morss 2009, 100).
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, in which human consciousness establishes itself in a

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 economy of shadows, work of death 55

life and death struggle over animal life, exemplifies philosophical strategies of occul-
tation. The dialectic also manifests trajectories which disrupt self-consciousness and
mastery. Alexandre Kojève’s commentary draws out reciprocity and imbalance in the
relationship between master and slave. Retreating from death and ceding recognition
and desire to the master, the slave is left to work while the master enjoys the fruits of
the other’s labour. Without the recognition that comes with risking one’s animal life,
the slave remains less than human, a ‘living corpse’ whose consciousness ‘exists in the
concrete form of thingness’ (Kojève 1969, 18). While the result of the struggle suppos-
edly distinguishes the one who consumes and enjoys from the other that serves, their
interdependence means the master can only be recognised by a slave in a ‘one-sided’
relation (Kojève 1969, 17–18). In contrast, the slave, condemned to work, thus acting
on the world and negating nature, is able to transform him or herself. Here, the slave
finds a capacity to become human: work ‘forms-and-educates’, ‘civilizes’; ‘frees’ and
‘humanizes’ (Kojève 1969, 24, 29). The living corpse, however, marks an impasse in
dialectical resolution. Unlike the colonial instantiation of mastery and slavery, the liv-
ing corpse, in line with Fanon’s rejection of Hegelian thinking, manifests slave work as
neither freeing nor humanising: the master laughs at rather than recognises the slave,
the latter ‘in no way identifiable with the slave who loses himself in the object and
finds in his work the source of his liberation’ (Fanon 1986, 173). Nonetheless the slave
encounters the ‘naked declivity’ of rawest existence from which ‘authentic upheaval’
is possible (Fanon 1986, 10). Upheaval and revolution come from a denuded zone
of consciousness and being, identifiable with neither master nor slave. In relation to
the figure of the living corpse, or to the zombis accompanying successful revolution,
the conditions of a different form of sovereignty appear along with a different rela-
tion to humanity, work and freedom. Not tied to mastery or production, it manifests
a complete refusal to be subordinated. Against sovereignty as biopolitical exception,
Mbembe returns to Hegelian mastery to counter the way its subjectivity and spirit are
bound to slavish work and defined by a politics in which death ‘lives a human life’
(2019, 68). He opposes this economised form of death to one understood in terms of
vital, exuberant expenditure and radical negativity outside utilitarian or profitable
ends. The economy of death, restricted to production and accumulation, only values
things it can use, exploit or sell; it requires human bodies as things, tools and machine
appendages to be drained of life and energy and left as husks or shadows.
Figures of gothic fiction seem unequivocally necropolitical in form and effect.
Death is everywhere, everything: ghosts, shadows, monsters stage death’s mysteriously
over-natural return in modernity. Associated with a childish or primitive past sur-
mounted by civilisation and morality, gothic figures nonetheless remain resolutely of
their times, modern inventions manufactured in and for a world of commerce, prog-
ress and reason (and colonialism and slavery), images conjuring up, fending off, yet
endlessly promoting the work of death. They inhabit, disclose and screen off zones of
indistinction on which biopolitical determination rests. A ‘shadow ground’, it teems
with monstrous shapes delineating the ‘double exception’ that is ‘homo sacer’: sacred
and accursed humanity exists in the divisions between human and divine, profane and
religious worlds, constituted by an interpenetration and ‘double exclusion’ in which
it is both captured and exposed to violence (Agamben 1998, 82–3). Werewolves, for
instance, do not simply designate ‘natural life’ but occupy ‘a zone of indistinction’
between human and animal, disclosing homo sacer as ‘a man who is transformed into

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 56 fred botting

a wolf and a wolf who is transformed into a man’ (Agamben 1998, 105–6). Biopoli-
tics calls up dead and phantasmatic forms to reassert boundaries between natural and
political life. Held to be mere superstition, phantasms and abstractions of ungrasp-
able death are opposed to and affirm the tangible and empirical reality of the living:
gothic spectres make life dependent on and infuse it with figures of death so that a life
lived as though it was real remains an effect of phantasmagoria, fiction and spectral
enmity. Gothic figures and colonial representation constitute related modes of what
can be called a ‘necro-aesthetics’: regimes of representation that organise what can be
made visible, recognised and apprehended, giving form to or screening off otherness
and encounters with any unpalatable reality. They demonstrate parallel projects in the
production of alterity and subalternity, blocking off and making up figures of other-
ness. Colonial modes of representation are more like disfigurations, blocking oppor-
tunities of mutual recognition, annihilating actual differences and rendering others
‘empty of all substance’, ‘lifeless’ and furnished with faces not their own (Mbembe
2019, 139–40). Necro-aesthetics manufactures negatives in the image of sameness.
Any reality due to an other person is masked in a ‘veiling’ that deploys prefigured
shadows, surrogates and doubles: the other is given the ‘ghost of face’ that both denies
his/her specificity and identity in difference and permits summary exclusion, a body
that may be killed (Mbembe 2019, 32). Race becomes a currency that converts what is
visible into ‘image, body, and enigmatic mirror within an economy of shadows whose
purpose is to make life itself a spectral reality’ (Mbembe 2017, 110). While the play
of looks and shadows also undoes any solidity in the position of master, the disclosure
of artifice matters little to the nocturnal powers of capital: they have little truck with
custom, history or tradition, relishing the profitable opportunities of unreal existence.
Effects and affects are all that count: fear and horror ensure pusillanimity and obe-
dience. Zombies, spirits and leopard-men, notes Fanon, ‘create around the native a
world of prohibitions, of barriers and inhibitions more terrifying than the world of the
settler’ (2001, 55).
Modern monsters demonstrate the doubling of biopower and necropolitics: their
unreason, primitivism, horror, deformity and inhumanity consolidate, as shadowy sup-
ports, ideas of human life, civilisation, reason, productivity and freedom. Modernity
emerges from a feudalism that it retrospectively rejects as darkness (a gothic darkness
of its own making). While intimating modes of otherness that escape modern culture
and convention, monstrosities also take their place at the edges of representation, giving
shape to anxieties and pushing them away. Otherness, like monstrosity, has two forms,
two faces: one, beyond the frames of cultural comprehension and projection, cannot be
recognised; another, negatively articulated within existing systems of identity and dif-
ference, can be apprehended and subordinated in a hierarchy of sameness and alterity
(silencing or occluding acknowledgement of anything real). Cautionary, protective and
expulsive, the construction of alterity constantly produces and polices the very bor-
ders (between inside and outside) that its vigilance always imagines being penetrated.
Gothic writers, fictions and images are variously entangled in slavery, colonial practice
and racial imaginings (Malchow 1993; Paravisini-Gebert 2002). William Beckford and
Matthew Lewis, of course, profit directly from plantations. Frankenstein, unnamed, is
cited by George Canning during a parliamentary debate on the slave trade. His cau-
tionary reading states why freedom and abolition should be delayed: the slave remains
no more than body without reason, all brawn with a child’s intellect and unready for

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 economy of shadows, work of death 57

admission to human society (Canning 1824, 1,103). Later nineteenth-century fiction

equates otherness, criminality and foreignness in stories of imperial assurance and anxi-
ety: evolution’s ‘descent’ opens the human animal to scrutiny, allowing signs of atavistic
and criminal regression to be read on the faces of lower classes, other races and sexual
deviants (Leps 1992; Arata 1990; Brantlinger 1985). Gothic figures participate in this
apprehension of criminality and otherness: look at Dracula and note the traits of sav-
agery, race and degeneration, the ease with which he shifts between human and bestial
forms; at the vague but utterly abhorrent Hyde and detect oriental, criminal, queer ten-
dencies; at the suburban darkness shrouding an imperial city and quiver in revulsion as
a mythical Eastern creature makes its vengeance felt. Apprehensions that stem from and
give form to fears, monstrous Orientalist projections construct and repel otherness as
the mirror of the imperialism they temporarily disturb. Morbid phantasms born from
indistinction and artifice, they purge fictions with fiction and sustain the work of death
through a play of shadows.

Zombimodernity
Transportation, plantations and colonisation fuel commercial expansion, provid-
ing testing grounds for modern modes of economic organisation and production.
They constitute ‘one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation’ (Mbembe
2019, 74–5). Atlantic slaving and the plantation system, integral to the ‘institution
of modern capitalism’, made blackness crucial to the articulation of economic trans-
formation and disciplinary mechanisms: ‘the cog that made possible the erection of
the plantation – one of the period’s most effective forms of wealth accumulation’
also ‘accelerated the integration of mercantilist capitalism, with the technology and
the control of subordinated labour’ (Mbembe 2017, 37, 20). The cheapness of slave
labour and the amount of wealth it generated enabled colonialism to become the
‘spinal cord’ of capitalism’s ‘mercantile epoch’ (Williams 1944, 142). It demanded
mechanical modes of organisation: labouring bodies were subjected to systematic
regulation to ensure optimal efficiency and maximum productivity – workgroups,
long hours, brutal discipline (Fick 1990, 22–8); slaves became ‘labouring machines,
cogs in a system meant to produce as much sugar and coffee as possible’ (Dubois
2004, 44). A ‘modern system’ of large-scale production and social reproduction, an
industrialisation of growing, harvesting, refining and exporting cane, it was ‘in its
essence a modern life’ (James 1989, 392).
Slavery was a ‘pulverizing’ experience (Métraux 1974, 38). Beyond economic sub-
jection it made the slave a ‘socially dead person’, divested of name, parentage or cul-
ture (Fick 1990, 27). Without ties or legal recognition, any trappings of humanity
were abandoned: ‘enslavement, transportation and life under servitude in the New
World was a fundamentally individualizing experience’ (Mintz and Trouillot 1995,
125). Severed from past, place and personhood, the slave was subjected to devastating
conditions that caused ‘apathy, anonymity, and loss’, stripping away feeling, desire,
will and self-identity; slavery’s ‘absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death
(expulsion from humanity altogether)’ instituted a threefold loss of ‘home, rights over
body, political status’ (Mbembe 2019, 74). Even on the eve of Haiti’s Revolution,
colonists could not envisage the possibility of resistance or defiance since ‘to acknowl-
edge them was to acknowledge the humanity of the enslaved’ or to ‘acknowledge that

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 58 fred botting

something is wrong with the system’ (Trouillot 1995, 83–4). Without humanity, slaves
were things, commodities, tools or brutes (domesticated animals), not yet even viewed
as a race among humans. Delaying abolition but recommending reforms, Canning’s
case refusing immediate freedom argues that some alleviations should first be made
to raise slaves ‘from the brute state to that of man’: sparing the whip and inculcating
values of family, religion and property constituted necessary preparations for human
subjectivity (1824, 1,097).
Unseen by necropolitics, something emerges, shaping itself in response to pulveri-
sation and the losses of home, recognition, past and community. The devastations of
transportation and enslavement were individuating and alienating: ‘coming as they
did from different societies, the enslaved did not share a common language, a com-
mon religion, or a single political system’. Upheaval also involved an ‘intensely drastic
resocializing process’ which saw slaves ‘forge common cultural practices out of their
highly diverse pasts and within the constraints imposed by their living conditions’
(Mintz and Trouillot 1995, 125–6). From abject individuation imposed by slavery, in
which no single past, language, culture or belief system had predominance, and from
whatever scraps could be salvaged by memory and repurposed in a very different pres-
ent, something else was composed, a society with a singular relation to its multiply
eradicated pasts and its brutal present, a society, moreover, that began to envisage
some possibility of a future. Vodou, as a new, specifically Haitian and modern reli-
gion, incarnates community, inspires creativity and hope. The religion is a modern
construction: ‘for all its African heritage, it belongs to the modern world and is part of
our civilization’ (Métraux 1974, 213). Not syncretic nor composed of ‘simply African
imports’, Vodou is irreducible to other religions or places and produced in conditions
of slavery, with Catholicism, African gods, saints and devils ‘remade’ on Haitian soil
(Dayan 1995, 35, 54). Remaking involves a radical expression: ‘what was said in this
language in response to historical events was totally new’, enabling ‘a burst of cultural
creation’ through which ‘the shared trauma of defeat, slavery, banishment, and the
horrors of the Atlantic crossing and plantation labour’ could be ‘transformed into a
community of trust’ (Buck-Morss 2009, 132, 126). Staging ‘re-enactments of a colo-
nial past’ allowed both memory and transformation, acknowledging and displacing
relations to and consciousness of slavery: ‘memories of servitude are transposed into a
new idiom that both reproduces and dismantles a twentieth-century history of forced
labour and denigration.’ Establishing some agency and self-determination in respect
of extreme events initially beyond any control, the process ‘repeats or re-enacts the
experience of slavery but allows the speaker to hold onto a freedom that goes beyond
intentional signification’ (Dayan 1995, 37, 70). Symbolic repetition allows some col-
lective distance and autonomy in respect of present and past: Vodou ‘brings dignity
to lives which would otherwise be brutalized and crushed by the poverty and back-
breaking labour of the fields’, enabling slaves to ‘see themselves as independent beings’
(Métraux 1974, 213; Fick 1990, 44–5). Replaying past devastations engenders some
resistant, liberating forward momentum, the ‘work of life’: ‘ghostly subjects’ of slavery
distance themselves from temporal fixity and adapt to life’s contingencies, able to cre-
ate and invent self in relation to the unknown, the unexpected and ‘radical instability’
(Mbembe 2017, 149). Subjugated by forces of capture, removal and objectification,
refused recognition, freedom and the rights to self or to the products of labour, the
slave, whose human status is suspended if not entirely erased, manifests another kind

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 economy of shadows, work of death 59

of humanity – a ‘supplemental humanity’ (Mbembe 2017, 48). An addition to, and

undermining and supplanting of, the humanity of the master, supplemental humanity
manifests itself in moments of refusal, desire, escape and reconstitution, displaying
something potentially and differently human where no humanity is allowed. In and
against degradation and abjection, it evinces capacities to make relationships and
meanings, to create symbols, and to produce community.
With its multiple cultural sources and specifically Haitian origin, the zombi mani-
fests the physical and psychological impact of the work of death: ‘a zombi’s life is seen
in terms which echo the harsh existence of a slave in the old colony of San Domingo’
(Métraux 1974, 166). Like the religion in which it holds a place, the word ‘zombi’
has various meanings and diverse etymological sources ranging across West Africa
and the Caribbean: ‘jumbi’, ‘zonbi’ and the Jamaican ‘duppy’ have varying senses of
‘ghost’, ‘spirit’, soulless body and bodiless soul; ‘nzambi’ connotes a more divine spirit
(Ackerman and Gauthier 1991, 467–9, 475; Warner 2005, 119). Noting parallels
between many Haitian folk-monsters and those of ‘medieval folk-lore of white Europe’,
William Seabrook recognises the zombi to be ‘exclusively local’. It is ‘a soulless human
corpse, still dead, but taken from the grave and endowed with a mechanical semblance
of life – it is a dead body which is made to walk and act as if it were alive’ and be ‘a
servant or a slave, occasionally for the commission of a crime’ (Seabrook 1929, 94).
Zombis lie between abject humans, animals and machines: wretched figures clothed in
rags with blank features ‘plodding like brutes, like automatons’ (Seabrook 1929, 101).
‘Rag-humans’ suffer a degradation that places them ‘at once outside and within the
human’: they are ‘infrahuman’ (Mbembe 2017, 135). Drained of anything but the bar-
est trace of humanity, zombis are more victims of enslavement than monsters of evil or
revenge. Zora Neale Hurston relates a very sympathetic meeting with a ‘broken relic’,
named Felicia Felix Mentor (Hurston 1966, 197). Maya Deren, avoiding associations
of malevolent monstrosity, describes Haitian zombis as pitiful figures made to function
‘as a kind of uncomplaining slave-labor to be used in fields, the construction of houses
etc.’ (Deren 1953, 42–3). Zombis are tolerated but not welcomed into the life of the
communities they shadow. They are not objects of outright denegation and revulsion
but circulate as living dead reminders of slave states, of a past of death still close to those
who live. Zombis evoke some abhorrence in manifesting states reminiscent of slavery:
bodies ‘without a soul, matter without morality’ (Deren 1953, 42). What Haitians fear,
it seems, is what the zombi suffers: ‘the loss of physical liberty that is slavery, and the
sacrifice of personal autonomy implied by the loss of identity’. Hence ‘the fear is not of
being harmed by zombis, but rather of becoming one’ (Davis 1985, 139). What one was,
one may become: the zombi marks the difference from which autonomy and identity
emerge, a past that is and is not one’s own. Not welcoming any zombi encounter is part
of an oscillation in which identity defines itself: the ‘real dread’ prompted by the zombi
is the thought of ‘being made into one’, a fear rooted in the value placed on the ‘powers
of consciousness and the attendant capacity for moral judgement, deliberation, and self-
control’: ‘in the soulless zombie the Haitian sees the ultimate extension of that which
he despises most in any context: the loss of one’s powers of perception, evaluation and
self-control’ (Deren 1953, 42–3). Embodying what was lost to slavery, zombis present
inverted images of Haitian subjectivity and, in repetition, stimulate the work of life as
it performs its distancing and differentiating operation from the work-death to which it
was condemned, and from which it freed itself and was able to fashion itself anew.

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The Haitian zombi, a figure of the work of death that no longer works for death,
may well prompt memories of monstrous historical practices and conditions. But it
is no monster. The zombie, however, very much embodies ravenous and destructive
monstrosity. Though inspired by mixed fragments of Haitian and colonial culture, the
zombie comes, dripping in blood, violence and horror, from another place and contin-
ues the work of death. It incarnates, for European observers, an intolerable doubling
of horrors: political revolution and blackness. Bryan Edwards prefaces his historical
survey of St Domingo with warnings and lurid tales of monstrosity unleashed in the
colony. Most hideous is the image of ‘savage man, let loose from restraint, exercising
cruelties, of which the bare recital makes the heart recoil’ (Edwards 1797, xviii). Thou-
sands of ‘savage people’ used to the ‘barbarities of Africa’ take advantage of nocturnal
cover and fall upon unsuspecting planters. Husbands are killed in front of their preg-
nant wives whose bellies are cut and babies cast to hungry pigs (Edwards 1797, 63,
92). Though intensified by associations between Africa and barbarism, much of the
horror relates to then current European concerns about revolution: it is not oppression
that excites rebels ‘to plunge their daggers into the bosoms of unoffending women and
helpless infants’ but ‘the vile mechanism of men calling themselves philosophers (the
proselytes and imitators of France)’ (Edwards 1797, xx–xxi). Echoing conservative
reactions, like Edmund Burke’s, to the French Revolution, Edwards’s ideas of mon-
strosity are projected, from their European frame, on to the colonial situation: some
of the ‘monstrous wickedness’ he castigates stems from the ‘schemes of perfection, and
projection of amendment in the condition of human life’ that are pushed, ‘faster than
nature allows’, by reformers (xviii). The terms that are invoked follow the pattern of
the ‘Jacobin monster’ in which power and revolt conjoin and split in a double figure:
monstrosity is linked and divided as a ‘monster of abuse of power’ and a ‘monster that
breaks the social pact by revolt’, one of its transgressions being cannibalism (Foucault
2003a, 100). Subsequent denunciations of Haiti as a ‘black republic’ temper the politi-
cal shock of a successful slave revolution with projections of barbarism, superstition
and cannibalism. Spencer St John’s account describes the land as a place of ‘brutes’,
‘barbarous worship’ and ‘barbarous customs’ (St John 1889, xii, xxii). He notes how
‘vaudoux-worship and cannibalism’ prevail in Haiti, and describes its people as ‘cred-
ulous serpent-worshippers’ practising ceremonies involving child-sacrifice and canni-
balism (St John 1889, 189, 207, 241). ‘Superstitious fear’ and ‘fetish worship’ are rife
in a land where disturbing graves, intoxicating and poisoning bodies (to be robbed of
their organs or eaten) seem common practice (St John 1889, 220, 229). The account
turns a free republic into a monstrous exception, making its blackness into a sign of
the primitivism, superstition and barbarism expected by colonial discourse.
‘There is ample evidence that Voodoo is the most bestial, cruel and depraved of all
the religions’ (Dennis Wheatley in Métraux 1974, 7). Associations of cannibalism, con-
tagion, superstition and carnality are repeatedly invoked, well into the twentieth century,
to suppress the significance of Haiti in the modern world (Murphy 2011, 47). Along
with colonialist and gothic projections, the ‘fiction’ of Haiti’s ‘exceptionalism’ turns its
unusual origins into ‘a shield that masks the negative contribution of the Western powers
to the Haitian situation’ (Trouillot 1990, 7). It leads to the construction of Haiti, again,
as a ‘state of exception’ where national and international law can be suspended. Between
1915 and 1934 Haiti was occupied by US forces in an act that marked the emergence of
a new imperial power. Sensational stories by marines, accounts by visiting ethnologists,

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 economy of shadows, work of death 61

and popular films reimagined Haiti as a place of otherness, barbarous ritual and super-
stition. It was a charming ‘magic island’. At the same time, the country’s place in history
was reassessed by writers like Zora Neale Hurston as part of a growing articulation of
racial and class consciousness across America (Renda 2001, 277). Popular narratives,
in contrast, deployed a range of colonial versions of the culture. John Craige’s Black
Bagdad uses images of primitivism and savagery to justify the ‘civilizing’ presence of
US marines on Haitian soil (Davis 1988, 37). Popular representations not only looked
to the past to legitimate occupation and economic reconstruction; they harnessed and
projected an image of the US as a new, imperial global power, reinforcing ‘the ability to
conscript citizens into the logic of empire’ (Renda 2001, 21). Colonialism, modernity,
racism and imperialism overlap in many images of monstrosity. One account relates
how a small group of shambling figures in rags arrived from the mountains led by an old
man, to be put to work in a distant corner of a cane plantation. After labouring all day
in the sun and suffering occasional beatings, they were rested at night, nourished only
by a very bland stew. The old man took their wages at the end of the week. A mistake in
their dietary provision, however, brought this racket to an end: accidentally given salt,
they suddenly realised they were dead and, in some confusion, turned and walked slowly
back to the villages, and perhaps the graves, from whence they came (Seabrook 1929,
96–7). The event occurred in spring 1918 at a cane plantation adjoining a large sugar
factory. The plant was owned by HASCO (the Haitian American Sugar Company). It is
not distant colonial history, despite its reiteration of popular myths, but occurs during
the occupation of a free republic by a new imperial master and located on the property
of an international corporation.
The story’s association between industrialised slave labour and new, imperial and
corporate powers chimes with one of the most striking scenes from White Zombie.
Released in 1932, the film draws on contemporary popular US accounts of Haiti
(Rhodes 2001). It oddly barbarises Haiti, in terms of feudal associations with savagery
and in the magical possession and abduction of a young white North American female
victim that replays older colonialist fears. Odder still: the blacked-up voodoo master
is a particularly entrepreneurial businessman who owns a sugar cane factory. Over
scenes depicting shambling black bodies carrying bundles of cane to the processing
machine, satisfaction evident in his voice, he remarks on the cheapness and tirelessness
of the labour he uses. The scene of abject and will-less Haitian bodies (played by US
extras), worked to and beyond death by a relentlessly necropolitical system of pro-
duction, acknowledges the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism and
relocates it at the start of a new imperial and global regime. Rather than concealing the
material and systematic basis of slavery or restricting it to a primitive and local past,
the economic and industrial resonances of the scene, in a film produced just after the
US Depression, extend beyond Haitian shores and further entangle zombies in matters
of race, class and capital: images of industrial exploitation and zombification present
a ‘sign for the powerlessness that white men and women felt in the face of economic
struggle’ (Renda 2001, 225–6; see also Dendle 2007, 46; Murphy 2011, 53). White
Zombie thus stands at a crossroads of zombie representation and zombification, enact-
ing (gothic) patterns of monstrosity which veil, exclude and destroy otherness while dis-
closing the material and economic histories and conditions underpinning and radiating
from colonisation and slavery. It registers a disempowerment shared by systematically
subjugated beings across the world.

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 62 fred botting

General Zombification
The shift that can be seen in the crossed references of White Zombie, an incipient
acknowledgement of change that extends zombie associations to dehumanising global
imperatives, forms the site at which the modern myth of the zombie emerges: a split
figure of work, death and co-opted desire (Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 335). Matters
of race, colonisation and empire do not disappear but dissipate and intensify as part of
a global displacement of political conditions, from national liberation to neo-colonial
formations and neoliberal reconfigurations. The work of death that gathers pace after
World War II and accelerates across media and culture towards the millennium’s end
participates in a process of generalised ‘zombification’ – of bodies, cultures, practices,
institutions, enmities – that presses at the limits of modernity and biopolitics. ‘Zombie
categories’ describe customs and institutions that persist despite the evaporation of
their historical relevance (Beck and Beck-Gernstein 2002). Changes in production, too,
are marked by the zombie: shifts from mass industrial manufacturing to post-industrial
and consumerist economies discard workers like trash; without employment, purpose
or hope, they barely live on benefits or in debt (Romero 1978; Beard 1993; Shaviro
2002). Consumerism, of course, made zombies of us all, all walking dead, all already
infected (Romero 1978; Grant 2010). Science and technology helped, from the radioac-
tivity that transforms humans into nocturnal beings to the animal experimentation that
unleashes every destructive and violent energy of a hyper-activated species (Matheson
2007; Boyle 2002). The cities and suburbs defining modern society and the non-spaces
of late modern existence – stadia, malls, airports – all fall to ruin, consumed by the
work of death (Romero 1978; 1985; Marion 2010; Fresnadillo 2007). The family is
tested, remodelled, and eats itself (Romero 1968; Browne 2009). Or sees its rituals of
loss and mourning twisted by protocols of biopolitical body disposal (Lindqvist 2009).
Global upheavals make zombies embody collective trauma (Whitehead 2011). Human
affections quickly cede to zombie romance and zombie sex, not that one can tell the dif-
ference when the grunting starts or when the neurologically rewired response enhance-
ments kick in (Martin 2008; Bark 2009; Marion 2010). If it all seems a bit queer, some
serial killing, group therapy or self-help can be provided in the interests of rehabilita-
tion and well-being (Oates 1996; Browne 2009). But the apathetic, hollow offspring
of meaningless affluence are already too emotionless to speak or commune, severed
from human relations, dead before their time (Winter 2008). Media, too, mark and
in-differentiate humans and zombies, in televisual stupefaction or information systems
that delete consciousness or inculcate ravenously antisocial interactions (King 2006;
Hill 2010). Zombie media dial up that zombie within, whether an instinctual brain,
genetic predisposition to infection, or a language virus (Grant 2010; Burgess 2009).
For all the apocalyptic pleasures, promises and fantasies of a cleansed, depopulated
world, or of a self abjected of everything and itself, zombies insist on things as they
are, returning, from horror, to normal: banal, boring, dead-end circuit breakers of an
undead West mindlessly bumping up against the walls of the compound it made for
itself and cannot see beyond. Capital continues, happy to profit from the zombies it
tries to keep in thrall, quietly banking any soul as it develops new ways of making
money from nothing (Bark 2009). Levelling all to things and commodities (machine-
things, flesh-things, bit-things), they are no different from trails of detritus strewn in the
wake of suburban flights from neighbour-zombie hordes or as corpse mountains left by

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 economy of shadows, work of death 63

incompetent techno-military urban clearance measures (Brooks 2006). Here zombies

are truly global, effects of the flows of capital: fluid, mobile, barely regulated finance,
exponential patterns of information and algorithmic decision, outsourced production
and fantastic consumption, economically migrant bodies (whole, or in spare parts), all
abstracted and tracked on screens of desire-fear and anxiety-affluence (Brooks 2006).
The perma-in-security of rapidly info-bio-corporal-commodity circulation is cha-
otically managed or policed, from digitally demarcated codes of access, identity and
surveillance to the fences, walls and zonal strategies of militarised biopolitical existence
like those, in World War Z, that are put in place to protect the beneficiaries of state
emergency planning in Israel or apartheid South Africa. Antagonists in the fluctuating
drama of global shadow-capital, zombies reek of disposability amid patterns of fluid
and free exchange, consumption and mobility: whatever life is left to be lived does so on
the terms and conditions of insecurity, non-identity, indignity, abstraction, waste – and
extinction. What is left of life in capital’s death world only pays interest on a desperate
mortgage to maintain its picket-fence against workless wasted hordes. The situation –
less than human, desperate, vulnerable, insecure – is the same on both sides. Fear sticks
to screens and social media (shots of urban rioting, migrants swarming over border
walls, ragged harbingers of an imminent plague; Romero 2008). Figures of dignity,
resilience and hope, black survivors organise, disappear from the plot and, perhaps,
live. Whites whimper and record their flight on film, marking their end as film. Their
last place of safety and security perfectly captures their anxious affluence: locked in a
panic room bunker watching CCTV of zombies roaming the mansion above.
Always imagined as invading from without, the work of death moves within, close
by, mostly unnoticed. While the industrial work of death is banished to sweatshops,
European ethical committees, pharmaceutical distribution contracts, investment port-
folios, welfare and employment regulations, credit, debt and insurance, all calculate
the costs of life in terms of the frequency, expense and distribution of death. Refugees
find a ‘jungle’ in Europe. Care homes and hospices manage the practical and emotional
incursions of death and dying. On larger scales, zombies identify otherwise incom-
prehensibly abstracted global powers: vampires as networks of capital feeding off the
many-bodied energy of a planetary populace (Hardt and Negri 2000; 2006). Figures
for vast, decentred, faceless entities determining global existence appear as zombie
economics, zombie banks, zombie capitalism (Quiggin 2010; Harman 2009; Onaran
2012). Nothing escapes general zombification, not even the planet. In the Anthro-
pocene, the first person plural of humanity finds itself ‘in the vicelike death grip of a
gigantic entity’ which is nothing other than ‘ourselves as the human species’. Scales
of disgust, at individual and collective complicity in destruction, are registered as ‘we’
are invited to see ourselves in a new ‘dark mirror’: ‘I am a component of a zombie’
yet nothing more than ‘a cone in one of its eyes’ (Morton 2016, 25, 35, 42). Zombie
humanity is recomposed on monstrous and minute scales. A complex misanthropic
charge seems too ensconced in monstrosity to promote a positive response: riven with
self- and species-loathing, it collapses in abjection, too nauseated to be otherwise.
Like zombie capitalism or zombie debt, monstrosity assumes a scale neither imagin-
able nor surmountable. Horror remains in and as the image of a multiple yet will-less
planetary destroyer. Perhaps it requires a seriously scaled-up standard remedy: a bullet
to the species-brain? Yet horror overwhelms, paralyses and prompts recoil, a repul-
sion of affect that, if it moves anyone anywhere, it is backwards, to the safety and

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 64 fred botting

security of the same shadowy powers, the same habits of perception, the same border
controls and electric fences, the same gated communities and panic rooms. Zombie
monstrosity, while attempting crucial critical discriminations of vast and shadowy
things, remains caught up in the very webs, shadows and unrealities of the powers it
would attack. In-distinction, in-discrimination, in-decision and in-action remain part
of the armoury of empire’s spectral reign. At what object, what other, what brain does
one aim? On what terms does one decide, and with whom does one act in respect of
decentred, shadowy power or multiple, brainless species-zombie? To stay in shadows,
in proximity and distance, intimacy and horror, twitching in anxiety and affluence.
General zombification, at least in the West or Global North, pulses with the triumphs
and dead-ends of neo(liberal)colonisation. Despite artifice and irony, zombies stay
dead, provide masks for faceless others, conflate representation and anxiety, disallow
distinction and inhibit analysis and action. Once the other-same darkness of colonial
and late modernity, zombie monstrosity assumes the mantle of shadows in the global
extension of necropolitical power. To decolonise gothic would be to degothicise gothic
in a process of demonstering the world.
Decolonisation has always required a double address, to both mental and material
worlds and to the transformation of representations and the practices of interpreta-
tion (Ngũgĩ 1987, 16, 88). It must not only counter how imperialism ‘turned real-
ity upside down’, but rectify its dismemberments in producing ‘a society of bodiless
heads and headless bodies’ (Ngũgĩ 1987, 26–8). Neo-colonialist powers, finance capital
and transnational monopolies still give necropolitical ultimata to newly independent
nations: ‘theft or death’; ‘liberty or death’ (Ngũgĩ 1987, 2). For René Depestre and
Aimé Césaire, the necessity of decolonising ‘our inner life’ accompanies the struggle
to decolonise society. They recognise the ‘doubly proletarianized and alienated’ global
status of black people, both as workers and as blacks, the latter the ‘only race which is
denied even the notion of humanity’ (Césaire 1972, 94). Depestre’s ‘general zombifica-
tion’, stretching from slavery to neo-colonialism, signifies an ongoing mental, material
and political denial of humanity. Accelerated depersonalisation reduces human bodies
to productive energies (‘carbon man’, ‘petrol man’, ‘combustion man’), causing sub-
jective annihilation of being, a ‘general zombification’ erasing all creativity, cultural
history and psychological integrity (Depestre 1970–73, 21–2). General zombification
extends from Haiti to neo-colonial and global struggles. Depestre uses it in relation to
neo-colonialism and Haitian life under dictatorship (Murphy 2011, 51). Conjoining
work and death, the myth ‘of the man whose mind and soul have been stolen and who
has been left only the ability to work’ retains, in Haiti, a spark of life: refused salt, the
zombi remains unable to ‘revitalise his spiritual energies’. Haitian history has tasted salt
before and the quest continues: despite a ‘history of colonization’ causing ‘man’s general
zombification’, the salt of energy, imagination and culture remains on the horizon of
political desire (Depestre 1971, 20; cit. Davis 1988, 75). ‘Man’s’ general zombification
perhaps extends to what might now and then have been called humanity, as Césaire
suggests when he notes the extent to which colonisation debases the civilised person
(1972, 44). A crucial proviso recognises difference and refuses any equality in the mode
of debasement colonisation entails: any idea or claim to humanity is duplicitous or, at
best, nothing more than a ‘pseudo-humanism’ (Césaire 1972, 38). Humanism has not
yet been realised, general zombification further interrogating human possibility. Where
Depestre’s zombi has some residual memory of the revitalising properties of the salt of

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 economy of shadows, work of death 65

spirit and imagination, zombies can only chew at the torn mask of pseudo-humanism
and reveal there is no face behind it.
Dissipation of spirit characterises the ongoing work of death. ‘Our times’, an irrevers-
ible breach, are marked by spiritual fragmentation and an ‘existence that is contingent,
dispersed, and powerless but reveals itself in the guise of arbitrariness and the absolute
power to give death anytime, anywhere, by any means, and for any reason’ (Mbembe
2001, 13). Necropolitics proceeds in biotechnical, military, economic triumph. Atlantic
slavery, followed by a period of black self-empowerment and historical self-inscription,
cedes to a new age of ‘the globalization of markets, the privatization of the world under
the aegis of neoliberalism, and the increasing imbrication of the financial markets, the
post-imperial military complex, and electronic and digital technologies’ (Mbembe 2019,
2). Here, now, necropolitics moves beyond life: our age is one of ‘raw life’, ‘a place and
a time of half-death—or, if one prefers, half-life. It is a place where life and death are so
entangled that it is no longer possible to distinguish them, or to say what is on the side
of the shadow or its obverse’ (Mbembe 2001, 197). From the position of raw life, racism
and necropolitics disclose patterns of ‘organized destruction’ and ‘sacrificial economy’,
‘a generalized cheapening of the price of life’ and ‘a habituation to loss’ (Mbembe 2019,
38). Biopower is ‘insufficient to account for contemporary forms of the subjugation of
life to the power of death’ on a planet where ‘death-worlds’ (camps, zones, ghettoes,
occupied territories) confine populations in conditions where they have the ‘status of
the living dead’ (Mbembe 2019, 92). Technological, geopolitical and economic powers
extend the work of general zombification, materialising in an in- or post-human extreme
that discards any human or economic value to so many living bodies. Divisions of and
within the Global North and South create populations (displaced to occupied or hold-
ing zones, to refugee camps at national borders or to the edges of cities, in ghettoes and
shanty towns) that are refused recognition, rights or dignity and completely excluded
from productive existence: these ‘garbage humans’ are not even worth exploiting as
labour (Balibar 2001, 24–5). Life and work count for very little:

there are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If yesterday’s
drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today
is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, rel-
egated to the role of a ‘superfluous humanity.’ Capital hardly needs them anymore
to function. (Mbembe 2017, 2)

Dead to humanity and dead to work, general zombification carves out swathes of living
waste: death, it seems, passes beyond work and life.
Another name for the general zombification occurring under neoliberal exigencies
and acknowledging racist histories of transportation, plantation and colonisation is
‘the becoming black of the world’:

across early capitalism, the term ‘Black’ referred only to the condition imposed
on peoples of African origin (different forms of depredation, dispossession of all
power of self-determination, and, most of all, dispossession of the future and of
time, the two matrices of the possible). Now, for the first time in human history, the
term ‘Black’ has been generalized. This new fungibility, this solubility, institutional-
ized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet, is what I call the
Becoming Black of the world. (Mbembe 2017, 5–6)

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 66 fred botting

Post-humanised, post-industrialised, de-vitalised, the bodies of slavery’s biopolitical

experiment – psychologically and materially pulverised – become the necropolitical
condition. Couplings of necropolitics and race are not, however, made redundant:
historical and institutional forms give way to multiple and diverse detonations of
‘nanoracism’ in the reorganisation of cultural, corporeal and geopolitical divisions
and codifications: managing and delimiting modes of access and exclusion, produc-
ing, documenting, deporting bodies, developing immigration and detention protocols,
deploying digital surveillance and profiling and, rather than acknowledging the mock-
ery that genetics makes of racism, multiplying the discourses that enable segregations,
discriminations, disavowals (Mbembe 2019, 59).
At another extreme of the same necro-capitalised global circuit that abandons
subjects to superfluity and ghostly humanity, new bodies of neoliberalism are also
caught within orders of disposability and spectrality. General zombification is
global. Though imaginarily cushioned in affluence and anxiety by fragile comforts
of rights, electronic papers, credit ratings and border forces, buried like the world
under an inescapable pile of debt, these beings are steadily transformed from ‘tragic
and alienated’ figures of early industrialisation by neoliberal technological and eco-
nomic imperatives that turn everything – space, matter, time, body and psyche – over
to the logic of the transnational corporation and the market. Determined by laws of
flexibility, information, abstraction and mobility, this subject has little history, sub-
stance or stability: ‘as a human-thing, human-machine, human-code, and human-
influx, he seeks above all to regulate his behaviour according to the norms of the
market’, defined by objects, commodities, market and debt and ‘fictionalized as “an
entrepreneur of the self”’. This being is wired, algorithmically responsive. Psyches
change, memories and cognition digitally and artificially remodelled on neurosci-
entific lines, private desires and pleasures readily commodified according to image
regimes that are ‘capable of absorbing any content’. A ‘neuroeconomic subject’
appears, split ‘by a double concern stemming from his animal nature (as subject to
the biological reproduction of life) and his thingness (as subject to others’ enjoyment
of the things of this world)’. Rendered ‘just one animal among others, lacking an
essence’ and availed of unlimited possibilities of genetic and biological modification,
only performance prevails – for the eyes of others and in terms of the performance
charts measuring ongoing market value and fending off spectres of nomad labour,
disposability and crushing debt (Mbembe 2017, 2–3). Performance, moreover, is
played out in a world of shadows, on screens, in bits. It is informed, directed and
enveloped by a digitally real phantasmagoria humming with nocturnal, neoliberal
imperatives and pleasures, a performance for and in an abstracted realm in which
all substance and reality cedes to shadows, spectres, ghosts, a technological fusion
of capital and animism that raises ‘the very distinct possibility that human beings
will be transformed into animate things made up of coded digital data’ (Mbembe
2017, 5). The (im-material) work of death that consumes living bodies and psyches
in a play of shadows leaves only ghosts. Only ghosts. Having nothing to lose other
than repetitions of loss, can one pass beyond yet not give up on them? Is there,
as general zombification turns into a becoming black of the world, any chance of
tasting some vitalising salt, of stopping the work of death and glimpsing, beyond
the economy of shadows, something like a supplemental humanity? Stop. Step out.
Breathe (Mbembe 2021).

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 economy of shadows, work of death 67

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Onaran, Yalman. 2012. Zombie Banks. Hoboken, NJ: Bloomberg Press.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean.’ In The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 229–57. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Quiggin, John. 2010. Zombie Economics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Renda, Mary A. 2001. Taking Haiti. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.
Rhodes, Gary D. 2001. White Zombie. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland.
Romero, George, director. 1968. Night of the Living Dead.
———. 1978. Dawn of the Dead.
———. 1985. Day of the Dead.

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 economy of shadows, work of death 69

———. 2008. Diary of the Dead.

St John, Spencer. 1889. Hayti or the Black Republic. New York: Scribner & Welford.
Seabrook, William B. 1929. The Magic Island. London: Harrap.
Shaviro, Steven. 2002. ‘Capitalist Monsters.’ Historical Materialism 10, no. 4: 281–90.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. ‘The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the
World.’ Cimarrón: New Perspectives on the Caribbean 2, no. 3: 3–12.
———. 1995. Silencing the Past. Boston: Beacon.
Warner, Marina. 2005. Phantasmagoria. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, Colson. 2011. Zone One. London: Harvill Secker.
Williams, Eric. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Winter, D. E. 2008. ‘Less Than Zombie.’ In The Living Dead, edited by John Joseph Adams,
256–67. San Francisco: Night Shade Books.

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 4

Gothic and the Black Diaspora

Maisha Wester

A frican diasporic authors have increasingly challenged the suitability of mon-

sters from European folk and literary traditions as expressions of the complexity
of racial subjectivity. Such monsters are pre-loaded with racial and ethnic significations
and discourses. Rather, Afro-diasporic authors in general have made a space in their
gothic texts for the monsters arising out of Black experience and diasporic folklore.
The nuances expressed by such monsters reinterpret the nature of racial difference,
oppression and domination. Edgar Mittelholzer’s novel My Bones and My Flute, Erna
Brodber’s novel Myal, and Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Ganger: Ball Lightning’ and ‘Tan-Tan
and Dry Bone’ particularly exemplify this practice. Furthermore, the incorporation
of folk figures into twentieth-century Black Gothic texts produces narratives haunted
by pre-contact histories even as these figures are revised to also reflect the impact of
colonial contact and consequent oppression. Contemporary narratives incorporating
folkloric monsters such as the bolom and the soucouyant emphasise the endless costs
of racialisation, colonialism and its resultant modernity. A duppy may be similar to
a ghost, but the devilish history of racial encounter and oppressive modernity is best
reflected in its distinct details.
Authors such as Mittelholzer, Brodber and Hopkinson acknowledge the ways that
unmediated Western literary genres are inadequate for minority subjects that always
exist as an outsider-within among Western nation states. They critique the insidious
assaults upon, and erasures of, Black identity and culture which occur in these genres,
particularly the gothic. For instance, in Myal Dan and Willie – two African ancestors
who possess two of the Jamaican characters in the text – recount the ways the Afri-
canist voice is stolen from racial minorities in predominantly white, Western nations
and displaced with oppressive ideologies, noting how in ‘sen[ding] in their message,
using our voice’, such nations ‘split man from his self’ to render the oppressed subject
‘a working zombie’ (Brodber 1988, 66–7). The exchange touches upon the explicit
nature of neo-colonialism, noting that Western imperialists ‘rule the rulers’ who have
no faith in their own people or willingness to act as independent leaders to a sover-
eign nation. Significantly the two ancestors also comment upon the implicit strategies
of neo-colonialism, stating that the false leaders have been duped into betraying their
people by notions that they as leaders are enlightened. Similarly, Brodber’s text calls
attention to the racial conflicts and ideologies undergirding Western Enlightenment
thinking, which privileges a specific kind of literacy and literature and consequently
teaches non-Western minority populations to ignore their own cultural legacy. As a
result, the Black voice is exiled from its own narrative and made to speak another
story.1

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 gothic and the black diaspora 71

Language of the West: Fat/Jargon/Psychobabble

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Black Gothic fiction consistently reveals anxiety over the struc-
ture of texts and narratives. Mittelholzer’s novel My Bones and My Flute repeatedly
refers to renowned artists of gothic literature and recorded history as his protagonist
Milton reads his experiences through and against writers like Poe and M. R. James.
The fictitious introduction to the novel also stresses the importance of form and genre.
Recounting his discussions with the Nevinson family over style, Milton explains:

My diary style, from a literary point of view, he [Mr Nevinson] considered too ragged
and undignified for a published book, and, moreover, he was of the opinion that the
narrative, as set forth in my diary entries, lacked proper form and shape. . . . Let it
be chronological, as in my diary, but ‘let it be a good thrilling sort of old-fashioned
ghost story, with the mystery solved at the end’, as Jessie put it. Her mother agreed
with her, and thought that ‘it would be a shame to publish those scrappy notes in
your diary. They’re dull – and so unromantic! Why not write them over and put a lot
of atmosphere and excitement into them.’ (Mittelholzer 2015, 49)

Significantly, Milton’s description makes it clear that ‘old-fashioned ghost story’ does
not refer to indigenous or Black narrative styles but explicitly signifies Western or
European genre. The fact that the novel takes this phrase as its subtitle only further
draws attention to the ways the novel itself attempts to contest genre standards.
Yet the anxiety over form is not just about the problem of finding an audience.
Rather, genre itself proves destructively infectious. In My Bones and My Flute, the
ghostly Dutch planter Voorman infects the living when they merely touch his journal.
The form of Voorman’s curse and haunting – infection through physical contact with
his manuscript – suggests the power of literature to possess. Further, one aspect of the
haunting – the branding of the outline of Voorman’s flute on to the infected body –
marks this kind of infection as a contemporary manifestation of physical, spiritual and
psychological enslavement. Thus, listening to Mr Nevinson relay his ghostly encoun-
ter, Milton thinks he should

tell [Nevinson] he had been reading too many of the ghost stories of M.R. James . . .
Even his way of describing the apparition had a touch of James about it. Why
‘cloaked’? Why not ‘covered with’? . . . I discovered that his mode of expressing
himself had, indeed, been subconsciously influenced by M.R. James. (Mittelholzer
2015, 138)

Likewise in the midst of a debate about whether Jessie and her mother are possessed,
Jessie snaps at Milton for ‘talk[ing] like Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’ (207). Of course,
the irony here is that Milton’s ramblings reveal that he too is already intellectually and
psychologically possessed by the West as a consequence of textual contact, even as he is
diagnosing Jessie and her mother’s spiritual possession. The consequence of such pos-
session is internalisation of racist and colonialist ideology. Milton and the Nevinsons,
though middle-class Blacks, utter racist terminology and ideas when discussing other,
impoverished Blacks. Mr Nevinson, for instance, explains that the manuscript initially
‘belonged to an old buffianda’, deploying a racially problematic moniker (Mittelholzer

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 72 maisha wester

2015, 73). Likewise, Mrs Nevinson, though of racially mixed ancestry and needing help
fighting the ghost, resists bringing their Black servant Rayburn into their house, protest-
ing ‘she had never in her life hobnobbed with niggers, and she saw no reason why she
should do so now’ (124). Thus Voorman’s haunted manuscript rather acts as a synecdo-
che for the corruptive influence of Western narrative.
Similarly in Myal, the British school text is ‘more than a dispiriting allegory’ (Kortenaar
1999, 67). Reading proves ‘a particularly dangerous form of spirit thievery’, even for the
elementary students struggling through their first primers:

Because it allows communication across distances and provides ‘memories’ of

events that predate the reader’s birth . . . reading resembles the myalist communion
with ancestral spirits; it allows her to travel across distances and communicate with
imaginary (but nonetheless real) friends, with Peter Pan, with Wordsworth’s Lucy
Gray, and with the boy who put his finger in a hole in the dike to save his town
from flooding. . . . When reciting Kipling [as a young girl], Ella looks as if she were
‘flying’: ‘Totally separated from the platform and from the people around her. Not
just by colour.’ (Brodber 1988, 62)

The Western text threatens to empty Ella, a light-skinned Jamaican and the novel’s
protagonist, of Black cultural content and replace it with racially oppressive, imperialist
ideologies. Consequently, ‘The words were the words of Kipling but the voice was that
of Ella O’Grady aged 13’ (5).2 Equally important, such primers sever Ella’s connection
to her community, offering up a fantasy of whiteness and nation that lures Ella into an
isolated state. As an adult who survives and is cured of Western-imposed zombification,
Ella critiques the school primers, complaining to Reverend Simpson that ‘She didn’t like
the way Percy and Master Willie were treated by the other animals . . . – They treat
them as sub-normals who have no hope of growth’ (97). The conversation importantly
acknowledges the contradictions inherent both in the racist discourses which produced
colonialism and in the readers that help maintain neo-colonialism. In other words, the
children’s primers – masked as the unassuming story of a revolt on a farm – proves but
another variation of Kipling.3
Mittelholzer, Brodber and Hopkinson repeatedly indict Western genre and language
for the silences imposed and covered over by Western jargon and genre. My Bones and
My Flute indicts the entirety of Western knowledge as haunted by glaring omissions and
gaps. Milton, surveying Mr Nevinson’s library, comments on ‘the restful gloom that
always lurked in the spaces between these dark mahogany bookcases with their vol-
umes and stacks of yellowed manuscripts and the relics that occupied some shelves . . .
benign jumbies seemed to crouch in the gloomed spaces between the bookcases’
(Mittelholzer 2015, 55). The scene indicts the whole of Western knowledge by includ-
ing various forms of scholarship in the library before explicitly defining the exclusion
of the Afro-Caribbean from the Western body of knowledge via the invocation of the
‘jumbie’ as the ghost haunting the gaps in the library. Consequently, the West Indian
subject that attempts to mimic and reproduce Western scholarly and textual forms is
equally haunted by silences. Milton’s diary is equally prone to exclusions and conse-
quent misrepresentations. Explaining that he tries to please all three members of the
Nevinson family in how he structures his narrative, he nevertheless acknowledges the
omissions which adherence to genre creates, remarking that ‘“the mystery [is] solved

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 gothic and the black diaspora 73

at the end” (though whether the mystery can really be said to have been solved in the
end is a matter for serious debate)’ (49).
Hopkinson’s story ‘Ganger: Ball Lightning’ explicitly indicts Western narrative for
its potential to function as fat, an excess of tongue-twister words which essentially say
and reveal nothing. In brief, ‘Ganger’ follows Issy and Cleve as they battle a creature
birthed from the improper storage of their high-tech sex toys; in the process, the two
finally address some of the psychosocial issues which have prevented them from emo-
tionally connecting and communicating. ‘Ganger’ repeatedly mocks the protagonists’
turns to Western jargon and pseudo-science:

The marketing lie was that the suits were ‘consensual aids to full body aura align-
ment,’ not sex toys. Yeah, right. Psychobabble. She was being diddled by an over-
sized condom possessed of fuzzy logic. . . . The stim started to writhe, conforming
itself to her shape. Galvanic peristalsis, they called its ability to move. (Hopkinson
2001, 224)

She similarly declares later, ‘it was the logo of the Senstim people who’d invented the
wetsuits! . . . She remembered some of the nonsense words that were in the warning
on the wetsuit storage boxes: “Energizing electrostatic charge,” and “Kirlian phenom-
enon”’ (237). The passages are replete with vague and nonsensical but smart-sounding
phrases such as ‘psychic effluvium’ and ‘etheric magnetic field’ before finally turning
to a verifiably Western invention – electricity – in an analogy which still doesn’t clarify
the nature of the event. Consequently, throughout the story, the ‘proper’ terminology
for the sex wetsuits and their phenomenon surfaces only to be immediately dismissed
as ‘psychobabble’ and ‘nonsense words’ before being renamed in more accessible lan-
guage. Thus ‘consensual aids to full body aura alignment’ is rearticulated as ‘sex toy’.
Rejecting the original terminology for the phenomenon, the story plays with a variety
of alternative terms, from ‘suit-ghost’ to ‘stim-ghost’. Eventually Issy concludes at
one point, ‘But this wasn’t a wetsuit, it was like some kind of, fuck, ball lightning’
(227). The text’s very title points to the struggle for narrative power. Named after the
wetsuit electric monster, the title refuses the scientific jargon any place at all – it is the
invisible referent. The title does allude to another Western term, the doppelganger,
but even marks this as corrupted and insufficient, reduced down to mere ‘ganger’ and
accompanied by a parenthetical aside. The renaming accomplished in this aside both
clarifies and challenges the competency of the original Western term and, more impor-
tantly, is an utterly new linguistic descriptor conjuring a new visual referent. Further,
in the midst of the plot of ‘Ganger’, Cleve begins to speak the full Western term ‘dop-
pelganger’, only to have the utterance cut short by an assault from the ghost-suit. The
scene thus suggests that the terminology and its referent figurations fail to encapsulate
the reality. Importantly, the most powerful moment of renaming occurs when Issy and
Cleve displace all Western terms with Black diasporic terms and figures. It is only when
Issy renames the ‘Kirlian phenomenon’ as ‘duppy’ that the two begin to move towards
defeating the monster.
‘Duppy’ is the most fitting descriptor for the wetsuit spectre when we know what a
duppy is in Jamaican folk belief. A duppy is essentially one half of a person’s being, the
earthly half which is most likely to be corrupted into a destructive force. The other half
is the good, heaven-bound portion of spirit which, during life, ‘can wander away from

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 74 maisha wester

the body during sleep and then can engage in all sorts of activities’ including consort-
ing with other creatures (Leach 1961, 207). The tension in ‘Ganger’ is between three
entities as it were: the living ‘body’ which is composed of Issy’s and Cleve’s romantic
existence; the neglected communicative spirit which is one half of their relationship
and which Issy mourns the loss of; and the overfed, corrupted corporeal aspect of
their relationship which appears as the destructive suit ganger, correctly identified as
a duppy. But equally important is the role of the West in silencing and eradicating the
communicative portion of the spirit, while privileging and corrupting the corporeal
side. As previously noted, Western society is embodied by the scientific jargon on the
wetsuit box and instructions which present a lot of language while communicating
nothing. If anything, the language offers an impediment to clarifying the actual ori-
gin and meaning of the assault. Wetsuits and Western language ultimately stop Cleve
and Issy from touching or reaching each other, as Issy astutely notes. Her complaint
that the wetsuits are just giant condoms, ‘rubber body bags’ and ‘fake flesh’ that they
‘Wrap [themselves] in . . . to make us feel’ even though ‘Their bodies didn’t touch’
(Hopkinson 2001, 229–30) correctly marks the invention and the terms used to define
its effect as an impediment to Black coupling and intimacy. The complaint defines Issy
and Cleve as corpses; they are the undead animated by Western invention. Thus, the
story reveals how Western materialist ideology helps turn romantic lives into duppies.
Only through turning back to their cultural roots, in naming the wetsuit ghost, and
therefore the behaviour that produced it, ‘duppy’, can Issy and Cleve name what has
been neglected in their romantic life: the communication which allows them to emo-
tionally connect and enliven their existence.

New Monsters to Correct the Silences

In Haiti, History, and the Gods Colin Dayan details folklore about various monstrous
Caribbean creatures, concluding that these figures are remnants from the experience
of slavery: ‘rather than viewing the monsters as representations of the people draining
the life force out of their enslaved victims, however, [he] posits that the stories repre-
sent how slavery “turned humans into things, beasts, or mongrels”’ (Anatol 2015, 8).
In discussing the trait of skin-shedding monsters, such as the soucouyant and the san
po, he concludes ‘that these folktales are abstracted recollections of enslavement on
the island of Hispañola, when slaves had their skins flayed and applied with “pepper,
salt, lemon, and ashes”’ (8). However, as many of these creatures are also mutations
of figures from various African cultures, they also implicitly record and are haunted by
pre-colonial African history even as they provide a critique of the horrors of Western
colonialism and enslavement.
By comparing the descriptors for La Diablesse, the douen, the River Mumma and
the Dutchman ghost,4 just to name a few among many others, we can see that each
records a specific historic experience, specifically the experience of slavery. The mulatto
form of La Diablesse, for instance, records the sexual violation experienced in slavery
and colonisation even as her threat reproduces the repercussions of sexual miscegena-
tion for Black men. Her skin and old-fashioned dress also speak to the debates around
colourism and ideals of femininity as expressed during the era in which contemporary
discourses around race, gender and sex were solidified. Similarly, the douen speak to the
reality of frequent child deaths under slavery and colonialism. Arising from the deaths of

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 gothic and the black diaspora 75

unbaptised/unchristened infants, the figures provide a critique of Christianity as practised

by slaveholders, revealing how frequently ‘Christian’ colonial masters refused Blacks
salvation both in life and in death. As such, these creatures are similar to the original
Vodou zombie as both the absolute and utter damnation slavery offered. Indeed, their
backwards-facing feet ultimately signal assault on Black futures, even beyond the era of
enslavement. The descriptions of River Mumma are particularly interesting as this is a fig-
ure which can be explicitly traced back to various African cultures. Her current manifes-
tations, however, suggest uncertainty about the fates of African diasporic peoples. Linked
as she is to the tale of the Golden Table,5 she offers critiques of diasporic people who
have aligned themselves too closely with Western ideals, specifically the drive to consume.
Even the centrality of salt to many of these folk stories signifies historical encounter. Salt
has historic connections to slavery, in which African-born slaves were termed ‘saltwater
slaves’; its role in the Middle Passage6 also connotes involuntary migration and enslave-
ment. And, of course, slaves were tortured with salt as it was rubbed into their wounds
after whippings and flayings. As such, Black diasporic folk figures record both historical
experience and mourning.7
Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute exemplifies the function, significance and
impact of introducing Black folk figures to the gothic text. The novel spins around a
notable revision of Guyana’s Dutchman ghosts. While Voorman’s ghost follows the
traditional description in his insistence on a proper burial, aspects of his haunting pro-
vide significant critiques on the challenges confronting the modern minority subject.
Mittelholzer’s version also contains elements of the pied-piper narrative; his victims
are entranced by the ghostly flute music until they are finally compelled to follow it to
their doom. We might further connect the lure and temptation of the flute music to the
other aspect of Voorman’s haunting – the infection of his victims via textual contact –
to understand how the invisible ghostly spectres of the Dutch haunt the Black islanders
beyond explicit phantasmal encounters. Rather, through texts and narratives, the dead
Dutch lure modern Black subjects to accept destructive racial and class ideologies. The
Dutchman ghost, already a packed folk figure, thus reveals the complex ways in which
the Black Guyanese are still ‘claimed’ by the West.
Mittelholzer’s revisions to the ghostly figure reveal the stakes of claiming humans
as objects for the oppressor. Unlike the traditional Dutch ghost, Voorman’s ghost is
plagued by a demonic force determined to doom Voorman’s soul to hell. Yet the nov-
el’s conclusion reveals how Voorman is both victim of and villain to his own torment,8
even as he is villain to and victim of the rebelling slaves which eventually destroy him:

Sometimes I see myself as I am, and sometimes I see myself as they are, but all is
one. . . . If a man shall defy his naturally beneficent urges and turn from God to
unnaturally malevolent practices . . . then shall he emit evil manifestations and
influences – and these came out of that man himself. And should he persist with
concentration upon deeds of greed and ambition . . . then shall his emanations take
unto themselves active and frightful shapes. . . . It is I myself who plague myself
in several forms projected and created by my errant will. These presences bear the
essence of me Jan Pieter Voorman. (Mittelholzer 2015, 229–30)

Given Voorman was a slave owner killed in the Berbice rebellion, the damning ‘unnatu-
rally malevolent practices’ must be taken conjointly with the equally destructive ‘deeds

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 76 maisha wester

of greed and ambition’. The passage reproduces slavery as a kind of dark magic capable
of summoning and producing heinous evil that warps and destroys all involved.
Further, his observation that ‘if I haunt in the Afterlife, I sometimes may appear as my
own good self in piteous supplication, sometimes as the evil grey fiends’ (230) holds
valuable criticisms of modern economy and culture. Voorman’s comment must be taken
as a signifier for the haunting of slavery which, like Voorman’s ghost, may assume
different forms in its afterlife.
Similarly, Brodber’s Myal is built around Caribbean figures to clarify the horrors of
Western domination, imperialism and global capitalism. Brodber’s use of folk figures
reappropriates them from dominant representation which has warped the zombie and
Obeah in particular into gross versions of their original form. Brodber’s novel primarily
aligns Obeah with the West, emphasising that its destructive capacity is teased out by the
gluttonous aspect of the West. In the novel, Obeah is also termed ‘spirit thievery’ to fully
name and define the nefarious, corrupt, seemingly mystical powers of Western cultural
dominance. For instance, critiquing her husband and Pastor, William, Maydene – an
English woman who at least sympathises with her Jamaican congregation – considers
the various ways that William’s ministry deprives people of their culture, forcing them to
adopt certain dress and practices in order to receive ‘salvation’. Thus the novel, through
Maydene and other characters, explicitly defines assaults upon and theft of spirit as one
of the unseen perils of cultural imperialism. Later, through Reverend Simpson’s sermon,
the novel ties such behaviour to physical theft of culture, people and labour. According to
the novel, the West practises a kind of ‘Obeah’ on populations in order to reduce minori-
ties to such a numbed, zombified state that they do not object when their resources and
bodies are stolen to stock European museums and jewellery cases.
Ella’s journey in the novel explicitly connects cultural theft to zombification. As
much as Pastor William believes it is his duty to ‘exorcise’ the current culture of the
islanders and ‘replace’ it with Western Christian culture, Ella’s American expedition,
marriage and illness illustrate how zombies are created through the exorcism and
displacement of the subjects’ original will and culture. Made to understand racial
difference and white privilege by her white American husband Selwyn, Ella is also
emptied of cultural narrative, for she tells him all her stories of the island, until she is
drained. Further, Selwyn manages to recreate Ella; as she becomes less useful to him
for her stories, she gradually shifts to the role and position of servant, primarily con-
cerned with ‘the washing and cooking and shopping’ and managing Selwyn’s house
(Brodber 1988, 82).
Brodber’s novel significantly returns us to the original depiction of the zombie not
as a cannibal, id-driven monster but as the undead doomed to eternal servitude. The
original concept of the zombie as it appeared in the Black Caribbean epitomised the
experience of slavery: ‘The zombie is sort of a slave’s nightmare. For the slave, the only
hope of release was death . . . But if a dead slave’s body was reanimated as labor for
the zombie, then the slave existence would continue even after death, a particularly
horrible thought’ (quoted in Lauro and Embry 2008, 98). The zombie in Myal exem-
plifies this nightmarish existence and function, as a victim whose ‘knowledge of their
original and natural world’ has been stolen, rendering the person an ‘empty shell . . .
capable only of receiving orders from someone else and carrying them out’ (Brodber
1988, 107). In shifting the zombie back to its original form and content, Brodber’s text
not only illustrates how the Black diasporic folk monster in its original form is packed

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 gothic and the black diaspora 77

with historical content, but also draws important connections between the bygone era
of slavery and capitalism in its present iteration. While the slave of previous eras may
rest in the afterlife, their descendants are nonetheless doomed to a spiritually numbed
existence in which they too are alienated from their culture and labour, their minds
and their bodies, by Western imperial forces.
Ella’s zombification reveals more of the mystery behind Western Obeah, specifically
the method of transmission and the roles of women in doing the transmitting. Emptied
of her stories, turned from a free light-skinned island woman into the Black wife of a
white American, and finally into a zombified servant, Ella returns home seemingly preg-
nant. Throughout the novel, Obeah is only practised against women. The first victim,
Anita, a teenager whose spirit is being drained to keep a man young, suffers expressly
sexualised, though invisible, assaults during the course of her spirit possession. Such
moments situate women’s reproductivity as central to Western domination, for Anita’s
body sustains the vitality and power of her assailant. Ella’s pregnancy also serves as an
illustration of how Western oppression resurfaces across generations, appearing dif-
ferently but accomplishing the same end. In describing Selwyn, the text critiques this
exploitation as ‘tradition’:

If Selwyn Langley had been born in eighteenth or nineteenth century Britain and of
upper class parentage . . . He would have been sent off to Jamaica and would have
met Ella O’Grady and chosen her from among his stock to be his housekeeper. He
would have given her two children, made his fortune and returned to England . . .
ready for his rightful place in the fold there. (Brodber 1988, 42)

Thus, like her mother and grandmother before her, as usual, Ella returns home seem-
ingly pregnant with the child of a white man from an imperial nation. Further, Ella’s
‘pregnancy’ utterly prevents sexual encounter between the colonial and coloniser from
being redeemed or reread through idealising romantic narratives. Having returned
home to be cured of her zombification, Ella gives ‘birth’ to horror: ‘it was like twenty
thousand dead bull frog, the scent that escape from that chile’s body. That had to be
the hand of man . . . Then what come out of her! Colour grey . . . she marvel that a
body coulda hold so much stuff’ (94). Recalling the sexualised violation Anita suffers
in her spirit theft and repeating the patterns of pregnancy suffered by previous genera-
tions, Ella’s tale unites the notion of the zombie as subject of (sexualised) violation and
the idea of imperialism as erasing and ‘impregnating’ the subject with vile matter in a
process repeated across generations.
Hopkinson’s tales also rely on folk figures to clarify the horrors of contemporary capi-
talism and Western imperialism for the minority subject. More importantly, Hopkinson’s
texts incorporate the figures as if the reader is already familiar with them. Her texts thus
offer the Western reader an alienation similar to that which the Black Caribbean subject
encounters in the traditional gothic text. Her fable-esque short story ‘Tan-Tan and Dry
Bone’ best exemplifies her use of African diasporic folk figures to express the complex
history which threatens to destabilise and bury the modern Black subject. The story is set
just outside of ‘Duppy Dead Town’, a place where

people go when life boof them, when hope left them and happiness cut she eye
’pon them and strut away. Duppy Dead people drag them foot when them walk.

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 78 maisha wester

The food them cook taste like burial ground ashes. Duppy Dead people have one
foot in the world and the next one already crossing the threshold to where the real
duppy-them living. (Hopkinson 2001, 147)9

Similar to the story ‘Ganger’, the duppy metaphorises the fragmentation and self-exile
of a people who have been cut off from the good parts of themselves. Further, as the
details of Tan-Tan’s life reveals, this severing starts from outside the individual. It
begins in criticisms of behaviour, which are eventually internalised. In many ways, the
Duppy Dead recall and illustrate the Western Obeah critiqued throughout Myal: ‘The
first two principles of spirit thievery – let them feel that there is nowhere for them to
grow to. Stunt them. . . . Let them see their brightest ones as the dumbest ever. Alienate
them’ (Brodber 1988, 98).
Mr Dry Bone embodies the dominant narrative that imprisons and alienates Blacks,
reducing them to duppies. The origins of the figure further clarify what and who he
embodies. The tale of Dry Bone is a parody of a well-known Jamaican slave song chid-
ing a master who orders that an old, useless slave – someone with ‘dry bones’ – be
thrown over a cliff. Thus, we can easily see him as a signifier of both the inevitable
ravishes of age and the horrifying, wasteful destruction that was and is the modern
dehumanising economic system. Further, in the Jamaican variations of the Anansi sto-
ries, he is the only character capable of outsmarting Anansi, a trickster figure from
African folklore. Dry Bone in the Anansi stories stands as both a figure of natural
death and a figure of unnatural death via systemic racist assaults; both are impossible
to avoid entirely. Consequently, in Hopkinson’s story, Dry Bone is equally difficult to
escape: ‘them will tell you how it ain’t have no way to get away from Dry Bone the
skin-and-bone man, for even if you lock you door on him, him body so fine him could
slide through the crack and all to pass inside your house’ (Hopkinson 2001, 147–8).
Dry Bone proves a plague to Tan-Tan, the young heroine of the story. Dry Bone is
endlessly hungry throughout Hopkinson’s tale, never getting enough food to eat and
proving so impatient he swallows food whole without chewing and eats raw food
rather than waiting for it to cook. His insatiable nature recalls the ways Black bod-
ies and labour were consumed by slavery, particularly the resultant insatiable sugar
and coffee trade. Hopkinson, however, does not clearly locate the time or era of the
story, thus emphasising Dry Bone more as an ideology, rather than as a specific system
constrained by time and location. In fact, the descriptions of his weight further mark
him as a sign of history of discourse and treatment of Black peoples. When Dry Bone
touches Tan-Tan, ‘she feel[s] a coldness wrap round she heart. She pick up the old
man, and is like she pick up all the cares of the world’ (Hopkinson 2001, 151). Given
Dry Bone’s origin, ‘the weight of the world’ might also be understood as a comment
upon the ways Black bodies have been socially used even beyond slavery – the ways
Blackness is made to serve as a sign for a slew of social dysfunctions and crimes. The
longer Tan-Tan carries Dry Bone, the heavier he gets, until

She [could] feel the weight of all the burdens she carrying: alone, stranded on New
Half Way Tree with a curse on she head, a spiteful woman so ungrateful she kill she
own family. ‘Feed me, Tan-Tan, or I go choke you.’ He wrap he arms tight round
she neck and cut off she wind. (Hopkinson 2001, 151)

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 gothic and the black diaspora 79

Important here are the details that come to Tan-Tan’s mind the longer she carries Dry
Bone: indictments against her behaviour defining her as criminal, observations about
her isolated and unloved state, and critiques of her womanhood.
As much as these comments seem to stem from Tan-Tan’s interior, the fact that they
are unvoiced until she picks up Dry Bone suggests that these are actually external voices
attempting to define Tan-Tan as lesser. Indeed, Dry Bone’s appraisal of Tan-Tan as
‘A stranger in Duppy Dead Town . . . One who can’t see she joy for she sorrow . . .
He know she good’ (Hopkinson 2001, 149) explicitly acknowledges her virtuous
soul. However, Dry Bone first weakens Tan-Tan mentally through telepathy, his ‘voice
fill[ing] up the inside of she head . . . whispering in she head like knowledge: “Me know
say what you is, Tan-Tan. Me know you is worthless and your heart hard”’ (153–4).
Inevitably, Tan-Tan believes Dry Bone, hanging her head in agreement at names such as
‘stupid one’ and ‘hard-ears one’ (155). Significantly, Dry Bone’s appraisal and treatment
of Tan-Tan recalls Brodber’s concept of how Western Obeah works to render the Afro-
Caribbean an emptied zombie. Tan-Tan is stunted by overwhelming suffering, so great
that she is blinded to hope and can hear only messages about her worthlessness. Thus,
Dry Bone metaphorises not just the history confronting the African-descendant, but the
modern manifestations of an ensnaring, dehumanising discourse.10

Changing the Tune

The use of diasporic lore provides Black authors with a means to resist the kinds of
intellectual and cultural theft and zombification Myal warns against. One hope at the
end of Brodber’s text is that the Black student will learn ‘that one need not read obedi-
ently. It does not matter what she reads, as long as the reader maintains her distance.
Critical reading involves a kind of linguistic ritual, a gauging of the distance between
the reader and the writer, between the self and the other’ (Kortenaar 1999, 67). But
the greater hope is to produce texts that speak back to, are received by, and are kept
within the heart of the imperial West. The ancestral figure White Hen voices just such
hope about Ella as an author: ‘You’ll next see Ella’s papers at the top of the files at
Whitehall with the under secretaries bowing their heads and saying: “Yes, yes, yes. We
are spirit thieves”’ (Brodber 1988, 109). For Brodber, the goal is to create counter-
narratives which hopefully will trigger self-reflection in the heart of Western nations.
Further, such counternarratives contain the potential to teach Black diasporic students
to read the world and themselves differently, as Willie explains to White Hen:

Now we have two people who are about to see through that. . . . People who are
familiar with the print and the language of the print. Our people are now beginning
to see how it, and they themselves, have been used against us. Now, White Hen,
now, we have people who can and are willing to correct images from the inside,
destroy what should be destroyed, replace it with what it should be replaced with
and put us back together, give us back ourselves with which to chart our course to
go where we want to go. (Brodber 1988, 109–10)

Literature, Brodber argues, is the new ‘slave ship’, and the modern Afro-diasporic
writer has to ‘learn the outer’s ways, dish it out in little bits, an antidote man, against

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 80 maisha wester

total absorption. . . . You see where to put what, to change what. You change those
books, you take those ships and away we go’ (Brodber 1988, 68). Hopkinson’s conclu-
sion to ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ conveys a similar hope. Liberated from the curse of
Dry Bone, who feeds her a constant narrative of her inferiority, Tan-Tan starts to see
her home differently: ‘home. It wouldn’t be plenty trouble to make another window
to let in more light. Nothing would be trouble after living with the trouble of Dry
Bone. She go make the window tomorrow, and the day after that, she go re-cane the
break-seat chair’ (Hopkinson 2001, 164–6). Of course, it remains a question if such
improvement will be permanent, but that depends upon Tan-Tan seeing Papa Bois. In
other words, Hopkinson’s story argues that one has to fully reconnect to the culture
that has been erased in the course of colonial history if there is any hope of a future.
Lastly, in turning to the folk figure, the texts also present us with alternative
concepts of existence and social organisation.11 As much as Brodber is critical of privi-
leging Western styles, her text is equally critical of denying them a place. Rather, what
we witness in Brodber’s novel is the ideal for the modern subject – a blending of forms
which acknowledges their complex blended identity. Consequently, in a scene chart-
ing the history of enslavement, the discussion between two ancestral figures concludes
with a parody of a Scottish ballad: ‘So you take the low road and I’ll take the high road
and I’ll reach Grove Town afore ye’ (Brodber 1988, 39). In quoting from ‘The Bonnie
Banks o’ Loch Lomond’12 Brodber comments upon the diasporic nature of oppression
across races and nations while also signalling that this too is part of her story.
In each of these illustrations the use of figurations allows Black diasporic authors
access to and use of a genre whose tropes are weighted in favour of Western discourse
and positionality, while sending out a challenge to the gothic genre. We find these chal-
lenges to the genre across the diaspora, in texts by authors such as Edwidge Danticat,
Alesia Perry and Helen Oyeyemi. Monsters such as the soucouyant, the sasabonsam and
the baku provide Afro-diasporic authors with a means to acknowledge their difference
and their history, and to critique their complex present. Reclaiming the zombie from the
cannibal apocalypse, privileging figures such as the duppy, is a significant act of resis-
tance, a determination to ‘reclaim a past anterior to European conquest, a history whose
outlines blend with those of originary myth, and whose ghosts are not horrifying appa-
ritions from another, unwanted era but welcome catalysts for the recovery of a buried
ancestral consciousness’ (Huggan 1998, 129). As Brodber explains,

Different rhymes for different times

Different styles for different climes
Someday them rogues in Whitehall
Be forced to change their tune. (Brodber 1988, 111)

Notes
1. Russell McDougall clarifies the connections between the fictional character’s obsession over
form and the author’s very real struggle with genre in relation to his racial and national ori-
gins: ‘The form which Mittelholzer’s exploration takes . . . may of course have a lot to do
“with the West Indian author doing his best to accommodate his prospective British reader.”
. . . the grounds of th[e] objections [from the Nevinsons] seem almost to anticipate the pos-
sible reservations of a British publisher’ (McDougall 1992, 80). Further, Mittelholzer’s

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 gothic and the black diaspora 81

life, literary career and tragic death exemplify the consequence for the racial subject battling
with a sense of exile from cultural space and narrative. Critics have noted how his

novels seem to bear witness to the novelist’s fierce despise for the non-European part
of his genetic and cultural heritage. It is as if . . . the writer transposed his self-abjec-
tion above all in black and mixed-blood characters. . . . Mittelholzer felt divided and
inherently disharmonic; with time, this conflict between different ‘bloods’ progres-
sively took the shape of a continuous battle between intellect and emotion, spirituality
and sensuality, the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian.’ (Scalinci 2009)
Unable to locate a space within any of the worlds he existed in – as a racial subject, as a
West Indian British colonial, as a Guyanese writer – Mittelholzer committed suicide, set-
ting himself ablaze in 1965.
2. The novel emphasises the section of Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ which
directly correlates to Ella’s own conception; her Irish father is stationed there to stop the
locals from presumably cannibalising each other.
3. Myal’s structure emphasises the connection between zombification, literary genre and con-
tent to reveal the workings of Western influence. The first chapter of the novel is a descrip-
tion of Ella as an adult, possessed and zombified. The second chapter shifts back nearly a
decade to Ella’s childhood, specifically the moment of her elementary school recital. The
second to last chapter details the process of curing Ella before returning to the question of
the school primers. The very last chapter details Ella’s critique of the primers and the pos-
sibility of her generating a new story to occupy a place in Whitehall, in the heart of Britain.
Thus the threat and cure of zombification is structurally linked to the question of Western
narrative and genre.
4. La Diablesse: a veiled, beautiful woman with one cloven hoof, usually described as a
‘mulatta’ dressed in old-fashioned clothes; preys upon men, luring them to their deaths
(usually off a steep cliff).
Douen: the spirits of lost children. These creatures are pygmy-sized and feature backwards-
facing feet.
River Mumma: mermaid-like, she is feared by some and sacred to others; associated with
the ‘golden table’ treasure, believed to have been buried in deep waters by the Spaniards,
who were fleeing at the onset of England’s invasion of Jamaica in 1655. Also known as
Mama Wata or Mama Dio.
Dutchman ghosts (Guyanese specific): the unsatisfied spirits of Dutch men and women
who died during the Berbice rebellion and who have, since 1764, roamed the land, seeking
ways to reclaim their property, to vindicate their untimely deaths, and/or to gain a proper
burial.
5. In Jamaican folklore, the golden table once belonged to Spanish conquistadors. In some ver-
sions of the tale, the conquistadors hid the table in a river for safekeeping until their return;
others say it sank with the conquistadors’ ship when River Mumma flooded them as they
pursued her. River Mumma protects the table, which occasionally rises to the water’s surface,
tempting greedy people to search for it. River Mumma drowns these hunters. As a character
in one iteration of the story declares, ‘Only greedy people take what’s not theirs . . . People
who are covetous end up creating big problems for themselves’ as greed always drowns
people (Friedman 2011).
6. During the Middle Passage and on land, slaves were often made to survive on salt-cured
(instead of healthy fresh) food.
7. In Derek Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers, the devil’s ‘troop of fiends’ consists of ‘the
Werewolf, the Diablesse, the Bolom’ (Walcott 1970, 89). The devil’s costumes throughout
the entire play shift between a plantation owner and a white, modern labour manager. The

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 82 maisha wester

play thus links the history of violence and horror to contemporary capitalism, arguing that
the weapons and miseries of one era follow into the contemporary moment.
8. The text predicts Toni Morrison’s observation in Playing in the Dark: ‘Pouring rhetorical
acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but . . . what happens in
that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one
who does the pouring? Do they remain acid free?’ (Morrison 1993, 46).
9. Hopkinson’s name for the town and its residents calls our attention to the figure of the
duppy itself. To invoke the people as dead describes the stagnation that plagues their life; to
invoke them as duppies too signifies the way the folk reference is also packed with histori-
cal and cultural experience beyond the generalised living death.
10. The ending to ‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’ is in keeping with the traditional gothic in light of
what Dry Bone signifies. Although Tan-Tan manages to rid herself of Dry Bone and starts to
see her life with a little more hope, the plot reveals that her happily-ever-after has not arrived
and is not guaranteed. Rather, the story ends with possibility as she prepares to undertake a
journey which could liberate her from the burden of history and Western racial discourse.
11. In juxtaposing Obeah against Myalism, Brodber’s text compares two notions of social
organisation, for Obeah tends to appear in societies where there is a social hierarchy and
stratification, whereas Myal appears in smaller societies where there is no centralised adju-
dication or stabilised class structure. The Myalism Brodber depicts emphasises the absence
of hierarchy (Kortenaar 1999, 60). In contrast to the kinds of spirit possession one typi-
cally sees in the West Indies in which power ‘“descends on the powerless” from above’,
there’s ‘nothing of ownership or control in the ancestral spirit communion depicted by
Brodber. Such communion constitutes not a takeover of the self but rather an enhancement
of the self and is best called not “possession” but perhaps “transport” or “self-possession”.
The myal spirits and their human hosts bear different names and can be distinguished, but
their relation is a near complete identity’ (Kortenaar 1999, 54). The Myalist ancestors
are presented as a counter against which to read Western Obeah, which, as the previous
discussion of zombification argues, is a rape rather than the mutually beneficial symbiotic
relation of ancestor possession or riding. Brodber’s strategy throughout Myal performs this
rejection of cultural hierarchy.
12. The song is based on a Jacobite lament written after the Battle of Culloden. One interpreta-
tion attributes the song to a pair of Jacobite Highlander brothers captured by the Hanover
British during the 1765 uprising. Cruelly forced to choose which one would die, one offers
to take the ‘low road’, signalling his execution and spiritual return ‘home’. Given the song’s
origin, it signals rebellion against oppressive foreign rule despite extreme loss.

References
Anatol, Giselle Liza. 2015. The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in the Literature of
the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Brodber, Erna. 1988. Myal. Long Grove: Waveland Press.
Friedman, Amy. 2011. ‘River Mumma and the Golden Table.’ Reprinted in Times-Herald
Record, 30 April 2011. https://eu.recordonline.com/story/lifestyle/2011/05/02/tell-me-story-
river-mumma/50069206007/.
Hopkinson, Nalo. 2001. Skin Folk: Stories. New York: Warner Aspect.
Huggan, Graham. 1998. ‘Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Countermemory.’ In Cannibal-
ism and the Colonial World, edited by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen,
126–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kortenaar, Neil ten. 1999. ‘Foreign Possessions: Erna Brodber’s “Myal,” the Medium, and her
Message.’ Ariel 30, no. 4 (October): 51–73.

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 gothic and the black diaspora 83

Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. 2008. ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman in the Era
of Advanced Capitalism.’ boundary 2 35, no. 1: 85–108.
Leach, MacEdward. 1961. ‘Jamaican Duppy Lore.’ The Journal of American Folklore 74, no.
293: 207–15.
McDougall, Russell. 1992. ‘Sound, Depth and Disembodiment in Mittelholzer’s My Bones and
My Flute.’ In Re-Siting Queen’s English: Text and Tradition in Post-Colonial Literatures,
edited by Gillian Whitlock and Helen Tiffin, 79–89. Atlanta: Rodopi.
Mittelholzer, Edgar. 2015. My Bones and My Flute: A Ghost Story in the Old-Fashioned Manner.
Leeds: Peepal Tree Press.
Morrison, Toni. 1993. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York:
Vintage Books.
Scalinci, Francesca. 2009. ‘A Matter of Colour: Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Swarthy Boy.’ Les Caraïbes:
convergences et affinités 10. https://www.farum.it/publifarum/ezine_articles.php?art_id=92.
Walcott, Derek. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.

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 5

Engendering Globalgothic: The ‘Hideous

Progeny’ of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Monica Germanà

L ooking back at the late-twentieth-century global ramifications of gothic from

this side of the millennial threshold, Glennis Byron pioneers a reflection on the
centrifugal forces that have pulled the genre’s origins – rooted in the late-eighteenth-
century evolution of the English romance – into multiple and sometimes invisible
directions: ‘in “Globalgothic” traditional gothic tropes . . . [are] reformulated to
engage gothickly with the anxieties produced by the breakdown of national and
cultural boundaries’, she argues (2013, 2). As much as the fluid and uncontrollable
transactions of globalisation have had an impact on definitions of the gothic, as a
tradition, mode of representation, and interpretive practice, the reverse, Byron notes,
is also true: globalisation is, increasingly, articulated through eminently gothic forms
and aesthetics. And if, on the one hand, the effects of globalisation on gothic raise
questions about ‘the homogenising of culture’ and cultural appropriation, they also,
on the other hand, produce ‘a more dynamic process of transnational exchange with
new forms being produced or old forms revitalised’ (2013, 1). In its typical aptitude
to unsettle accepted norms and expose anxieties about the instability introduced by
change, globalgothic speaks of the concerns derived from the erasure of fixed national
boundaries and simultaneously contributes to ‘the cultural flows and deterritorialisa-
tions that characterise globalisation’ (2013, 3). More recently, however, as this chapter
goes on to demonstrate, the narratives of globalgothic have focused on the geopolitical
tensions rooted in the neo-colonial drives of global politics, shifting their attention to
the exacerbation of racialised and gendered division of labour worldwide and social
injustice, the increasingly urgent environmental crisis and the ‘invisible’ threat of AI.
The impact of globalisation on gender, an identity category central to gothic’s
exploration of sexuality and desire but also of patriarchal oppression and female sub-
version, has produced complex and often contradictory effects. On the one hand, as
R. W. Connell notes, ‘[i]mperialism and globalization change the conditions of exis-
tence for gender orders’, as colonialism replaces local patriarchies with colonising
patriarchies, destabilising existing gender arrangements, and undermining the local
cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity (2005, 1804). In this respect, the
persisting effects of colonial control on gender oppression have, for instance, haunted
the postcolonial gothic works of writers as diverse as Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison and
Helen Oyeyemi. Simultaneously, however, this chapter argues that globalgothic can
also challenge ‘the divide between masculinist grand theories of globalization . . . and
local empirical studies of globalization in which gender takes center stage’ (Freeman

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 engendering globalgothic 85

2001, 1,008). In these narratives where the interrogation of male/global, female/local

binaries delivers a more complex and fluid intersectional model which places the spec-
trum that is gender within the intricate network of relations between local and global.
Anxieties around the racial, female and the queer Other, deep-set within early gothic,
have converged and become more deeply affective through the cultural acceleration
produced by global consumption: ‘Here, always mobile, travelling with migrations and
through the flows of global media,’ argue Fred Botting and Justin Edwards, ‘boundaries
between life and death, real and unreal, self and other, normality and deviance become
defamiliarized as they are shifted across geographical, virtual and cultural planes, global
and local at the same time (2013, 13). While globalisation, on one side, exposes the ways
in which ‘Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain
order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict’, as John Hardt and
Antonio Negri observe, it ‘is also the creation of new circuits of cooperation and col-
laboration that stretch across nations and continents and allow an unlimited number
of encounters’ (2006, xiii). The large-scale, wide-range and high-speed movements that
distinguish the present global age, therefore, have intensified and accelerated a confron-
tation with both a multitude of Others and the multitude that is Otherness, and, with
that, the possibility of social, political and cultural clashes. Simultaneously, they also
have raised a challenge to discriminatory approaches to difference: globalgothic – as, in
one sense, a mode of representation that translates the traditional tropes of its original
anglophone canonical texts both into and for global contexts – is in fact a hybrid mon-
ster in whose body difference is constantly being made.
Translated into multiple languages, including Japanese, Korean and Indonesian, the
cross-national dimension of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) foreshadows the fast
trafficking of globalgothic (Davison and Mulvey-Roberts 2018). No other traditional
gothic figure precipitates the fluid difference and multifariousness of globalgothic as
effectively as the ‘monster’ at the centre of Shelley’s novel, a narrative where nothing
stays in its place for very long. Reflective of the monster’s dynamic shiftiness is the
crossing of multiple borders of the story’s global geographical settings, which extend
from Switzerland to Turkey, the Arctic and, imaginatively, South America, where the
Creature intends to move after the creation of his female companion which Victor
Frankenstein aborts. The geographical breadth of the narrative articulates a critique of
globalisation as it establishes a link between uncontrolled scientific experimentation,
imperialism and enforced migration, in juxtaposing Frankenstein’s ‘unnatural’ reani-
mation experiment to Robert Walton’s ‘impossible’ North-West Passage expedition
in the Arctic, a space where the joint forces of scientific experimentation, economic
exploitation and imperialist politics serve as a prelude to the sources of political ten-
sion of later stages of globalisation.
The link between the fast pace and ravenous appetites of colonial expansion and
Frankenstein’s pioneering scientific project emerges in the form of a global/local dichot-
omy in a rare moment of lucidity in Frankenstein’s creational craze: ‘if no man allowed
any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections,
Greece had not been enslaved,’ Frankenstein ponders, ‘Caesar would have spared his
country; America would have been discovered more gradually; and the empires of
Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed’ (Shelley 2012, 34). Much like the drastic
impact of Frankenstein’s hubristic project, the catastrophic consequences of colonial
invasion and imperialism are the dark side of the ‘ardent curiosity’ and desire to ‘tread

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 86 monica germanà

a land never before imprinted by the foot of man’ (Shelley 2012, 7). This is what moti-
vates Walton, whose colonial mindset transpires unambiguously upon his sighting of
the sledge which carries Frankenstein and the Creature, in a description which reeks
with imperial race discourse: ‘He was not, as the other traveller seemed to be, a sav-
age inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but an [sic] European’ (Shelley 2012, 14;
Bugg 2005, 659). Walton’s perception of the Creature’s ‘foreignness’ has parallels with
Frankenstein’s own response to his creation, where the Creature’s racialised details –
‘His yellow skin’ and ‘lustrous black’ hair and ‘black lips’ (35) – expose the narrative’s
colonial subtext and point to the Creature’s ethnicity as non-white (Lew 1991, 273;
Mellor 2001, 2; Malchow 1993, 103).
Preoccupations with aggressive imperialism and racial discrimination are jointly
embedded in many adaptations from a diverse range of cultural traditions. The Japa-
nese kaiju adaptation Frankenstein Conquers the World (dir. Ishirō Honda, 1965),
set in the aftermath of the Hiroshima nuclear attack, significantly points to shared
accountabilities in the Second World War – while Japan is responsible for ‘import-
ing’ the heart of Frankenstein from Nazi Germany, the features of the new Creature
are Caucasian. The reincarnation of Frankenstein’s Creature, a ‘strange-looking’ boy
who preys on small animals on the streets of Hiroshima, is also ‘humanised’ by the
cultural reference to wartime hunger and desperation. In Blackenstein (dir. William
A. Levey, 1973), the black monster ambiguously draws attention to American race
politics at the same time as it dwells on the ‘excessive’ masculinity of the black mon-
ster combining the stereotyped trope of black hypermasculinity with ‘[t]he lingering
racist discourse of Negro bestiality’ of Blaxploitation horror (Benshoff 2000, 42).
With ‘his Afro-natural hair . . . molded into a square-like head reminiscent of
Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster’ (Benshoff 2000, 42), the black Vietnam vet-
eran Eddie Turner’s transformation into ‘Blackenstein’ also, significantly, exposes
Hollywood’s practice of casting foreign actors for the monsters of horror film. The
reference is to the classic adaptations directed by James Whale, Frankenstein (1931)
and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), films which Elizabeth Young also identifies
as ‘implicit black Frankenstein stories which update the homoeroticism of Shelley’s
novel’ (Young 2008, 6).
Indeed, the ‘natural’ limits which Frankenstein and Walton, in different ways, force
their way through point to another set of contested boundaries – those of gender
and sexual difference – which the Creature, arguably, crosses. As a composite hybrid,
human/non-human, adult/infant, master/slave, the Creature’s strangeness is as foreign
as it is queer, a category which, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims, evokes ‘the open
mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses, and excesses
of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality
aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’ (1993, 8). The gender crisis at
the heart of the narrative is significantly ushered in by the deferred gender assignation
following the birth of the Creature:

I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive
motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or
how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured
to form?
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful.
Beautiful!—Great God! (Shelley 2012, 35, my emphases)

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 engendering globalgothic 87

The it/he pronoun switch here mirrors the process of natural birth, where the sex of the
unborn baby may remain undisclosed whilst in utero. It also, however, signals that the
Creature’s gender identity is not ‘natural’ but constructed, and, most importantly, as
the Creature’s stitched-up body becomes both a physical extension and a psychological
reflection of Frankenstein, also reveals the creator’s masculinity as ‘unnatural’.
Reworking the preoccupations with both colonialism and patriarchy in Shelley’s
novel, the selection of contemporary works examined in this chapter raises questions
about the most pressing issues of the global age. In Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein
in Baghdad (2013) the sinister story of the revived corpse is set against the turbulent
background of an Iraqi nation equally troubled by national factions and international
occupying forces. Kate Horsley’s reimagining of Frankenstein’s creation of a female
companion in The Monster’s Wife (2014) produces an ecofeminist critique of patriar-
chy and anthropocentrism. Finally, Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) delves
into questions of artificial intelligence and gender (dis)embodiment in a dual narra-
tive tracing the making of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein alongside a twenty-first-century
sequel set in Britain, continental Europe and America.

Frankenstein in Baghdad
Frankenstein in Baghdad transposes Shelley’s tale of corpse reanimation in twenty-first-
century Iraq, a country made of Arab, Jewish, Christian, Shia and Sunni Muslim identi-
ties, simultaneously torn apart by local sectarianism and global political interests. With
Iraq in the dual stranglehold of the occupying coalition forces and corrupt local gov-
ernment, Frankenstein in Baghdad unfolds as ‘an acute portrait of Middle Eastern sec-
tarianism and geopolitical ineptitude, an absurdist morality fable, and a horror fantasy’
(Perry 2018). Political satire and macabre horror converge in the figure of the Whats-
itsname, the creature that junk dealer Hadi creates from the body parts of the multiple
victims of the city’s frequent violent outbreaks. As the revived corpse pursues revenge on
the perpetrators of such attacks in what becomes a vicious circle of increasingly sense-
less violence, the narrative constantly undermines any clear-cut moral judgements on the
characters involved, the principles that drive them, and their political alignments.
What looks like an exposure of the dangers of anarchy closer to Edmund Burke’s
1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France than the endorsement of liberal anarchism
of William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) signals, instead, the
disquieting relevance of biopower to global geopolitics. As Michel Foucault argues,
violence is the sole raison d’être of wars ‘waged on behalf of the existence of everyone’,
so that, paradoxically, ‘entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale
slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital’ (1998, 137). It
follows that ‘[w]ar has become a regime of biopower’, as Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri note, ‘and . . . a form of rule aimed not only at controlling the population but
producing and reproducing all aspects of life’ (2006, 13), xenophobia, racism and sec-
tarianisms of all kinds become crucial components of biopower. This resonates with
the analysis the al-Haqiqa (‘The Truth’) magazine journalist Farid gives of ‘the biggest
disaster that had struck Iraq so far’ (Saadawi 2018, 117):

The people on the bridge died because they were frightened of dying. . . . The
groups that have given shelter and support to al-Qaeda have done so because they
are frightened of another group, and this other group has created and mobilized

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militias to protect itself from al-Qaeda. It has created a death machine working in
the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. . . . The government and the
occupation forces have to eliminate fear. They must put a stop to it if they really
want this cycle of fear to end. (Saadawi 2018, 118)

Intriguingly, Farid’s ‘death machine’ theory intimates that the violent disorder that has
taken hold of Iraq is not down to the action of one of the political sides controlling the
country, but to the endemic fear of the Other, which keeps Iraq in a state of perpetual
chaos. Following this absurd logic, the appearance of the Whatsitsname, whose body
is a composite of the victims of many an act of pointless violence, disseminates more
violence as a result not only of his own revenge agenda but also of the multifarious
followers he gathers along the way.
In articulating the complex intersections of local and global politics, gender is
central to the novel’s treatment of masculinity and ‘the special relationship between
male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining
and transmitting patriarchal power’ (Sedgwick 1985, 25). Much like Shelley’s novel,
Frankenstein in Baghdad is a story of men told by men, a portrait of masculinities at
war with one another, and, simultaneously, a revealing portrayal of the tight bonds
between them. Watching the report on the Imams Bridge disaster, Brigadier Majid,
head of a bizarre intelligence team of astrologists in the ‘Tracking and Pursuit Depart-
ment’, admires ‘the way Farid Shawaf was dressed – the grey suit with black shirt and
red tie’ (Saadawi 2018, 118); in turn Farid’s colleague, and the novel’s main point of
view, Mahmoud, makes similar remarks of the magazine editor, Ali Baher al-Saidi,
whose sartorial advice to him is to open up to Western masculinity: ‘Take every oppor-
tunity to look at yourself in the mirror, any mirror, even in the windows of parked
cars,’ he says. ‘Compete with women in this, and don’t be too oriental’ (Saadawi 2018,
44–5). Mahmoud’s efforts to ‘recreate’ his own image to resemble Saidi, by putting
on weight, shaving daily and wearing ‘suits and ties and coloured shirts’ (Saadawi
2018, 173), and even replacing him as his mistress’s bedfellow, in turn echo with
Saidi’s admission, at the end of the story, that ‘We’re very much alike’ (Saadawi 2018,
267). These patterns of reciprocal admiration, identification and mimicry reveal the
homosocial network underpinning the power contest that both divides and binds
these male characters. Similarly, Hadi’s distress after the death of his business partner,
Nahem, reveals stronger queer undertones, also reflected in Hadi’s identification with
the Whatsitsname, following another car-bomb explosion, which, though Brigadier
Majid admits at least partial government responsibility (Saadawi 2018, 259), results
in Hadi’s conviction for the Whatsitsname’s crimes. Yet, because of the main charac-
ters’ homosocial network, the monster remains both a completely unidentifiable threat
and a relatable object of the collective imagination: ‘The definitive image of him was
whatever lurked in people’s heads, fed by fear and despair. It was an image that had as
many forms as there were people to conjure it’ (Saadawi 2018, 260).
Just like his elusive identity, the monster’s story is made up of the contributions of mul-
tiple authors – the Whatsitsname, Hadi, Mahmoud, the anonymous writer – mirroring
the polyphonic narrative structure of Shelley’s novel, a reference to which appears in both
the headline – ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ – Saidi chooses for Mahmoud’s piece based
on Hadi’s story, and the still of Robert De Niro in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein (Saadawi 2018, 133) which accompanies the published piece in the maga-

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zine. The composite structure of the story is, in turn, a reflection of the hybrid creation the
Whatsitsname is from the start: the abject corpse, whose skin does not ‘have a uniform
colour’, is stitched together by a junk dealer, ‘so it would be respected like other dead
people and given a proper burial’ (Saadawi 2018, 25). The patchwork body is then pos-
sessed by the soul of security guard Hasib, whose body has been disintegrated in another
attack and imaginatively reconstructed by the communal dreams of friends and family
(Saadawi 2018, 34). Ultimately, the body is revived by Elishva, who names him Daniel,
after her son, thinking he might have come back from the dead (Saadawi 2018, 51). The
result of the shared desires and fantasies of multiple members from different communi-
ties, the Whatsitsname is a poignant embodiment of the ‘multitude’:

The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be

reduced to a unity or a single identity – different cultures, races, ethnicities, gen-
ders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living;
different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity
of all these singular differences. (Hardt and Negri 2006, xiv)

More specifically, one of the Whatsitsname’s followers, ‘the young madman’, believes
the Whatsitsname is ‘the first true Iraqi citizen’, precisely because he is ‘made up of
body parts of people from diverse backgrounds – ethnicities, tribes, races, and social
classes – . . . the impossible mix that never was achieved in the past’ (Saadawi 2018,
140). Yet, rather than incarnating a notion of ‘local’ syncretic identity, the increasingly
lacerated body of the Whatsitsname points to the decomposition of the culturally spe-
cific local body, and its replacement with the patchwork non-specificity of the global
body. It follows, then, that the Whatsitsname lives in an ‘area that’s become a battle-
ground between three forces: the Iraqi National Guard and the American army on one
side, and the Sunni militias and the Shiite militias as the second and third sides’; the
Whatsitsname’s ‘No Man’s Land’ has ‘never been under the full control of any of the
three forces, and . . . [is] a war zone without any inhabitants’ (Saadawi 2018, 138).
That the warring masculinities that simultaneously converge and clash with each
other in Iraq are central to the perpetual state of violent disorder the country is in is also
made clear by the marginalised presence of the story’s few significant female characters.
Amidst a multitude of voiceless, and largely nameless, women, the two main female
characters – Elishva, the Whatsitsname’s ‘adopted’ mother, and Nawal al-Wazir, who is
presented as Saidi’s mistress – also seemingly reinforce gender polarisation, with moth-
erhood and whoredom as representatives of the two kinds of femininity at the service
of patriarchy. While this would suggest a reductive understanding of the female subject
as either innocent carer or conniving seductress, both characters in fact challenge these
feminine constructs through their complex engagement with the local and ambivalent
embracement of the global. Thus, while Elishva’s initial reluctance to leave Iraq rein-
forces her bond with the ‘local’, she eventually joins her daughters in Australia for the
sake of her grandson (Saadawi 2018, 230). Significantly, even if Nawal is derogatively
dismissed as the boss’s ‘fuck buddy’ (Saadawi 2018, 42) and ‘the devil incarnate’
(Saadawi 2018, 97), it is her contacts with the coalition-controlled Green Zone that
cement her loose morals, while her project on ‘a feature film about the crimes of the
Saddam Hussein regime’ (Saadawi 2018, 42) and disdainful resistance to Mahmoud’s
sexual advances highlight her critical stance on local politics and gender norms.

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What both the misogyny and toxic masculinity in Saadawi’s narrative deliver is not
a critique of Iraqi politics but a cynical portrayal of the globalised world, which, as the
Whatsitsname puts it, ‘has been totally ravaged by greed, ambition, megalomania, and
insatiable bloodlust’ (Saadawi 2018, 137). Discussing the metaphorical implication
of the monster in contemporary discourse, Hardt and Negri reflect on the possibility
that ‘[p]erhaps what monsters like the golem are trying to teach us, whispering to us
secretly under the din of our global battlefield, is a lesson about the monstrosity of
war and our possible redemption through love’ (2006, 12). Viewed in this light, the
Whatsitsname retains the moral ambiguity of Shelley’s Creature: ‘They have turned me
into a criminal and a monster, and in this way they have equated me with those I seek
to exact revenge on,’ he laments, ‘This is a grave injustice. In fact there is a moral and
humanitarian obligation to back me, to bring about justice in this world’ (Saadawi
2018, 137). With ‘[g]angs . . . on the rampage in the streets of Baghdad, and people . . .
abandoning their homes or shops for fear of being kidnapped or killed’ (Saadawi
2018, 225), it becomes clear, towards the end of the novel, how the elusive threat of
the Whatsitsname ultimately keeps the cogs of global politics moving:

Fear of the Whatsitsname continued to spread. In Sadr City they spoke of him as a
Wahhabi, in Adamiya as a Shiite extremist. The Iraqi government described him as
an ingenious man whose aim was to undermine the American project in Iraq. . . .
As far as Brigadier Majid was concerned, . . . [i]it was the Americans who were
behind this monster. (Saadawi 2018, 259)

A manifestation of biopower at work, the Whatsitsname is weaponised to keep the

population under control while no real solution is sought to address the political dif-
ferences that divide the nation (and the world).
There is, however, another way of looking at the Whatsitsname’s heteroge-
neous body, as I have begun to suggest above. While the Whatsitsname’s monstros-
ity may follow ‘laws [that] don’t operate around the clock like the physical laws’
(Saadawi 2018, 125), as Saidi writes in one of his weekly columns, his decomposing
body also cohesively embodies the ‘multitude . . . composed of innumerable internal
differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity’, which, as Hardt
and Negri propose, signals to ‘the common’ as an ethical response to the challenges
posed by the global: ‘neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses),
the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them
to communicate and act together’ (2006, xv, my emphases). While, at the end of the
novel, following Hadi’s conviction for the Whatsitsname’s crimes, the community’s
‘state of hysterical joy’ is, one suspects, bound to be short-lived, the final image, dwell-
ing on the solitary ‘spectre of an unknown man . . . crouched down to pet the old cat’,
points to ‘the common’ established between the golem and the survivor of the com-
munity haunted by him: ‘They were now close friends’ (Saadawi 2018, 272).

The Monster’s Wife

In both Saadawi’s and Shelley’s novels the discourse on masculinity is haunted by the
near absence of female characters and, specifically, the lack of a female monster. The
aborted creation of the female creature is not only ‘one of the darkest and most violent
moments in Shelley’s novel’ (Hawley 2015, 218), but also the most powerful statement

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that Frankenstein, ‘a man who usurps the female role by physically giving birth to a
child’, makes about gender: ‘Monstrousness is so incompatible with femininity that Fran-
kenstein cannot even complete the female companion that his creature so eagerly awaits’
(Johnson 1982, 7–8). Perhaps because of her interrupted existence, she also remains the
novel’s ultimate enigma: ‘Would she have fulfilled the demands of the monster, going with
him to the jungles of South America?’ (Baumann 2018, 145), asks the co-curator of the
Lilly Library’s 2018 exhibition Frankenstein 200: The Birth, Life, and Resurrection of
Mary Shelley’s Monster. Juxtaposed to Elizabeth’s position rooted within the local, which
becomes ‘a metaphor for the domestic prison that threatens to entrap Frankenstein’
(Halberstam 1995, 29), the female monster’s threat has a much wider scope, as Fran-
kenstein realises that ‘[e]ven if they were to leave Europe, and inhabit the deserts of the
new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted
would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth’ (Shelley
2012, 119). Destined as a companion for the Creature, the female monster holds the
potential not only to reproduce and ‘colonise’ the world with a new ‘race of devils’, but
also, and perhaps more worryingly, to ‘turn in disgust from him to the superior beauty
of man’ (Shelley 2012, 119) and, consequently, be instrumental in a monstrous kind of
miscegenation. The female monster’s threat, therefore, would not end with the Creature’s
death, but would continue to exist and spread globally, just like the female monster has
continued to spark the imagination of worldwide filmmakers – James Whale’s The Bride
of Frankenstein, Franc Roddam’s The Bride (1985) and Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein (1994) – and writers – Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992), Victor
Kelleher’s Born of the Sea (2003) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995).
The Monster’s Wife also reimagines Frankenstein’s journey to Orkney to create the
female companion for the Creature, in a novel which juxtaposes the pristine Orcadian
environment with the polluting waste from Europe, significantly associating the dis-
order caused by the Napoleonic wars – ‘it must be those Frenchies assaulting us with
poisoned frogs to cut off our victuals’ (Horsley 2014, 24) – with the arrival of the
‘foreign doctor’ on the island of Hoy. Beginning with a third-person narrative through
the point of view of local nineteen-year-old Oona at the time of Frankenstein’s arrival,
halfway through the novel, the narrative shifts to accommodate the narrative of Eve,
‘the monster’s wife’, whom Frankenstein ‘creates’ by grafting the heart of Oona’s best
friend, May, killed at the hand of her jealous fiancé, on to Oona’s own body, after a
cardiac arrest causes her death.
Self-consciously biblical in its references to the account of creation, Orkney, ‘bar-
ren’, ‘desolate’ and ‘appalling’ in Shelley’s novel (Shelley 2012, 117), is conversely
depicted in Edenic terms: ‘Every tree and river pleasant to her sight, the sea compass-
ing the land of Hav’ilah, where there is gold and the naked go unashamed’ (Horsley
2014, 19). Rather than suggesting sterility, the natural contours of the island are
emphatically evocative of fertility, from the beach’s ‘sandy womb’ (Horsley 2014,
10) to the burn ‘that . . . cut the island like a long wound, fusing sea with sea, swell-
ing gardens, scraping under the earth for gold and onyx stone’ (Horsley 2014, 12).
Against this depiction of Orkney’s unspoilt scenery, Frankenstein’s arrival is poised as
an environmental plague which disrupts the island’s ecosystem and natural rhythms
in the novel’s opening section:

Life changed when he came to the island, the foreign doctor from further away
than anyone cared to know. The night he landed, a storm rose and blew boats

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towards the Northern ice floes, swept Dolphins aground to lie panting on the white
scythe of beach. New lambs were stolen and hens found with their throats torn out.
Kirk-going women left their cooking and ran wild, reeling home soused to take the
distaff to their husbands’ heads. All were agreed that this pestilence followed the
foreign doctor to the island as Hell follows the pale rider. (Horsley 2014, 1)

The privileged status of the unwanted scientist – he takes up residence in the only ‘big
house’ on the island – bears the colonial undertones of the ‘rich travellers from Europe
and America who wanted to play the laird for a summer, drink brandy from crystal
glasses and sup on roasted grouse’ (Horsley 2014, 29). Yet, the notion that the doctor’s
‘[c]lothes [are] almost as filthy as Old Cormick’s’ (Horsley 2014, 35), who, it emerges,
sexually abused May when she was a child, foregrounds the secret of Frankenstein’s
corruption.
The community’s responses to the stranger’s environmental impact are distinctly
gendered. On the one hand, the local men find ‘no living pollock or cod’ in their fish-
ing nets, as the sea water appears infested with strange creatures, ‘freaks, half fish,
half frog, half bloody bird, not one thing or t’other’ (Horsley 2014, 18). On the other,
Oona and her friend May are responsible for dealing with the flotsam of ‘pale, rot-
ting sea creatures, blanched and bloodless flopping out belly up and tainting the boat’
(Horsley 2014, 18), the waste product of Victor’s experiments they are hired to ‘clean
up’. As a result, the two women become, themselves, the ‘tainted’ victims of his sinister
plans, like the shrouded (female) body lying on one of the two beds in Frankenstein’s
laboratory, which Oona visualises in terms of local landscape, ‘[t]hat tangled seaweed
– hair. Those scalloped hills – feet. And the soft undulations – hips, belly, breasts’
(Horsley 2014, 43), prefiguring her own destiny at the hand of Victor.
The impact of Frankenstein’s scientific experiments on the land, its animals and its
women, points to the joint forces of patriarchy, scientific discourse and colonialism, and
exposes the ways in which ‘the dualisms of male/female, . . . civilised/primitive, human/
nature correspond directly to and naturalise gender, . . . race and nature oppressions
respectively’ (Plumwood 2002, 43). Moreover, as ‘waste’ is both ‘rubbish’ and ‘destruc-
tion’, it signals, as Françoise Vergès suggests, the interconnected environmental effects
of slavery, colonialism and capitalism which ‘have laid waste to lands and people’
(2019, 8). That May and Oona are enslaved is made clear by Frankenstein’s address to
the former as ‘My Man Friday, scavenging the wilderness for manna!’ (Horsley 2014,
36). Concurrently, Frankenstein’s rhetoric when discussing his scientific mission echoes
the discourse of domination and control of nature, central to the patriarchal structure
of Western scientific thought: ‘To discover the secrets of life, we must flush nature out
of her hiding places, move her into an orderly setting in which she may be observed.
Therefore I keep caged birds, not free-flying ones’ (Horsley 2014, 37), Frankenstein
proclaims. The phrase, which resonates with Francis Bacon’s own defence of ‘the scien-
tific method as power over nature’ (Merchant 2006, 517), for the purposes of ‘disclos-
ing the secrets of nature’ and ‘entering and penetrating into these holes and corners’
(Bacon 1870, 296), reveals the patriarchal alignment of the body of nature and the
body of woman, through the language of violation, coercion and exploitation.
Rebelling against Victor’s masculine authority, supported by the overlaps of scientific,
colonial and patriarchal discourse, the Creature simultaneously exposes and resists his
‘enslaved’ condition and racialised ‘monstrosity’: ‘See how the skin on my arm is darker?

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I do not know where I came from, not as you do, though I have searched long and hard
for a mother, father, a home’, he tells Oona (Horsley 2014, 219, my emphases). Against
the inherited privilege and biological ‘normality’ which Victor’s status and authority are
anchored to, the perpetual wandering and patchwork body of the fatherless Creature
functions, in fact, not only as tentatively liberating for the Creature but also as the sub-
versive threat to the established order, embodied by the global subject, be they the migrant
on the move, the colonised seeking independence, or the rebellious slave, which Shelley
had firmly in mind when she wrote Frankenstein (Webster 2020).
The novel’s treatment of femininity similarly questions conventional assumptions in
relation to the story’s female/male and local/global binaries through the different kinds
of knowledge Frankenstein and Oona have access to and which shape their world-
views. Thus, Frankenstein’s status derives from his elitist European roots in Ingolstadt.
Throughout the continental Europe that Frankenstein roams freely around, ideas also
travel fast, including new scientific theories, such as galvanism, ‘a new discovery . . .
much debated across Europe’, as Victor puts it to Oona, whose knowledge, instead,
relies on the community’s local tales and superstitions. The international breadth of
Frankenstein’s scientific knowledge, however, remains firmly rooted in anthropocen-
tric ideas of human supremacy, and, arguably, enmeshed in the patriarchal structure of
the Scientific Revolution (Merchant 2006). In contrast, Oona’s local folkloric knowl-
edge speaks simultaneously of the blurred boundaries between ‘natural creatures’ and
‘supernatural monsters’, and of an approach to nature based on mutual respect and
ethical consumption: ‘Some people whispered that he’d angered the sea spirits
and they’d taken him, others that he’d been greedy, casting his nets in the far North
waters where icebergs groan’ (Horsley 2014, 149), she notes of her father’s loss at sea.
The novel’s treatment of the local/global, female/male tensions, however, does not
crystallise these into essentialist binary oppositions, but proposes the view that Oona’s
(re)constructed femininity paradoxically paves the way for the emancipation from both
the imperial and patriarchal constraints of her existence. Her forced escape from her
native land, where she will never be accepted in her newly reanimated body, admittedly
fulfils Oona’s own dream ‘of seeing a bit of a town, one with a shop in it’ (Horsley
2014, 250), leading her to the discovery of a world of ‘misfits’, a community made of
the ‘walking dead’, war veterans ‘scarred and broken like her’ (Horsley 2014, 254).
Although gender bias may persist – ‘My son’s come back from the war with a scar on
his face. Worse to see it on a lass,’ says one of the market women staring at ‘her bare
throat’ (Horsley 2014, 255) – the novel’s final whisper to May’s heart – ‘we’re free’ –
displays emancipation from the patriarchal oppression and misogynist violence both
women have been victims of. Evocative of Oona’s queer desire, the ending undermines
the female/male, local/global binaries, as her much sought-after freedom will involve
the crossing of geographical boundaries further afield: ‘Each day the ships sailed until
they reached the world. Maybe she’d climb on one and buy passage to a country she’d
heard of but couldn’t imagine – France or Germany, India or China. There, in some
great city she’d find a place that felt like home’ (Horsley 2014, 256, my emphases).

Frankissstein
Discussing the emergence of ‘queer’ discourse, Sedgwick suggests that while the term
has been mostly applied to indicate same-sex sexuality, it has also been ‘claimed’ by

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other minority discourses to spin ‘the term outward along dimensions that can’t be
subsumed under gender and sexuality at all’ (1993, 9). The Creature’s fluid cross-
ing of boundaries separating countries and continents, as well as gesturing to their
own borderline position, also speaks of a figurative loss of direction in Frankenstein’s
heteronormative world. Countering the patriarchal model of stable orientation, the
Creature brings about a kind of disorientation mirrored in Walton’s sentiment towards
the unknown Arctic and Frankenstein’s anxiety of being lost in the Atlantic, and points
to the spatial quality of queerness: ‘If orientation is a matter of how we reside in
space,’ Sara Ahmed explains, ‘then sexual orientation might also be a matter of resi-
dence; of how we inhabit spaces as well as “who” or “what” we inhabit spaces with’
(2006, 543). Significantly, many cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein, from the
earliest rendition directed by J. Searle Dawley in 1910 to Jim Sharman’s 1975 Rocky
Horror Picture Show and Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, have capitalised on
the homoerotic undertones of the Creature’s queer appeal and, as a result, drawn
attention to their disruptive intrusion into the familiar spaces of patriarchal heteronor-
mativity such as the ancestral home and, in particular, the bedroom.
Through a queer lens, therefore, not only does the Creature’s queerness ‘[elude] gen-
der definition’ (Brooks 2012, 389), it also, as Susan Stryker cogently argues, articulates
a critique of the ‘natural’ body versus ‘[t]he transsexual body’ viewed as ‘unnatural’,
‘the product of medical science’ and ‘technological construction’, ‘flesh torn apart and
sewn together again in a shape other than in which it was born’ (1994, 238). In turn,
the ‘unnaturalness’ of the trans body exposes the alignment between monstrosity and
transgenderness:1 ‘I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the
monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,’ Stryker admits. ‘Like the monster, I am often
perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment’ (1994, 238). In
destabilising the hierarchical foundations of gender, the trans reading of Shelley’s novel
points to the conflation of imperial/colonial and scientific/medical discourse on gender:

Heroic doctors still endeavour to triumph over nature. The scientific discourse that
produced sex reassignment techniques is inseparable from the pursuit of immor-
tality through the perfection of the body, the fantasy of total mastery through the
transcendence of an absolute limit, and the hubristic desire to create life itself.
(Stryker 1994, 242, my emphases)

The transsexual body is, in Stryker’s analysis, the product of ‘[t]he agenda that pro-
duced hormonal and surgical sex reassignment techniques . . . no less pretentious, and
no more noble, than Frankenstein’s’ (1994, 242), as ‘science seeks to contain and colo-
nize the radical threat posed by a particular transgender strategy of resistance to the
coerciveness of gender: physical alteration of the genitals’ (1994, 244, my emphases).
Reflecting on the intersectionality of the trans monster narrative’s multiple discourses,
Jolene Zigarovich rightly observes that ‘[t]hese matrices – racio-gendered-sexualised-
specist – effectively colonize all subjects excluded from the normative domain of
“human”’ (2018, 263). As a figuration of trans monstrosity, whose body exceeds the
categorical boundaries of gender, race and species, the monster’s condition is subject to
the double and interconnected yokes of patriarchal heteronormativity and colonisation.
Winterson’s Frankissstein translates these preoccupations into a dual-time narra-
tive alternating between a historical retelling of the origin of Shelley’s novel, and a

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post-Brexit sequel with a global scope. Linking the two parallel strands is a critical
investigation of gender and sexual difference, nature and science, human agency and
ethics, pointing to the continuity between past and present philosophical inquiries as
well as delivering a cautionary tale about the future of humankind within a global,
AI-led brave new world. At the start of the novel, set in Lake Geneva in 1816, at the
time when Mary wrote Frankenstein, the gender debate is set up in binary terms and
led by Byron’s patriarchal views – ‘The male principle is readier and more active than
the female principle. This we observe in life’ – and challenged by Mary Shelley – ‘We
observe that men subjugate women’ (Winterson 2019, 8). In response to Byron’s sup-
port for the Luddites, and the idea that ‘No man should be a slave to a machine’, Mary
Shelley’s reply – ‘Men are slaves to other men . . . and everywhere women are slaves’
(Winterson 2019, 138) – situates female oppression within the broader framework
of slavery, binding together the subjugation of humans to machinery and the Atlantic
slave trade.
Slavery, female oppression and global economy similarly bleed into the patriarchal neo-
colonialism of the contemporary narrative. Explaining the reason why there are thirty-
one Manchesters in America, AI scientist Victor Stein remembers ‘the Lancashire cotton
workers’ solidarity with Abraham Lincoln over slavery’ because ‘Manchester refused to
process cotton from the slave plantations’ (Winterson 2019, 108). But references to slavery
in Frankissstein are not limited to the past; a legacy of female oppression and slavery, the
sexbot business led by Welsh entrepreneur Ron Lord articulates the exploitative conflation
of capitalism and misogyny of the contemporary age: ‘This market is global. This market
is the future,’ he claims enthusiastically, because ‘[t]here’s millions and millions of Chinese
men who’ll never have a female partner because there aren’t enough girls to go around’
(Winterson 2019, 49). Even transgender doctor (Ma)Ry Shelley contemplates a future
human/bot relationship where the latter are ‘our helpers and care-takers – not our equals’,
an attitude which Victor tags as ‘colonial’ (Winterson 2019, 150).
The global, however, also opens up the path towards the AI revolution promoted by
Victor, who claims, ‘We’re all global travellers . . . We’re all somewhere else’ (Winterson
2019, 108). The freedom of movement Victor’s neoliberal perspective associates with
the global condition, then, becomes a stepping stone for the ultimate kind of freedom,
the complete erasure of the physical constraints of embodiment:

The modern diaspora – that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants
of some kind – global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate
history of family or country to shape ourselves – all of that is preparing us for a
looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.
(Winterson 2019, 110)

Juxtaposed to nationalism, which, as Ry reminds him, ‘is on the rise’ but Victor thinks
of as a ‘throwback’ and ‘[a] refusal of the future’, the global diaspora represents the
first step in the journey towards the ultimate goal of his AI utopia. In fact, ahead of
‘[t]he breakthrough . . . in America or China’ (Winterson 2019, 274), in a paradoxical
subversion of the local/global dualism, the first technological stage towards Victor’s AI
project is ‘[t]he plan . . . to showcase Wales as the world’s first fully integrated country.
Human and bot’ (275). This move, according to Ron, will solve the ongoing issues
of xenophobia and right-wing border-control policies: ‘The bots will be Welsh, not

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 96 monica germanà

foreign. . . . Solves racism! . . . Solves Brexit! We’ll have bot workers to pick the broc-
coli and sweep the roads and work in the hospitals, but they’ll all be Welsh. It’s a
model for a new world’ (Winterson 2019, 276). Victor’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion
that the same model may work in Hungary, Brazil and Trump’s America, where there
will be ‘No Mexican bots’ (Winterson 2019, 276), exposes the fact that the bot revo-
lution would not in fact eradicate xenophobia and slavery, but merely redirect the
discriminatory and exploitative practices of colonialism on to the machines.
In addition to its dubious neo-colonial implications, Victor’s AI dream, a purely
disembodied existence, has complicated gender ramifications. On the one hand, if
human consciousness were reduced to data, this virtual existence could lead to a world
without gender categories – ‘There’d be no straight, gay, male, female, cis, trans’ –
leaving Ry to question, ‘what happens to labels when there is no biology?’ (Winterson
2019, 311). Conversely, the integration of bots in the stage preceding pure AI existence
would have its own advantages, as the male bot would not, arguably, behave ‘badly’:
‘I won’t be tiptoeing round the house trying to keep out of his way cleaning up after
him. Worrying about him. Worrying about what he’ll do next’ (Winterson 2019, 311),
claims Claire, a Christian marketeer who is also Ron’s business partner. To Victor,
however, disembodiment is simply the next stage of human evolution, an emancipa-
tory move away from the confines of nature, a kind of freedom which, significantly, he
already sees actualised in Ry’s trans body:

Humans are evolving. The only difference here is that we are thinking and designing
part of our own evolution. . . . We’re not waiting for Mother Nature any more. . . .
No other species can tinker with its own destiny. And you, Ry, gorgeous boy-girl,
whatever you are, you had a sex change. You chose to intervene in your own evolu-
tion. You accelerated your portfolio of possibilities. That attracts me. How could it
not? You are both exotic and real. The here and now, and a harbinger of the future.
(Winterson 2019, 154, my emphases)

Victor’s ‘interest in Ry is both sexual and detachedly philosophical’, seeing ‘[i]n Ry’s
post surgery body . . . transhuman implications’ (Byers 2019). Nevertheless, barely
concealed within his vision is the trace of the colonial gaze which looks upon the trans
body as ‘both exotic and real’, revealing the overlaps between patriarchy and colonial-
ism that underpin the gender politics of ‘monstrous’ bodies.
Yet, in a novel which avoids polarising perspectives, Ry’s hesitation around Victor’s
project draws attention to the complicated discourse of trans embodiment, captured in
their remark that ‘[c]onsciousness isn’t free-flowing’, but rather ‘enmeshed’ (Winterson
2019, 110). Rather than transcending the physical restrictions of biology, the trans body,
therefore, reinforces the bond between consciousness and body, a relationship more
acutely perceived through the misalignment between gender identity and sex assigned at
birth. Although their name suggests identification with the historical Mary Shelley, Ry’s
‘reconstructed’ body bears a more intimate relationship with the artificial body of the
Creature. Both attract the scorn, discrimination and violence of those who do not accept
physical deviations from perceived notions of normality: ‘No one in the Bible is trans,’
Claire is quick to remind Ry (Winterson 2019, 241), whereas Ron’s question – ‘Why
would you want to be a man if you don’t want a dick?’ (Winterson 2019, 85) – coarsely
exposes the limits of gender binaries.

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 engendering globalgothic 97

Unlike Frankenstein’s Creature, whose initial lack of consent is the root of their
disempowered condition, Ry’s transness is also the embodiment of their active con-
sciousness: they are both Creator and Creature. A self-declared ‘hybrid’ (Winterson
2019, 83), Ry openly interrogates cis-gender assumptions – ‘Is manhood dickhood?’
(Winterson 2019, 85) – and acknowledges the duality of their embodied existence:
‘When I look in the mirror I see someone I recognise, or rather, I see at least two people
I recognise. That is what I am, but what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live
with doubleness’ (Winterson 2019, 89). Repeatedly, this duality is expressed as the
product of self-awareness – ‘I am fully female. I am also partly male. That’s how it is for
me’ (Winterson 2019, 97) – and agency – ‘Make myself. This is who I am’ (Winterson
2019, 244) – pointing to the trans subject as actively engaged in the ‘making’ of their
own bodies, which are at once the result of medical intervention and a subversion of the
discourse behind it: ‘As we rise from the operating tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals
are something more, and something other, than the creatures our makers intended us
to be’ (Stryker 1994, 242).

Conclusion
To conclude this analysis of Frankenstein’s ‘hideous progeny’, one could argue that gothic
has, in fact, always been global and queer. While the earlier gothic works of Horace
Walpole, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis displayed a queer penchant for the ‘exotic’
locations of southern Europe, fin de siècle texts such as Richard Marsh’s The Beetle and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, both published in 1897, significantly articulated preoccupations
with racial difference and reverse colonisation in conjunction with anxieties around
female/queer desire, miscegenation and the hypersexuality of the foreign Other. The rapid
advances in technology, the power of social media and the spread of capitalism across
the globe have created the conditions for neo-colonial forms of gender oppression at the
same time as they have galvanised subversive movements such as #MeToo and Black
Lives Matter. With gender still a contentious issue in a world haunted by the spectres
of biopower, the environmental crisis and AI apocalypse, the global narrative remains
pervasively gothic.

Note
1. In Susan Stryker’s essay ‘transsexuality is considered to be a culturally and historically
specific transgender practice/identity through which a transgendered subject enters into
a relationship with medical, psychotherapeutic, and juridical institutions in order to gain
access to certain hormonal and surgical technologies for enacting and embodying itself’
(1994, 251–2). In this essay the term ‘transgender’ is meant to reflect the permeability of
the sex/gender boundaries, the notion that sex and gender are both cultural constructs, and
the non-binary structure of both categories.

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 6

Queering Globalgothic Ecologies

Gregory Luke Chwala

Globalgothic Ecologies

G lobalisation has devastated world ecosystems and silenced queer identities

over time. It has been a neo-colonial force that continues to contaminate and
subvert cultural traditions and values, an idea that gothic fiction in recent years has
begun to explore. ‘Gothic fictions that address the issue of globalization,’ Glennis
Byron writes, ‘particularly those . . . that represent globalization as neo-imperialism,
tend to explore the darker side of the new world order, most notably in ways they reg-
ister disturbances to traditional identities and cultures’ (2012, 372). Yet, what is often
referred to as globalisation is only the latest phase in five centuries of coloniality and the
capitalist expansion it has produced. Since the Renaissance, European colonisation has
obliterated indigenous sexualities and genders, dismantled indigenous naturecultures,
and set out to classify and denaturalise non-heteronormative sexualities and non-binary
genders using justifications that were both theological and secular. As Walter Mignolo
notes, ‘Proponents of both were Christian, white, and male, and assumed heterosexual
relations as the norm – consequently they also classified gender distinctions and sexual
normativity’ (2011, 9). The ecologies of those colonised by Europeans were quite queer –
diverse, varied and in a constant state of becoming something new. The colonial
discourses produced of race, gender and nature continue to organise socio-ecologies
on a global scale. Some gothic fictions have found ways to disrupt the continuation of
colonial hegemonies by reappropriating gothic tropes in ways that help to reclaim and
naturalise queer identities for indigenous cultures, in turn rebuilding the naturecultures
of the past. Caribbean gothic stories, for instance, sometimes use queer ecologies to
scrutinise the ways in which coloniality has neglected, subverted or erased sexualities
and gender identities, and, when doing so, I argue, contribute to a process of decolo-
nisation. In such cases, the globalgothic becomes something new in the way it acts as a
mode of recovery that resituates ecologies.
Queering globalgothic ecologies reclaims the past from modernity and colonial-
ity. Part of that reclamation must include a critique of the intersections of sexuality,
gender, race, ethnicity and environment. Of course, the gothic has a long tradition of
interrogating and negotiating anxieties about genders and sexualities. Gothic super-
natural elements and tropes, such as spectres and sublime landscapes, often appear in
postcolonial gothic fiction wherein plots of insurgence and resistance are found that
include and are sometimes led by queer(ed) characters. In fact, the landscape itself in
postcolonial gothic fiction sometimes becomes a haunting cultural metaphor, part of a
historical mental repository that draws attention to the importance of nature/culture

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 101

interconnectivity in the process of decolonisation. Ecologies moreover factor into what

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert notes as the crossroads between the Caribbean colonial
and the gothic: ‘the frightful other, the defeated, the eerie, the disappeared, the dead’
(2002, 254). The Caribbean gothic is one globalgothic space where decolonial, queer
and environmental studies merge and are in many ways inseparable.
This chapter will examine how queer ecologies function in Michelle Cliff’s Carib-
bean gothic novels Abeng (1984) and No Telephone to Heaven (1987). I consider how
these texts resituate queer agency and environment in a way that challenges estab-
lished colonial hegemonies and ideas. I will show how the gothic is repurposed for and
contributes to decoloniality, in turn showing that Caribbean gothic texts can queer
globalgothic ecologies in order to scrutinise how sexuality/gender, race/ethnicity and
conceptions of nature inform one another, but also how coalitions of affinity, empathy,
interdependency and biodiversity function to upend and undo the logic of coloniality.
I trace what I call decolonial queer ecologies – reflections of the aforementioned queer
ecological values and attributes which I claim assist in the process of decolonisation –
in order to investigate the ways in which Cliff uses gothic terror and horror to depict
queer characters and sublime landscapes, such that her characters reverse and repair
colonial damage to reclaim their agency and discover values displaced by colonialism.
In sum, I will argue that what makes Cliff’s novels decolonial texts is their investment
in queer ecologies. Queering the globalgothic is a decolonial act. Viewing globalisa-
tion as part of a longer process of capital/coloniality brings this function into focus.
My conception of globalisation and thus of globalgothic accounts for the ways that
heteronormative/racialising/objectifying categories are deployed within transnational
relationships to legitimate the devaluation of lives and environments.

Decolonial Queer Ecologies

Cliff’s Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven are decolonial texts precisely because of
their engagement with and investment in queer ecologies. Cliff’s novels emphasise the
inseparability of Jamaican culture from its environment. In her retelling of Jamaican
colonial history, Cliff stresses that Afro-Carib bodies have been marked and driven
from Jamaican land that has been stolen, used and afterwards abandoned. No Tele-
phone to Heaven follows its protagonist, Clare Savage, through her travels in Jamaica,
England, Europe and the United States. Clare, a light-skinned Jamaican creole of Eng-
lish, African and Arawak ancestry, immigrates to the US from Jamaica with her family
as a young girl, and after her parents’ divorce, she remains there with her father, while
her mother and sister return to Jamaica. As a young adult, she studies in England but
returns to Jamaica for a vacation, where she befriends Harriet, a trans character. She
eventually ends up in Jamaica, and with Harriet forms a guerrilla revolutionary coali-
tion that fights for the island’s independence. The novel, written out of chronological
order, begins and ends with the rebellion of the guerrillas preparing in the ruinate and
then fighting the crew of an American film set in the Jamaican jungle. The novel is a
sequel to Abeng, which introduces Clare as a child and uses stream of consciousness
to tell a story of Jamaica’s history and the Savage family background, concluding with
teenage Clare’s growing awareness of the dynamics of sexuality and race in Jamaica.
Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven showcase the centrality of queer ecologies to
a decolonial imaginary. Cliff uses gothic tropes to describe postcolonial realities that

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 102 gregory luke chwala

highlight the Eurocentrism of traditional realist/fantastic distinctions. In Cliff’s novels,

queer ecologies are grounded in materiality, for example, in the way that her charac-
ters use violent revolt to resist British colonialism and the recent American imperial-
ism that has come to exploit their Jamaican land and culture. Decolonisation, simply
put, is the undoing of colonialism, but also a broader and deeper intellectual practice.
I use the term as Walter Mignolo uses it to mean ‘delinking’ from the ‘logic of coloni-
ality’ (2011, 143). Nevertheless, in decolonial novels, this often involves violence. As
Frantz Fanon contends in The Wretched of the Earth, violence is often symptomatic of
decolonisation: ‘Decolonization is always a violent event’ because ‘the colonist derives
his validity, i.e., his wealth, from the colonial system’ (1963, 1–2). Fanon asserts that
all people are entitled to moral consideration – that no person is dispensable – but jus-
tice often requires dismantling and resisting constructions of the colonised world. This
is the core of his decolonisation theory which continues to inspire human rights and
social justice, not unlike the goals of queer ecologies. However, this analogy is not the
only relationship between these formations. Decolonisation theory and queer ecolo-
gies notably share an urgency in deconstructing and dismantling human boundaries
and obstacles that specifically exploit a separation of select human beings from their
right to be a part of, and to interact with, their environments.
One cannot commit to decolonisation without acknowledging queer ecologies
because the ways in which the Western concept of nature has influenced colonisation
are deeply ingrained in a discourse of sexuality and gender, and it is likewise impossible
to have queer ecologies, or indeed a meaningful ecocriticism, without a commitment
to decolonisation because erotophobia and ecophobia are so deeply intertwined. To
queer ecology means to scrutinise the intersections and boundaries of sexuality/gender
and environment to understand the biosocial constitution of the material, non-human
world, and our experiences and perceptions of what constitutes it. Catriona Mortimer-
Sandilands and Bruce Erickson explain: ‘Queer, then, is both noun and verb in this
project: ours is an ecology that . . . calls into question heteronormativity itself as part
of its advocacy around issues of nature and environment – and vice versa’ (2010, 5).
Queer ecologies offer a decolonial solution that can transform an understanding of
how the material environment and culture inform one another in Cliff’s novels. Char-
acters come together to reclaim their queer agency in the ruinate to undermine hierar-
chies of race, gender and sexuality. On the one hand, Cliff comments on homophobia
in her novel through the terror-stricken death of queer characters, but on the other
hand, she also creates a safe environment for her trans character Harriet and her
Afro-Carib revolutionaries in the ruinate (a term discussed more fully below) of a once
colonised land. Cliff’s novels challenge colonialism through cultural reappropriation
and the reclamation of the ruinate. She positions the terror of revolutionary struggle
alongside the transformation of her characters and landscape, both of which attempt
to reclaim their agency, for the ruinate itself acts as a character of its own that haunts
and resists colonial exploitation.
Both human bodies and land are central to the anxieties of the Caribbean colonial
imagination. Cliff takes up this problem of the inseparability of Jamaican people and
land in her novels, but she adds a further layer to this ecological critique that queers
it. Several of her characters who have special connections with the land are first of
all queered: Nanny of the Maroons, Harriet, and even her protagonist Clare Savage
herself. Secondly, the coalitions formed between queer and revolutionary characters
often take place in the regrowth of ruinate. Thirdly, their reclamation of Jamaica

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 103

from those Americans that they perceive to be exploiting their land and rewriting
their history is an active form of decolonisation that leads Cliff’s characters to dis-
cover the importance of the queer bodies that inhabit Jamaica.

Reappropriating Ruinate
Queer ecologies illustrate how Michelle Cliff’s Caribbean gothic fiction overtly chal-
lenges colonialism and its relation to nature through the reappropriation of ruinate, a
term used to describe Jamaican wilderness spaces. Cliff’s novels emphasise the insepa-
rability of Jamaican culture from its environment, and the place of queer identity
in it. Jamaica is portrayed in Cliff’s novels as a place where boundaries are set and
challenged, proclaimed but never completed. Cliff attempts to disrupt boundaries and
emphasises the importance of interdependency between her characters, most notably
between her protagonist Clare Savage and the characters with whom she interacts.
Abeng focuses on Clare Savage’s childhood, flashbacks to which reveal Jamaica’s his-
tory, as well as Clare’s hybrid identity, having ancestors that were once both slaves and
plantation owners. As a child, Clare is told that she should behave like a girl, but she
does not feel a connection to feminine interests. Clare is confronted by gender restric-
tions when she is not permitted to understand the mysterious activity of her male
cousins, who hide from her the male rite of passage of eating hog penis and testicles.
Joshua and Ben belittle Clare for wanting to know the ‘ways of men’, and Clare feels
powerless because of her gender: ‘They had the power to hurt her because they were
allowed to do so much she was not – she was supposed to be here, in this house, with
all the dressed-up women’ (Cliff 1984, 61). Clare is further ostracised from her fam-
ily when she kills her grandmother’s bull, not only because she has done something
wrong, but also largely because she has transgressed gender boundaries. Her grand-
mother, Miss Mattie, accuses her of being, in Clare’s words, ‘A girl who seemed to
think she was a boy. Or white’ (Cliff 1984, 134). Gender and race appear here together
as sites of power improperly claimed by Clare, who also experiences racial passing at
various points. What is also interesting, however, is that which happens in the scene
immediately before this that causes Clare to shoot Miss Mattie’s bull.
Clare and her childhood friend, Zoe, are in the woods swimming naked together,
when they are disrupted by a man in khaki, a canecutter from Miss Mattie’s fields,
who frightens Clare and causes her to pick up her rifle and shoot a warning. The bul-
let unintentionally hits Miss Mattie’s bull, Old Joe. The scene that follows of Clare
and Zoe’s homoerotic exploration defies Jamaican boundaries and customs, even after
Clare has revealed the consequences of homosexuality in Jamaica to readers. This
is especially important because she and Zoe swim naked together after Miss Mattie
forbids Clare to swim, out of fear that she will see her male cousins Joshua and Ben
swimming naked in the river. The boys’ swimming naked together is not construed as
homoerotic by Miss Mattie, but Clare fears that her swimming naked with Zoe will
be construed as homoerotic, which is not unfounded, since she does disclose sexual
desires for Zoe as they explore each other’s bodies in the woods:

Zoe’s naked body was lean and muscled. Her hips were narrow and her thighs
long. The patch of tight curly hair between her legs glistened in the riverwater and
the sun. Clare’s own body was also long. . . . Pussy and rass – these were the two
words they knew for the space-within-flesh covered now by strands and curls of

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 104 gregory luke chwala

hair. Under these patches were the ways to their own bodies. Their fingers could
slide through the hair and deep into the pink and purple flesh and touch a corridor
through which their babies would emerge and into which men would put their
thing. Right now it could belong to them. (Cliff 1984, 120)

This passage is certainly homoerotic, but what is more significant is that Clare is
exploring the interiority of a female embodiment she has been taught to think of only
in relation to masculinity (her body as the ground in which a man will plant seed but
which she is experiencing as something else – body as land on its own terms, touching
other land) – a form of queer ecological eroticism. Clare makes a conscious choice to
see herself as something else, and the land as something else – as a place that offers her
freedom for challenging conscripted identity.
Clare furthermore defies heteronormativity and challenges colonial boundaries even
after learning of the repercussions and risks (after hearing horror stories of ‘battymen’,
male homosexuals, who died because of their queerness). Though female homosexuality
is seemingly invisible in Clare’s immediate environment as a young girl in postcolonial
Jamaica, the stories Clare hears of gay men or males perceived to be gay are full of hor-
ror that would seem to terrify her out of exploring lesbian sexuality. Though she does
not see female homosexuality being punished, stories that deviate from heteronorma-
tive relationships with men do permeate Cliff’s texts. Uncle Robert committed suicide
by swimming out into the ocean after being disowned by his family for being what they
call ‘funny’, and a young boy named Clinton is allowed to drown by the townspeople
because he is perceived as queer. He is not even allowed a proper funeral, which causes
his mother to go insane and stalk the night looking for his duppy (ghost). Cliff writes,
‘Clare knew what “funny” meant. She knew that Robert had caused some disturbance
when he brought a dark man home from Montego Bay and introduced him to his
mother as “his dearest friend”’ (1984, 125). Robert’s mother Dorothy tells Clare that
funny ‘is when one smaddy is a little off – is one sint’ing one smaddy born with. Him no
can help himself . . . Him is battyman – aim want fe lay down wi’ only other men. No
ask me no more’ (Cliff 1984, 125). The insinuation is that male homosexuality should
not be spoken of because the consequences of even being suspected of being queer are
dire. British colonial legacy instilled a gender hierarchy that was not to be transgressed.
The privileging of masculinity over femininity that puts females in confined spaces is
what seems to anger the townspeople about Clinton when they say, ‘If she [Clinton’s
mother] had not been fool-fool [foolish/stupid], her son would not have been sissy-sissy
[effeminate, implied homosexual]. Because he was sissy he was drowned’ (Cliff 1984,
65). These norms are so ingrained that Robert commits suicide by swimming out into
the ocean and drowning. The state-supported expectations for heteronormativity and
hypermasculinity in men and the homophobia it supports are part of a colonial legacy
that Clare challenges through her exploration of female homosexuality.
There is a preoccupation with British masculinity at play here, where women in the
novel are not described as ‘funny’ in the same way; yet, Clare risks exploring her sexual-
ity with another girl. Clare’s desire for Zoe is not quite the same as Robert’s or Clinton’s
position because the constraints are different for each gender, but knowing that norms
can be challenged does perpetuate Clare’s sexual inclinations and exploration with Zoe
in the bush and forest. Why Cliff chooses to use wooded environments as the setting
for the girls’ homoerotic exploration is my point of queer ecocritical interest here, and
works as a form of decoloniality. Nature is presented as both a cultural and a sexual

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 105

safe haven that is not feared. In addition, race and class barriers seem to dissolve in the
ruinate (the bush and forests); Zoe is no longer beneath Clare in the ruinate because
she is more black and less British. Nonetheless, the legacy of British colonialism (the
taboos it has set in place) ultimately does stifle the girls’ exploration. The decolonial
moment never reaches full fruition, but the conflict is presented – the possibility plotted.
Immediately before their sex is disrupted, Cliff writes, ‘Clare held on by the river that
the two of them could erase difference . . . She had wanted to lean across Zoe’s breasts
and kiss her. To thank Zoe for stopping her from being fool-fool’ (1984, 124). Clare
being fool-fool, like Clinton’s mother implies, suggests that the feminine must be kept
in check. Clare checks herself for stepping out of line. The interruption of Clare and
Zoe’s homoerotic moment by the canecutter reintroduces British colonial taboos that
are largely responsible for the criminality of homosexuality around the world, taboos
that reinforce differences: polarities of race, gender and sexual orientation.
Bathing in the river, in the woods alone, away from civilisation structured through
British norms, allows Clare to discover what comes spontaneously to her – an erotic
attraction to the same sex – but the canecutter’s interruption enables feelings of guilt
and stupidity to surface. After this scene, Clare comes to realise her and Zoe’s racial and
class divisions and the consequences this presents between them in pursuing a friendship:

The space between them was not as neat as Zoe had perceived it. But Clare, who
had never considered the subtleties of this division, could not now analyse or
explain to her friend what she felt about their given identities in this society, where
they met and where they diverged. (Cliff 1984, 121)

Cliff shows readers how colonial hierarchies not only cause but also reinforce divisions
of race, class, gender and sexuality, seemingly in this order. Due to the hierarchies
created between structures of class and race after colonialism in Jamaica, Clare and
Zoe’s erotic foreplay, and even friendship, is seemingly impossible outside of the nar-
row confines of the ‘wild countryside’. However, the hierarchies created because of
colonialism seem to be broken down as Clare comes to realise that the many evils and
restrictions around her are the result of their colonised inheritance.
The intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender are noticeably important here
and can be better understood through what I have called decolonial queer ecologies.
This is because Clare and Zoe transgress several boundaries, explore an interdepen-
dency that defies hierarchical structures, and realise freedoms within the confines of
Jamaican ruinate for a short while – before the power of the British colonial world
reinscribes them. The girls discover a freedom in the ruinate where they can resist their
racial and economic class differences, explore their homoerotic sexuality, and refuse
colonial-ascribed gender roles. Clare’s exploration of sexuality with Zoe while bath-
ing in the forest provides her with a private space where she can feel free, and their
differences help them to form a coalition that suspends class, race, gender and sexual
constraints, even if just for a bit. Cliff notes that it is the landscape setting in the novel
that enables this decolonial turn:

In their [Zoe and Clare’s] friendship the differences [which enabled their friendship]
could become more and more of a background, which only rarely they stumbled
across to confront . . . They had a landscape which was wild and real and filled
with places in which their imaginations could move. (1984, 95)

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When Clare meets Harriet in No Telephone to Heaven, this decolonial turn is more
fully realised; she discovers Jamaican ruinate is a space that must be not just reclaimed,
but reappropriated.

Queering Spaces and Bodies

Ancestral presence is experienced deeply when in the ruinate – a place where hierarchies
seem to dissolve. Harriet discusses ‘de duppy’ (spirits of the once enslaved Maroons) and
their inseparability from nature – meaning the land. She tells Clare about what went on
in the ruins of her grandmother’s land (once cane fields) and of its ghosts:

But I have seen them [their ancestors] . . . for I come here often . . . Some of our
people, girlfriend . . . some of our ancestors . . . But, you know, t’ings not so dif-
ferent now. Do you know what happens on this island still? The lives of cutters, of
timekeepers? . . . Were we to sleep on this beach, we might hear more than . . . our
people celebrating cropover. (Cliff 1987, 131–2)

The insinuation is that by getting back in touch with the ruinate, Clare and Harriet are
also rediscovering the culture of their once enslaved ancestors who fought for their free-
dom. This connection is further witnessed by a gothic-like description of the ancestral
ghosts that continues in chapter 7, entitled ‘Magnanimous Warrior’, a chapter consisting
of only one full page. The magnanimous warrior is described as ‘she in whom the spirits
come quick and hard. Hunting mother. She who forages. Who knows the ground’ (Cliff
1987, 163). She is described as caring for her people and scattering bone fragments
among other natural debris in an almost recursive recycling, but Cliff’s hunting mother
burns herself in an act of retaliation: ‘Mother who goes forth emitting flames from her
eyes. Nose. Mouth. Ears. Vulva. Anus. She bites the evildoers that they become full of
sores. She burns the canefields’ (Cliff 1987, 163–4). The gothic fire imagery, haunting
and torment of humans by a spirit is noticeably sexual and gendered; yet, it furthermore
alludes to a symbiosis with the land as an act of decolonial resistance. Harriet and Clare
experience a sort of catharsis in the biosocial space they seek to reappropriate that helps
them deal with the oppressive conditions their ancestors have been a part of and from
which they now face liberation as queer individuals.
Clare and Harriet both strive for liberation from a restrictive colonial environ-
ment, a liberation found only in ruinate with each other. What is also remarkable
about Harriet is that she redefines gender and opens up room for both the acceptance
of non-conventional genders and a deconstruction of colonial logic, quite remarkable
for a character in a novel written in 1987, when being queer or trans in Jamaica could
mean death. Cliff was certainly embedded in feminist and queer contexts that suggest
Jamaican homophobia did not go uncontested. However, Cliff characterises Harriet’s
identity not as a singular phenomenon, but as a complex duality that is innately plural,
manifested in her appearance. Sally O’Driscoll writes, ‘Cliff’s project is to examine the
possibility of claiming an identity – a project that moves her away from essentialist
notions of identity and toward a postmodern concept of a constructed subject’ (1995,
61). Cliff’s character Harriet is ahead of her time as a queer character in the 1980s;
however, what is also interesting about Harriet is how her presence contributes to a
deconstruction of the colonial system in No Telephone to Heaven.

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 107

Harriet is able to teach Clare a lot about her Jamaican identity, race, respect for
the environment, and gender and sexuality, which can be viewed as a challenge to the
logic of the colonial system. However, it is the way that Harriet queers ecologies that
makes her a unique character. Rosamond King argues that Harriet ‘re/present[s] the
idea of gender itself by deconstructing the myth of the “real woman” and the “real
man”’ (2008, 595). This is important because getting people to accept queer and trans
individuals must start with deconstruction of the problem. Harriet is able to teach
both Clare and the guerrilla revolutionaries that gender is not a barrier by challenging
the limits of colonial structures. She opens Clare to new possibilities and helps her to
break down racial barriers as well as come to terms with her sexuality, for Clare and
Harriet are more similar than they would have thought; they are both talented lead-
ers, largely because of what they learn from one another, and their plights are more
similar than one first realises. Though the role of a trans character opening up a cis-
gender character to new possibilities has been quite soundly critiqued in trans studies
by scholars such as Jay Prosser (1998), what is unique about Harriet is the way that
she challenges the colonial system and its overall structures through the ways she
queers ecologies.
Harriet introduces Clare to the complexity of her identity and teaches her that
queerness is not only legible as exclusive homosexuality. While Harriet’s queerness as
a trans person is more apparent to the revolutionaries than Clare’s sexuality, Clare’s
queerness lies in her unique amalgamation – in her position of class/race/gender/
sexuality and access to Jamaican environment. As noted earlier, Clare certainly had
homoerotic experiences with her childhood friend, Zoe; however, in No Telephone
to Heaven, she appears to be heterosexual for the majority of the novel, an entire
chapter devoted to her relationship with an African-Vietnamese-American man, her
pregnancy with his child, and subsequent miscarriage caused by what they assume
to be his exposure to toxins during the war. This miscarriage leaves Clare sterile and
much like Harriet – unable to reproduce as women. Yet, Harriet is able to give new
meaning to gender, and she redefines what it means to be female in a profound way
that transcends the idea that women hold a birthing role in reproduction, thus open-
ing up possibilities – such as that of Clare and Harriet’s love affair. However, Clare’s
queerness lies not only in her same-sex experiences with Zoe and Harriet, but also in
her challenge to heteronormative roles: in reproduction and maternity, in a love affair
with a trans character, and in her ability to see Jamaica from a unique perspective as
a creole woman who has been able to migrate across continents. She and Harriet are
maternal to their cause, to the revolutionaries, and to Jamaica, but Clare’s queerness
puts her in the unique position of giving Harriet the ability to seek decoloniality.
Clare and Harriet’s ability to decolonise, however, is importantly first grounded in
queer ecologies, largely by the way that they are able to reappropriate not only their
bodies, but also spaces. This is evidenced in a scene in which Harriet and Clare go
swimming on the ‘most beautiful beach on the island’ of Jamaica, the most secluded,
where ‘they could swim as girlfriends’ (Cliff 1987, 130). They frolic and eat mangos,
then lie side by side, ‘touching gently, kissing, tongues entwined, coming to, laughing’
(Cliff 1987, 130). When Harriet asks Clare if she finds her strange, although Clare
responds that she finds Harriet no stranger than she finds herself, Clare expresses: ‘Of
course, I find you strange; how could I not? You are a new person to me. At the same
time I feel drawn to you. At home with you,’ to which Harriet responds, ‘The time

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 108 gregory luke chwala

will come for both of us to choose. For we will have to make the choice. Cast our lot.
Cyann [can’t] live split. Not in this world’ (Cliff 1987, 131). In the Jamaican wilder-
ness, Clare feels comfortable with her queerness, yet Harriet senses Clare’s dilemma
in having to choose between a heteronormative and queer orientation. The sense is
that the remote landscape is what offers them a life free from colonial restriction, and
Harriet emphasises the importance of choosing what feels natural.
Even though Clare feels drawn to and at home with Harriet, Harriet’s statement
regarding having to make a choice presents a contradiction. Omise’eke Natasha Tin-
sley calls this scene the ‘novel’s most erotic and postcolonial journey’, referring to
Harriet’s agency as ‘male womanhood’ and Harriet and Clare’s relationship as ‘les-
bian eroticism’ (2010, 169–92). Harriet’s choice might not be as straightforward as it
seems. The choice might lie in a blurring of distinctions – in choosing between living
in the ruins of empire versus moving toward becoming something new and building
a new future. The choice to which Harriet refers can be understood as queering the
permanence of gender and sexuality altogether – in seeing the environment in all its
complexity as a movement toward decolonisation. Tinsley writes:

This secluded afternoon is a moment when s/he [Harriet] makes an intimate con-
nection to one Jamaican whom s/he can love and help lead to freedom while
embracing both women’s full complexity, and so opens the novel’s only lesbian love
scene and a unique imagination of the erotics of decolonizing gender and sexuality
otherwise. (2010, 192)

Tinsley’s close reading attests to the importance of queering spaces and bodies as a
means of decolonisation; Harriet and Clare’s erotic encounter with one another acts as
a form of colonial resistance deeply entwined with the land that in turn propels them
to form a coalition with guerrilla revolutionaries.

Queer Coalitions
Tinsley draws attention to queer coalitions formed between women who loved women
in Caribbean history, from Middle Passage same-sex eroticism to same-sex relation-
ships that were part of a rebellion under brutal conditions of slavery. She also draws
attention to the importance of coalitions between Caribbean revolutionaries and
nature. Tinsley examines metaphors of landscape and sexuality which undermine an
‘imperial obsession with separation and categorization that divides human from slave,
female from woman, and man from nature’; her account considers metaphors which
instead emphasise connectivity and form what she calls a ‘poetics of erotic decolo-
nization’ (2010, 23). Nature, when understood through a decolonial context in the
Caribbean, she argues, is not static nor distanced from human culture, but importantly
interconnected to an understanding of queer agency. Tinsley notes, ‘Flowers, trees,
land forms, sexed bodies, sexual natures, [have been] constantly, tactically remade by
both colonialists and countercolonialists’ (2010, 22), never static, but always in a state
of interruption, redirection and bonding. These interconnections (these coalitions) are
crucial to an understanding of queer ecologies. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson
further argue that ‘a queer ecological framework not only . . . offer[s] a possibility of
coalitions between racial and sexual inequities, but also would necessarily provide an

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 109

analysis of the contemporaneous development of race, sexuality, and nature through

each other’ (2010, 35). This redirection is, at times, an important aspect of rebellion
and revolution led by characters who refuse to conform to sexual, gender and racial
conventions. Coalitions that consist of queer and non-queer characters interacting
with the land are instrumental stories in both of Cliff’s novels.
In Abeng, Nanny of the Maroons and Mma Alli are characters that refuse to con-
form to sexual, gender and racial colonial-influenced normalities. They further resist
slavery, and Nanny leads a great rebellion that is reliant on interdependency with the
environment. Nanny, an Obeah woman who uses her magic (i.e. knowledge of plants)
to fight colonisers and slavers, forms a united coalition of rebels and plantation slaves
to expel colonisers from the control of their land and bodies. She is rumoured to be
tough and can catch a ‘bullet between her buttocks’ (Cliff 1984, 14), and in this way
transgresses gender boundaries because she terrifies the British with a role they perceive
as masculine. What is also important is that her coalition emphasises a respect for the
land, a reciprocal relationship that is formed in several ways. Nanny’s revolutionaries
are protected by the refuge of forests, caves and mountains; they cultivate cassava, yam
and plantain to sustain themselves, and they gather roots, bark and birch gum to make
poisons for their enemies. Nanny tells her people that Jamaica was once said to be one
of the most fruitful places on Earth, but this changed after colonial cultivation, which
the reader knows was set in motion by the rape of the land for foreign commodities.
Nanny’s revolution aims to change this.
The story of Mma Alli’s resistance is also a decolonial attempt invested in queer
ecologies largely because of its emphasis on queer coalition building. Mma Alli uses
the erotic and the environment to help slaves fight for control of their own bodies and
escape the terror and horror inflicted upon them. Timothy Chin argues that ‘Mma
Alli is spiritually if not biologically related to Maroon Nanny’ (1997, 137); yet, what
is different about Mma Alli is that she is located as a slave on the Savage plantation.
Ronald Cummings notes that ‘her acts of marronage contrast to those of Nanny of the
Maroons in that they are comprised not of open resistance and fighting but of private
erotic acts of desire and remembering between women’ (2014, 329). Mma Alli’s resis-
tance is more of an erotic marronage than a revolutionary marronage. She comforts
slaves, while they respect her queerness and leadership. She also uses queer sexuality
as a powerful tool to resist colonial control over the body, enabling slaves to reclaim
their agency. For example, Mma Alli helps a slave named Inez escape from her planta-
tion’s owner, Justice Savage (Clare’s slaver ancestor), who has taken her by force to his
plantation house to be his mistress, where he repeatedly rapes her and enacts savage
punishments on runaway slaves: he himself strings up and whips slaves, rubs salt in
their wounds, hangs them from a cotton tree till nearly dead, and dissects them while
still alive and naked into four parts that are suspended by ropes on the property, eaten
by vultures and flies, and which become fertiliser for cane. Mma Alli leads a resistance
against this horror, which starts with the plight of Inez. She builds a coalition in the
forests to rebel against the colonial slavers.
Mma Alli and Inez’s story is invested in queer ecologies not only because the
women partake in a same-sex love affair, but also because of the way they challenge
colonial structures through a knowledge of their environment to form coalitions with
and in the environment. Mma Alli’s sexuality is only a part of the reason that she gains
respect from the people. Her queerness is a unique aspect of her appeal; however, Mma

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 110 gregory luke chwala

Alli’s story also intersects with the land because she teaches Inez how to use herbs (tea
roots and leaves) and a chant during an erotic, sexual encounter to abort her child (the
child being a colonial product of rape by Justice Savage). Mma Alli further teaches
several women all manners of magic via botany:

How to soothe and excite [themselves] at the same time. How to touch a woman in
bed deep-inside and make her womb move within her . . . [and how] . . . to keep their
bodies their own, even while they were made subject to the whimsical violence of the
justice and slavedrivers, who were for the most part creole or quashee. (Cliff 1984, 35)

Inez gains control over her body and reproductive choices, and fellow slaves begin
a rebellion that is championed by Mma Alli’s resistance. However, neither Nanny’s
rebellion nor Mma Alli’s resistance is successful, and they result in worse terror. Nanny
is betrayed by Cudjoe, who secretly conspires with the British governor to quiet her
rebellion, and Mma Alli and her slaves are burned alive on the eve of their freedom
from the British by Justice Savage, who ends a reign of terror that has included mutila-
tion, quartering, skinning and dissection with one final atrocity.
Nevertheless, both Nanny of the Maroons’ rebellion and Mma Alli’s resistance
are stories grounded in decolonial queer ecologies that inform the identity of Abeng’s
protagonist, Clare Savage, who identifies herself through her matriarchal line and uses
these stories to help Jamaican revolutionaries fight American imperialism through an
investment with the land and in their ancestry. The stories of Mma Alli and Nanny
act as an erotohistoriographic connection that is nevertheless complicated by Clare’s
descendance from both slaves and owners. It is the Jamaican cultural repository of
these erotic stories that helps Clare to re-evaluate her position and put what she learns
into practice to resist colonial oppression. She identifies with a queer, non-patriarchal
past through Mma Alli and Nanny of the Maroons. Clare, who has a mixed-race
bloodline but is descended from the Savage slave owners, recites her investigation
into the horrible, brutal history of slavery enacted by her ancestor, Justice Savage, and
wonders what she might do to rectify resulting colonial influences. She finds her cause
when she meets Harriet, who recounts an ancestral presence from the spirits of slaves
when in the ruinate.
Clare and Harriet decide to fight back by forming a coalition. They and their revo-
lutionaries train within the grounds of her deceased grandmother’s ruinate, where
Clare expresses an anger regarding the toxic pollution of their ancestral land and
water as a result of colonisation, a damaged past they seek to avenge as a way of mov-
ing forward. It is important to note that although Clare’s inheritance from a coloniser
is what provides this land for their coalition, it is not simply her position alone that
enables this coalition, but the process of discovering connections between the land and
queerness that have enabled a decolonial resistance to form. Clare says, ‘You know
then that the rivers run red . . . and the underground aquifers are colored . . . from
the waste of the bauxite mines and the aluminum refineries? We do not speak of past
here, but present, future’ (Cliff 1987, 195). This passage is important for two reasons.
First, it highlights the relationships among industry, colonialism and ruinate to show
the ways that the land cannot be fully taken back – how colonialism endures in the
form of poisons. Second, the future Clare speaks of is grounded in a decolonisation
invested in queer coalition, queer becoming, queer temporalities and queer ecologies.

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 111

Though the land cannot be fully reclaimed, relationships with the land can change for
the better. This is one way that No Telephone to Heaven invests in queer ecologies as
a movement toward decolonisation.
Harriet also resists colonialism and embraces queer ecologies on many fronts to
promote change and build queer coalitions. She sees no reason for changing her bio-
logical body, which is arguably another act of colonial resistance, despite whether or
not she could afford reassignment surgery: ‘Cyann [can’t] afford [genital reconstruc-
tion],’ Harriet tells Clare. ‘Maybe when de revolution come . . . but the choice is
mine, man, is made. Harriet live and Harry be no more . . . you know, darling, castra-
tion ain’t de main t’ing’ (Cliff 1987, 168). Harriet’s refusal of reassignment surgery
is importantly embraced by the coalition of guerrilla revolutionaries she leads, who
recognise Harriet as female, yet are indifferent to her remaining biologically male.
Thus, both her decision and her revolutionaries’ embracing of her trans identity can
be construed as an anti-colonial move that allows her to be queer and accepted, and
the revolutionaries to defy the gender and sexual normativity they have inherited
from a colonial legacy, in turn strengthening their coalition. Harriet’s independence
and queer leadership reflect Jamaica’s self-sufficient ability as an independent Jamaica
that is interdependent with queer and non-queer bodies alike, as well as cognisant of
the role of nature.
Harriet’s revolution wants to be independent from American imperialism, includ-
ing capital and tourism, and the revolutionaries plan to invade an American movie set
that has come to exploit Jamaica and rewrite the history of its legendary hero, Nanny
of the Maroons. It is important to realise that their goal is not economically motivated,
but an anti-colonial quest aimed at fighting segregation and economic inequality with
the aim of taking back ownership of their cultural heritage from the colonial develop-
ment of Jamaica. Nicole Seymour clarifies the intent of the guerrilla revolutionaries:

Cliff makes clear that this band is changing the landscape not for profit through
exploitation, but as a way to repair that exploitation. And, interestingly enough, they
leave a layer of ruinate to keep their operations under cover – a human-nonhuman
reciprocity that is engineered, but reciprocal nonetheless. (2013, 60)

This point is important not only because it emphasises the unselfish motives of the
coalition, but also because it highlights the reciprocal relationship they have built with
their environment.
Cliff’s coalition reinvests in a knowledge and rediscovery of nature/culture inter-
dependence that values queer bodies and spaces, and its members resist being othered
or viewed as monstrous rebels or terrorists, instead using terror themselves to reclaim
their land and culture from American imperialists. What is also interesting is the way
that the ruinate is used as a place to form a coalition between oppressed others that
society considers misfits; the ruinate becomes a place wherein the guerrilla revolu-
tionaries can reclaim the land not for capital profit or exploitation, but as a way to
repair the colonial damage done. However, there is no easy way out of the colonial
matrix; the revolutionaries also strategically embrace capital when they need to in
order to achieve their goals, as they do in Clare’s relationship to the ownership of the
land. Decolonisation is a process – not a straightforward, easy solution. The point
is that this coalition that is formed emphasises an important attribute of decolonial

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 112 gregory luke chwala

queer ecologies – natural space becomes queer cultural space. The characters of Cliff’s
decolonial fiction realise that the commodification of the environment as well as hier-
archical cultures – both understood as products of colonialism – cause imbalance in
their world. They discover spaces that welcome queer bodies and explore a means
of decolonisation through coalitions that are both queer-inclusive and eco-friendly.
Harriet’s revolutionaries work with the land, protect it from exploitation, and receive
their nourishment from it. Their coalition enables them to transgress the terrors of
neo-imperialism while rediscovering a symbiotic relationship with their environment.

Transgressing Terror and Horror

Cliff comments on the gothic in Abeng when she notes the ways that Europeans cre-
ated inhuman monsters to ‘minimize the terror’ and ‘render the actual inhabitants
[of the Caribbean] harmless’ (1984, 78). No Telephone to Heaven and Abeng are
filled with gothic imagery that often represents sentiments of the Western coloniser.
Cliff writes, ‘The true inhabitants will always be less fearsome than these imaginary
creatures and therefore easier to conquer . . . Their primary feature is their difference
from white and Christian Europeans. It is that heart of darkness which has imagined
them less human’ (1984, 78–9). The allusion to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
in this passage is obvious. The darkness of colonisation certainly haunts Cliff’s post-
colonial gothic fiction. However, Cliff reverses gothic terror and horror back on to
the colonisers.
The horror of slavery and the terror of colonisation are overcome through ances-
tral spiritual ties experienced by revolutionaries who form a coalition led by a trans
character, which is created and nurtured in nature, to decolonise Jamaica from a his-
tory of British colonialism and a more recent American imperialism. The imagination
and empathy of Cliff’s characters enable them and their coalition to be successful in
breaking down barriers, even though their coup d’état itself is unsuccessful. Cliff seems
to insinuate that the rediscovery of an ancestry and culture before the British colonisa-
tion of Jamaica can help solve some of the problems which have separated people from
their environments and created hierarchies of race, gender, class and sexuality. Queer
ecological values are realised and practised by Cliff’s protagonist and revolutionary
characters as they work to decolonise Jamaica from both a history of British colonisa-
tion and new looming threats of American imperialism.
Cliff shows that through decolonial queer ecologies individuals can divest them-
selves of colonial baggage to reinherit a tradition that understands a world beyond
binary gender roles and sexual orientations, a world in which interdependency is
necessary and urgent. She shows that through decolonial queer ecologies charac-
ters can transgress traditional gothic themes and tropes in decolonial literature that
have served as methods of regulation to reproduce Eurocentric conceptions of a
racialised other in order to enforce ownership of the land. It is the rediscovery and
redefining of nature that moves Cliff’s transgressions. For Cliff, gothic tropes are
used to describe postcolonial, grim realities still facing much of the Caribbean: neo-
liberalism, homophobia, xenophobia and environmental turmoil – problems rooted
in postcolonial and modern-day imperialism. Yet, at the same time, by repurpos-
ing these tropes and themes, Cliff’s novels queer the globalgothic by decolonising
its ecologies.

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 queering globalgothic ecologies 113

References
Byron, Glennis. 2012. ‘Global Gothic.’ In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David
Punter, 369–78. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Chin, Timothy. 1997. ‘Bullers and Battymen Contesting Homophobia in Black Popular Culture
and Contemporary Caribbean Literature.’ Callaloo 20, no. 1: 127–41.
Cliff, Michelle. 1984. Abeng. New York and London: Plume.
———. 1987. No Telephone to Heaven. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Cummings, Ronald. 2014. ‘Queer Theory and Caribbean Writing.’ In The Routledge Companion to
Anglophone Caribbean Literature, edited by Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell, 323–31.
London and New York: Routledge.
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York:
Grove Press.
King, Rosamond. 2008. ‘Re/Presenting Self and Other: Trans Deliverance in Caribbean Texts.’
Callaloo 31, no. 2: 581–99. https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0085.
Mignolo, Walter D. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial
Options. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson. 2010. ‘Introduction: A Genealogy of Queer
Ecologies.’ In Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, edited by Catriona Mortimer-
Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, 1–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
O’Driscoll, Sally. 1995. ‘Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity.’ The Journal of the Midwest
Modern Language Association 28, no. 1: 56–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/1315243.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean.’ In The
Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 229–57. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Prosser, Jay. 1998. Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination.
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Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha. 2010. Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean
Literature. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

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 7

Anthropocene Gothic, Capitalocene

Gothic: The Politics of Ecohorror
Rebecca Duncan

I t is becoming increasingly commonplace to assert that the gothic provides a vocab-

ulary uniquely suited to our present geohistorical moment, in which unfolding trans-
formations to the Earth System are placing the biosphere in the shadow of existential
threat. ‘If there is a new direction in Gothic Studies,’ writes Holly-Gale Millette, ‘it is
one centred by the critical acceptance of the degeneration and ruin that the human has
wrought in its epoch’ (2020b, 91). ‘The Gothic seems . . . well placed to capture these
anxieties’ about ‘climate change and environmental damage’, Andrew Smith and Wil-
liam Hughes concur (2013, 5), in one sense because gothic has always understood – in
the words of Justin Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan Höglund – that ‘[d]igging in
the dirt is a hazardous pursuit’. Contemporary global heating – overwhelmingly the
product of two centuries of fossil extraction – would seem to confirm the point. How-
ever, as Edwards, Graulund and Höglund note, getting to the bottom of current bio-
spheric shifts – determining what has caused these – demands further excavation, thus
requiring ‘the introspective, abject historical work in which gothic always engaged its
audience’ (2022, xi).
What is emerging from this gothic mining of the depths is by no means beyond
debate. Millette and Edwards, Graulund and Höglund choose to locate their accounts
of gothic in the Anthropocene – the age in which ‘man’ is culpable – but all these crit-
ics rightly acknowledge other ways of naming our present planetary situation. Though
it is subtitled ‘The Gothic Anthropocene’, Edwards, Graulund and Höglund’s Dark
Scenes from Damaged Earth is structured into sections that attend also to ‘Planta-
tionocene’, ‘Chthulucene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ – concepts that can each be understood
as providing a certain perspective on the relationship between human societies and the
rest of nature. Importantly, however, the terms also designate distinct political proj-
ects, which differently identify the drivers and effects of the biospheric transformations
that are currently under way. Grasping this point is crucial, because it shows that the
struggle over how we name the present is not a matter of semantic finickiness: to name,
in other words, is to locate accountability, and so to make possible certain kinds of
action and demand such action from certain groups. This applies also to the Anthro-
pocene, though the concept is sometimes reverted to as a kind of neutral catch-all
theory, and, as we shall see, this manoeuvre is not always helpful. The notion that the
human species has brought the Earth System to its current state of collapse is as much
an ideological interpretation as its more directly political conceptual bedfellows –
‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016), ‘Plantationocene’ (Haraway 2015) and ‘Proletarocene’

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 anthropocene gothic, capitalocene gothic 115

(Allison et al. 2021) in particular – and the fact that it is not always treated as such
might itself raise our critical suspicions.
Taking as its starting point the fact that the different ‘-cenes’ entail different origin
stories of the planetary emergency, this chapter will examine how such interpretations
give rise to their own distinct gothic aesthetics and strategies, shedding light in turn
on the politics of certain ecohorror forms. Case studies are provided by South African
dramatist and filmmaker Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia (2021) and by Senegalese director Mati
Diop’s Atlantics (2019), two texts that deploy markedly different gothic vocabular-
ies to engage with climate and cognate crises. It is worth pointing out here that the
South-South comparison is deliberate: this corpus enables a development of Edwards,
Graulund and Höglund’s existing discussion of aesthetic variation across global eco-
gothic production, in which the authors read these differences chiefly as expressing
divergent experiences of the climate emergency on either side of the hemispheric divide
(2022, xix–xxi). It is crucial to account for the uneven distribution of socio-ecological
crisis throughout the still relatively (but increasingly less) insulated Global North and
the already catastrophically affected South. The twenty nations most vulnerable to the
effects of global heating are, as Vishwas Satgar writes, all located across ‘Africa, Asia,
the Caribbean, Latin America and the Pacific’ (2018, 4) – the same regions, as Jason
Hickel has recently confirmed, that are least responsible for emissions (2020, e402–3).
It is important too, however, to keep in sight the climate inequalities that internally
fracture North and South, and which, as Jason W. Moore shows, cut along axes of
race, gender and class (2019, 54). These intraregional differences may shed more light
on the distinct gothic approaches taken by Bouwer’s and Diop’s films. However, as we
will see, these texts also remind us that where one stands on the multiscalar map of
climate inequality might affect not only one’s experience, but also one’s interpretation
of the planetary situation, shaping answers to the questions of who is accountable, and
of when and where the greatest threat lies.
It is different assumptions regarding precisely these issues that underwrite the gothic
strategies deployed in Gaia and Atlantics, with the result that these texts can be read as
paradigmatic examples of an ‘Anthropocene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ Gothic respectively.
Bouwer’s film explicitly positions itself in the so-called ‘age of man’, where – as Millette
puts it – ‘human beings have created environments in which their communities . . . may
become unsustainable’, and so have ushered in a ‘post-human’ condition characterised
by ‘a relationship between humans and their hybrid . . . others’ (2020a, 3). Drawing
on gothic’s long-standing function as a counternarrative to Enlightenment humanism,
Bouwer figures this human/nature entanglement as a monstrous return of the repressed,
which places the human species as a whole on the brink of reabsorption into a vengeful
biosphere. Ultimately, however, the film demonstrates with remarkable clarity some of
the limitations that inhere in related Anthropocene and posthumanist accounts of plane-
tary emergency, prioritising an abstract sense of human/nature imbrication at the expense
of actually existing racialised and gendered climate inequalities, with the result that the
(humanist) discourses from which these derive are (inadvertently) reinscribed. Diop’s
Atlantics takes a different approach. Less interested in gothic’s anti- or post-humanist
possibilities, the text is instead legible through accounts that connect early gothic writing
to the wide-scale transformation of society and environment represented by industri-
alisation in Britain. As in these readings, Diop’s gothic captures the anxious and dis-
orienting experience of socio-ecological shifts, which are unfolding – in Atlantics – in

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the Senegalese capital of Dakar. The film also, however, attempts to make sense of this
bewildering local situation, by carefully mapping intersecting colonial, patriarchal and
capitalist relationships that extend across history and global geography to unevenly
produce the present.

Anthropocene Gothic
Gaia opens with park rangers Gabi (Monique Rockman) and Winston (Anthony
Oseyemi) on a surveillance mission in an area of South Africa covered by ancient
woodland. The pair are separated when Gabi leaves her colleague to investigate the
sudden disappearance of a drone, and, after becoming caught in a hunter’s trap,
encounters Barend (Carel Nel) and his teenage son Stefan (Alex van Dyk): a pair of
white, Afrikaans-speaking, hessian-wearing ‘survivalists’ – the term used on Gaia’s
website – who weave their own twine from natural forest fibres, and hunt animals in
the woods with their hand-made bows and arrows. Barend, it turns out, is a former
scientist, but now lives a hermit’s life on the forest’s bounty, periodically making
votive offerings of whatever he and his son take to survive in a mysterious ritual of
human/nature reciprocity. Stefan has had no prior contact with the outside world, but
is drawn to Gabi – an attraction ambivalently sexualised by the film – and begrudg-
ingly his father gives her shelter in their hut.
Winston is less fortunate. Alone in the woods, he is attacked by a strange, shrieking
humanoid monster, whose body is grotesquely distorted by fungal outgrowths, and
before long he himself is lying prone against a tree in the throes of his own mushroom
transformation. Eventually Barend explains: an ancient mycelium network has been
growing beneath the forest since before humans evolved, and is now about to unleash
itself on the Earth’s population in an act of retribution for the war on nature that has
been waged by humanity since the industrial revolution. The fungus prefers Homo
sapiens, and, once it has incubated in a particular body, erupts in a cloud of infectious
spores, and so multiplies. The mushroom creature that attacks and infects Winston
thus represents the fate for which all humans are destined: an enforced reincorporation
into the biosphere that Barend frames as ‘the apes return[ing] to the trees’, and which
appears inevitable unless – like Barend and Stefan – humans defer to Gaia, and live in
reciprocity with ‘her’ (and here the gendering is noteworthy, as we shall see). It is those
votive rituals, it turns out, that keep the survivalists immune: in return for their offer-
ings they receive mushrooms that allow them to maintain their human form, despite
the fungal spores nestled within their bodies.
The film makes clear reference to James Lovelock’s famous Gaia hypothesis (1979),
which holds that all disparate elements of the biosphere work together to sustain
the conditions for life. It also corresponds closely to Bruno Latour’s reassessment of
Lovelock’s work in the age of the Anthropocene, when, he argues, climatic shifts are
making distinct categories of ‘Nature and the Human . . . more and more implausible’
(2017, chap. 4), with the result that we as a species are now called to ‘face Gaia’ – to
acknowledge that we have never been separate from the rest of nature. This, however, is
a far-from-straightforward task, since – as Latour himself has argued at length (1993) –
the epistemic tradition hegemonised since the Enlightenment hinges precisely on a cat-
egorical distinction between Humans and Nature. This anthropo-ecological binary is
also informed – importantly – by discourses of race and gender, so that the human of

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Enlightenment humanism is in fact quite specifically – as Latour puts it – a ‘Western,

Masculine Subject’ (2017, chap. 2). I will return to this latter point shortly; here it is
important to note, as Amitav Ghosh has done, that from the vantage of an epistemic
position which assumes humans and nature are separate, Anthropocene events acquire
the status of the returning repressed. They are encountered as what Ghosh calls the
‘environmental uncanny’ (2016, 32), in instances of which the apprehension of a dis-
avowed human/nature imbrication comes to be loaded with a nightmarish quality of
dread and threat.
Ghosh’s commentary is quite obviously relevant to Bouwer’s film, and to the mon-
strously hybrid fungal creatures in particular, who – as emblems and agents of the bio-
sphere’s revenge on humanity – can be understood precisely as uncanny metaphors for
anthropogenic shifts in the Earth System. Drawing directly on the resources of horror
fiction, Gaia would also seem to corroborate Ghosh’s influential argument – predi-
cated in part on his account of the environmental uncanny – that speculative fiction
provides the literary language best equipped to address present planetary shifts. This
is because, in Ghosh’s view, canonical realism remains wedded to the Enlightenment’s
system of knowledge; in the ‘outhouses’ of literary production, however – in science
fiction, fantasy and the gothic – the binary on which this system is founded has always
been treated as a fluid, transgressable line (2016, 66). Similar observations provide the
foundation for analyses of gothic fictions as – in Fred Botting’s formulation – ‘counter-
narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values’ (1996, 1).
Where these prioritise categorical separations, in other words, gothic presents scenar-
ios in which, as Jerrold Hogle has it, ‘opposed positions of many kinds keep blurring
into each other’ (2002, 16). In this way, gothic can be understood to retrieve complex
and hybrid identities – racialised, gendered, anthropo-ecological – for which the tidy
narrative of the human and all its others does not account.
In Gaia, this gothic function is mobilised specifically to excavate a repressed, and
now lethal, interconnectivity of human life in the wider biosphere. The gesture is
intended, at the same time, to explode the Enlightenment’s illusion of human excep-
tionalism by revealing that – in the age of climate and cognate crises – we are all, always
already incontrovertibly posthuman. These, I propose, are characteristic features of
Anthropocene Gothic, which overall can be defined as a mode that takes the following
as read: (1) that, in Millette’s words, ‘as a species, we have hollowed out the Earth for
our own devices’ (2020b, 90); (2) that the effects of this process demonstrate our imbri-
cation in the rest of nature; and (3) that the retrieval of this interrelationship in figures
of the environmental uncanny puts paid to humanism’s human, driving instead towards
a non-anthropocentric conception of human/nature relationality.

Post/Humanism in the Popular Anthropocene: Pitfalls

Gaia is, as we have seen, a film that allegorises unfolding planetary shifts in gothic
figures, whose hybridity suggests these transformations have a human origin. In this
way, the text subscribes to an analysis of climate and cognate crises which Moore
terms ‘the Popular Anthropocene’. Different from ‘the Geological Anthropocene’ – a
‘deliberate abstraction . . . in order to clarify the . . . relations of humans (as a species)
and the biosphere’ – the Popular Anthropocene is a discourse ‘about the historical
development, and contemporary realities, of planetary crisis’ (Moore 2019, 50). It is

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both an origin story and a future projection: a ‘narrative’ – in Moore’s words – ‘of
Humanity doing terrible things to Nature’ (2019, 50), and consequently of Human
posterity paying the price.
This, as Moore points out, is a deeply ‘faulty analytic’ (2019, 53), which at a very
basic level simply gets the picture of actually existing biospheric shifts very wrong. As
we have already seen, it is not humanity generally that is currently confronting climate
and cognate crises, but instead the global poor – a category disproportionately com-
posed, Moore confirms, of ‘women, neo-colonial populations, [and] peoples of colour’
(2019, 54). This real inequality suggests in turn that at the root of changes to the
Earth System is not humanity overall, but rather interlocking systems of capitalism,
colonialism and patriarchy. Thus, Moore writes, ‘the problem is not Man and Nature,
but certain men committed to the profitable destruction of most humans and the rest
of nature’ (2019, 53). The category of the universally culpable, universally vulnerable
‘anthropos’ on which the Popular Anthropocene hinges abstracts and flattens out these
differences. It risks obscuring, in this way, actually existing socio-ecological inequali-
ties, and so perpetuating these as a result.
The same point can be made, importantly, with respect to critical framings of the
Anthropocene and planetary crisis which hold that everywhere this is urgently exposing
a posthuman condition. As Austin Lillywhite has cogently argued, the suggestion that
the human species should be rethought to accommodate its real interconnection with
the biosphere – while not without value – has tended to prioritise universal relational-
ity at the expense of actually differentiated racialised and gendered experiences. This
manoeuvre is questionable because it ultimately legitimates a surreptitious recourse,
in the project of imagining posthuman entanglements, to precisely the racialising and
gendering narratives that drive such inequality in the material world. ‘The problem’,
as Lillywhite puts it, ‘is the way that certain mainstream . . . discourses erase differ-
ence in the interest of valorizing the common network while simultaneously relying
on explicitly racialised [and gendered] figures and tropes’ (2018, 107). In other words,
because the posthuman – like the human of the Anthropocene – assumes that race and
gender are somehow subordinate in importance to an overarching planetary situation,
frameworks hinging on these concepts ultimately give themselves licence to ignore,
and so reassert, how race and gender work together with forces that decimate the bio-
sphere. Viewed in this way, it seems eminently possible that, as Lillywhite writes, ‘the
new posthumanism is just another generalization taking the place of the old, hegemon-
izing concept of the human’ (2018, 101), and this risk is clearly borne out by Gaia’s
Anthropocene Gothic, as I shall outline in what follows. The film mobilises the gothic
to imagine present crises as the resurgence of repressed entanglements proper to this
geological epoch, but does so in terms that draw on suspect visions of indigeneity and
gendered identity, ultimately presenting us with a posthuman figure who – apart from
his ability to transmit the mycelium spores – is virtually indistinguishable from the
human of the Enlightenment tradition.

Indigeneity and Afrikaner Historiography

Gaia’s investment in the Popular Anthropocene is perhaps most clearly evidenced by
the film’s envisioning of ecological cataclysm as a threat that obtains at the level of the
species. The monstrous fungus incubates, as Barend has explained, in Homo sapiens,

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 anthropocene gothic, capitalocene gothic 119

and accordingly it is Homo sapiens overall who will be punished by the avenging
Gaia: forced – in the character’s words – to ‘return to the trees’ as mycelium-human
hybrids. It is striking how this narrative of universal vulnerability differs from the
actually existing South African context in which Gaia takes place. Cues across the film
indicate this local setting: the badge on Gabi and Winston’s uniforms closely resem-
bles the South African National Parks’ logo, for example, much of the dialogue is in
Afrikaans, and a snide reference to ‘democracy’ in one of Barend’s diatribes obliquely
suggests dissatisfaction with the post-apartheid nation. The interest in locality does
not seem to extend, however, to the issue of socio-ecological crisis with which the film
is centrally concerned. Following the global pattern, vulnerability to the future and
already unfolding effects of the changing biosphere is concentrated in South Africa dis-
proportionately among the nation’s poor – a demographic still strongly racialised and
gendered, despite the fall of the racist and heteropatriarchal apartheid state in 1994.1
Gaia is clearly intended to provide a sweeping, mythic vision of the Anthropocene – of
a species’ cosmic rise and fall – and this, perhaps along with an interest in garnering
international attention, is probably why the film does not concern itself with the local
nitty-gritty of South Africa’s radically uneven day-to-day. This is not to say, however,
that such a strategy is without issues, and these arise precisely from the abstract scale
in which the text operates, and which obscures the real contouring of socio-ecological
shifts in South Africa and elsewhere – thereby replicating at the level of narrative the
logic that drives inequality.
A closer consideration of the survivalist characters will begin to shed light on this
last point: as we have seen, Barend and Stefan live simply but laboriously in the South
African forest, whittling their own tools and traps, and hunting animals and gathering
insects for food. Across this narrative there are references to colonial settlement, and
to Afrikaner historiography in particular. For example, the film makes direct recourse
to the Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac, when – like Abraham – Barend is
commanded by Gaia to sacrifice his son in a show of faith. We will recall that Abraham
emerges from this encounter as leader of the chosen people and inheritor of the prom-
ised land, and it is worth noting that, for these reasons, his story has been associated in
South Africa with the development of Afrikaner Nationalism2 – the political doctrine
that would be enshrined in law after the 1948 inauguration of the apartheid state.
Unlike much of the Afrikaans literature in which this narrative was inscribed, however,
Gaia emphatically refuses to present Barend and Stefan as farmers, or ‘boers’: the two
do not earn their right to a place in the wilderness by carving an arable territory out
from ‘the primeval bush’ – the scenario that J. M. Coetzee sees as paradigmatic of the
conservative genre of the plaasroman, or South African farm novel (1988, 85). Instead,
Gaia’s chosen people survive in the forest precisely by eschewing settled agriculture,
and pursuing a hunter-gatherer existence. In the Southern African context, such a way
of life is associated primarily with the San peoples indigenous to the Kalahari region –
communities for whom contact with ‘European colonial agro-pastoralists’ in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries amounted to what the South African San Institute
(SASI) calls ‘a protracted genocide’ (SASI, n.d.). Viewed in this light, Bouwer’s film
can be understood in one sense as a speculative rewriting of Afrikaner historiography,
in which – rather than decimating Indigenous peoples – the Afrikaner pioneer figure
adopts a quasi-Indigenous mode of being, which is framed in the film as centred on a
reciprocal and spiritual exchange with the more-than-human world.

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This is the relationship that Gaia valorises as the (relatively) positive dimension of
its figuring of the posthuman: Barend’s hunter-gatherer existence offers the possibility
of a human/nature interconnection that does not require the transformation of the
human into fungal monster, but instead consists in a deferential acknowledgement of
the biosphere as the condition of possibility for any instance of life. It is noteworthy,
however, that though Gaia shifts the key terms of the South African pioneer narrative
described by Coetzee – from taming the wilderness to living in harmony with it – the
outcome remains essentially the same. Of the film’s multiracial and multigendered
cast of characters, it is only Barend and Stefan – white, male and associated with
colonial history – who are allowed to survive, Barend having endured the attack Gabi
launches during his Abrahamic attempt to sacrifice his son. He is subsequently able
to make a blood offering to Gaia, leaving open the possibility that he may be able to
retain his human form. Thus, if the film appears to endorse a non-Western way of life
as the route into a sustainable posthuman ecology, this reciprocal relationship with
nature – like the agrarian relationship of natural domination – functions ultimately
to validate the figure most closely aligned in the text to precisely an Enlightenment
conception of the human.

Goddess Discourse and its Discontents

The treatment of gender in the film operates in broadly similar terms: there is an
effort in Bouwer’s film – also visible in Latour’s discussion of Gaia – to code the
vengeful biosphere as a specifically feminised form of power. Not only is the myce-
lium network – Barend’s ‘God’ – explicitly referred to as ‘her’ and ‘she’ throughout,
but it is also suggested that the film’s (two) women characters acquire a quasi-godlike
status on merging with Gaia at the moment of death (and both of them are indeed
killed off). Lily, Barend’s wife and Stefan’s mother, appears about halfway through
the film, still ‘living’ in the forest, though now almost entirely fused with a tree. Gabi
undergoes a similar transformation after she dies (on her request, at Stefan’s hand),
and morphs into an aesthetically pleasing bouquet of colourful mushrooms and ferns.
Winston, who was euthanised by Barend much earlier in the film, is notably not
afforded the same floral treatment.
Indeed, Gabi is elevated as a kind of martyr to Gaia: after she dies, Stefan is freed
from attending to her, and goes off to the city to spread the spores that will make fun-
gal monsters of all of humanity. In this way, the war against nature to which Barend
has referred will be arrested. A triumph, then, for the feminised biosphere, but one that
is significantly achieved at the direct expense of sacrificing the film’s only active female
character, so that – as with Barend – the role of posthuman hero is left to a figure who
appears almost indistinguishable from the human he has supposedly superseded. The
whole scenario resonates closely with those described in different contexts by Anne
McClintock and Elleke Boehmer, in which the iconography of feminised power belies
the very logic that undergirds gendered forms of oppression. Here, women’s transfor-
mation into goddess figure – into ‘Mama Afrika’, as Boehmer notes (2005, 34), or the
Afrikaner Nationalist ‘volksmoeder’ in McClintock’s study (1993, 72) – simply reas-
serts in reverential terms a (colonial) patriarchal hierarchy, in which women’s value is
tied to their capacity for social and biological reproduction.

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The deification of the woman figure is thus at one and the same time a subalternis-
ing manoeuvre: ‘symbolically she is ranged above the men,’ writes Boehmer, ‘in reality
she is kept below them’ (2005, 29). The comment sheds particular light on Gabi’s
representation across Bouwer’s film, and specifically on her nearly seamless occupation
of a maternal role in respect to Stefan – a shift that takes place with little discernible
motivation, and is indeed rendered fairly implausible by the fact that she experiences
his clearly sexualised interest in her as predatory at the outset. There is a sense, then,
in which Gabi and also Lily are denied a more fully rounded subjectivity and charac-
terisation through their subordination to the mythical role of mother, in which Gaia –
the biosphere – is also placed. Any real power or agency that may be ascribed to this
position is thus thoroughly defused, as ultimately all the mothers of the film – real, sur-
rogate, autochthonous – turn out to be little more than symbolic props in the narrative
of Stefan as Gaia’s principal and central agent.

Against Anthropocene Gothic

Thus, as Gaia demonstrates an Anthropocene Gothic mode, it also dramatises with
particular clarity a set of problems that haunt this brand of ecogothic imaginary.
The film deals, as we have seen, in the homogeneous category of Homo sapiens – of
the ‘anthropos’. It understands current planetary events as emerging from collective
human activity, and offers its various figurations of a posthuman existence as repre-
sentative of a repressed entanglement of our species with the biosphere. But in pri-
oritising this vision of universal interconnectivity, Gaia also replicates the very social
hierarchies from which the degradation of extra-human nature is inseparable, and
indeed resonates uneasily – though presumably inadvertently – with certain political
discourses that shaped South African history across the second half of the twentieth
century. The ramifications of this approach emerge vividly at the end of the film,
which shows Stefan carrying the fungus from the forest to the city: in the final scene,
a quick-growing mould appears ominously on the remnants of a burger he has been
eating in a fast-food restaurant. The conversion of the earth’s population into Gaia’s
apostles has thus begun; the effects of the Anthropocene are about to be unleashed
in all their force – though in reality, of course, these are already unfolding, and with
most intensity among those communities and bodies who appear in the film in fetish-
ised form. There is no room for this socio-ecological inequality in Gaia’s ultimate
envisioning of environmental breakdown, which is presented as a danger to which
all of humanity is about to be equally exposed. The racialised and gendered logic
that has structured the film’s posthuman ecologies thus resurfaces one last time, in
an apocalyptic image which erases the experience of women and people of colour in
South Africa and elsewhere.
The same sense is discernible in the dismissal of Anthropocene critiques as a kind
of semantic preciousness. The suggestion that humans are transforming nature, and so
it matters little how we phrase this situation, simply reasserts the value of generalising
culpability to the level of the species, and thus skates over the deeper point that doing
so effectively disarms any meaningful critical endeavour, by allowing the actual driv-
ers of biospheric shifts – interlocking colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism – to drop
out of sight, and so become inactionable. Anthropocene Gothic, which operates in a

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 122 rebecca duncan

posthuman vocabulary of monstrous human/nature hybridity, can be understood as a

form of narrative that participates in this disabling obscurantism. There are, however,
other modes in which the gothic has been mobilised to engage planetary emergency
that do not proceed from the assumption that humans collectively are altering the
Earth System.

Capitalocene Gothic: Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019)

Atlantics, the debut feature from Senegalese director Mati Diop, is a film that inter-
weaves elements of love story and ghost story, drawing to do so on a transregional
variety of Middle Eastern and African folkloric figures, including – as Namwali
Serpell notes – the zombie and the djinn (2019, n.p.). There is a dreamy, meditative
quality to the text, which is punctuated by resonant shots of the Atlantic Ocean, and
which features a persistently hazy mise en scène that Lindsay Turner notes refer-
ences the poor air quality in the city of Dakar – an effect, among other factors, of
industrial production in the region (2020, 189). Action takes place often veiled in
this smog, and focuses initially on the young couple Ada (Mame Bineta Sane) and
Suleiman (Ibrahima Traoré), deeply in love, despite Ada’s engagement to the wealthy
but unlikeable businessman Omar (Babacar Sylla) – a match for which, her mother
reminds her, she should be grateful, since it will take care of the financial difficulties
that are an inevitable obstacle to a woman’s single life. In contrast to Omar, Sulei-
man is poor: he is a construction worker on the ominous, fictional skyscraper that
appears recurrently across the film – always wreathed in that characteristic haze –
and which spectacularly dominates Dakar’s otherwise modest urban skyline. When
the film opens, Suleiman has not been paid for three months: desperate, he and his
colleagues decide to make the dangerous sea-passage to Europe in a pirogue – a
small vessel used by West Africa’s coastal fishing communities. Tragically, the entire
crew is drowned when a storm hits. Across the rest of the film, however, they return
in spirit form to possess the bodies of their grief-stricken loved ones, in an effort
to exact what they are owed. In a remarkable scene towards the end of the film,
Ada’s friends – all women she knows from a nightclub, the sisters and lovers of the
migrant crew – surround the tower’s building manager in a cemetery, their blanked-
out eyes signalling their ghostly occupation by those they have lost. Together, men
and women, living and dead, retrieve the money due to them, and then look on while
the unfortunate boss digs the graves for the workers he, with his corporate antics,
has effectively sent to their death.
A very different film, then, to Bouwer’s discussed above, but one which is equally
interested in the present as a moment of planetary crisis. Where Gaia draws on
the possibilities of gothic as a counternarrative to the Enlightenment tradition that
separates humans from the rest of nature, however, Diop summons a gothic scenario
of the returning dead in order – as I will elaborate below – to capture the experi-
ence of life in a region already especially intensely affected by indissociable shifts in
society and the biosphere. In this sense, her mobilisation of the gothic recalls critical
work that emphasises close links between this mode’s emergence and the large-scale
socio-ecological transformations effected by industrialisation in Britain from the late
eighteenth century. On such accounts, the anxious and ambivalent lexicon of the

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 anthropocene gothic, capitalocene gothic 123

early gothic text – caught, as Hogle shows, between the lure of a dying aristocracy
and the new possibilities of class mobility (2002, 4)– registers the disorientation
that breeds as established relations between social groups shift and change, and the
relation between society and its environments is likewise reconfigured (Punter 1996,
192).3 Diop’s ghost story can be understood in similar terms, as a text that engages
a folklore-inflected gothic tradition to encode the bewildering sensorium of a con-
temporary West African lifeworld in violent socio-ecological flux. Instructive here is
Adam Ashforth’s concept of ‘spiritual insecurity’ (1998, 507), which is formulated
for neoliberalising, post-apartheid South Africa, and describes a rupture to the social
fabric profound enough to necessitate explication in terms of supernatural threat.
In Atlantics, however, supernatural figures do not only register such a rupture as
ontologically and epistemically confounding; they are also pressed into the service
of mapping the histories and global connections that together produce the socio-
ecological disturbance in question. In this way, the film is legible as an example of
‘critical irrealism’, in the Warwick Research Collective’s (WReC) sense of the term:
it is a text in which the relationship between the supernatural – the irreal – and the
experience of deleterious socio-ecological shifts is deliberately infused with world-
historical consciousness, and implemented to advance ‘a negative critique of the
world-order’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 97).
There are multiple interweaving layers to Diop’s critical irrealist narrative of mate-
rial dispossession/spiritual possession, which, as I will show, incorporates labour
exploitation, (gendered) social reproduction and the degradation of biophysical nature.
The drivers of these processes are carefully traced out so that the film elucidates, and
thus makes actionable, the transregional vectors out of which the tragedy of Ada and
Suleiman emerges. Ultimately, then, Atlantics mobilises the gothic elements of its plot
to raise and then address the question of why, at the present global conjuncture, cer-
tain lives are being rendered apparently expendable, both through their exposure to
corrosive or toxifying environments, and through their subjection to violent labour
practices that hamper survival at every turn. This is thus a gothic that sets little stock in
the concept of the Anthropocene, with its notions of universal human culpability and
universal human risk. As I will suggest by way of conclusion below, the film instead
locates itself in a planetary present where capitalism, operating through colonialism,
patriarchy and the objectification of nature, is the major force transforming the Earth
System in uneven and historically redolent ways.

Labour Precarity
The critical function of the revenants in Atlantics is perhaps most immediately con-
nected to the state of social precarity in which Suleiman and the other construction
workers find themselves: they have been forced, through their destitution, to place
their trust in a viciously capricious labour market, the aim of which is ultimately – the
film makes eminently clear – to extract value from them without giving anything in
return. The link between these circumstances and the spirits’ journey back from the
Atlantic is made quite explicit by the fact that, once possessed, the women repeatedly
descend on and interrogate the besuited manager of the construction site in his lav-
ish home. The restlessness of the dead is thus in a key sense shown to be an effect of

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 124 rebecca duncan

exploitation – and indeed it is their exploitation that has propelled Suleiman and the
others towards the ocean in the first place. Diop thus uses the scenario of the returning
dead to index a violent experience of being treated as expendable labour – one that is
thus cast as sufficiently bewilderingly unjust to produce the sense of spiritual insecurity
to which Ashforth refers.
At the same time, and in keeping with the critical irrealist agenda, Atlantics also
locates this experience in the context of world-economic shifts. The spectacular tower
is key in this respect, and recalls a host of actually existing ‘megaprojects’ which have
emerged across the African continent during the postcolonial period. Prominent exam-
ples include the multi-million-dollar stadia built in South Africa for the 2010 football
world cup, and – currently – Dakar’s own large-scale deep-water port facility, which
according to President Macky Sall will be ‘the biggest private investment in the West
African country’ (Reuters 2022). The last comment is particularly illuminating, because
it highlights the model of ‘development’ for which the postcolonial megaproject is
representative: namely, one that relies on attracting foreign capital (the port is being
financed from Dubai), and originates with the implementation of Structural Adjust-
ment Programmes (SAPs) across postcolonial states during the late-twentieth-century
period of global neoliberalisation. Designed by institutions of international finance,
SAPs were imposed to bring newly independent nations – including Senegal – in line
with the demands of global capital, at the time seeking to depress the costs of labour
and manufacturing by outsourcing these to regions across the southern hemisphere.
Alongside ‘the removal of all restrictions on foreign investment’, Neil Lazarus explains,
SAPs required ‘huge cuts in government spending and social provision, the slashing of
wages . . . and deregulation in all sectors to ensure that all developments were driven by
the logic of the market rather than by social need’ (2011, 9). As a result, SAPs ensured
an influx of money into certain strata of postcolonial societies, but they also deepened
the pre-existing hardships faced by the poor, who – like Suleiman – are subordinated to
the whims of a deregulated labour market, with no access to the social safety net that
would alleviate the destitution this breeds.
The tower functions as a visual shorthand for all of this in Atlantics, and so serves
to locate the exploitation to which the restless dead are linked as the local effect of
wider neoliberalising shifts in the system of capital. In this way, the haunting spirits
of the migrant crew expose and critique a contemporary world order where – in
a further mutation of colonial history – Africa continues to be treated as a site of
cheap labour.

Gendered (Dis)Possession
Importantly, the film also nuances this assessment by foregrounding the gendered ram-
ifications of labour market deregulation and intensifying poverty. Dinah Hannaford
and Ellen E. Foley have highlighted how ‘the fallout from privatisation and structural
adjustment reforms’ (2015, 210) has strongly destabilised established cultural para-
digms of marriage in Senegal, chiefly by undermining the feasibility of the ‘gendered
division of labour’ via which the marital relation is organised (207). Faced with pre-
cisely the kind of labour market precarity in which Diop’s Suleiman finds himself,
young Senegalese men are increasingly unable to occupy the husband’s role of ‘good

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 anthropocene gothic, capitalocene gothic 125

provider’ (208) – a situation that sheds particular light on the palpable relief Ada’s
mother expresses over her daughter’s engagement to the wealthy Omar. It is important
to note, however, that the conception of marriage in play here – one which situates
husbands as wage-workers and women as overseers of the domestic realm – has its
roots in colonial history, emerging from what Maria Mies, in her formative analy-
sis of patriarchy and the world-economy, calls ‘housewifization’. This is the process
through which colonised women were dispossessed of their pre-existing social roles,
and assigned the unpaid task of reproducing the colonial proletariat, on whom empire
depended for its prosperity. The effect is an enduring situation in which – as Mies puts
it – ‘women, and not men, are the . . . labour force for the capitalist . . . accumulation
process on a world scale’ (2014, 116). In Atlantics, the constricted romantic pos-
sibilities available to Ada clearly reference the persistence of this gendered economic
structure, but the film also gestures further, to the ways in which housewifisation is
intensified and mutated in a present shaped by the effects of SAPs.
As Mies notes, the postcolonial period has witnessed escalating efforts to draw
women across the Global South into the domain of waged work in a variety of ways,
but this development should not be mistaken for a liberatory act: rather, as she notes,
the discourse of housewifisation remains powerfully in effect, and is manipulated in
the interest of framing work performed by women as illegitimate labour – ‘what they
do is not defined as work, but as an activity’ (Mies 2014, 118) – with the result that
it can be bought at low cost. Mies shows that such carefully orchestrated exploitation
applies across the formal and informal sectors of the postcolonial economy, extending
also – significantly – to sex work, which represents one of the few viable modes of sur-
vival available to women under conditions where (despite their supposedly increased
access to the labour market) gainful waged work remains in effect gendered as male.
This is important because it is suggested in Atlantics, especially by Ada’s conserva-
tive friend Mariama (Mariama Gassama), that the heroine’s unmarried female friends
from the nightclub – the lovers and sisters of the lost crew – congregate in the smoky,
neon-lit seaside bar precisely to sell sex. Making this observation, Serpell notes that
after she abandons her engagement to Omar, Ada, too, runs away from her family
to work in the nightclub (2019, n.p.). Thus, her story charts the shifting functions of
housewifisation, first shining a light on a marital system in which the association of
wage-labour with masculinity coercively inducts women into unpaid domestic service;
and second, exposing how, in the present, the buckling of this same system compels
women to take surreptitious or risky routes into the wage-economy, where what Mies
calls their ‘income generating activities’ (2014, 115) are then stigmatised, not recog-
nised as real work and so bought on the cheap. It is against the background of this
latter point in particular that we may interpret Diop’s decision to leave the matter of
sex work at the level of insinuation in the film, so that (as in reality) the labour of
the women in the nightclub remains the obscured substrate – what Marx called the
‘hidden abode’ – on which the world-economy depends.
The film thus acknowledges how the labour practices to which Suleiman and his
colleagues are subject rely on a deeper set of gendered exploitations, which hinge on
the construction of women’s work – domestic or otherwise – as illegitimate and so
freely appropriable. When the possessed women descend on the unfortunate construc-
tion manager – as they do at two key points across the film – they should not, then, be

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 126 rebecca duncan

understood as mere vehicles for the working men’s spirits. Rather, as Serpell observes,
their possession by the dead signals a communal or solidaristic form of redressive
action, in which the postcolony’s men and women come together in protest at their dif-
ferential but interlinked exploitations (2019, n.p.).

Environmental Violence
Different facets of global inequality are thus reflected across the different dimensions
of Diop’s ghost story: the restlessness of the dead indexes the labour precarity that
emerges from postcolonial structural adjustment, and the scenario of spirit posses-
sion registers the gendered exploitation that underpins and enables these depreda-
tions in the wage-economy. The film also, however, positions these indissociable
forms of systemic violence in the context of unevenly distributed environmental
shifts, from which it is thus suggested that they are inseparable. Scenes in which we
see the characters receiving the ghosts of the migrant crew are illuminating in this
respect. The process is physically distressing: the host bodies are shown staggering,
collapsing, and all the time – crucially – gasping for breath. As Turner notes in her
own assessment of Diop’s film, ‘it seems impossible to separate [t]his condition from
the density of the air’ (2020, 188), which we will recall is foregrounded throughout
Atlantics by the film’s characteristically hazy mise en scène.
Dakar’s air is about five times more polluted than it should be to be safely breath-
able, Turner explains, and ‘a certain amount of that pollution comes from . . .
construction financed by multinational companies’, while another proportion derives
from ‘goods manufactured by outside companies to be exported elsewhere’ (2020,
188–9). Both construction megaprojects and the relocation of manufacturing to post-
colonial nations are key consequences, as we have seen, of structural adjustment, and
so the smog should be understood as in significant part an effect of the same socio-
economic shifts responsible for the hardships endured by Suleiman, Ada and the rest
of the characters. Indeed, as Rob Nixon points out in Slow Violence and the Environ-
mentalism of the Poor (2011), the outsourcing of material production to postcolonial
regions in the late twentieth century was consciously informed not only by a social but
also by an ecological calculus. It aimed to rectify what was constructed as an ‘inef-
ficient global imbalance in toxicity’ by ‘export[ing] rich nation garbage, toxic waste
and heavily polluting industries to Africa’ and other countries across the Global South
(Nixon 2011, 1). To illustrate the point, Nixon quotes Lawrence Summers, former
president of the World Bank: ‘I’ve always thought that countries in Africa are vastly
under polluted . . . [S]houldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the
dirty industries to the Least Developed Countries?’ (2011, 1).
The assumption on which this proposal rests – namely, that African environments
are disproportionately untainted and robust – bears little relation to reality. As Moore
demonstrates clearly in his environmental history of the global sugar frontier, coloni-
sation has, since the inauguration of transregional capitalism in the fifteenth century,
always been an extractive ecological relation, through which ‘[n]utrients were pumped
out of one ecosystem . . . and transferred to another’ (2000, 413). ‘In essence’, he con-
tinues, colonised ‘land was progressively mined until its relative exhaustion fettered
profitability, whereupon capital was forced to seek out fresh lands’ by expanding the
imperial frontier (2000, 413–4). It is in no small part the cumulative effects of this

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 anthropocene gothic, capitalocene gothic 127

history – the progressive degradation and destabilisation of colonised environments –

that render postcolonial regions disproportionately vulnerable to the crises currently
unfolding across the biosphere. The inequality of these shifts is in turn compounded
and intensified by contemporary practices such as those Summers mentions, which – as
they continue to treat the postcolony as a disposable ecosystem – not only recall but
precisely replicate the colonial relation in the present.
Atlantics’ Dakar, wreathed in smog and overshadowed by its heavily symbolic
tower, provides a vision of colonial- and capitalogenic climate inequality from the
vantage of one of the climate emergency’s frontlines – though the film also gestures
beyond atmospheric pollution to other forms of environmental destruction. It is note-
worthy in this respect that the small vessel in which the workers make their ill-fated
journey is in fact a redolent socio-ecological symbol, and the namesake of what has
become known over the last two decades as ‘the pirogue phenomenon’ (Mayault 2017,
n.p.). Commercial overfishing in the Atlantic off the Senegal coast – an industrial-scale
operation in which European, Chinese and Japanese trawlers feature prominently –
increasingly means that pirogues can no longer fulfil their traditional purpose of cater-
ing to local communities, and are being used instead as migrant ferries – a function
for which they are ill-equipped, as Atlantics grimly shows. This reality hovers behind
the narrative of Suleiman and his fellow workers, providing the explanation as to why
they have to sell their labour in a deeply exploitative multinational system, which in
turn is transforming the Dakar air into that unbreathable smog. Atlantics conjures this
multidimensional history of socio-ecological dispossession and toxification, and gives
it palpable concrete form in those scenes of asphyxiation that accompany the arrival
of the possessing ghosts.

Capitalocene Gothic
The haunting figures in Atlantics can thus be understood as encoding the dispropor-
tionate (gendered) social and environmental precarity that characterises life in Sen-
egal’s capital city. The pervasive scenes of the tower, dominating the Dakar skyline,
serve to anchor these conditions in the context of late-twentieth-century structural
adjustment and its after-effects, which – as we have seen – entrench and compound
the racialised and gendered economic/ecological relationships cultivated under formal
colonialism. Indeed, this history is summoned as the backdrop against which all action
in the film takes place. The repeated, lingering shots of the ocean direct the viewer’s
attention to Atlantic crossings that pre-date Suleiman’s, as Turner also notes (2020,
190): we are called to remember that Gorée Island off the Dakar coast is home to a
door of no return, through which captive Africans passed en route to the plantations
of the New World between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Atlantics’ linking
of its present to this history is suggestive. It resonates with Aníbal Quijano’s notion of
‘coloniality’ (2000, 533), which describes how, from the colonisation of the Americas
onwards, the geopolitical landscape has been structured by a racialising principle, and
how this serves to identify the exploitable, expendable populations and environments
always required by the capitalist relation.
Coloniality is different, then, from formal colonialism which concludes (also in
Senegal) around the middle of the twentieth century. It is instead a more surreptitious
alliance between colonial hierarchies of racial difference and capitalist production,

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 128 rebecca duncan

which obtains – Quijano suggests – on a world scale into the present. ‘[T]he racial
axis has a colonial origin,’ he writes, ‘but it has proven to be more durable . . . than
the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model of power
that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element of coloniality’ (2000, 533).
Invoking a history that begins with enslavement and plantation ecologies, and persists
into the neoliberal age, Atlantics would seem to proceed from a similar premise. This
means in turn that the payment Suleiman and his crew return from the sea to collect
perhaps exceeds the wage due to them. It can be understood, rather, as encompassing
the wider and deeper historical debt owed to enslaved and colonised women and men,
to exhausted ecosystems, with the fruits of whose unpaid work and energy the present
world order has been unequally built.
Atlantics offers a perspective on this globally extensive socio-ecological system, but
does so – significantly – from the vantage of contemporary Dakar, the complex senso-
rium of which is critically encoded in the ghostly narrative, as I have shown. As a result of
this local rooting – historical, social, environmental – the film notably refuses to be read
through sweeping abstractions: it is not humanity generally who either suffers from, or
drives, the deleterious socio-ecological situation it witnesses, and accordingly the gothic
figures in the narratives are not non-anthropocentric representatives of a repressed and
universal human/nature connectivity. Indeed, where the Anthropocene Gothic prioritises
these entanglements as superseding in their importance systems of racialised and gender
power, Atlantics takes as central these latter structures and their inseparability from the
history of capitalist exploitation and extraction. It is a text, then, that demonstrates a
form of gothic which situates itself in what Moore calls the Capitalocene (2016, 81–9):
the age in which capitalism, mobilising colonial discourses of race, heteropatriarchal
conceptions of gender, and objectifying categories of biophysical nature, has brought the
planetary system to its current state of unevenly unfolding collapse.

Notes
1. See, for example, Soheil Shayegh and Shouro Dasgupta’s analysis of the gendered and
classed effects of climate emergency in South Africa (2022), or Suma Mani et al.’s account
of land degradation and climate justice (2021).
2. A discussion of the narrative of the chosen people and its construction and function within
Afrikaner Nationalism can be found in André Du Toit’s article ‘No Chosen People: The
Myth of the Calvinist Origins of Afrikaner Nationalism and Racial Ideology’ (1983).
3. In ‘Decolonial Gothic’ (2022), I provide a more detailed account of gothic and the socio-
ecological effects of industrialisation.

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Turner, Lindsay. 2020. ‘In the Atmosphere: The Politics of Mati Diop’s Atlantics.’ The Yale
Review, 1 June, 186–91. https://yalereview.org/article/atmosphere.

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 8

Extractive Gothic
Sharae Deckard

G othic has a long history of fascination with nature, both in a secondary sense as
‘a powerfully unruly background’ that functions as a backdrop to human violence
(Calder Williams 2011, 32), and in a primary sense, as itself the agent of violence on
which terrifying plots turn. Tom Hillard, one of the first critics to delineate ‘ecogothic’
as a distinct subgenre, has compellingly argued that US literary gothic, for instance, has
a long tradition of ‘representations of nature inflected with fear, horror, loathing or dis-
gust’ (2009, 685), radiating out through the work of William Bradford, Charles Brockden
Brown or Edgar Allan Poe, and ineluctably bound up with the racialised imaginaries of
environments emerging from settler colonialism, frontierism, slavery, plantation and war,
whose legacies continue to haunt the present. As such, ecogothic has different political
valences: it can function in a primarily ‘eco-phobic’ manner, to register fears of more-
than-human nature, often encapsulated in ‘revenge of nature’ narratives that imagine bio-
physical forces, flora or creatures of the natural world as striking ‘back against humans as
punishment for environmental disruption’ (Rust and Soles 2014, 509), or in tropes that
highlight alterity or material excess, anxiously imagining the threats posed by ‘the uncanny
sentience or animation of nonhuman nature and the absorption of human characters into
an unbounded natural world’ (Sencindiver 2018, 489).
However, ecogothic can also function critically, exposing the socio-ecological crises
produced by the capitalist organisation of nature, and retooling the ‘revenge’ trope to
imagine environments that revolt against capitalist forms of extraction, enclosure and
pollution. In such narratives, the insurgency of more-than-human nature becomes a
vehicle for sympathetic identification or catharsis, ‘the insurrectionary prospect of the
background coming monstrously into its denied prominence’ (Calder Williams 2011,
33). Disgust is elicited not by nature and its imagined difference from humanity, but
rather by the repulsive violence immanent to the socio-ecological regimes of the ‘capi-
talist world-ecology’ which treats nature as ‘cheap’ or valueless (Moore 2015), except
to the extent that it can be commodified and transformed into an object of exchange.
In this chapter, I further refine the category of the ecogothic to delineate a sub-
set that I call ‘Extractive Gothic’, ecogothic narratives set in contexts of extractivism
that can operate through either extractivist or anti-extractivist aesthetics. If extractivist
aesthetics tend to revolve around phobic conceptions of nature’s resistance to extrac-
tivist technics, anti-extractivist aesthetics turn around the horror of Capitalist Nature
itself. Extractive Gothic tends to be ‘preoccupied with energy at the point of extraction’
(Henry 2019, 406) and turns on tropes of drills and dredges, its plots often hinging on
the terrifying consequences of delving too deep: of unearthing monsters from beneath;
excavating horrifying substances that pollute the topside; or triggering the uncanny

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fusing of oil and coal into massified bodies and sentient matter. The vertical frontiers
of industrialised extraction are concretised in gothic imagery of dark tunnels, shafts,
boreholes, mines and wells; its settings are spatialised on vertical axes, offering uncanny
revelations of the previously concealed undersides and recesses of subterranean or sub-
oceanic terrains. At the same time, Extractive Gothic’s affective registers, particularly
in peripheral or (post)colonial settings, are characterised not only by dread and horror,
but by exhaustion, expressed through motifs of draining, sucking and pulverising, that
express the extractive logic of the capitalist world-ecology itself, which extends core-
periphery divisions by extracting massive volumes of ‘raw’ materials from peripheries
for export according to the demand of capitalist cores. As such, Extractive Gothic fic-
tions are often global in their horizon even when rooted in local sites of extraction; they
are not only ecogothic, but world-gothic: permeated with a systemic consciousness of
the world-scale of imperialist and capitalist extraction, and of the accelerating plan-
etary impacts of energy and resource extraction, whether as global warming or other
forms of ecological catastrophe.
A growing body of literary criticism has mapped the aesthetics of ‘literature in the
age of extraction’ (Amatya and Dawson 2020, 1) and of ‘extractive fictions’, examining
‘literature and other cultural forms that render visible the socioecological impacts of
extractive capitalism and problematize extraction as a cultural practice’ (Henry 2019,
403). Rashmi Varma argues for a world-literary perspective of extractivism as ‘both
a project and a process that is bolstering new forms of imperialism on a world scale’
(Varma 2021, 127). Crucially, this requires ‘a materialist conceptualization of the materi-
ally submerged or the ideologically invisibilized’ since ‘Literature that is written either
as a registration of the depleting life-worlds of the extractive zones or as resistance to
the ongoing onslaught mounted on the poor and the indigenous communities can be
read then as mediating global regimes of extraction that rely on conditions of invisibility’
(Varma 2021, 128). If our role as critics is to decipher the role of the cultural ‘in making
visible and resistant that which extractivism seeks to exploit for profit’ (Varma 2021,
127), a specific focus on the aesthetic capacities of gothic to reveal repressed or invisi-
bilised dimensions can prove salutary. Much criticism of extractive fictions has concen-
trated on literary realism, as in Elizabeth Miller’s pioneering study of the rise of industrial
extractivism and the aesthetics of nineteenth-century provincial realism, where discourses
around ‘exhaustion, supply, futurity, and decline’ leach into ‘the endings, trajectories,
and temporalities’ of the realist novel (Miller 2020, 29). However, it is equally produc-
tive to examine the temporalities, tropes and narrative energetics of the irrealist genre of
Extractive Gothic, particularly its telaesthetic capacity to telescope time and space, and
its capacity to ‘mine’ earlier gothic registrations to represent nested regimes of extraction
characterised by the periodic exhaustion and relocation of commodity frontiers.
Throughout this chapter, I focus on Extractive Gothic fictions from the twentieth to
the twenty-first century that register the global intensification of new modes of mineral
and energy extractivism. My approach to ‘fiction’ is expansive, encompassing literary
texts and the intermedial forms of cinema, graphic novels and video games. Similarly, I
take a broad approach to ecogothic that encompasses registers of both terror and horror,
which are often commingled in ways that defy neat separation into discrete categories,
since these works tend to be characterised by gothic affective intensities that explode
into fully fledged horror at their climaxes. Ecogothic, with its temporal emphasis on rev-
enants of past ecological catastrophes returning to haunt the present, and its atmosphere
of slow-mounting dread, is well-suited to figure the more incremental forms of ‘slow

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violence’ (Nixon 2011). By contrast, horror-gothic turns not so much around creeping
revelation of bio-magnification, toxic accumulation, decay, pollution or depletion over
the longue durée, but rather around sudden eruptions of monstrous nature, whether
uncanny deluges and disasters, slashing jaws of monstrous creatures, teeming excres-
cences of plagues and swarms, ghastly mutations and horrid hybrids, or the accelerated
fecundity of malevolent flora. The more intangible or unrepresentable aspects of ecologi-
cal crisis produced by longer temporalities of extraction, mining and appropriation of
nature, which the weird tends to render more through atmospheres of dread, foreboding
or incomplete apprehension, are supplanted in horror-gothic by the immediacy of con-
cretised violence. Horror erupts directly, rendered tangible and corporeal, inflicted upon
the body of the human animal or the infrastructures undergirding extractive regimes,
or embodied in eerie distortions of more-than-human environments. If ‘horror is what
bleeds’ (Shapiro and Storey 2022, 4), ecohorror is nature that oozes, swarms, strangles,
creeps and seeps, splattering capitalism’s environmental history into gory consciousness.

Twentieth-Century Extractive Form

Eric Walrond’s short-story collection Tropic Death (1926) offers a signal example of
early-twentieth-century Extractive Gothic, whose circum-Caribbean settings sketch
the ascendance of US resource imperialism across the hemispheric Americas, grap-
pling with the ‘specter of US expansion and its implications for black labor, migra-
tion, and death’ (Owens 2016, 96). The collection is morbidly permeated by tropes of
‘tropic death’ that evoke earlier nineteenth-century imperialist discourses of ‘tropical
decadence’, but are reconfigured to portray modern Caribbean landscapes as drenched
in the blood of the exploited, colonised and enslaved peoples whose labour has been
coercively deployed to construct infrastructures of extraction and imperial domina-
tion. Walrond’s stories combine experimental modernist aesthetics with folk beliefs
from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, but are punctuated by phantasmagoric moments
when fatalism flares into fully fledged ecogothic to express the socio-ecological vio-
lence of resource imperialism. A striking example arises in ‘The Palm Porch’, set within
the Panama Canal Zone as the canal is being constructed, a project that would be key
to the establishment of US naval dominance in the hemisphere:

After the torch, ashes and ghosts – bare, black stalks, pegless stumps, flakes of
charred leaves and half-burnt tree trunks. Down by a stream watering a village of
black French colonials, dredges began to work. More of the Zone pests, rubber-
booted ones, tugged out huge iron pipes and safely laid them on the gutty bosom of
the swamp. Congeries of them. Then one windy night the dredges began a moan-
ing noise. It was the sea groaning and vomiting. Through the throat of the pipes
it rattled, and spat stones – gold and emerald and amethyst. All sorts of juice the
sea upheaved. It dug deep down, too, far into the recesses of its sprawling cosmos.
Back to a pre-geologic age it delved and brought up things. (Walrond 2013, 65)

If the human labourers are referred to in insectile terms as ‘pests’, suggesting their
depersonalisation, and vegetation is rendered spectral by slash-and-burn deforestation,
the machinic dredges are uncannily personified, moaning as they carry out their ghastly
work, draining the water – and thereby the life – out of the wetland ecosystem. The
anthropomorphised sea groans as if in protest at its dredging, while the plundering of

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mineral resources throughout the frontier zone of the isthmus is imagined as a gro-
tesque, if glittering, vomitus. The regurgitation elicits a sense of cosmic horror, dredging
up some primordial past in a trope reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction.
However, in Lovecraft the horror of delving too deep is usually linked to a
racialised dread, the fear of unearthing some primordial past, as in the fears of occult
rituals practised by ‘mixed-blood cultists’ in the Louisiana bayous in Lovecraft’s ‘The
Call of Cthulhu’ (1928) that summon up ‘out of the earth the black spirits of earth,
mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours’ (Lovecraft 2013, 35). By contrast,
Walrond’s story focuses on the ecosystemic and social violence in the draining of
the Panama isthmus, personified through the suffering sea. In Tropic Death, horror
emerges not from the uncanny ecology of the sea and swamp, nor in their association
with Afro-Caribbean belief systems and the spectre of miscegenation that perennially
haunts Lovecraft’s fictions, but rather in their violent transformation at the hands of
modern capitalism.
Common to both Walrond and Lovecraft, however, is the trope of the drill or dredge
that penetrates too deeply into earth or sea and unleashes ancient terror, a trope which
resonates throughout Extractive Gothic from the early stages of the coal- and oil-fuelled
rise of first European then US imperialism, to the neoliberal era’s attempts to shore up
the hegemony of capitalist core states through the unleashing of new extreme frontiers
of extractivism. Indeed, affects of ‘carbon-dread’ and ‘fossil-terror’ correlative to novel
forms of energy extraction reverberate throughout Lovecraft’s oeuvre, and are power-
fully crystallised in ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ (1931), which concludes with a
cautionary warning:

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s
dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities
wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash
out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. (Lovecraft 2013, 283)

Lovecraft’s novella is an Ur-text of Extractive Gothic whose plot mechanics rely upon
an imagined technological novum of extraction: a ‘new form of drilling technique
borne by state-of-the-art equipment’ that allows the polar exploration team to pierce
through permafrost, which leads to ‘the discovery—and surfacing of the horror-bringing
subterranean source of a death substance’ (Macdonald 2016). This black ooze has
led to the extinction of a former humanoid species, and seems to threaten, as it seeps
up from the icy depths, the survival of future humanity. The ‘fetid black iridescence’
(Lovecraft 2013, 278) is also racialised and charged with an atavistic fear in Love-
craft’s rendering, heightened by contrast to the ghastly whiteness of its Antarctic set-
ting, which resurrects the Manichaean black-white dichotomies of Edgar Allan Poe’s
earlier polar-traversing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838).
The convergence of ‘fossil-terror, hallucinogenic racism and ecophobia’ in Lovecraft’s
imagination of the polar regions as a new frontier zone can be read as mediating the
energy unconscious of the emergent age of oil (Deckard and Oloff 2020, 5). As such,
his work is a powerful example of what Christine Okoth has called ‘extractive form’,
the process of mediation by which literature ‘stages the unfolding relationship between
historical and ongoing modes of racial subjection and the logics produced by regimes
of extraction’ (Okoth 2021, 381).

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The extractive form of Lovecraft’s fictions crystallised a potent repository for future
gothic writers, providing a rich ‘node’ of imagery that has been repeatedly mined and
reprocessed in order to mediate the implications of novel regimes of extraction, but a
deeply ambivalent one, shot through with noxious veins of racialised ecophobia. The
mid-century short fictions of Fritz Leiber offer a prominent example of the recalibra-
tion of Lovecraft’s Extractive Gothic, including the persistence of racialised logics
in the inherited form. In particular, Leiber’s extraordinary, hallucinatory ‘The Black
Gondolier’ (1964) draws on the same concatenation of fossil-terror and dread of
extractivist novums that characterises the earlier Lovecraftian oeuvre, but replaces
proleptic dread with eruptive horror in its representation of oil as a sentient agent of
violence that consciously murders the protagonist.
The short story is set in the Venice Beach neighbourhood of 1960s Los Angeles.
Its location is a site of extraction not in some frontier zone or offshore drilling site,
but in the heart of an urban capital in the imperial metropole, in the middle of the
Californian oil boom that erupted in the 1930s before tailing off in the 1970s. In the
narrator’s description, the derricks clotting the neighbourhood’s canals and beaches
take on the uncanny appearance of an alien invasion:

It seemed to me that I was seeing a congeries of such tower-high beings and

that the next moment they might begin to stride lurchingly toward me, with
something of the feeling, modernistically distorted, of Macbeth’s Birnam Wood
coming to Dunsinane. And here and there along with the oil derricks, like
their allies or reinforcements, one sees the gleaming distillation towers and the
monstrous angular-shouldered cracking plants with muscles of knotted pipe, and
the fields of dull silver oil tanks, livid in the smog, and the vaster gas tanks
and the marching files of high-tension-wire towers, which look at a distance like
oil derricks. (Leiber 2000, n.p.)

The technology in the Venice boom-town, like Walrond’s congeries of dredges in the
Canal Zone, is not some fantastic invention as in Lovecraft’s earlier fiction, but rather
the fully developed infrastructure of petromodernity itself. Instead of the nascent
energy imaginary of anticipatory dread associated with a new frontier in ‘Mountains’,
Leiber’s story marks the transition to a fully fledged regime of oil extraction in mid-
century America. A persistent note of exhaustion permeates the narration, emerging
from the vampiric sucking and draining of the oil wells,

all of them wearily pumping twenty-four hours a day with a soft slow syncopated
thumping that the residents don’t hear for its monotony, interminably sucking up
the black petroleum that underlies Venice, lazily ducking and lifting their angularly
oval metal heads like so many iron dinosaurs or donkeys forever drinking. (Leiber
2000, n.p.)

The extraction of oil is everywhere in plain sight, banal in its ubiquity for those who
inhabit the neighbourhood, except through the estranging perspective of the narrator,
whose terror mounts as he succumbs to dreams of the phantasmic Black Gondolier,
an inhuman, tentacular extrusion of oil that pilots him in a gondola throughout a vast
subterranean ocean filled with petroleum.

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Achieving an ‘impossible’ celerity that gestures to the new sensorium of planetary

time-space compression enabled by the technics of fossil-fuel combustion, these onei-
ric journeys circumnavigate the globe, spanning the reservoirs underlying every great
oil-producing region: ‘We flash about like a single black corpuscle in the oil plasma of
the great world-creature. I know, intuitively, that one instant we are beneath Caracas;
the next Ploesti; then Baku, Iraq, Iran, . . . Argentina, Colombia, Oklahoma’ (Leiber
2000, n.p.). Immersing themselves in ‘world history, geology, and the occult’ in the
attempt to make sense of these malevolent dreams, which they come to believe are
telepathic communications from oil itself, the narrator and his friend Daloway develop
the theory that

crude oil – petroleum – was more than figuratively the life-blood of industry and
the modern world and modern lightning-war, that it truly had a dim life and will
of its own, an inorganic consciousness or sub-consciousness, that we were all its
puppets or creatures, and that its chemical mind had guided and even enforced the
development of modern technological civilization. . . . In brief, Daloway’s theory
was that man hadn’t discovered oil, but that oil had found man. Venice hadn’t
struck oil; oil had thrust up its vicious feelers like some vast blind monster, and
finally made contact with Venice. (Leiber 2000, n.p.)

Daloway’s paranoiac rantings about the agents of oil, which are capable of taking on
‘a darkly oleaginous humanoid’ form, frequently spill over into racist and misogynist
speculations: that the ‘Black Man’ of early Puritan ‘witch-cults’ was a premonition not
of the devil, but of the oil-humanoid; that the Civil War, with its ‘triumph’ of the indus-
trial North, was triggered by oil’s desire for ascendancy – ‘We have to remember too
that oil was first discovered, so far as the modern world is concerned, in Pennsylvania,
the hexing state, . . . in 1859, just on the eve of a great and tragic war that made fullest
use of new industrial technologies’; and that the contemporary ‘Negro’ is ‘mixed up’ in
the conspiracy: ‘I think that the racial question . . . is of crucial significance. Oil’s using
the black as another sort of camouflage’ (Leiber 2000, n.p.). Daloway’s weird periodi-
sation of oil’s alleged interference throughout US history, from the colonial era to the
Civil War to the civil rights era, can be read as resurrecting racialised logics immanent
to gothic form in order to project his anxiety about the erosion of white supremacy
by the collective agency of Black activists in the 1960s and the demographic ‘invasion’
of Los Angeles by Black urban migrants onto the threatening ‘blackness’ of oil itself.
By the end of the story, in retribution for his knowing too much about oil’s plans to
conquer human civilisation and extend into space to colonise new planets, the narra-
tor’s friend Daloway is abducted by the Gondolier and drowned in the carboniferous
sea in a ‘black baptism’.
The novella is rife with the ‘petro-fetishism’ that attributes a demoniacal agency to
oil, emanating from its alleged power to reshape societies and generate infrastructures
across the globe (Watts 2001, 205). Eugene Thacker reads this uncanny materiality of
oil as expressing the dissolution of the dichotomy between the thinking ‘human’ subject
of interiorised thought and the non-thinking object of ‘nature’. The petrolic ooze is ‘both
crude, material stuff, and immanent, miasmatic thought, both materially viscous and
sentient’ (Thacker 2011, 94). However, more significant for critics of world-gothic is the
world-ecological horizon of oil’s totality invoked in Daloway’s ‘wild theory of world oil’

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(Leiber 2000, n.p.), whose unthinkability might lie not so much in its material alterity
as in its function as an expression of the global logic of fossil capital. As Michael Niblett
argues, crude oil is only ‘dark gunk’, and does not become an ‘energy source’ or the
‘commodity “oil”’ until it is transformed within the structural relations of the capitalist
world-system that have themselves been ‘restructured through oil, which, since the late
nineteenth century, has become the key vector through which capitalism knits together
human and extra-human natures in the interests of endless accumulation’ (Niblett 2015,
274). In making oil into a direct antagonist, an all-powerful, all-spanning global entity,
‘The Black Gondolier’ attempts a kind of impossible subjectivisation of global petromo-
dernity itself. The story’s representational excess can also be understood as related to the
stark visibility of extractive infrastructure in 1960s Venice, before the wells were capped
and concealed. In twenty-first-century Los Angeles, the remaining derricks and wells
are now obscured behind false façades and water-tanks – the revelation of ‘world oil’ as
structural relation of world-system concealed from view once more – while the greater
burden of extraction has been outsourced and offshored to new frontiers.

‘Extreme Extractivism’ in the Twenty-First Century

If Leiber’s story is poised on the cusp of the neoliberal ‘turn’, the second cluster of works
I wish to examine are situated in the twenty-first century and mediate the rise of ‘extreme
extractivism’ (Dawson 2011) and ‘extreme energy’ in the late neoliberal world-ecology.
While capitalist accumulation has always depended on the brutal extraction of resources,
extractivism of non-renewable resources has intensified in the neoliberal era, with
‘50 percent of the resources that high-income nations consume . . . appropriated from
the Global South’ (Amatya and Dawson 2020, 3). Extreme extractivism has emerged
as a form of ecological imperialism truly graspable only at the world-ecological scale,
reinforcing core-periphery relations and reincorporated into postcolonial countries as
a central element of their ‘development’, even as it generates plunder and ecological
degradation on an unprecedented planetary level (Varma 2021, 127). ‘Extreme energy’
denotes the intensification of methods of energy extraction over time, as easier to extract
fossil fuel resources are depleted or constrained. In the late neoliberal era, this includes
shale gas extraction via hydraulic fracturing, deep-sea oil drilling, mountaintop coal
removal, and tar sands open-cast extraction, which not only bring ‘forms of environ-
mental destruction heretofore confined to the Global South home to populations in the
North who have for decades been relatively sheltered from the most aggressive efforts
of the energy industry’ but which also compound the release of greenhouse gases, thus
accelerating climate change, extreme weather and ‘(un)natural disasters’ (Dawson 2011,
n.p.). Literature and media in the age of extreme extractivism mediate these new intensi-
ties and disasters and ‘explore new subjective realities that derive from struggles against
extractivist worldviews’ (Amatya and Dawson 2020, 12).
This section explores intermedial cultural forms including comics, film and games that
retool the aesthetics of Extractive Gothic to figure the new geographies, vertical frontiers
and technics of intensified extraction and extreme energy, arguing that even as they focus
on regional points of extraction, they are characterised by a heightened global conscious-
ness of both the world-scale of extractivism and its planetary ecological impacts. At the
same time, these twenty-first-century forms are increasingly malleable in their generic
mixtures, blending science-fictional conventions of near-future eco-apocalypse with

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features of ecogothic and horror, registering a growing sense of apprehension of the end
of nature as we know it, in the age of climate emergency and mass extinction.
I begin with the graphic novel Carbon (2014), written by Daniel Boyd with art by Edi
Guedes, which is set in a declining coal town, ‘Eden Valley’, in rustbelt West Virginia.
The graphic novel explores the centrality of coal mining to the socio-ecological lifeworld
of the town, using the genre of Extractive Gothic to visibilise ‘instances of environmental
degradation and economic decline associated with energy development’ and to challenge
‘the deep-seated role of extraction as a cornerstone of regional cultural identity and the
mythos of fossil fuel development as a path to economic and social progress’ (Henry
2019, 404). Set against the rapacity of the mining bosses and the seeming limitlessness
of fossil capital, Carbon posits a working-class consciousness and celebrates the col-
lective agency of the miners at the same time as it grapples with the severity of climate
emergency confronting them.
The town is depicted as the site of nested frontiers of commodity extraction, mov-
ing to forms of extreme extractivism after the exhaustion of more easily accessed
deposits. In the twenty-first century, the Eden Energy mining company has started
using new deep exploration techniques to penetrate to the very heart of the earth,
after accidentally discovering back in 1978 a glowing purple seam made up of the
compressed mineral remnants of the bodies of a carboniferous primordial human-
oid race, which can be rendered through a (speculative) technology of liquefaction
into a perpetually burning fuel. The periodicity of boom-bust and energy depletion
is heralded through the narrative’s shuttling backwards and forwards – often in the
architecture of two-page layouts – between the fantastic present within its speculative
energy novum and contexts of previous energy crisis, resource exhaustion and mining
disasters in the past, with the 1970s counterposed as a kind of originary turning point
for the mounting ecological crisis of the twenty-first century. Julia Round’s useful out-
line of a ‘gothic critical model of comics’ emphasises the capacity of the intermedial
architecture of comics to braid together complex temporalities: ‘A sense of haunting
(as both a legacy and a promise) thus structures the layout of the comics page, which
depicts time as a co-present and static structure that we only experience sequentially’
(Round 2014, 60).
The comics format lends itself to a gothic narratological model via the trope of the
‘crypt’, visibilising marginalised or forgotten cultural elements (Round 2014, 65). In
Carbon, that which is resurrected from the ‘crypt’ is the violence of carbon-based fossil
fuels. Carbon is imagined as taking an animate form that surges up the long shaft of
the mine (obsessively rendered in the repeated verticality of a series of panels) to pol-
lute the whole surface. In the graphic novel’s mythology, a carbon-based race of sub-
terranean Ur-humanoids have been condemned by a creator god to dwell underground
after they nearly destroy the earth through pollution and ‘foul[ing] of the water’ (Boyd
2014, 11). They are guarded by another species of bat-like ‘Sheves’, Lovecraftian in
appearance, with tattered wings, demonic faces and voluptuous bodies gendered as
the monstrous feminine. Ignorant of the fact that the seemingly miraculous new ore
he has ‘discovered’ is composed of the remnants of another species, the Eden Energy
boss declares with a grandiosity appropriate to a comics villain, ‘I will be the one to
give the world, liquid, clean burning coal, and mine will burn forever’ (Boyd 2014,
27), but inadvertently unleashes a swarm of Sheves when the liquefaction process trig-
gers an explosion. No longer constrained by their guardians, the carbon-beings flatten

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the mine’s infrastructure in a swathe of fiery destruction and erupt to wreak planetary
apocalypse in revenge for their long imprisonment.
Guedes’ art portrays Eden Valley as dark and satanic, with aerial views of infernal
machinery and a town dwarfed by blazing refinery towers and black slag heaps; the
landscape is characterised by an aesthetics of removal, framed in grimly symmetrical
panels that echo the capitalist rationalisation and emptying out of nature, framing
the mining offices against grey, denuded mountains, stripped of vegetation and soil
by mountain-top removal mining, and rivers blackened and poisoned by slurry. The
carbon-beings are at first individual and human in appearance, but over aeons, their
bodies are compressed into grotesque new forms, lumpen and coal-like, and once freed
from the underworld, they fuse together into giant, towering monsters pulverising the
land: ‘Tons of pressure for millennia have combined and mutated the ancient beings.
One became many. Many merged into one as they returned to full awareness’ (Boyd
2014, 90). Again, here is a fearful image of fossil fuels made animate and agential,
fusing together into a mass consciousness given visceral form, but a carbon-sentience
that rather than secretly manipulating humanity’s every endeavour, as in Leiber’s story,
seeks to wreck the whole of civilisation. The carbon-creatures’ emancipation from the
bowels of the earth is accompanied by a fearsome surge of heat that withers the entire
surface of the planet, and the final panel concludes, ‘It’s so hot, and it will get hot-
ter, hotter than mankind has ever known, may even survive’ (Boyd 2014, 110). Their
uncanny merging thus functions as an explicit allegory of global warming, the price
of ‘extreme energy’ that unleashes massive volumes of carbon from the earth into the
atmosphere, fundamentally altering the biosphere.
However, the graphic novel is marked by a contradiction between its searing critique
of extreme energy extraction and its narrative energetics, which revel in the accelerated
mobility and velocity enabled by fossil fuel combusting engines through frenetic action
sequences, depicting the team of miners and their families fleeing the ground zero of the
mine in electrifying truck and helicopter chase scenes. As such, it exemplifies the tensions
which Daniel Worden has attributed to the genre of ‘oil comics’, whose aesthetics ‘strug-
gle to find a visual mode of representation for the petroleum industry, the industry’s
behaviors, and even the speed and scales afforded by fossil fuels’ (Worden 2019, n.p.).
The kinetic imaginary of Carbon, ‘of bodies and vehicles in rapid motion, surrounded by
speed lines, unhinged from gravity and mortality, set loose from metabolic limitations’,
is marked by the ways in which fossil fuels have refashioned cultural understandings
of space-time compression and agency (Worden 2019, n.p.). The etiological tropes of
petromobility that have shaped the development of comics as a medium thus exist in
tension with the graphic novel’s anti-extractivist discourse.
If Carbon focuses on a speculative version of ‘Coal to Liquid Fuels’ (CTL) as the
target of its critique of extreme energy, the film Unearth (2020) takes aim at hydraulic
fracturing, which Jason Molesky argues is particularly ripe for representation through
aesthetics of gothic toxicity:

Due to the obvious dangers that it presents to groundwater aquifers, and the
lengths to which the industry goes to obscure these dangers, . . . texts about hydro-
fracking inhabit a unique position at the nexus of toxicity, petroleum, secrecy, and
water, rendering them particularly potent sites for comprehending and contesting
the manifold violence of extractive regimes. (Molesky 2020, 52)

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Co-directed by John C. Lyons and Dorota Swies, the film is shot in northern Pennsyl-
vania, a state where small farmers in rural counties have increasingly been targeted by
companies fracking for natural gas in shale formations. The narrative revolves around
a ‘landman lease plot’ (Molesky 2020, 54), when an impoverished rural mechanic,
George Lomack, driven to desperation by a failing business and a crippling debt of
medical bills after his teenage daughter gives birth, signs a lease allowing fracking on
his ancestral land. The legal agreement with Patriot Exploration, the fracking corpo-
ration, is framed as a kind of devil’s contract into which working-class rural people
from rustbelt regions are coerced, and the fracking unleashes an unknown pathogen
previously locked deep within the earth into the groundwater.
The film takes a slow-burning approach, with its first forty minutes shot in a mode
more reminiscent of social realism, focusing on the daily rituals of the two families
at the heart of the film, as they sow and plough and irrigate and struggle to navigate
the demands of their creditors. Multiple scenes emphasise their interdependence with
water: repeated shots of the Dolans drinking tap water out of the gallon jar they
lug around their farm, pointed close-ups of taps dripping and bodies sweating, shots
of water trickling between the cornrows and the brook running alongside the fields.
However, it is only halfway through the film, after the trucks carrying the heavy equip-
ment to build the rig arrive, and a title indicates a time jump to ‘one year later’, that
gothic conventions intrude into the narrative. A symmetrical aerial shot framing the
newly constructed rectilinear site of the fracking rig on the Lomack land to the left,
with the undulating fields of the Dolan farm on the right, divided by the road bisecting
their two farms, is immediately followed by an uncanny sequence tracing the threat of
toxic water, in which the camera tracks down the narrow, dark vertical well bored into
the earth through the striated layers of shale formation, to centre on the churning drill
bit surrounded by the noxious chemical foam of stimulation fluid, then cuts to a close-
up of white fungal-like nodules oozing a pale goo that drips into the groundwater, later
zooming back to the surface, where it tracks the brook on the Lomacks’ land, now
eerily bubbling, all to a soundscape of keening industrial noise and fracturing rock.
Drinking the contaminated tap water, the Lomacks and Dolans are tipped into a cat-
aclysm of violence, killing each other after they succumb to murderous hallucinations,
or dying poisoned, their bodies convulsing as tentacle-like nodes burst out of their
backs. The diversity of deaths in the final act of the film suggests they are each ‘fracked’
in different ways: minds fractured by crushing anxiety; bodily integrity fractured by
new substances forcing their way out of their skins, or, in the case of the Lomacks’
grandson, disintegrating into bloody white goo, reminiscent of the earth dripping and
dissolving in the previous shot of the churning drill, but also symbolic of the crisis of
social reproduction and futurity, the collapse of the hope of a next generation. The vio-
lence with which the families turn on each other suggests the fracturing of the potential
for class solidarity in response to the divide and conquer tactics of the fracking corpo-
ration; there is no monster to combat, only each other, stranded in an altered ecology.
The film ends with a final time lapse, where the sole survivor, Christina Dolan, an
ambivalent Last Girl, has resumed the work of the farm and is driving the latest corn
crop to the nearby town of Edinboro. The camera leaves the truck behind, to follow
the brook as it crosses the farmland and connects to a river leading all the way to a
giant bay (shot at Lake Erie), in a visual reversal of the ‘agnotology’ or structured
forgetting of water contamination. As such, the film’s anti-extractivist gothic centres

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on the anamnesis of the threat unleashed by hydraulic fracturing in the form of the
contamination that crosses territorial boundaries of private property to affect first the
neighbouring farm, and later the whole watershed, not only those who have signed
the contract. It emphasises the extent to which the web of life is hollowed out from
below by fracking for natural gas, contaminating the water and food of the larger
community, thus removing its entire capacity for subsistence.
Whereas Unearth focuses on revelation of subterranean water contamination by
extreme extractivism, Underwater (2020), a film directed by William Eubank, turns
to the suboceanic. Underwater has a near-future setting in the Mariana Trench in the
western Pacific, where (fictional) advances in deep-sea drilling allow the extraction of
oil from the deepest part of the seabed. After an earthquake strikes Kepler 28, a research
drilling facility operated by Tian Industries, a team led by Norah Price are left battling
a host of tentacular squid-like, but also partially humanoid, monsters emerging from
the drilling fissures. The film riffs on the ‘blue horror’ of The Abyss and the ‘extrater-
restrial horror’ of Alien (which has its own pronounced extractive imaginary, not least
in its Conradian naming of the Nostromo), melding together conventions of B-movie
creature horrors with tropes from the oceanic weird. Its reworking of Lovecraft is made
explicit at the conclusion of the film when the creatures are revealed as the spawn of an
ancient titanic monster, explicitly called Cthulhu by Eubank in interviews. The kraken-
like leviathan rises up to attack the station in a kind of revenge of the deep, an avatar of
the primordial sea revenging itself against new forms of drilling in subaqueous realms
previously inaccessible to humanity.
This film’s conclusion is more conservatively ‘heroic’ than Unearth’s, turning on the
thrills of an explosive action sequence that leads to the conquest of the monster, when
Norah Price sacrifices her life to overload the nuclear core of the Roebuck station and
blow up Cthulhu to prevent it from surfacing and attacking human civilisation on
land – there is no ‘making kin’ with ‘the Chthulucene’ to be found here, to paraphrase
Donna Haraway (2015, 160). The nuclear explosion is presented as a eucatastrophe
that brings the ecological crisis to an end, even though it entails Norah’s sacrifice
and the utter annihilation of the deep-sea lifeforms, and implies the massive nuclear
contamination of the Mariana Trench. As a ‘technological fix’ to the environmental
degradation of the deep sea unleashed by extreme energy, nuclearisation seems pro-
foundly inadequate (as such, perhaps reminiscent of the various geo-engineering fixes
proposed in response to climate change), resulting only in more destruction, even if it
temporarily brings to an end the local regime of extraction by blowing up the mining
infrastructure. The film makes a blunt critique of the deep-sea oil industry’s pursuit
of profit over all else, but its ecophobic horror of the deep is never complicated by
anything resembling awe or respect for non-human lifeforms to be found there, and its
conclusion acts to recontain the very threat it posed.
If Lovecraft continues to haunt the previous example of contemporary Extractive
Gothic, The Last Winter (2006), directed by Larry Fessenden, is a film that similarly
explores the horror of new frontiers of drilling, but with a more ambivalent concep-
tion of more-than-human nature. The film is set in a near future where the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska has been opened for oil exploration
in the ‘Race for the Arctic’, the twenty-first-century global competition to secure oil,
gas and mineral resources in polar territories rendered newly accessible by the combi-
nation of global warming and new technics.1

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The film opens with a promotional video for employees of North Industries, with
a chipper voiceover full of corporate enthusiasm for how the ‘vast wilderness of the
North’ is being transformed into a ‘land of Black Gold’ crossed by the ‘great Trans-
Alaska pipeline’, and promising ‘energy independence’, over footage of maps with ice
roads sketched in, and an icon of the original experimental test well where oil was
first located, now marked by a solitary white box. As the film progresses, the rhetoric
of oil boom gives way to horror and claustrophobia, building on John Carpenter’s
classic The Thing (1982) as a template for snowbound suspense, but focusing more
pointedly on the technics of extractivism as the source of fear. In particular, the ‘K.I.K.
box’ concealing the well assumes an eerie prominence as an entity of enigmatic dread,
emitting eldritch frequencies, and hypnotically luring Maxwell, a rookie member of a
drilling team in a remote station, out to its location. In a delirium, he strips naked and
attempts to photograph spectral presences exuding from the box, and dies of expo-
sure, his eyes pecked out by ravens.
In its rectangular shape and obscure menace, the K.I.K. box is like an inverse ver-
sion of the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), shining
off-white against the snow, suggesting that what the box conceals, the deep well like an
abyss under the melting permafrost, is the object of true horror. The figure of Maxwell,
his eyes bloody in their sockets, once more turns on the gothic tropes of invisibility and
revelation, implying the myopia of oil corporations, or even of the viewers themselves,
who cannot bear to witness the environmental costs of intensified extraction in the
regime of extreme energy. The frozen blankness of the landscape itself casts whiteness
as a source of anxiety in aesthetics reminiscent of Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym and
Herman Melville’s white whale. To underscore the association of whiteness with rapac-
ity and the global ecological crisis unleashed by drilling, the film invokes the Wendigo
myth, and a Native Alaskan character, Dawn, wonders whether the drilling team are
being possessed or hunted by the ‘Chenoo’, a spirit from Algonquin mythology that in
the film’s account is cursed to eat people’s flesh.2
The film’s monochromatic study in whiteness is later countered with an opposing
image of oil as black tide. James Hoffman, an environmental scientist hired to file a
report on the drilling impact, discovers the permafrost beneath the tundra is melting
due to unusually warm temperatures for the Arctic, which he perceives as an irrefutable
sign of climate change; he concludes that this is the ‘last winter’ where oil exploitation
will be possible, since the ice roads will become unnavigable by heavy machinery as
temperatures rise. This failure of the ice roads mediates the mounting limits to extrac-
tion of ‘cheap’ oil – the accumulation of what Jason W. Moore calls ‘negative value’,
in the emergence of biophysical forces of nature that exceed capitalist discipline and
which ‘can be temporarily fixed (if at all) only through increasingly costly and toxic
strategies’ (Moore 2015, 98). Hoffman’s initial fear that the team’s hallucinations are
caused by ‘sour gas’ (natural gas containing hydrogen sulphide that has leaked out of
the melting permafrost) gives way to a larger terror that the massive release of Arctic
methane will be a tipping point for runaway climate change, and that the earth itself is
unleashing a defence against the actions of the drilling team. Asking ‘Why wouldn’t the
wilderness combat us, like several organisms would fend off a virus?’, he is possessed
with a delirious vision of substances gurgling up from underneath the ice, expressed
in an aleatory shot of bubbling oil that fills the entire screen. Like the tide of blood
escaping from the elevator in Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), which suggests a kind of

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eruption of the Real, the true violence of settler colonialism, capitalism and patriarchy
which undergirds the Overlook Hotel, this shot of oozing crude oil in The Last Winter
visualises the submerged violence of global petromodernity. It is the moment when the
belowground surges into monstrous visibility, no longer concealed by the box.
The use of aerial cinematography creates the ‘sense that an immensely powerful
(and hostile) natural intelligence has begun to assert itself’ through the inclusion of
‘repeated shots of the camp and the people that inhabit it as though seen from above,
to reinforce the sense that they are being watched by an all-seeing higher intelligence’
(Murphy 2013, 196). In the final act, the remaining members of the drilling team are
stalked and ripped apart by the dark shadows of caribou spirits that take on phan-
tasmal towering forms – poorly rendered in the film’s clumsy CGI but symbolically
redolent nonetheless – suggesting that by drilling too deeply, the corporation has res-
urrected the ‘ghosts’ of fossil fuels, or triggered a larger retribution of Nature itself,
figured in the spectral form of the Porcupine herd displaced by oil exploration from
the wildlife refuge they once roamed in life.
The film’s conclusion is ambiguous, with the sole survivor of the drilling station,
Abby, awakening in seeming safety in a hospital in the nearest inhabitation to the
south. However, the last shot is of her exiting the building to find the entire town
abandoned, with cars upturned all around her, and a murky tide of water lapping at
her feet, as the ominous clatter of hooves surges on the soundtrack. By moving into
this eco-apocalyptic register, the film conjoins Extractive Gothic with climate horror,
subverting the consolation of the Last Girl’s survival by plunging her into a more exis-
tential scenario from which there is no escape: the threat to the entire planet of global
warming posed by ‘the last winter’. Unlike Norah in Underwater, who resolves the
monster-threat by blowing it up, Abby cannot ‘escape’ from the individual terrors con-
fronting the drilling team in the remote Arctic wilderness to the safety of ‘civilisation’,
because it is fossil-fuel-dependent civilisation itself that is the origin of the larger crisis.
I conclude with a brief example of Extractive Gothic in video games, a medium
whose own material culture is energy- and resource-intensive and deeply bound up
with neoliberal extractivism. Gaming mechanics often rely on the extractivist mind-
set of ‘PvE’, or Player versus Environment, where the performative mastery of the
player is exercised through instrumental domination of the external environment. This
‘environment-as-utility-belt mentality’ encourages player ‘levolution’ through ‘environ-
mental destructibility’ (Chang 2019, 201), treating nature solely as a site of resource
extraction, something to be demolished, shot open or smashed to provide pre-formed
materials for augmentation. The energy industry itself has also contributed directly to
the gamification of extraction by producing energy games as recruitment and training
tools that ‘often evoke historical mythologies and draw on the frontierism of prospect-
ing’, such as Maersk Oil’s Quest for Oil (2013), which encourages players to drill deep
waters off Qatar (Church 2021, n.p.).
Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding (2019), an open world video game, is not focused
on literal sites of mining or drilling, but its aesthetics are wholly saturated in the tropes
of Extractive Gothic form. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future after the titular ‘Death
Stranding’, where a chain of ‘void-outs’, similar to mini-nuclear explosions, triggered by
the collision of living matter with the spectral matter of the afterworld, called chiralium,
have decimated the world, killing off the majority of humanity and wildlife, and leav-
ing the land shattered and riven with ‘beached things’ or BTs, barely perceptible ghosts.

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Later, the game reveals that corporate research into a technology that can penetrate
the alternative dimension of ‘The Beach’ (through which souls transit after death) is to
blame for breaching the inviolable barrier between life and death, catalysing the mass
catastrophe of the Stranding. As such, the game poses an even more extreme version of
extractivism, which excavates not a new vertical frontier, but rather a dimensional fron-
tier that collapses space and time. The fact that ‘bridge babies’ (unborn foetuses enclosed
in bottles and turned into tools) enable this penetration into the other dimension can be
read as allegorising the intergenerational crisis at the heart of extreme extractivism and
climate emergency, in which the next generation of both human and non-human beings
are instrumentalised and sacrificed for short-term profit. The game protagonist Sam
Porter’s quest – while seeming at first to be only to hook the fragments of remaining
human civilisation back into a ‘chiral network’ of cities and inhabitations – is ultimately
to forestall a final extinction of all earthly life, and to be accountable to his own bridge
baby by emancipating ‘Lou’ from her pod and raising her as his child, a decommodifica-
tion of life that symbolically restores the prospect of futurity.
Less significant, perhaps, than the convoluted, often outlandish narrative is the
game’s extraordinary imagery depicting the worldwide manifestation of ‘chiralium’
that has contaminated the atmosphere and geology of the world after the Stranding.
This new substance causes a deathly form of acid rain, ‘timefall’, that ages and corrodes
all it touches, and summons the dangerous BTs, but is also harnessed to help power the
fantastic new technics enabling humanity’s survival in a post-oil world, including elec-
tric vehicles, gated cities and the ‘chiral network’. Its physics are described in the game
as akin to ‘antimatter’, but in its function as energy source, and invisible atmospheric
contaminant, it ‘also resembles another vital cosmic element: carbon’ (Gordon 2019,
n.p.). The BTs that haunt the world appear as spectral, oleaginous vapours tethered by
umbilica to the other dimension (reminiscent of the oily body of Leiber’s Gondolier).
If accidentally touched, BTs morph from cloud-like tendrils into a globular tarry circle
that mires the player as a sea of viscous black gloop inundates the screen, and a new,
Lovecraftian giant BT manifests, fused together from others into the monstrous form
of a leviathan, or a giant humanoid with a tentacular maw, or a lion with a squid-like
head. This carbon horror is succeeded by imagery of extinction, scenes when the inky
tide of chiralium recedes, leaving behind a beach full of stranded dead animals – the
tiny forms of thousands of dead fish and crabs, their bellies shining silver and still – or
the mighty corpses of stranded whales and cetaceans, the skeletons of more ancient
dinosaurs. Without explicitly thematising fossil fuel extraction, the game’s visual
imaginary incarnates carbon-dread and climate-angst in visceral form, erupting into
sudden, horrifying visibility.
Yet, this is staged in tension with the extractive PvE mechanic immanent to the
game’s form – which encourages Sam to harvest the crystallised chiralium formations
left behind after defeating a giant BT – as well as with the fact that Sam’s high-risk
‘fetch quests’ as a Bridges porter (reminiscent of an Amazon worker) seem to encapsu-
late the new technics of the late neoliberal gig economy that rely on quantification and
networked surveillance to extract surplus labour from an army of precarious workers
(Jagoda 2020). To this extent, the BTs could be interpreted as not only embodying the
horror of planet-altering carbon emissions, but also symbolising the cognitive block-
ages posed by oil and the extractive logics of capitalism, in which the surviving human
civilisation in the game – and the player in real life – is literally mired or ‘stranded’. Like

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 extractive gothic 145

the other twenty-first-century media examples I have discussed here, Death Stranding’s
‘secular eschatology of environmental end-times’ (Chang 2019, 189) is fused with aes-
thetics that reactivate the common tropes of extractive horror, reflecting the growing
perception throughout contemporary popular gothic ‘that an absolutely catastrophic
ecological disaster looms not in the distant future, but is in fact already unfolding’
(Murphy 2013, 179), rooted in the extreme extractivism of late neoliberal capitalism.

Notes
1. As such, the film is prognosticatory: under the Trump administration, Interior Secretary
David Bernhardt announced an oil and gas leasing programme that would allow for
future drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and a temporary halt to drilling
activity was only announced by President Joe Biden in January 2021. Drilling in the
ANWR would damage tundra and permafrost, harming the land and wildlife, accelerat-
ing the impacts of climate change, and threatening the livelihoods of Indigenous peoples
who rely on the animals and plants residing in the refuge. In particular, it would endan-
ger the Porcupine caribou whose calving grounds are encompassed in the coastal plains
of the refuge.
2. Fessenden is part of a long line of non-Indigenous white artists, starting with Algernon
Blackwood’s famous novella The Wendigo (1910), who have appropriated Wendigo
myth to explore ideas of settler colonial civilisation, often racialised in complicated or
pejorative ways. Fessenden’s repeated use of Wendigo myth across his oeuvre, from his
film Wendigo (2001) to his script for the mining horror video game Until Dawn (2015),
has been criticised by some Indigenous Studies scholars for decontextualising Wendigo
myth from Indigenous ethics. In particular, the video game and earlier film were criti-
cised for de-emphasising the prohibition of the violation of social norms around greed,
excessive resource consumption, and the interdependent reciprocity between both
humans and non-humans – and instead turning the Wendigo into a fetishised spectacle
of cannibalism that emphasises pejorative racial stereotypes of ‘native savagery’. His
transplantation of the myth to new geographies and his visual depiction of Wendigos,
diverging from Indigenous imaginations of snowy, emaciated giants with hearts of ice,
has also been questioned.

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 Part II:
Issues

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 9

US Imperial Gothic
Kevin Corstorphine

A quotation of dubious origin, but often attributed to George Orwell, states

that ‘we sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to
visit violence on those who would do us harm’. This gothic vision of a shadowy threat,
repressed in order for civilian life to function normally, speaks deeply to an underly-
ing cultural anxiety around war. It is, of course, absolutely correct that members of
the US armed forces put themselves in harm’s way, and that the general population
remains blissfully ignorant of the full reality of war. Whether or not the repeated inva-
sions in the Middle East, carried out by the United States and its allies against a broad
and shifting spectre of ‘terror’, do anything to keep American citizens safe in their
beds is another question entirely. The death and destruction wrought upon countries
like Iraq (the focus of this chapter) and the trauma and abandonment of American
troops at home are constantly haunting reminders that war is not something that can
comfortably be ignored, even if it occurs in seemingly distant and ‘exotic’ lands, easily
characterised through an Orientalist lens as Other. This chapter will develop the idea
of an American imperial gothic, examining three key texts that demonstrate its pres-
ence and what it has to offer to a discussion of US imperial conflict and its representa-
tion in literature and wider media.
The examples given are purposefully drawn from popular culture, and variously
reflect and comment on dominant attitudes to US imperialism. The first is American
Sniper, the 2012 memoir of Chris Kyle: ‘the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history’
(Kyle 2012, cover), who claims to have accumulated at least 160 confirmed kills (Kyle
2012, 6). The story was brought to the screen in Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster film
version in 2014, after Kyle’s own shooting death at the hands of a fellow veteran. The
film’s handling of this aspect will be discussed alongside the book itself. The second
example is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019): a video game that, as part of a
long-running series, has come to represent what might be the most globally domi-
nant conception of contemporary armed conflict, and one that deserves close scrutiny.
The intertextual relationship between games, films and military memoir is one that
will be shown to flow continually back and forth. The third text is Ahmed Saadawi’s
Frankenstein in Baghdad, published in Arabic in 2013, and translated into English in
2018. A more self-consciously literary work, and a more overtly gothic one, Saadawi’s
novel deals directly with the aftermath of US militarism, as an Iraqi junk dealer pieces
together parts of corpses that have been victims of post-war sectarian violence, and the
creature comes murderously to life, physically manifesting the horrors of war. While
Frankenstein in Baghdad is overtly critical of US imperialism, in contrast to the others
here, they can all be read as presenting a distinctly imperial gothic mode that shows

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traces of earlier empires as well as commenting directly on the present. Gothic studies
is used here as an approach through which to interpret Saadawi’s satirical intertextual-
ity, but also to read the repressed undercurrents that haunt the more mainstream and
seemingly pro-imperialist texts under examination. This approach situates Saadawi’s
novel in a wider context of the gothic being used to examine the experience of ongoing
imperial power in what Sherie-Marie Harrison calls the ‘new black gothic’ (Harrison
2018) with regard to Jordan Peele’s film Get Out (2017) or Childish Gambino’s music
video to ‘This Is America’ (2018), and the reinvention of the portrayal of Native Amer-
icans in horror in a novel such as The Only Good Indians (2020) by Steven Graham
Jones. This critical perspective allows for the reappraisal of American Sniper and Call
of Duty: Modern Warfare in the light of such postcolonial concerns.

US Imperialism and its Representations

The first question is that of the legitimacy of the term ‘imperial’ when discussing
America’s military interventions as well as its political and economic presence in the
Middle East. It is certainly a commonplace assertion in public debate, and one that
has become more prevalent since the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade
Center and the subsequent ‘War on Terror’ pursued by the United States, although its
roots go back to the vacuum of power created by the retreat of older empires and the
specific conditions of the Cold War. Edward Said, in a prescient article from 1980,
points out that ‘ever since the end of World War II, the United States has been taking
positions of dominance and hegemony once held in the Islamic world by Britain and
France’ (Said 1980). Said ties this explicitly to the Orientalist attitudes of previous col-
onisers, who reduced whole cultures to shallow stereotypes: ‘as far as the United States
seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Moslems and Arabs
are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists’ (Said 1980). American
Sniper and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare are undoubtedly guilty of perpetuating this
imagery, although there is some complexity in the case of the latter. A. G. Hopkins
refers to the current state of international relations as a process of ‘postcolonial global-
ization’ where ‘global flows of trade, investment, people, and ideas have outstripped
the reach of existing political institutions’ (Hopkins 2018, 728). Still, the United States
remains tied to notions of American exceptionalism and patriotic ideals, even to the
point of their being worthy of export. As Hopkins notes, ‘the belief that American
values, expressed in a generalized and partisan notion of liberalism, are global values
that need to be universally recognized remains an orthodoxy among policy-makers
and their academic advisors’ (Hopkins 2018, 728). The United States’ self-styled role
as global policeman sits in stark contrast to a widespread perception of the nation as
a rapacious conqueror (from without) and as corrupt or incompetent (from within).
Here, I posit the tension between these co-existing narratives as the essence of the US
imperial gothic.
The ambiguity at the heart of contemporary US imperialism creates a desire for cer-
tainty in a postcolonial world that defies simple narratives, particularly the myth of the
benevolent imperial power. The most obvious precedent for such a power is the British
Empire, which was notably fertile in producing gothic narratives that responded to the
inherent ambiguities and anxieties of the imperial project. Hopkins cautions against
direct comparisons, pointing out that ‘The Pax Britannica was exercised in an era
that either favored or required territorial control; the Pax Americana was applied in

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an age when annexations were either impractical or unnecessary’, and further stating
baldly that ‘the United States functions in a postcolonial era that is hostile to imperial-
ism and empires’ (Hopkins 2018, 736). Nonetheless, this only strengthens the case to
draw parallels with the later period of the British Empire, when decline was inevitable
and increasingly desperate military action was needed to bring colonies into line, for
example in the Boer War of 1899–1902. Patrick Brantlinger, in his classic study Rule
of Darkness (1988), has characterised this period as the ‘dusk’ phase of the British
Empire, when the gothic romance of a century earlier re-emerged as a vehicle for the
specific anxieties of the day, forming a distinctive ‘imperial gothic’ seen in the writ-
ing of authors such as ‘Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, Doyle, Bram Stoker, and John
Buchan’ (Brantlinger 1988, 230). Brantlinger argues that the supernatural elements
of these texts (for example, Dracula) partly reflect changing attitudes about religion,
but that ‘even more clearly [imperial gothic] expresses anxieties about the ease with
which civilization can revert to barbarism or savagery and thus about the weaken-
ing of Britain’s imperial hegemony’ (Brantlinger 1988, 229). Taking a cue from this
assertion, Johan Höglund has examined ‘how the gothic negotiates the present decline
in American power’ and argued that, in a post-9/11 world, ‘the American imperial
gothic . . . maps both the perceived need to aggressively defend, and at times even
expand, the ideological and territorial boundaries the United States has established,
and the profound anxiety connected to the experience that these borders are, indeed,
constantly challenged’ (Höglund 2014). In the present chapter the portrayal of this
aggressive defence and expansion of American ideals, and the cultural anxieties asso-
ciated with this process, is the key theme under discussion, even where texts such as
American Sniper do not explicitly present themselves as ‘gothic’.
The freewheeling assumptions that underpin US imperialism are so commonplace
as to often be unremarkable. Discussing the ideological appeal of British imperialism,
Brantlinger writes that ‘it was good to be British and on top of the world, a member
of the most enlightened, progressive, civilized race in history, and to most Victorians
and Edwardians it would have seemed crazy to deny it’ (Brantlinger 1988, 14). The
same might be said at various points in modern American history, and even in the
worst times the idea of American exceptionalism and its attendant popular patriotism
is never too hard to find. The gothic tends to undercut these ideals while still maintain-
ing a sense of their appeal. A good example might be from Stephen King’s The Shining
(1977), where the protagonist Jack Torrance imagines the history of the seemingly
haunted Overlook Hotel in its glory days after World War II: ‘The war was over, or
almost over. The future lay ahead, clean and shining. America was the colossus of
the world and at last she knew it and accepted it’ (King 1978, 148). Jack’s reveries
are interrupted by an intrusive memory of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red
Death’ (1842), suggesting that death cannot so easily be shut out from the utopian
fantasies of American life. In The Shining, the Overlook Hotel causes Jack to descend
into a savage embodiment of his own worst instincts, as he attempts to murder his own
wife and child. Violence and savagery are always just beneath the surface in the Ameri-
can gothic. As Joel Faflak and Jason Haslam note, this is a ‘debate between the chaos
of the “wilderness” and the light of civilization’ (Faflak and Haslam 2017, 10). What
began as an encounter with the wilderness at the Western frontier becomes transposed
to the Middle East in the new US imperial gothic, with all of the ideological fantasies
of ‘savagery’ now associated, as with Said’s critique, not with the Native American
‘Indian’, but with the Arab.

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American Sniper: SEALs and Sheepdogs

American Sniper is both an intimate personal account of the man who became known in
Iraq as ‘The Legend’ and ‘The Devil of Ramadi’, and a text of multiple authorship. Chris
Kyle’s name is prominent on the book’s cover, although two co-authors, Scott McEwen
and Jim DeFelice, are credited as having written ‘with’ Kyle. Another layer of authorship
is filtered through screenwriter Jason Hall, who started work on a script with Steven
Spielberg, before ending up with Clint Eastwood as director of the film version. Kyle’s
voice remains distinctive, even while portrayed by Bradley Cooper on screen, although
elements of the book are undoubtedly sanitised in the process. American Sniper encapsu-
lates the experience and ideology of combat in the Iraq War from the US-led invasion in
2003 to Kyle’s retirement from the Navy in 2009. Eastwood’s film opens with Kyle train-
ing his sniper rifle on a young Iraqi boy, who is seemingly carrying an explosive device.
It then cuts to the story of Kyle’s early life, where the young Kyle is shown hunting with
his father, sitting in church, and then defending his younger brother from a bully. This
last scene cuts back and forth to the family dinner table, where Kyle’s father gives Kyle
and his bruised sibling a lecture on humanity and violence:

Some people prefer to believe that evil doesn’t exist in the world, and if it ever dark-
ened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves: those are the
sheep. Then you got predators who use violence to prey on the weak. They’re the
wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpower-
ing need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed that live to confront the
wolf: they are the sheepdog. (Eastwood 2014)

The speech serves as a warning to be neither a sheep nor a wolf, and as an approval of
Kyle’s actions in the schoolyard (where we see him brutally beat the bully). It also sets
up the future Kyle’s role as a Navy SEAL sniper: a role the real Kyle never questions in
his autobiography, and in fact sets before all of his other responsibilities as husband,
father, and even as responsible US civilian when off-duty.
In his memoir, Kyle comments that his father’s ‘sense of justice and fair play influ-
enced me more than I knew at the time, and even more than I can say as an adult’
(Kyle 2012, 11). The sheep/wolf/sheepdog distinction, however, is not given here. This
is derived from the book On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Con-
flict in War and in Peace (2004) by Dave Grossman, a retired lieutenant colonel in the
US Army, and Loren W. Christensen. The book is a serious attempt to help military
and police personnel to deal with the guilt of killing. It is also a call to arms, suggesting
that more Americans should strive to be sheepdogs. Part of this includes the sugges-
tion that the ‘sheepdogs’ have a moral responsibility to accept their role, including the
necessity of carrying guns in places like schools and churches. Grossman claims that
he heard the analogy from an old Vietnam veteran, and expands it at length to exam-
ine the character of sheep and sheepdogs (the wolf is merely representative of evil).
He writes that ‘most citizens are kind, decent people who are not capable of hurting
each other, except by accident or under extreme provocation’ (Grossman and Chris-
tensen 2004, n.p.). The sheepdog, by contrast, is ‘a warrior, someone who is walking
the hero’s path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the universal
human phobia, and walk out unscathed.’ The reference to the ‘heart of darkness’ is

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very telling, and bitterly ironic in the context of a reading of its obvious reference
point: Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Here the character of the ivory
trader Kurtz had started on what he saw as a civilising mission in the Congo, before
becoming murderous, insane, and finally dying. It is possible that Grossman is directly
responding to Conrad’s novella, and if so he is making a fatal misreading warned
against by Brantlinger: ‘one of the most remarkable perversions of the criticism of
Heart of Darkness has been to see Kurtz not as an abomination, a hollow man with a
lust for blood and domination, but as a “hero of the spirit”’ (Brantlinger 1988, 268).
The critical debate around Heart of Darkness has repeatedly centred on the extent of
Conrad’s self-awareness and critique of the darkness he identifies in the Congo, and its
source. The horror of American Sniper comes precisely from its lack of this awareness.
Kyle’s memoir documents his journey from Texan cowboy, through gruelling train-
ing, to his eventual role as sniper in the elite Navy SEALs (Sea, Air and Land Teams)
deployed to Iraq following the 2003 invasion. What the film adds in a postscript,
unknowable in the memoir, is that Kyle was shot dead in 2013 by a Marine suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder, having served in Iraq and in Haiti after the 2010
earthquake. Kyle had taken the Marine to a shooting range as a form of therapy. It
is a bathetic ending for someone who had survived bucking broncos, sadistic military
training and some of the heaviest fighting of the Iraq conflict. It is also a hauntingly
gothic end, as if something vengeful had come back from the Iraqi battlefields to the
heart of American life. Just as Father Merrin is confronted with a vision of the demon
Pazuzu on an archaeological dig in Iraq in The Exorcist (1973), the country is pre-
sented as a place of strangeness and evil in contrast to the United States, embodied in
the patriotic Kyle (who at one point recounts using an American flag to distract the
enemy before killing them all). Throughout the book Kyle stresses that he is ‘no differ-
ent than anyone else’ (Kyle 2012, 5), and yet in Kyle’s presentation of himself, and in
Eastwood’s hagiographic film, he comes to represent all of the values of the ideal war-
rior, the ‘sheepdog’ described by Grossman. It is worth pointing out at this stage the
flaw in the metaphor: sheepdogs do not actually fight off wolves, but are used instead
to aid the shepherd in herding the flock. There are breeds of livestock guardian dogs
(primarily used in Central Asia but historically in Europe) that fulfil this role, but it
is hard to shake off the suspicion that this comparison to dogs is a smokescreen for a
specific domestic political agenda: the continued proliferation of firearms in American
life, specifically through an uncompromising interpretation of the Second Amendment,
and an acceptance of violence as the norm.

Guns and ‘Righteous’ Violence

The gothic mode originally emerged as a response to Enlightenment ideals about aes-
thetics, rationality and the organisation of society. Fred Botting writes that ‘the rejec-
tion of feudal barbarity, superstition, and tyranny was necessary to a culture defining
itself in diametrically opposed terms: its progress, civilisation, and maturity depended
on the distance it established between the values of the present and the past’ (Botting
2012, 14). In the contemporary American context, 9/11 stands out as a traumatic rift
in modernity created – according to US imperial discourse – by the forces of barbar-
ity. This is also a return of the past: the powerful founding myth of the US is that of
a culture defined against a savage enemy: Kyle even specifically refers to the areas of

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Ramadi outside of coalition control as ‘Injun country’ (Kyle 2012, 332). The spectre
of more recent conflicts is also physically present in the form of the jihadists previously
encouraged and armed by the US in Cold War attempts to weaken the Soviet Union.
Writing about 9/11, Grossman portrays this need to actively defend against the inevi-
table incursion of the wolf:

Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the
wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on Sep-
tember 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, ‘Thank
God I wasn’t on one of those planes.’ The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, ‘Dear God,
I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a differ-
ence.’ (Grossman and Christensen 2004, n.p.)

Kyle recounts his experience of the day in exactly these terms. Having graduated from
training, he was recalled to base immediately following the attacks. He recounts being
pulled over for speeding, and after telling the police officer he was a Navy SEAL
being not only let off the ticket but escorted by the patrol car, with the officer telling
him ‘go get some fuckin’ payback’ (Kyle 2012, 53). This sense of a need for revenge
is embedded in Kyle’s memoir, even as he overtly addresses the fact that he ends up
being deployed a year later and ‘against Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden’ (Kyle
2012, 53). The connection between the events of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq are
linked even more disingenuously in the film version, which cuts rapidly between Kyle
and his wife Taya watching the towers fall on television, and Kyle in the field in Iraq.
Whatever the link in Kyle’s mind between these events, and despite his obvious sincer-
ity about fighting for his country, the first time he sees action it becomes clear that this
is more about the thrill of violence than it is any practical solution to terrorism. In the
midst of battle, and specifically when insurgents are retreating and being slaughtered
by US air forces, he examines his feelings amid the roar of engines and rattle of bullets:
‘Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great. I fucking love this. It’s nerve-wracking and
exciting and I fucking love it’ (Kyle 2012, 88). Taken together with later assertions
such as ‘it felt good to be getting back to war—I was ready to kill some more bad guys’
(Kyle 2012, 376), a clear picture emerges of an individual who, no matter what moral
stance we might take on the issue, enjoys the act of killing and is more than happy
to admit as much. If these are the American values being exported to the rest of the
world, it is easy to understand the rest of the world’s reluctance.
Chris Kyle was part of a cycle of violence much larger than himself, and he should
not be seen as an aberration, but as someone who was perfectly suited for the role
given to him. Matt Taibbi, in a scathing commentary on the film version, points out
pithily that ‘it’s the fact that the movie is popular, and actually makes sense to so many
people, that’s the problem’ (Taibbi 2015). This is both a political and cultural problem.
As Taibbi writes, ‘we end up talking about Chris Kyle and his dilemmas, and not about
the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other officials up the chain who put Kyle and his high-
powered rifle on rooftops in Iraq and asked him to shoot women and children’ (Taibbi
2015). In both the film and the memoir (of which one of the co-authors, DeFelice, is
an experienced writer for film and video games), a narrative of Kyle as hero is carefully
crafted, and specifically a hero who is a representative of American values. Hopkins,
in his discussion of American imperialism, uses the comic book character Captain

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 us imperial gothic 157

America as a paradigm of how the United States sees itself as a world power. Captain
America, he writes, ‘tackled the job by deploying stunning military force across the
world and inflicting widespread destruction in the cause of global freedom’ (Hopkins
2018, 721). Kyle’s version of this is even more narrowly focused on the US itself: as
he writes, ‘I went to war for my country, not Iraq—I never once fought for the Iraqis.
I could give a flying fuck about them’ (Kyle 2012, 221). The character of Captain
America has gone through various changes in the course of his comic book and film
career, some of which look very critically at US imperialism, but it is perhaps more
noteworthy in the case of Kyle that he takes direct inspiration from another character
in the Marvel Comics stable: the Punisher.
Kyle’s platoon called themselves ‘the Punishers’, and adopted the distinctively
stylised skull logo from the comic book character as their symbol. He explains the
reasons: ‘he’s a real bad-ass who rights wrongs, delivering vigilante justice—we all
thought what the Punisher did was cool: he righted wrongs. He killed bad guys’ (Kyle
2012, 263). The Punisher stands out from other superheroes largely because he does
kill his enemies, rather than act according to accepted ideas of being a hero. In fact,
he is driven by revenge, as the origin story is that his wife and children are killed in a
mafia shooting. A skilled combatant and Vietnam veteran (in later comics sometimes
changed to the War on Terror), he takes bloody revenge on the mob, using automatic
weaponry and explosives, and torturing his enemies where necessary. During the char-
acter’s comic book tenure, creators have at times used the mythology to explore the
idea that he is driven much more by psychological trauma than any real sense of jus-
tice, becoming a sociopathic killer as he goes far beyond his original motivations once
the mobsters are defeated. In military terms this is known as ‘mission creep’, where
initial success leads to the desire for further expansion of operations. Kent Roach
points out that:

The Iraq war is a fairly crude and commonly accepted example of mission creep.
The secret intelligence that originally was used to justify the invasion of Iraq as
part of a global war against terrorism has now been closely examined by several
commissions in both the United States and the United Kingdom and found to be
faulty. (Roach 2014, 74)

The use of the Punisher iconography links this narrative once again to Heart of Darkness.
In a visual sense the skull is reminiscent of the decapitated heads that Kurtz has mounted
on stakes to dry in the African sun. When the narrator Marlow is informed that these
were rebels, he exclaims, ‘Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There
had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were rebels’ (Conrad 2017, 58). We
might well substitute terrorists; insurgents; Iraqis.
Kyle begins with some attempts to contextualise the conflict and does distinguish
between not only innocent civilians but also ordinary Muslims and fanatics. As the
memoir progresses, however, the feelings of rage and hatred become ever more preva-
lent, to the point where the Kurtz comparison becomes impossible not to make. In
Conrad’s narrative Kurtz shows Marlow the report he has written for the ‘International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs’, where he expands in colonialist terms
on what Kipling called ‘the white man’s burden’. He argues that Europeans should
accept the responsibility of their social superiority as they ‘must necessarily appear

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to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural beings—we approach them with the
might of a deity’ (Conrad 2017, 50). At the end, however, a scrawled addendum simply
reads, ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’ (Conrad 2017, 50). Like Kurtz, Kyle consistently
refers to the enemy as ‘savages’, and he rails against the rules of engagement that hold
the military back, and even against journalists on the ground: ‘most Americans can’t
take the reality of war, and the reports they sent back didn’t help us at all’ (Kyle 2012,
341). ‘Tell me,’ he writes, ‘do you want us to conquer our enemy? Annihilate them? Or
are we heading over to serve them tea and cookies?’ (Kyle 2012, 341). This annihila-
tion is borne out in the tactics he advocates: ‘kill every male you see’ (90); ‘we were
just slaughtering them’ (310); ‘we’d repeat the process until all the local bad guys were
dead’ (393). Kyle becomes so unashamed of this that he adopts another symbol, having
a red crusader cross tattooed on his arm: ‘I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian.
I had it put in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting. I always will.
They’ve taken so much from me’ (Kyle 2012, 250). The crusader cross shows Kyle
embracing exactly what the US is accused of doing by its critics in the Middle East in
terms of its imperialistic intentions. It is also associated with alt-right movements (if
not overt racism), frequently seen at events such as the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Char-
lottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Likewise, the Punisher symbol has grown in popularity
among US police officers as well as the military, so much so that Punisher co-creator
Gerry Conway has spoken out against it, saying specifically of Chris Kyle that ‘I don’t
think he understood the fundamental truth that the Punisher is not a man to admire
or emulate’ (Riesman 2020). As Taibbi has pointed out, however, Kyle is merely one
extreme example of cultural forces that reflect not only the modern military-industrial
complex, but also the film industry and the many viewers and readers who view Kyle
himself in exactly this same uncritical way.

Modern Warfare: War and Play

The British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, killed by shrapnel in Libya in 2011,
observed troops in the military over many years and was struck by how they emulated
films and video games in a very similar way to Kyle’s descriptions. His friend, Sebastian
Junger, summarises the perspective that Hetherington built up over the years:

You had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images
they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You
had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men
that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another
in the long tragic grind of human affairs. (Junger 2011)

Hetherington’s perspective from the ground mirrors that of Jean Baudrillard’s claims
on the 1991 conflict in Iraq, published as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).
The Gulf War, for Baudrillard, was a technologically enabled massacre, carried out in
advance through simulations, and then enacted on television screens for the public to
consume. The Gulf War has been frequently compared to the experience of playing a
video game due to the constant broadcasting of images, many of which were showcas-
ing cutting-edge military technology. A Vice article on gaming notes that ‘weapons like
the laser-guided missiles showcased by CNN were disorienting to viewers at the time,

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who likened the images to digital landscapes and video games’ (Makuch 2014). Games
actually released at the time, such as Storm Over the Desert (1993), were fairly crude
by later standards (featuring tanks shooting at giant Saddam Hussein figures), but the
increasing realism of military combat games, usually in the first-person shooter (FPS)
category, has further blurred the lines of where we demarcate the real. As Marcus
Power points out in a discussion of the later conflict, ‘many of the news reports com-
piled by embedded reporters during Gulf War II contain stories of US troops referring
to their experience of combat as “like a video game”’ (Power 2007, 271). Power traces
the close relationship between gaming and war with specific reference to the US mili-
tary’s development of the very technologies that enable home videogaming, claiming
that ‘games and the entertainment industry they spawned would provide a forum for
the naturalization and incorporation of military technology into everyday life’ (Power
2007, 275–6). It is unsurprising, therefore, that there is a continuity between the repre-
sentation of war in games and the ways in which combatants experience the real thing,
framed by a set of expectations set up in the virtual world.
The game under discussion here is representative of a much wider phenomenon,
but is a notably successful one. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) is the sixteenth
instalment in the Call of Duty series, which began in a World War II setting before
moving increasingly to fictionalised conflicts in the Middle East. The game was the
best-selling in the franchise so far, with at least thirty million copies sold in the first
year (Deschamps 2020), and its free-to-play spin-off game, Warzone, had a hundred
million players as of April 2021 (Yin-Poole 2021). The game has a single-player nar-
rative campaign as well as various online multi-player modes. The campaign is of
particular interest in terms of comparisons with the Iraq War and Kyle’s memoir, but
the emergent narrative that arises during online competition is also striking in its simi-
larities with real-life combat. In American Sniper, Kyle notes his own preference for
sports games, with one particularly disturbing moment arising when he loots a Tiger
Woods golf game from an abandoned apartment, while also using a upturned baby’s
crib as a support for his sniper rifle (Kyle 2012, 161). Nonetheless, his descriptions of
combat back up the claims put forward by Hetherington and Power. Kyle writes of
heavily armed personnel carriers wiping out dozens of insurgents lined up on rooftops:
‘it started to look like a video game—guys were falling off the rooftops’ (Kyle 2012,
384). Kyle’s unintentionally postmodern framing of real-life combat through the col-
lective imagery of games even extends to how he engages in combat itself, or in fact
‘plays’ at war. He writes, in a chillingly blasé manner, of this kind of playfulness:

When you’re in a profession where your job is to kill people, you start getting cre-
ative about doing it—we had so many targets out in Viet Ram we started asking
ourselves, what weapons have we not used to kill them?
No pistol kill yet? You have to get at least one.
We’d use different weapons for the experience, to learn the weapon’s capabilities
in combat. But at times it was a game. (Kyle 2012, 271–2)

The nickname of ‘Viet Ram’, given to an area of heavy foliage near Ramadi, empha-
sises how troops saw the conflict through the lens of the earlier Vietnam War, or more
accurately, through its depiction in films like Full Metal Jacket (1987), Good Morning
Vietnam (1987) and, of course, Apocalypse Now (1979) – Francis Ford Coppola’s

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 160 kevin corstorphine

adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The creative playfulness which he describes is built

into Modern Warfare as a feature. The game features a huge range of realistically
depicted weapons, including sniper rifles and light machine guns that Kyle so enthu-
siastically describes in his memoir. Players earn experience points linked to specific
weapons, so that the more kills are earned with a weapon, the more features are
unlocked. This actively encourages players to practise with different weapons and even
enters the territory of metagaming, where players can make up their own rules for a
match, such as ‘pistols only’. The moral difference between gamifying killing in fiction
and in real life is absolute, but the aesthetic and phenomenological experience is less
clear-cut. It is obvious that for Kyle and his peers, the experience of war is nothing
more or less than the ultimate form of video game, with all of the excitement that this
entails, even if (and because) the stakes are higher.
For Baudrillard, the unreality of the Gulf War stemmed from the technological
mismatch between the US military and their opponents, an imbalance that has only
become more pronounced, as well as from the detached viewpoint engendered by
viewing the conflict through screens. In Modern Warfare, players have the option to
disable the most explicit violence by clicking ‘disable’ in the game’s settings screen
under the ‘dismemberment & gore effects’ section (Infinity Ward 2019). This is a
feature transparently included to reassure parents of younger players that they should
still be allowed to purchase the game, as it is hard to imagine any active players tak-
ing this option. It is also difficult to assess which option is morally better or worse.
During the Gulf War, photographer Ken Jarecke’s picture of the badly charred corpse
of an Iraqi soldier, seemingly frozen at the moment of death while trying to escape a
burning truck, was removed from the Associated Press pooling system and effectively
suppressed in the US. It has now become an iconic image of the visceral reality of the
war, in stark contrast to the distance provided by the night vision footage of surgical
air strikes played on the news. The image is undoubtedly a gothic one, and difficult to
interpret outside of the cultural reference points provided by horror fiction, such as the
zombie (already a racially Othered, dehumanised creature). The zombie, as Elizabeth
McAlister points out, ‘came into being (as it were) in the plantation society of colonial
Saint-Domingue’ (McAlister 2017, 65). Although its thinly veiled position as subaltern
has been used for sharply satirical purposes, such as George A. Romero’s commentary
on anti-Black mob violence in Night of the Living Dead (1968), it is as often as not
used simply as a mindless adversary to be gleefully destroyed, particularly in gaming.
Indeed, the Black Ops version of the Call of Duty series includes a co-operative ‘zom-
bies’ mode, where players team up to fight hordes of the undead. Höglund has written
on the internal contradiction of the mode, which in some versions features undead
Nazis. In facing such a purely monstrous foe, he writes, the player becomes ‘thus a
champion not simply of the virtues routinely associated with the U.S. (freedom and
democracy), but of humanity itself’ (Höglund 2016). This, however, is not a war that
can be won. The player’s avatar will eventually be killed, only to start afresh. In these
terms, ‘the gamer must engage in a (perpetual) war – a war not simply on terrorism
but on terror itself’ (Höglund 2016). What is apparent is not just that this process is
one of fictional media adapting itself to suit the current political climate, but a leakage
back into the real-world enactment of warfare, where citizens and enemy combatants
become indistinguishable through the scope of a gun. As Kyle writes of his fellow
SEALs teasing him: ‘Yeah, I know Chris. He’s got a little gun cut on the end of his
scope. Everyone he sees is in the ROEs [rules of engagement]’ (Kyle 2012, 341).

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Höglund’s analysis of gaming and the gothic stresses the growing fetishisation of
guns (which has increased exponentially with later games such as the one under discus-
sion here). Given the context of the intractable nature of modern warfare (such as the
Iraq conflict), and the gun-obsessed culture of the United States, he argues that ‘only
the human with the gun has political, social, and sexual agency. Only the human with
the gun can effect change. In a future of constant warfare, the soldier is the only true
citizen’ (Höglund 2014). Chris Kyle used his fame to advocate the Second Amend-
ment right to bear arms, and Dave Grossman’s ‘sheepdog’ analogy is steeped in the
assumption that these people with ‘the gift of aggression’ should of course be armed.
Grossman’s key idea is actually that ‘man is not, by nature, a killer’ (Grossman and
Christensen 2004, n.p.). Military training is one route through which to condition
humans to remain calm in combat situations, and to be able to confidently take the life
of another person. For Grossman, video games also serve this role of ‘murder simula-
tors’, and he has written two books on the subject as well as commenting in the media.
Grossman argues that they offer ‘conditioned responses, killing skills and desensitiza-
tion, except they are inflicted on children without the discipline of military and police
training’ (Grossman and Christensen 2004, n.p.). To blame video games for the long
history of gun violence in the United States is a remarkable, if unsurprising, evasion of
the need to examine the proliferation of guns in American society, and the response of
an increasingly militarised culture of law enforcement. It also tacitly justifies the need
for violent killing when deployed by the military in imperialistic foreign wars waged
in countries like Iraq.
Although there have been attempts to use gaming as an actual recruitment tool,
such as the America’s Army series (developed by the US Army itself), games do not
actually tend to operate as purely jingoistic propaganda, and have a much more com-
plex relationship to war than they are usually credited with. Modern Warfare’s single-
player campaign goes some way to muddying the waters of what we might expect
from such a game, although widespread disillusionment after years of protracted
military occupations and conflict are undoubtedly a factor. The campaign is set in the
fictional country of ‘Urzikstan’, and sees US and British special forces embroiled in a
conflict with Russian forces as well as a brutal terrorist group called ‘Al-Qatala’. The
unsubtle fictionalisation of Al-Qaeda is one of many borrowed elements from vari-
ous real-world conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The game’s key villains are
the Russian General Roman Barkov and Omar ‘The Wolf’ Sulaman, a one-time ally
of the US in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan and now leader of Al-Qatala.
As part of the story, player control moves between SAS Sergeant Kyle Garrick, a CIA
operative known only as ‘Alex’, and, most interestingly, Farah Karim, the leader of
the Urzikstan Liberation Force. Gameplay featuring Karim puts the player in the posi-
tion of being tortured, including waterboarding, and a harrowing sequence where
she is a child witnessing the murder of her father and where the player must attempt
to escape. Despite a fair share of insensitivity elsewhere, the game does at least allow
for the possibility of heroism from oppressed figures like Karim, thus acknowledging
the factional complexities of the conflicts arising from, or certainly not solved by, US
colonialism. Taking the game’s critique of US imperialism even further, Alex defects
from the United States to join Karim’s forces when the Urzikstan Liberation Force is
labelled a terrorist organisation. Although this is a clear indictment of the moral fail-
ings of his own country, it is hard not to read this as a form of the old colonial fear of
‘going native’ prevalent in British gothic fiction of empire. Brantlinger cites Dominique

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 162 kevin corstorphine

Mannoni’s critique of European writing about Africa, where ‘civilized man is painfully
divided between the desire to “correct” the “errors” of the savages and the desire to
identify himself with them in his search for some lost paradise’ (Brantlinger 1988,
194). Alex’s dilemma is that of Brantlinger’s ‘dusk’ phase of empire, where faith in the
imperial project is threatened by an awareness of its injustices and inherent instability.
Modern Warfare’s attempt to tell a nuanced story at the same time as utilising broad
stereotypes in the service of action makes it tonally confused, but a crucial reflection
of shifting attitudes to US imperialism.

Frankenstein in Baghdad: Whatsitsname Strikes Back

Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad is a crucial addition to this discussion of
the US imperial gothic as it appears in contemporary fiction. American Sniper and
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare have been purposefully chosen as popular blockbuster
representations of the conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of the coloniser.
With this novel, ‘the empire writes back’, adapting one of the most enduring gothic
stories in the European tradition to explore life in post-invasion Iraq. Frankenstein
in Baghdad generated international recognition in the original Arabic, winning the
International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2014, and drew further attention in the anglo-
phone world through Jonathan Wright’s translation, reaching the shortlist for the Man
Booker International Prize in 2018. The novel’s blending of realism and the fantastic
in a Baghdad ravaged by occupation and insurgency offers rich opportunities to read
it as a postcolonial response to the kinds of imperial narratives offered from within
the United States. In a text like American Sniper, the analytical framework provided
by gothic studies allows the critic to read the way in which such a seemingly trium-
phalist narrative is ‘haunted’ by the unspoken and the repressed. Chris Kyle allows
himself moments of wavering faith in the US government, but only when paperwork
and accountability rein in the freedom to kill. Looking outside the text there is also
the spectre of the traumatised veteran who took Kyle’s own life, and the many thou-
sands more suffering from PTSD and associated problems like addiction, many of
them homeless on the streets of the country they fought for. Nonetheless, the lens
remains focused entirely on the effects on American citizens as the only matter of any
consequence of imperialism.
Chinua Achebe’s famous criticism of Heart of Darkness denounced Conrad’s depic-
tion of Africa as ‘a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into
which the wandering European enters at his peril’ (Conrad 2017, 314). His own Things
Fall Apart (1958) gives context and texture to the lives of the Africans (although here
set in Nigeria) so conspicuously flattened by a colonial perspective. Tabish Khair reads
Heart of Darkness as hampered by this limited perspective, and yet revealing of the
psychology of distinguishing Self and Other. He writes that ‘it suggests, perhaps despite
itself, the great “lie” of decency in the absence of an equal and ethical relationship with
alterity’ (Khair 2009, 84). In other words, an acknowledgement of the full and equal
humanity of the colonial Other is the prerequisite for ethical behaviour, a condition
notably lacking in American Sniper. One of the consequences of such a state of affairs
is the murder of civilians under the euphemistic phrase ‘collateral damage’ (which, not
coincidentally, fell into common usage during the Gulf War). Modern Warfare actually
attempts to address this issue, with players purposefully presented with the presence of

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 us imperial gothic 163

civilians during raids. As with real military operations, split-second decisions may lead
the player to shoot these civilians. The mission is not generally failed, but the player is
given a poor ‘collateral damage assessment’ score. It is an attempt to tackle this reality,
albeit a relatively crass one. Frankenstein in Baghdad, in contrast, depicts the real-
ity of living under occupation. Where Kyle’s memoir approvingly describes Marines
‘putting a round in anybody they saw as they entered a house’ (Kyle 2012, 341),
Saadawi describes a character who ‘waited in dread, listening for movement in the lane
and for the moment when they’d knock on the door to carry out their search, or force
it open with their heavy boots’ (Saadawi 2018, 84). As opposed to fundamentalist ter-
rorists and Iraqi citizens being conflated as the ‘bad guys’, American troops are as likely
to bring death to the innocent as a suicide bomber.
A suicide bombing does open the novel, which decentres the perspective of Ameri-
can troops, focusing instead on a varied cast of Iraqi citizens. Hadi is a drunken and
shady junk dealer, but is appalled by the failure of the government to treat the victims
of bombings with respect (the lack of complete bodies is particularly disrespectful
in Islamic tradition). To protest against the lack of proper burials, he gathers up the
body parts so easily found in the grisly aftermath of the bombings and stitches them
together to create a monstrous composite corpse, naming it ‘Whatsitsname’. Unlike
Victor Frankenstein, Hadi does not attempt to reanimate the corpse, but nonetheless
it does come to life, seemingly possessed by the spirit of a victim who cannot find his
body. The ‘Whatsitsname’ is driven to exact revenge from those responsible for killing
each of its body parts, but as they rot and must be replaced its mission becomes one of
endless and increasingly pointless killing. Hadi and his creation are characterised by
confusion and a lack of control, reflecting the random violence of a destabilised coun-
try where even suicide would be pointless, as Hadi reflects in his despair: ‘he assumed
a car bomb or some other explosive might go off at any moment – he was well aware
that this was his destiny’ (Saadawi 2018, 100). The creature is clearly metaphorical
but resists clear allegory:

In Sadr City they spoke of him as a Waahabi, in Adimiya as a Shiite extremist. The
Iraqi government described him as an agent of foreign powers, while the spokes-
man for the US State Department said he was an ingenious man whose aim was
to undermine the American project in Iraq. But what project might that be? As far
as Brigadier Majid was concerned, the monster itself was their project. It was the
Americans who were behind this monster. (Saadawi 2018, 259)

As with the creature itself, the novel is a mash-up of cultural reference points in an age
of what Hopkins describes earlier as ‘postcolonial globalization’. Botting points out
that ‘the title of the novel, relocating a European monster to a Middle Eastern city,
underlines the imbrication of global and local forces’ (Botting 2019, 17), noting the
important detail that the title of ‘Frankenstein in Baghdad’ is that of a magazine article
within the narrative, comparing the appearance of the creature to that of American
actor Robert De Niro in Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994).
The American imperial project, for Botting, requires the spectre of terror: ‘as a per-
manent, omnipresent, and malleable threat demanding constant vigilance, the Enemy
serves to justify whatever military or police action may be deemed necessary’ (Botting
2019, 13–14). This is likewise what Höglund means, with reference to gaming, as ‘a

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 164 kevin corstorphine

war on terror itself’. A television host within the novel, during a discussion on the
cycle of violence in Iraq, claims that each faction ‘has created a death machine working
in the other direction because it’s afraid of the Other. And we’re going to see more and
more death because of fear’ (Saadawi 2018, 118).
American Sniper and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare have been positioned here as
analogous to the fiction of the late British Empire, where gothic undertones threatened
to disrupt the ostensibly triumphalist narrative. Frankenstein in Baghdad, in contrast,
uses the gothic as a transnational and postcolonial mode of expression. As Khair has
identified, ‘Otherness is a central concern of gothic literature in general’ (Khair 2009,
4), and the postcolonial novel is uniquely placed to redirect this tendency towards
humane ends. Saadawi pointedly portrays Iraq as a complex and multicultural society,
rather than one reduced to only Arab Muslims. These characters, too, have a rich
diversity of motivations and perspectives. The first character to be introduced is an
elderly Armenian Christian woman, still mourning the death of her son in the Gulf
War twenty years prior. She prays for intervention through her patron saint: St George,
ironically the same figure so revered as representative of European white Christianity
by modern crusaders. In this rich and vibrant culture, terror and grief are felt as keenly,
if tempered by familiarity, as they are in the West. From an imperial perspective, how-
ever, everyone is the same. One character in the novel reflects on the two fronts of
conflict: ‘the Americans and the government on one side, the terrorists and the vari-
ous anti-government militias on the other. In fact, “terrorist” was the term used for
everyone who was against the government and the Americans’ (Saadawi 2018, 76–7).
Khair comments on this distinction (or lack thereof) in the colonial mindset, com-
menting that ‘to battle “terrorists” is to engage in a legitimate historical function of
law, order and polity, but to wage war against “terror” is to reduce the human in all
of us’ (Khair 2009, 174). A reduction of the human allows for any abuse, indignity
and injustice to be carried out upon those so reduced, including the military used as a
tool by imperialism. People are not sheep, wolves or sheepdogs, and neither are they
virtual avatars to be killed for sport. Games, at least, acknowledge this through nar-
rative and play mechanisms that reveal parts of this underlying anxiety. The gothic
postcolonial mode is capable of exposing that which is repressed and oppressed even
further. By transporting the story of Frankenstein to Baghdad, the creature’s grotesque
but undeniably human fleshiness forces confrontation with the Other. The American
imperialist project’s tendency to ignore this humanity makes a gothic analysis of its
narratives both revealing and urgent.

References
Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Botting, Fred. 2012. ‘In Gothic Darkly: Heterotopia, History, Culture.’ In A New Companion
to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 13–24. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
———. 2019. ‘Infinite Monstrosity: Justice, Terror, and Trauma in Frankenstein in Baghdad’
(unpublished manuscript). https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/43607/1/Botting-F-43607
-AAM.pdf.
Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Conrad, Joseph. 2017. Heart of Darkness. Fifth Norton Critical Edition. New York and London:
Norton.

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Deschamps, Marc. 2020. ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Passes 30 Million Copies Sold.’ Comic-
book, 1 September. https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-sells-
30-million-copies.
Eastwood, Clint, director. 2014. American Sniper. Warner Bros.
Faflak, Joel and Jason Haslam, eds. 2017. American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion.
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Friedkin, William, director. 1973. The Exorcist. Warner Bros.
Grossman, Dave and Loren W. Christensen. 2004. On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology
of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace. New York: Open Road Media. Ebook.
Harrison, Sherie-Marie. 2018. ‘New Black Gothic.’ Los Angeles Review of Books, 23 June.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/new-black-gothic.
Höglund, Johan. 2014. The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence.
New York: Routledge. VitalSource.
———. 2016. ‘Virtual War and the Nazi Zombie Gothic in Call of Duty.’ In War Gothic in
Literature and Culture, edited by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffen Hantke, 176–91.
New York: Routledge.
Hopkins, A. G. 2018. American Empire: A Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Infinity Ward. 2019. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Activision. PS4/Xbox One/PC.
Junger, Sebastian. 2011. ‘Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington.’ Vanity Fair, 21 April.
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201104.
Khair, Tabish. 2009. The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
King, Stephen. 1978. The Shining. London: New English Library.
Kyle, Chris. 2012. American Sniper. New York: Harper.
McAlister, Elizabeth. 2017. ‘Slaves, Cannibals, and Infected Hyper-Whites: The Race and
Religion of Zombies.’ In Zombie Theory: A Reader, edited by Sarah Juliet Lauro, 63–84.
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Makuch, Ben. 2014. ‘8-Bit Desert Storms to 3D Calls of Duty: How the US Gamifies War in
Iraq.’ Vice, 25 June. https://www.vice.com/en/article/4x33ed/the-original-iraq-war-game.
Power, Marcus. 2007. ‘Digitized Virtuosity: Video War Games and Post-9/11 Cyber-Deterrence.’
Security Dialogue 38, no. 2: 271–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010607078552.
Riesman, Abraham. 2020. ‘Why Cops and Soldiers Love the Punisher.’ Vulture, 2 June. https://
www.vulture.com/article/marvel-punisher-police-cops-military-fandom.html.
Roach, Kent. 2014. The Long Decade: How 9/11 Changed the Law. Oxford Scholarship
Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199368327.003.0001.
Saadawi, Ahmed. 2018. Frankenstein in Baghdad. Translated by Jonathan Wright. London:
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Said, Edward W. 1980. ‘Islam Through Western Eyes.’ The Nation, 26 April. https://www.thenation.
com/article/archive/islam-through-western-eyes.
Taibbi, Matt. 2015. ‘American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticize.’ Rolling Stone, 21
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million-players.

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 10

Globalgothic and War

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

A s the twenty-first century unfolds with the longest US military intervention

on record ending in failure and violence (Afghanistan, after twenty years), the
gothic continues to be an important genre for exploring and questioning the global
dynamics of war. This chapter will focus on the transmedial and transnational circula-
tion of gothic tropes in the context of contemporary war writing and popular culture.
With an eye on the larger imperial, neoliberal and ecological issues framing the glo-
balgothic portrayal of war in literature and popular culture, I will explore how recent
war-themed gothic texts have responded to anxieties about the unfinished business of
empire and fascism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anxieties about new
technologies and state agencies, and the continuing fascination generated by the highly
mutable and adaptable trope of the living dead. Drawing on Glennis Byron’s account
of how local and non-Western cultures use local mythologies to resist silencing in their
encounters with the West, this chapter shows that the globalgothic represents a cul-
turally hybrid vocabulary to encode disturbances in local lifeworlds by transnational
forces, including economic and military.
Although the gothic is often seen as mainly a British and American literary genre,
it was a much broader transnational movement from the start, especially if we look
at its blood-soaked military roots. Historically linked to modernity and industrialisa-
tion, as a literary and visual exploration of the darker aspects of both, the gothic was
also a child of global war. Even before the Age of Revolutions with which it is often
linked (e.g. American, French, Haitian), the gothic actually emerged in the wake of
the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), known as the French and Indian War in the United
States (Wright 2013, 12). This conflict, fought by France, Britain, Spain, Prussia,
Russia, Austria, Sweden, India and the Iroquois Confederacy, left somewhere between
900,000 and 1,400,000 people dead across the globe. It was the first of many violent
conflicts that would shape the gothic imaginary throughout the nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries.
This chapter will look at war-themed globalgothic in three parts: first, a look at its
historical obsessions and revisitations of the unfinished business of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, especially colonialism and fascism, then an examination of its new
developments, including notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of visual
and surveillance technologies, and a willingness to scrutinise institutions that have pre-
viously escaped gothic attention, such as the CIA. Finally, in the last section, I look at
the return of a gothic trope that won’t die: the living dead. After an initial overview of
the topic, each section will focus on a more in-depth analysis of one or two key texts,
including the British-Iranian film Under the Shadow (2016), set against the backdrop

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 globalgothic and war 167

of the Iran-Iraq war, The Objective, set in Afghanistan, and, finally, a brief discussion of
Max Brooks’s World War Z (2006), as well as the highly successful Iraqi adaptation of
Mary Shelley’s monster: Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi (2013).

Unfinished Business
Looking at war from a globalgothic perspective brings into focus a much larger his-
torical frame than we are used to with existing War Gothic scholarship, which up to
now has been focused mainly on American wars and texts (e.g. Soltysik Monnet and
Hantke 2016). The wars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have largely been
the products of imperial, colonial and anti-colonial movements as they emerged from
the modern world-system. The issue of modernity itself has been at stake in many
of these conflicts, though the meaning of this word is unstable, sometimes pitting
itself against indigenous people, sometimes against communitarianism, and sometimes
against religious fundamentalism. Most of the time, the real motivations for armed
conflicts have been access to resources, influence, financial interests and racial ideol-
ogy. The tentacular effects of empire – especially the second imperial phase of the
nineteenth century when Britain, Germany and France became the main actors – are
still being felt. This is why this first section of this chapter has been organised under
the subtitle of ‘unfinished business’. Most of the wars of the past 100 years have been
fought by these major imperial powers, their proxies or their heirs. Even the great
twentieth-century struggle with fascism that is most associated with the Second World
War was partly a continuation of the racial ideologies established during the second
age of empire and partly a continuation of the troubled unfolding of modernity. The
issues of racial hierarchy, unfettered capitalist growth and the domination/overcoming
of nature are all aspects of European modernity that are still being negotiated across the
globe. These issues have also informed the other major ‘war’ of the twentieth century,
namely the Cold War and its correlated hot wars (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan).
The Cold War was ostensibly a stand-off between the capitalist-democratic United
States and the communist-authoritarian Soviet Union, but its underlying dynamics
were basically imperial as both major powers sought to extend their sphere of influ-
ence and global control while paying lip service in varying degrees to the values of
equality, freedom, democracy and self-determination.
One of the most striking things about twenty-first-century globalgothic is how much
of it is haunted by the wars of the twentieth century. It is obvious that these historical
events left scars on the fabric of collective memory that leak across national boundar-
ies and narratives. One clear example is the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro,
who has returned over and over again to the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s in his most
personal and important film projects, such as The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s
Labyrinth (2006). Considered by scholars as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for World War II, the
Spanish Civil War attracted a wide range of international volunteers who travelled to
Spain to support the left-leaning government against the right-wing rebel groups led by
General Franco. The government itself was backed by the Soviet Union and leftist Mex-
ico. When the fascist Nationalist Party won in 1939, with the help of Nazi Germany
and Fascist Italy, Spain began a decades-long period of right-wing dictatorship that long
outlasted the other right-wing governments of Europe and which still haunts Spain and
the Spanish-speaking world more generally, as we see with del Toro (Hardcastle 2005,

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 168 agnieszka soltysik monnet

129). While del Toro’s first Spanish Civil War film takes place during the war, at a
Republican-aligned orphanage haunted by the ghost of a boy murdered by a traitorous
groundskeeper, his most famous and successful film, Pan’s Labyrinth, is set in 1944, five
years after the Spanish Civil War officially ended. The protagonist is a young girl this
time and her step-father is a fierce right-wing Falangist who hunts down Republican
rebels in the neighbouring woods. Against this background of murderous violence,
Ofelia (played by Ivana Baquero) escapes into a supernatural world of pagan and myth-
ological characters. Clearly critical of the Catholic Church which aligned itself with the
right-wing dictatorship, del Toro draws on non-Christian folklore such as fairies and
fauns to create his parallel world. This is a recurring trope of globalgothic: an interest
in folkloric and alternative mythologies to create hybrid horror stories that commingle
the gothic with pagan and pre-European supernatural entities. I will return to this issue
in Under the Shadow and The Objective.
If the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for World War II, the legacy of the
Holocaust is a show that never ends. More than any other aspect of that war, the racist
ideology of the Nazis, and specifically their practice of medical experiments on prisoners
and their use of drugs to enhance the performance of soldiers during the blitzkrieg, has
left an enduring fear and fascination about the extreme instrumentalisation of human
bodies that they were capable of. No other theme of War Gothic has had as much vitality
as that of Nazi medical experimentation, which usually takes the more specific form of
plans to create immortal or highly enhanced super-soldiers. Frequently these are imag-
ined as zombies or otherwise undead and therefore unkillable (see Whittall 2020). This
trope began in 1943 with the film Revenge of the Zombies, which featured a German
scientist in Louisiana trying to create zombified living-dead warriors for the Third Reich.
Since then this has been the central plot device of hundreds of films, including the recent
Dutch-American-Czech found-footage horror film Frankenstein’s Army (2013), and the
surprisingly well-received American Overlord (2018).
Next to the Second World War, the Vietnam War is the other most important sub-
ject for gothic treatment. Most of the well-known films that have been made about
it – Apocalypse Now (1979), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Jacob’s Ladder (1990) – have
borrowed heavily from the gothic toolbox. More recently, however, the Vietnam War
has transcended the limits of conventional national cinema, with two of the most
notable films in the last twenty years approaching their subject with a decidedly glo-
balgothic frame. The better known of these two films is the South Korean film R-Point
(2004), which is a complex exploration of historical memory, though a rather conven-
tional ghost story. A team of South Korean soldiers are sent to an abandoned French
plantation to look for a previous team who have disappeared and are presumed dead.
The film features the usual conceits of haunting, internal conflict between the soldiers,
madness and hallucination, but it also poignantly evokes the colonial roots of the
Vietnam War, with the French plantation setting as well as the Cold War context.
That South Korean soldiers participated in the Vietnam War alongside the US military
is a historical fact that has been completely forgotten outside of Korea. Bringing this
lost historical memory into the narrative frame reminds us also how the Korean War
itself has been almost completely erased from world history even though (or, perhaps,
because) it never really ended. Both sides, the US and South Korea on one, China
and North Korea on the other, simply withdrew to pre-war positions after extremely
heavy losses on all sides. Technically, the war is still ongoing, even if the Cold War has

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long since ended (though current and ongoing attempts to cast China as the dominant
adversary to the US threaten to recreate Cold War dynamics).
Another globalgothic take on the Vietnam War was created in 2017 by Neill
Blomkamp, the South African director of sci-fi hits District 9 (2009) and Elysium
(2013). In Firebase, a twenty-eight-minute-long film produced by his independent
crowdfunding project Oats Studios, Blomkamp focuses on an aspect of war that
has rarely been seen on film: civilian grief and rage. The film begins with footage
that clearly references Vietnam War cinematic monuments like Apocalypse Now
and The Deer Hunter, with shots of napalm being dropped on jungle foliage, and a
bandana-wearing protagonist who is a dead-ringer for Robert De Niro’s character in
the Cimino film, and includes War Gothic staples like super-soldiers and body horror
(the main injured soldier has dramatic burns all over his face and body).
However, at the heart of the story – told and shown in flashback – is a civilian peas-
ant farmer whose wife and children were killed (in images that recall the notorious
hooch-burning scandal of 19651) and whose pain was so great that he morphed into a
monster with the ability to disrupt and control space and time. The villagers call him
‘the River God’, giving him a local and pagan identity, and the film shows the uncanny
gravity-defying events he can produce in grainy video clips purportedly from secret
CIA files: thousands of US soldiers and vehicles simply floating into the sky. The domi-
nant role given in the film to the CIA is also an important development in Vietnam
cinema, wresting the focus away from the infantryman-hero to the morally murky
activities of US secret agencies in Vietnam (and many other countries). The film did not
raise enough money to be expanded into a feature film and Blomkamp shut down the
project, but it is widely available on the internet and on the Oats Studios website and
is well known among science fiction and war film aficionados.
Finally, the example that I will examine in a bit more detail is Under the Shadow
(2016), a British-Iranian horror film set during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and
which has been distributed by Netflix since 2016. This well-received film is Babak
Anvari’s first feature and the second major Iranian horror film of the last decade, after
the vampire film A Girl Walks Home Alone (2014). Under the Shadow is another
example of globalgothic that uses a ‘monster’ from local folklore, here the airborne
supernatural entity called a djinn. Long Disneyfied in Western media to resemble some
sort of friendly slave (the common understanding of ‘jeannies’ being that they must
obey the commands of whoever opens their bottle), Under the Shadow returns to the
djinn its more ambivalent and complex local meanings. According to a book that the
protagonist consults, djinn come with the wind wherever fear and anxiety hold sway.
In the film, the immediate context for fear and anxiety are the missile attacks on Tehran
by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s which rain down on the city, forcing residents to take
shelter in their basements in scenes that vividly recall cultural memories of the Blitz in
London during the 1940s. Early in the film, an unexploded missile crashes through the
ceiling of the upstairs neighbour of the protagonist, a young woman living with her
daughter and husband. Gradually, as fear tightens its grip on the city and people flee to
the countryside, the protagonist Shideh (Narges Rashidi) and her daughter Dorsa (Avin
Manshadi) discover that their apartment is being haunted by a djinn (which is depicted
in the film as a fast-moving chador with a black space for a face).
While the missile war is the immediate cause of anxiety in the film, it becomes
apparent fairly quickly that the deeper and more insidious war portrayed in the film

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is that of the fundamentalist regime on its women. We see this from the first scene,
which is of Shideh at an administrator’s office at her former university, pleading to be
allowed to complete her medical studies, and being told that she will never be able to
return. While the explicit reason given is that she has participated as a student in leftist
political activism during the Revolution, it is clear that a multi-fronted assault is taking
place on women’s rights and freedoms on every level of society and daily life. When
she tells her husband that she cannot finish her studies, he counsels that it’s probably
‘for the best’. A conversation between her husband and the apartment manager reveals
that Shideh is the only woman in the building who drives a car. Most shockingly of all,
when she runs into the street later in the film with her daughter to escape the djinn, she
is picked up by the police and taken to the station to be scolded and threatened with
lashes for having been outside without a headscarf or chador.
The sense of threat that hangs over Shideh as a woman in a patriarchal society that
has just reverted to fundamentalist religious gender politics becomes increasingly pro-
nounced as the film unfolds, locating Under the Shadow at the centre of one of the most
important globalgothic dynamics. Few issues link postcolonial legacies to contemporary
globalisation as clearly as women’s rights and social status. These issues are as complex
as they are deeply rooted in local histories and conditions. The intrusions of empire have
often been justified by Western powers as a liberation of women from barbaric prac-
tices and confinement, and the processes known as ‘modernisation’ in many developing
countries have indeed involved a certain degree of feminist awareness and practices.
Nevertheless, these advancements have often been unequal or ephemeral, and in most
cases the arrival of war has created particular hardships for women.
Ironically, the most feminist governments have not necessarily been US or British
client states, but often those under the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, such
as Afghanistan or Iraq in the 1970s. Iran is a special case because women enjoyed a
great deal of Western-style freedom under the US-backed Shah in the 1970s, at least in
Tehran. Yet the Pahlavi regime created enormous resentment because of its corruption
and the stark economic divisions in the country, generating conditions under which
leftists initially sided with the Khomeini-led Revolution but later found themselves
in increasing disfavour with Islamist clerics. Women similarly initially supported the
Revolution and then were dismayed to find themselves being disenfranchised and shut
up in their fathers’ and husbands’ homes, literally pushed ‘under the shadow’ of the
veil, which became mandatory.
The film remembers the fear and anxiety of this time for women by making the
connections between mothers and daughters the primary relationships between char-
acters. A medical book given to Shideh by her mother, in encouragement of her stud-
ies, is a key object and Shideh’s most valued possession (along with her Jane Fonda
workout tape). The djinn steals both, destroys the tape and leaves the book exposed to
the elements under the broken ceiling where the missile fell. Shideh is also alone with
her daughter for most of the film, her husband having been conscripted as a doctor
and sent to the front to tend to the ‘martyrs dying for the new values’ such as obliga-
tory chador-wearing (as the police remind her). It is thus no accident that the djinn
takes the physical form of a faceless chador that tries to steal the daughter away from
her mother. In this globalgothic film, the djinn is more than a figure of local folklore
and superstition, but is a visually arresting symbol for the loss of autonomy faced by
Shideh and which will be passed on to her daughter, Dorsa.

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The film also brilliantly captures the larger globalgothic background to this story,
namely the oil politics that have made the region so important to the West, leading to
constant foreign interference, CIA meddling and the supplying of arms to both Iran
and Iraq throughout the 1970s and 1980s by both Cold War powers. The conversa-
tion about ‘left and right politics’ and how confusing they were during the Revolution
at the beginning of the film evokes the complex global influences on modern Iran. As
just mentioned, a key issue at stake in the right-left divide, of course, is the status of
women, especially with right-wing and fundamentalist movements generally seeking
to bring women’s bodies under the control of and into the service of their national-
ist projects. The left-right divide has also been crucial for understanding the politics
of oil extraction and decisions over where the revenues go, with leftist governments
favouring nationalisation and right-wing governments generally allowing foreign cor-
porations relatively free rein to pursue profits and funnel them out of the region. The
Iranian Revolution was unusual in that it completed the project of nationalising the
petroleum industry in the country while imposing right-wing-style social restrictions
on women, leftists and intellectuals. The final confrontation with the djinn in the film
evokes the issue of oil in a dramatically visual way, by making the djinn transform
itself into an oil slick on the basement floor that Shideh sinks into like quicksand.
These political events, including the coup that put the Shah in power, the Islamist
revolution that toppled him twenty years later, and the war with Iraq in the 1980s, can
all be seen as ripple effects of the initial British colonisation of the region and its con-
trol over the oil industry for much of the twentieth century. The rise of Islamist politics
and jihadist insurgencies can and should be examined in the light of US, UK and,
until 1989, USSR interventions in regional politics, from the consortium of British and
American business interests pressuring oil production to the Soviet war in Afghanistan
which the US blithely supported by arming and supplying the mujahideen (which later
metamorphosed into the very same terrorists now haunting the American geopolitical
imagination). Just like the djinn in the film are said to arrive with the winds when-
ever fear and anxiety become dominant, we can say that reckless and self-interested
Western interference with the region has created an atmosphere of fear and anxiety
that will continue to produce gale after gale of blowback.

New Tech, New Wars

In addition to the many examples of global War Gothic that revisit the fallout of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century unfinished business, there are a number of interesting
examples of military globalgothic that address newer topics and technologies (although
the forces discussed in the previous section continue to linger). In particular, there is
one technological innovation that has emerged in the twenty-first century as a key link
between war and gothic: visual technology (ranging from night vision and thermal
goggles to surveillance and drone video footage of lethal attacks). Of course, the use of
cameras and screen-based mediation in military contexts is not really new, and the close
relationship between cameras and weapon systems has been written about extensively
by Paul Virilio, especially in the wake of the Persian Gulf War but dating back to the
beginning of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, the twenty-first century has seen a rise
to predominance of military visual technology in globalgothic cinema that has roots
in two trends: the found-footage development in the horror film genre, and the war in

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Iraq (Soltysik Monnet 2015a). Night vision scopes are certainly used in Afghanistan
as well, but this kind of footage, often showing soldiers searching Iraqi homes at night
with terrified civilians caught eerily in luminous green, found its way into news reports
and documentaries and became the signature video style of the war. When the invasion
and occupation of Iraq turned out to be a catastrophic mistake, characterised by ruth-
less indifference to national treasures and civilian safety, military brutality, torture of
prisoners, and other horrors, the night vision footage of bodycams on soldiers as they
violently entered people’s homes and terrorised families came to be associated with
that war and its abuses, as apparent in examples such as Brian De Palma’s war horror
found-footage film Redacted (2007), which uses night vision for its terrifying scene of
the rape and murder of an Iraqi teenager and her family.
In other words, no other technological innovation is as closely associated with the
recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as that of night vision scopes, though the experience
of watching war destruction through black-and-white video footage of ‘surgical strikes’
began with the Persian Gulf War. These widely shown shots of bombs approaching tar-
gets were tightly censored and seemed to show only buildings, but in 2010 Wikileaks
released US military footage from 2007 of people on a Baghdad street, including two
Reuters journalists, being targeted and killed by an Apache helicopter as the gunners
joked and said things like ‘light ’em all up’, ‘come on, let me shoot’ and ‘nice’ when
discussing the bodies lying on the ground (Wikileaks 2010). The video embarrassed
the Pentagon and is one of the reasons Wikileaks infuriated American authorities. The
footage from the Apache gunsight showed people on the ground in fairly sharp detail,
which is perhaps also why the footage sparked such outrage, but most aerial gunsight
footage is grainy and depersonalising, making human beings look like pixelated blobs
or like targets in a video game. Another common visualising technology is thermal,
which depicts body heat and is characterised by blurry silhouettes.
All of these visual technologies and their shared characteristic of depicting human
beings as shadowy forms on a screen have become synonymous with the current wars
in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever the US pursues its ‘Global War on Terror’, not
only because these technologies are widely used by the most ‘developed’ (and aggres-
sive) countries but also because they visually evoke – for people uncomfortable with
these brutal, arrogant and unending wars – the dehumanisation implicit in the way
the US and its allies treat insurgents and civilians alike. The jokey commentary heard
during the Apache airstrike mentioned above is only the most grotesquely explicit
symptom of a collective indifference to the many victims in Iraq and Afghanistan since
the 1990s, when the ‘highway of death’ first leaked into the news. The civilian casual-
ties of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are not even counted by the US military, much
less considered as worthy of accountability, and the tendency to shrug off collateral
damage has only become more common with the rise of armed drones, which have
frequently targeted (supposedly inadvertently, but with zero accountability) civilian
gatherings including weddings.
The 2008 film The Objective, by the maker of The Blair Witch Project (1999),
Daniel Myrick, brings together a focus on this new visual technology with several
other issues to produce an original globalgothic critique of America’s secret agencies
and covert operations. The film takes place in Afghanistan, where a CIA operative
has been sent to investigate (so he claims) a mysterious source of radiation with an
A-team assigned to him by the US Army Special Forces. Narrated with an Apocalypse

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Now-style voice-off by the CIA agent, Benjamin Keynes (played by Jonas Ball), the
film acknowledges the long history of CIA meddling around the world since the Cold
War, when it operated in the shadows as king-maker and secret assassin, totally off the
books and unaccountable and utterly ruthless in its methods. It does so not only by
invoking the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, but also through its
plot premise, or at least what seems to be the official ‘objective’ of Keynes’s mission:
to investigate the possibility that Al-Qaeda has ‘finally gotten its hands on a nuclear
weapon’. In order to locate the radiation source showing up on their satellite surveil-
lance cameras, Keynes has a hand-held device that looks like a thermal scope, through
which he sees both heat and radiation in the landscape around him. This device will
also allow him to see invisible beings and floating vessels later on in the film, all of
which glow with heat or radioactivity. Later we learn that the device has been filming
and sending images back to Langley, making it essentially an avatar of the CIA, an eye
with no heart or conscience. In a sense, this device is the real protagonist of the film,
as it is revealed later that Keynes himself is expendable.
The film begins like a conventional war action film, with a team of irregular soldiers
on a mission to find a secret weapon. The fact that it is possibly a nuclear device is
one of many elements that conjure up the ghosts of the Cold War, including a dialogue
early in the film that explicitly refers to the Soviet invasion of the 1980s and reminds
us of the role of the CIA in helping jihadist insurgents against it. Thus, ironically, by
evoking the Soviet war, the film ominously begins with a reminder that Afghanistan
has often been called ‘the graveyard of empires’, a moniker that would caution against
foreign meddling. A scene later in the film, when the team encounters a hermit who is
wearing a mid-nineteenth-century British uniform underneath his Pashtun robe, mak-
ing him possibly the ghost or weirdly old lone survivor of a massacred British regiment
from the nineteenth century, reinforces this sense of Afghanistan as a place with a long
history of crushing imperial ambitions (and a gothic space of many mysteries).
Another globalgothic dimension of this film involves the frankly supernatural
nature of the assailants. The soldiers are ambushed by elusive fighters whose bodies
disappear after they fall (reminiscent of the ‘invisible enemy’ trope from the Vietnam
War), they encounter ghostly and impossible helicopter sounds from invisible helicop-
ters, and finally they see floating vessels and strange beings which are explained in the
film as ‘vimanas’ or mythological floating palaces apparently reported during Alexan-
der the Great’s occupation of the area. These vessels are presented in the film as real, in
the ‘marvellous gothic’ mode, and seem to possess characteristics of both the mythical
vimanas and modern UFO sightings (as the vessels sometimes disintegrate into rapid
lights, and at one point a creature comes out and touches Keynes with a long ET-like
finger on the forehead). The film’s willingness to credit this ancient Eastern (found in
Sanskrit, Hindu and Jain texts) mythology as ontologically real in the world of the
film is a typical feature in the globalgothic, as theorised by Glennis Byron in her essay
‘“Where Meaning Collapses”: Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as Global Gothic’.
Byron argues that by valorising local mythologies and folkloric beliefs – often creating
hybrid monsters such as the UFO-like vimanas – the globalgothic text allows the local
and non-Western culture to resist the silencing that would often occur in its encounter
with the West (2008, 40).
The fact that this local supernatural entity is conjured in the service of examining
and critiquing the behaviour of the CIA, represented by Agent Keynes, gives it another

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important globalgothic dimension. The CIA has long been given a pass by the horror
genre, even though it has been the source of many dark and illegal operations around
the world since the 1950s. The ruthlessness of the organisation is put on display by the
film as the team’s military members start to fall victim to the natural and supernatural
forces surrounding them, and the CIA agent refuses to stop, evacuate the wounded or
even to care. They are ambushed by ghostly insurgents, they run out of water and face
death from dehydration, and most end up being evaporated by the vimanas. As their
number dwindles, the increasingly sociopathic Keynes mouths empty platitudes after
each death (‘he died for his country’, ‘your men are patriots’, ‘this is bigger than you
and me’, ‘your country would be proud’), and eventually he admits that theirs was a
suicide mission (without their knowledge or consent) to gather information about the
mysterious sightings that have occurred since the 1980s. In short, the CIA wanted to
see what would happen to the soldiers when they found the radiation source, with an
understanding that they would probably be injured, sickened or killed by it.
The ending of the film is enigmatic but clear enough about the ruthless and shadowy
activities of the CIA. After being touched by one of the vimana entities, Keynes enters
a trance in which he experiences visions like a psychedelic trip or a mystical hallucina-
tion (reminiscent of the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey). The very last
scene shows him back in a Langley laboratory, levitating above his bed, as he remains
in the grip of his trance. A computer screen in the room – modelled on the thermal-
vision device he was using throughout the film – reveals that he is now glowing like the
‘radiation’ source that he was seeking. As the credits roll, we see news footage of his
wife speaking to a reporter about having been told only that her husband is missing
and presumed dead. Knowing that he is being studied after having been irradiated by
the vimana, the audience can see how the CIA continues to operate in the shadows with
no public accountability, as it has since the Cold War, when it took up the mantle of
imperial interference with weaker nations, motivated by a sense of racial hierarchy and
economic might-makes-right, to do whatever served its own interests.

The Undead Don’t Die

Since the gothic is always about the past’s hold on the present, it is not surprising that
the globalgothic reveals the extent to which specifically the colonial past lingers in the
twenty-first century. No gothic figure makes that more obvious than the ubiquitous,
adaptable and indefatigable zombie. As a trope the zombie has served many purposes
and incarnated many anxieties, and has shuffled into the twenty-first century more
energised than ever. In fact, the zombie picked up a great deal of speed and ferocity as
it entered the new millennium, especially in its European iterations. Although origi-
nally a figure of Haitian folklore with roots in West Africa, brought over the Atlantic
with the enslaved victims of the Middle Passage, the zombie entered the popular imagi-
nation after the US occupation of Haiti (1915–34) mainly through Hollywood film.
As many scholars have noted, it is very much a monster child of war and American
imperialism. It stumbled through the American cinematic landscape of the 1980s and
1990s and seemed to be on its way out when English director Danny Boyle revived
the genre with his fast-zombie apocalyptic horror film 28 Days Later (2002). The phe-
nomenon of the fast zombie, although used in American films, caught on particularly
well in European and international productions, including France’s The Horde (2009),

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the German Rammbock (2010), the Spanish REC (2013), the Korean Train to Busan
(2016) and many others. In a previous essay, I have suggested that the fast zombie
is a particularly apt figure for postcolonial rage, but I would emphasise here that all
zombies – even slow ones – seem to signify colonial populations, or even the global
poor more generally, as a biopolitical phenomenon that is treated as if it were already
dead (Soltysik Monnet 2015b).
One interesting example of a war-themed globalgothic zombie story is Max
Brooks’s World War Z (2006).2 This zombie narrative is global in the sense that it
tries to take as its focus an international, even a geopolitical, perspective on a zombie
uprising. Written by an American, it inevitably circles back to North America far more
than any other region, but it nevertheless imagines the zombie as a global phenom-
enon, and, more interestingly, as a product of globalisation. Brooks locates the origin
of his zombie pandemic in China, and specifically the flooded ruins of an ancient
City of Ghosts in the Three Gorges Dam area. This dam, one of the largest and most
controversial modern industrial projects in the world, flooded an area of 630 square
kilometres and displaced over a million people (and killed over a hundred workers)
and represents to many people an arrogant and brutal example of human interference
with natural systems typical of the Anthropocene more generally. Making this area the
origin of the pandemic suggests that the zombie is a symptom arising from the excesses
of rapid modernisation, especially in the context of a globalised economy, as the novel
frequently comments on the detritus of pre-zombie life: discarded computers, tele-
phones, appliances and other electronic equipment that became instantly useless when
electricity failed and cities were overrun. Considering how the most useful tactics and
survival strategies required people to return to medieval low-tech skills and devices,
the novel uses China’s attempt at a Second Great Leap Forward as its bitterly ironic
comment on the concept of ‘progress’ and modernity.
The novel is ‘global’ also in the way it eschews any single narrator or protagonist and
features a wide array of voices from around the world on the model of Studs Terkel’s
oral history of World War II. In fact, World War II haunts this book almost more than
any other war, though military history and strategies make up for a large portion of its
content in general. Brooks’s characters are veterans of Iraq, Kosovo, the Iran-Iraq war
and even Vietnam, but World War II and its massive national mobilisations and also its
biopolitical logic are the real subtext of the novel. The nations that react most effectively
to the zombie crisis do so through huge national programmes which generally involve
sacrificing some large swathe of the population in order to save another. That this strat-
egy originates with a South African architect of apartheid is only one of many troubling
aspects of Brooks’s novel, though to his credit he seems well enough aware of this (the
character in question ends up insane from guilt, it appears). The novel tackles issues
like refugees, corporate exploitation of the pandemic, and planetary nuclear winter, and
shows the global map being significantly rearranged as a result of the zombie ‘war’:
Russia becoming a religious state, the West Indies becoming a ‘Federation’, Cuba becom-
ing the powerhouse of the new world order, and the US working closely with Mexico
and Canada, finally choosing to throw its weight behind a UN ‘multinational’ force
rather than a national one. Most interestingly, the workers on the bottom of the global
political hierarchy end up being the most skilled in the art of post-apocalyptic survival,
giving orders and lessons to their former bosses, the managers and formerly rich people
now become useless and helpless.

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Finally, a word about a novel that has appeared in several chapters in this volume
but clearly also needs to be discussed as a war novel: Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in
Baghdad. This hugely successful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s story is a mix of gothic,
horror, magic realism and local esoteric and mystical traditions, but most of all it is
a portrait of an occupied city spiralling into violence as different armed groups fight
each other and ‘[d]eath stalk[s] the city like a plague’ (Saadawi 2018, 6). The novel
takes place in a post-invasion Baghdad of 2005 where phone service has been dis-
rupted by American missiles, corruption is rampant, clueless foreign journalists prowl
the city, and daily car bombs make people’s lives into a living horror story. The cast of
characters includes people of many origins, ethnicities and religions, and the creature
itself, a composite of body parts retrieved after suicide bombings from around the city,
is a mix of many ‘diverse backgrounds – ethnicities, tribes, races and social classes’,
leading him to call himself the ‘first true Iraqi citizen’ (Saadawi 2018, 140). In fact, he
was created from the body parts gathered by Hadi, a junk dealer, and animated by the
spirit of a young security guard killed in a suicide attack on a hotel, who lost his way
in the first confusing moments after dying, and given a name by an old woman waiting
for the return of her long-lost son who mistakes the creature for him.
Like the novel itself, the corpse is a globalgothic hybrid, a child of local beliefs and
longings and Western literary tradition and the American war. One of the saddest and
most uncanny things about the novel is how the older characters have all gone slightly
mad from the loss of people they loved to previous wars or to the current bombings
(such as the old woman who lost her son to the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and Hadi,
who has lost his friend Nahem) while the young continue to die (like the twenty-two-
year-old security guard). Another poignant aspect to the horrific Frankenstein project
of the junk dealer is that he began collecting the parts in order to make a body that he
could give to the forensics department to be buried and treated with respect, an indict-
ment of the American occupation, where Iraqis died daily and pieces of their bodies
were left like trash in the streets (Saadawi 2018, 25). The creeping indifference to
human life and human dignity was one of the many consequences of the war, certainly
true of the American forces but gradually infecting the local authorities as well, as the
bombings become routine.
The escalating nature of killings under occupation is also a theme of the novel, in
addition to the rising desensitisation to death. The creature, called ‘Whatsitsname’,
murders people like Shelley’s monster, but initially only seeks revenge in the name
of justice for the people whose body parts he possesses. For instance, he murders a
former Baathist who was responsible for recruiting many young men who died in
the Iran-Iraq war. The creature soon has a small entourage of assistants and follow-
ers who believe in him and his mission. However, he discovers after a while that the
purity of his actions has been compromised, as he has had to replace his body parts
and increasingly the new pieces are of criminals and even his own victims, blurring the
line between revenge and murder. Furthermore, he realises that even the criminals are
victims in some ways, and that in any case his mission has become open-ended and
never-ending, a metaphor for the occupation itself.
Frankenstein in Baghdad has struck a nerve with readers and scholars alike because
of the way it weaves together a wide range of issues and characters that reveal the
complex fabric and history of the city of Baghdad. Above all, it shows the devasta-
tion wrought by the America invasion and the suffering of Iraqis under its hubristic

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 globalgothic and war 177

occupation. It also shows the resilience of ordinary Iraqis who have already endured
so many wars and tragedies in recent decades, with America and with its powerful
fundamentalist neighbour Iran. One could argue that these wars are part of the legacy
of British colonialism as well as consequences of American fossil-fuel dependency and
desire for control of oil production in Iraq. Using graphic body horror and gothic
tropes like madness, haunting and possession, Saadawi creates a work that is as hybrid
as Hadi’s creature and as eloquent in its tale of a society under siege by the forces of
American global imperial overreach.
To conclude, in the context of the current global economy and its colonial legacy
and ecological impact, gothic war stories compulsively return to the racial and fascistic
dynamics that animated twentieth-century conflicts around the world, and which are
being reproduced in the technologies and institutions involved in military violence today.
The globalgothic invites readers and spectators to reflect on the larger systems and power
dynamics that structure the contemporary world and its ongoing military conflicts (and
the haunting after-effects of those conflicts) in the twenty-first century, making visible the
underlying connections between colonialism, imperialism and racialism and the current
dynamics of global capital, neoliberalism, fundamentalism and war.

Notes
1. An allusion to the notorious report by Morley Safer in 1965 which showed soldiers setting
South Vietnamese villagers’ huts on fire with Zippo lighters.
2. The film version of the novel, directed by the German-Swiss Marc Forster, is less interest-
ing for this chapter, since it replaces the multi-perspective narration with the tired trope
of a white American father trying to reunite with his family, and adopts the fast-zombie
conceit, which largely strips zombies of their colonial and Caribbean ancestry and makes
them more into agents of seemingly apolitical contagion.

References
Anvari, Babak, director. 2016. Under the Shadow. London: Precision Pictures, 2017. DVD.
Blomkamp, Neill, director. 2009. District 9. Culver City: Sony Pictures. DVD.
———. 2017. Firebase. Vancouver: Oats Studios. Accessed 6 December 2022. https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Tm0V24IEHao.
Botting, Fred and Justin D. Edwards. 2013. ‘Theorising Globalgothic.’ In Globalgothic, edited
by Glennis Byron, 11–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Boyle, Danny, director. 2002. 28 Days Later. Burbank: Walt Disney Studios, 2003. DVD.
Byron, Glennis. 2008. ‘“Where Meaning Collapses”: Tunku Halim’s Dark Demon Rising as
Global Gothic.’ In Asian Gothic: Essays on Literature, Film and Anime, edited by Andrew
Hock Soon Ng, 32–45. Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland & Company.
Cimino, Michael, director. 1978. The Deer Hunter. Universal City: Universal Pictures Home
Entertainment, 2002. DVD.
Coppola, Francis Ford, director. 1979. Apocalypse Now. Los Angeles: Paramount, 1999. DVD.
Dahan, Yannick and Benjamin Rocher, directors. 2009. The Horde. Toronto: Entertainment
One, 2010. DVD.
De Palma, Brian, director. 2007. Redacted. New York: Magnolia, 2008. DVD.
del Toro, Guillermo, director. 2001. The Devil’s Backbone. New York: Criterion Collection,
2013. DVD.
———. 2006. Pan’s Labyrinth. New York: Criterion Collection, 2016. Blu-ray.

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 178 agnieszka soltysik monnet

Hardcastle, Anne E. 2005. ‘Ghosts of the Past and Present: Hauntology and the Spanish Civil
War in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone.’ In Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
15, no. 2 (Spring): 119–31.
Kren, Marvin, director. 2009. Rammbock [Siege of the Dead]. London: Revolver Entertainment,
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DVD.
Raaphorst, Richard. 2013. Frankenstein’s Army. Orland Park, IL: Dark Sky Films, 2013. DVD.
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Sang-ho, Yeon, director. 2016. Train to Busan. London: Studiocanal, 2017. DVD.
Sekely, Steve, director. 1943. Revenge of the Zombies. Los Angeles: Monogram Studios. Amazon
Prime Video.
Soltysik Monnet, Agnieszka. 2015a. ‘Night Vision in the Contemporary Horror Film.’ In Digital
Gothic: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon, edited
by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 123–36. London: I.B. Tauris.
———. 2015b. ‘The Transnational Zombie: Postcolonial Memory and Rage in Recent European
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the United States, edited by Christof Decker and Astrid Böger, 151–68. Heidelberg: Univer-
sitätsverlag Winter.
——— and Steffen Hantke, eds. 2016. War Gothic in Literature and Culture. New York: Routledge.
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Virilio, Paul. 2002. Desert Screen: War at the Speed of Light. London: Continuum.
Whittall, Abigail. 2020. ‘Nazi Horror, Reanimated: Rethinking Subgenres and Cycles.’ In New
Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, edited by Eddie Falvey, Jonathan
Wroot and Joe Hickinbottom, 167–82. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
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Wright, Angela. 2013. Britain, France and the Gothic, 1764–1820: The Import of Terror.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 11

Terrorist Gothic
Steffen Hantke

Gothic Terrorists: The Inside View

F or most of its history, Hollywood has indulged its audience’s fascination with
terrorism, creating, in the process, what Tony Shaw calls, with equal parts sardonic
humour and exasperation, ‘filmic “terrortainment”’ (Shaw 2014, 3). In The Whip
Hand (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1951), an idyllic American small town harbours
a conspiracy to create an army of terrorists. Their nefarious nature as communists is
barely distinguishable from the Nazi saboteurs that had been haunting wartime cin-
ema not too long before (e.g. Saboteur, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1942). The embedded
terrorist awaiting activation would make a spectacular comeback in The Manchurian
Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer, 1962). Its tortured eponymous assassin would
bring the vague anxieties lingering after the Korean War home to American politics; a
remake (dir. Jonathan Demme, 2004) would update the topic for the Bush years. While
cartoonishly evil terrorists would pop up in action films of the post-Cold War era (e.g.
James Cameron’s True Lies, 1994), the thriller, especially in its handling of interna-
tional espionage, would imagine characters more subtly seduced into terrorism (like
Damian Lewis’s case study of a POW-turned-assassin by way of Stockholm Syndrome
in the TV series Homeland, 2011). At his most vaguely defined – as in the television
series Jericho (CBS, 2006), in which it is never quite clear if terrorist attacks are to be
expected from within or without the eponymous Kansas small town – the terrorist is
pure paranoid potential, nowhere to be seen but present everywhere. Not only does
this vagueness, this lack of clearly defined definitional boundaries, make the terror-
ist a more monstrous figure, drawing on abjection’s scandalising power to transgress
categories and boundaries;1 by demanding updated concrete iterations to fit new con-
texts, this vagueness also retains the terrorist’s flexibility as a trope, allowing both the
left and the right to mobilise it within its respective political discourse. Hence, terror-
ists in Hollywood productions, and in American culture at large, are more ubiquitous
than these few examples would suggest. Their gothic features are also dramatically
amplified by genres ranging from male melodrama to the thriller and science fiction.
Whenever terrorists are at their most gothic, they are most deeply anchored in the
villainous iconography of popular culture.
In its focus on hyperbolic and tumultuous emotional affect, on anxiety and para-
noia, on destabilisation and violence, the default story about terrorism told in these
films follows one of the basic scripts of the gothic. It is also the story told by terrorism
itself, aiming for a particular array of emotional responses to spectacular violence in
pursuit of an agenda more abstract and simplified than the complex world which it

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aims to rewrite in blood. The gothic story about terrorism, and terrorism’s gothic story,
align with each other to create what one might call the terrorist imaginary, or the gothic
terrorist imaginary. First and foremost, it asks that we as readers or viewers inhabit
terrorism as if from the inside, a subjectivity to be temporarily shared rather than an
objective historical, social or political fact. From Suddenly (dir. Lewis Allen, 1954) to
24 (Fox, 2001–14), stories about terrorism grant as much on-screen time to the ter-
rorists preparing and executing their attacks as they do to showing law enforcement’s
efforts to track them down, stop them or apprehend them after the fact. Terrorists are
often flamboyant raconteurs, supervillains indicting themselves as they expound their
mad theories. In films like Red Dawn (dir. John Milius, 1984) or TV series like Falling
Skies (TNT, 2011–15), in which the terrorists are the heroes, this viewer interpella-
tion is even more emphatic. With this invitation into the perspective of the other, the
terrorist imaginary, at its most gothic, is different from stories about terrorism told by
sociologists, political scientists and historians. They do not inhabit terrorism, but stand
aside from it, examining it from a critical distance and, in the process, demystifying its
allure. In questioning and explaining terrorism’s motivation, they bar the path toward
the charismatic interiority of terrorism.
The barring of the path toward interiority, preventing us from inhabiting the terror-
ist subjectivity, applies especially to the question of the rationality, or the lack thereof,
of terrorist violence. While the dismissal of terrorist violence passing itself off as ratio-
nal is the easy path toward critical distance, even the acceptance of rational motives
for terrorist violence might fall short of genuine identification as long as it follows the
critique of a rationality pushed toward excess collapsing into its own opposite. From
crazy-eyed Russian anarchists to suicide bombers with visions of heavenly rewards
at one extreme, and cold-blooded scientists of political violence at the other, there
is no access to either one extreme fringe from the rational middle of the spectrum.
True rationality rides in the middle, resting in moderation achieved through balance
and nuance. The gothic story about terrorism never allows us access to identification
because the terrorist is either not rational enough or too rational.
Another aspect of the gothic that, in contrast to the critical distance demanded
by more ‘analytical’ forms of discourse, allows for the inhabiting of its interiority
in its affective regard is the fuzziness of the term itself, its instability, its ‘notoriously
elastic’ accommodation of meaning that is ‘freighted ideologically’ (Shaw 2014, 3).
In his own struggle ‘to find an objective and watertight definition [of terrorism] that
satisfies both legal and scientific criteria’, political scientist Alex Schmid quotes Walter
Laqueur’s resigned admission that after ‘“thirty years of hard labor there is still no
generally agreed definition of terrorism”’ (Schmid 2004, 395). Much political jargon
comes with a moral judgement attached, and thus serves well as a polemical indict-
ment launched against a political enemy. ‘Terrorist’ seems to be so ill-defined as to be
purely that – all connotation, stripped of nearly all denotative value. As the old adage
has it, one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter. But even beyond that,
the lines are blurry that distinguish between a terrorist and a guerrilla fighter, an insur-
gent, a saboteur, a secret agent, a fifth columnist, or even a serial killer, a spree killer
or a mass shooter. The terms proliferate around the politics of violence, its psychology
or sociology, or its specific historical context. At its furthest connotative reach, the
term might apply to a male mass shooter aggrieved over his true or imagined rejec-
tion by women, as a larger political ideology grounded in the misogynist agenda of a

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 terrorist gothic 181

nostalgic reactionary patriarchy provides a framework in which the personal appears

violently political. Like any terrorist with clear political motives, this shooter is
‘making a point’. Conversely, the term also captures the random and spectacular
nature of violence inflicted by nation states in the metaphor of ‘state terrorism’. In
recent years, this is best exemplified by the depiction and perception of US drone
warfare in the Middle East:

With the radical extension of the battlefield, drone warfare is implicated in the same
logic as the guerilla tactics of the terrorism against which the United States osten-
sibly deploys it. It too relies on a permanent and pervasive latency or imminence
of violence, shrouded in a mythology of the ‘targeted strike’, even though it is, in
reality, dependent on the arbitrary assignments of targets, the indiscriminate killing
of civilians, and the widespread dissemination of terror. (Hantke 2018, 1,410–11)

To the extent that terrorism depends on the discursive collaboration and dissemination
of its violent acts in the public sphere, journalistic discourse is likely to borrow gothic
conventions to dramatise terrorism. By contrast, proper ‘analytical’ discourse ideally aims
at establishing clear delineations between these terms. Unlike journalists, sociologists and
political scientists are tasked with differentiating between a drone operator and the terror-
ist on the ground in the drone’s crosshairs. Inhabiting the grey areas and overlaps between
the two, gothic discourse exploits the ambiguity and uncertainty they generate, and repro-
duces exactly the same discursive effects terrorism produces as a range of hyperbolic affects
(perhaps to the same extent that terrorism itself thrives on such ambiguities).
If the narrative of gothic terrorism encourages emotional identification over critical
distance, asking us to inhabit terrorism’s interiority rather than looking at it from the
outside, the gothic’s potential to serve as a useful means of understanding terrorism is
either severely limited, or it needs to be reframed in accordance with what it can and
what it cannot be expected to do. What it cannot do is provide the same analytical
labour that sociology, history and political science perform. This is another way of
asserting that none of these discourses are ever truly gothic in nature. What the gothic
can do, however, is fortuitously attuned to a dimension that is crucial to terrorism
itself. It can inhabit and thus examine and measure terrorism’s affective dimension:
the anxiety, allure and elation of terrorist violence, projected on to its acts and its
agents. And it can translate – just like terrorism itself – this affective experience, be
it individual or collective, into a spectacular discourse aiming for a larger audience, a
text to be produced, circulated and consumed. Its path to understanding is not that of
political science or historiography. It is not about a rational analysis of the terrorist.
It is not about understanding terrorists in the precise specificity of their historical situ-
ation. Unlike analytical discourse, the gothic has access to how popular culture sees
terrorists, to how we daydream and fantasise terrorists, how we turn them into mythi-
cal entities, larger than life.2

Terrorism and the Global: Spatial and Temporal Tactics

There are good reasons to ground a discussion of terrorism as a manifestation of the
globalgothic in the historical role and the popular culture of the US.3 With the US emerg-
ing from World War II into the ‘American Century’, as a global superpower contested at

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 182 steffen hantke

best, and only with a temporal delay, by the Soviet Union, all broadly conceived models
of globalism would have to be constructed with the US at their centre. To the extent
that this central position would also be part of the US’s self-image, most emphatically
perhaps in the immediate post-war years, terrorism would appear as a counterforce both
from without and from within. Unable to meet the massive American military machine
on its own terms, asymmetrical warfare against US imperialism has, not surprisingly,
often taken on the form of terrorism (in response, for example, to US involvement in the
Middle East, culminating in the attacks of 9/11), just as US support of indigenous resis-
tance to imperialist aggression (as in, for example, support of the tribally fragmented
resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989) has
fostered paramilitary structures relying on terrorist tactics.
Domestically, the conventional gothic story America would tell itself about terror-
ism is one of terrorists as other, as alien intruders, burrowing deep in the fabric of the
peaceful nation, planning and executing violent actions against this benevolent and
progressive nation because they, to paraphrase George W. Bush, ‘hate our freedom’.
Cast in this light, terrorism’s gothic overtones dominate the overall picture. It hardly
matters if they are motivated by an organised foreign ideology or by highly idiosyncratic
(and thus antisocial) motives, or if they are merely confused and misguided victims of
ideological seduction or incorrigible avatars of evil unresponsive to reason, pleading
and negotiation. Gothic terrorists are at the centre of a paranoia that, even before they
commit violent actions, already poisons society by the power of their suspected pres-
ence. Terrorism rewrites the quotidian world as a landscape of latent anxieties: cars
turned into car bombs, aeroplanes flown into high-rise buildings, explosives made from
fertilisers and household cleaners.
In this destabilised landscape, the gothic image of the alien in our midst would
cross historical demarcations without a hitch. World War II fears about Axis infiltra-
tors and saboteurs would transform effortlessly into Cold War fears about communist
sleeper cells and Soviet agents awaiting activation to conduct terrorist attacks. The
brief moment of post-Cold War confusion about the vanishing of familiar enemies
would quickly yield to the admission, largely suppressed during the Cold War by the
period’s rigid political binary, that global decolonisation following World War II had
created far more resistance to US global hegemony than the Soviet Union ever could,
which would now bloom into multiple terrorist origins throughout the world. While
many of these images would apply to the Middle East, it would be the attacks of 9/11
(2001) that would concretise them within the imagery of Islamic fundamentalism,
with non-aligned single agents as well as ‘terrorist states’ and entire global regions now
indicted as terrorist sponsors.
As in earlier periods, the gothic narrative would help to assign to terrorism the task
of reframing complex geopolitical changes as an emotionally compelling narrative, con-
verting the spatial nature of terrorist challenges to US global hegemony into a temporal
one. To the same extent that the US would function as the harbinger of progressive
social values, terrorists would be the ones trying to turn back the clock, demanding a
return to fundamentalist religious fervour, traditional social values and conservative
political power when faced with an American culture priding itself (at least in theory)
on a religious culture tempered by reasoned secularism, on social values favouring
equality and multiculturalism, and political power managed rationally through demo-
cratic principles. Measured against this vision of a progressive, enlightened agenda,

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 terrorist gothic 183

even homegrown terrorism would always disqualify itself as reactionary (1960s coun-
tercultural terrorism, like the Weather Underground, as a naïve political primitivism, or
ecoterrorism as a naïve oversimplification of pre-industrial life).
While the globalist ambitions of post-war US hegemony thus indict terrorism as a
nefarious attempt to turn back the clock, there is another gothic story about terrorism
in which the ideological implications of agency and temporality are curiously inverted.
This inversion can be traced back to the discrepancy in US thinking between the actual
historical position the nation occupies within the larger global community, and its ideo-
logically tinged self-perception. With the emergence of the US from World War II as the
dominant global superpower, American hegemony has been haunted less by opposition
from competing superpowers like the Soviet Union or China. Rather, the unease of sneak-
ing subversion or imminent attack has come, more often than not, from forces misaligned
with either side of this simplistic bipolar model, that is, from internal unresolved social
and political tensions or from the more local conflicts arising from Cold War decolonisa-
tion. These forces, even when aligned against hegemonic American interests, raise the
problem that the national imaginary of the US has never reached an easy accommodation
with the imperialist impulse it has harboured within itself from the beginning.4 Against all
empirical evidence, it has preferred to cast itself – even, or especially, in moments of vast
superiority – in the light of the scruffy underdog, outmanned and outgunned, going up
against superior foes. There is never a doubt in an American audience’s mind as to who
the Rebel Alliance is and who the Empire is in the Star Wars universe.
The historical precedent cited most frequently as the origin of this self-perception
is the US’s historical beginnings as a British colony and its armed struggle for first
economic and then more broadly political self-determination. During this heroic
struggle, turned into one of the nation’s central origin myths, Americans essentially
acted like terrorists against British occupational control. Too weak and disorganised,
at first, to qualify as an army to match British institutional power, American resistance
would depend on the improvisational and peremptory (rather than the systemic), the
local (rather than across-the-board mobilisation), and the symbolic (rather than prag-
matic military victory) – on, in other words, terrorist tactics. Even when American
forces were organised into more coherent military structures, meeting the British on
the battlefield, their tactics, according to national mythology, would still be more
informed by guerrilla warfare learned from Native American allies, a more individu-
alistic and flexible form of inflicting violence in tune with one’s status as a young
nation. While the historical veracity of this account of the Revolutionary War remains
to be adjudicated by historians, the story itself has remained a potent ingredient in the
national mix of beliefs not just about America’s past, but about its present and future.
All actual post-war global hegemony during the ‘American Century’ aside, America
hardly ever sees itself as the empire projecting force across continents and against all
indigenous regional or local obstacles in pursuit of its own interests. The US aircraft
carrier patrolling the shoreline of some rebellious or non-aligned developing nation is
never a sign of large-scale organised, institutional power. In its own mind and national
mythology, America is always the opposite of that: individualised to the point of per-
sonal atomisation, motivated by ardently embraced ideological beliefs (in ‘freedom’
and ‘democracy’, or even just in ‘free markets’), and wily in the application of force
against enemies that, for all their contradictory qualities, are always somehow insidi-
ously more powerful than itself.

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 184 steffen hantke

These two gothic narratives – ‘them’, the bad terrorists, versus ‘us’, the good
terrorists – align themselves with a generational narrative that translates global space
into a specific temporality. Whenever the terrorist is cast as an embedded foe threat-
ening America from the inside, the nation is seen as a benevolent paternalistic force
imbuing its project of globalisation with the spirit of enlightened progressivism. In
the complementary model, shared by both the extreme left and the extreme right,
the nation’s paternalism is cast in negative terms, as ‘the system’ or ‘the evil empire’,
against which the terrorist must struggle as a righteous and formidable champion
of individuality, democracy and ‘freedom’. The asymmetrical warfare at the heart of
terrorism dissolves the present moment in either the past or the future. In a Freudian
scenario of generational struggle, it either casts terrorists on the side of the patriarchal
order, arresting the progress of time or even turning back the clock to a better past, or
it finds them in the subsequent generation, gearing their efforts toward speeding up
time to bring about a better future. One scenario has the terrorist embrace globalism,
the other has him trying to hold it in check or reverse it.
Since the gothic in general does not have a fixed political position, or even a more
vaguely defined political affinity, popular culture tends to lean politically toward the
left or the right depending on whether it takes sides with the older or the younger
generation. It is conservative on the older, and progressive, or even revolutionary,
on the younger generation’s side. This is, unless the connotations are reversed, and
the older generation acts to protect the invaluable heritage of progressivism, against
which their unruly children are plotting their return to a better, simpler past. Within
this framework, it hardly matters how the generational axes align with progressive or
reactionary politics. What matters is that terrorists are always at odds with the present
moment. Either they are ahead of their time, deploying violence to hasten the arrival
of the future; or, they are behind the times, deploying violence to turn back the clock
and return to a better past.
This peculiar temporality of terrorism is positioned in regard to the global insofar as
globalisation is the umbrella under which historical forces have gathered within moder-
nity. Turning back the clock, then, means a return to an (imaginary) time before the
global, when national spaces were distinct, discrete and unique – a nostalgia for the pre-
global as manifested in regionalism and separatism (the Basques, Northern Ireland, etc.).
Hastening the arrival of the future, then, means the utopian anticipation of the complete
dissolution of regional or national spaces under the auspices of a global ideology operat-
ing across national lines (like the communist international). If globalism is the wave of the
future, this makes one form of terrorism progressive, the other reactionary.

‘It Could Be Tomorrow’: Bad Terrorists in Black Sunday (1977)

Directed by John Frankenheimer and based on a novel by Thomas Harris, Black Sunday
(1977) tracks the planning and execution of a terrorist attack and the parallel efforts of
an Israeli Mossad agent (Robert Shaw) and an American FBI agent (Fritz Weaver) to
track the terrorists and prevent the attack. The film’s elevator-pitch is likely to have been
the spectacular method of the attack – taking control of the Goodyear blimp covering
the Super Bowl championship game, loading the craft with a massive load of shrapnel-
rigged explosives, and detonating it at low altitude above the crowded stadium. Though
the attack is planned by the Black September organisation, arising from US involvement

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 terrorist gothic 185

in the Middle East by way of Israel as its regional client state, the actual attack is con-
ducted by an American co-conspirator (Bruce Dern) piloting the blimp itself. Mossad
and the FBI ultimately save the day, redirecting the blimp over the ocean, where the
device explodes without causing harm. Still the film’s final climactic sequence above
the football stadium succeeds in communicating the terror of the mass audience as the
descent of the weaponised blimp recodes the space of leisure, with football as the iconic
American sport, as a space of potential violence. Like the film’s tag line, ‘It could be
tomorrow’, emphasising the latent potential of terrorist violence across time, the space
of the football stadium is part of a larger gothic American landscape imbued with the
menace of latent violence.
The parallel plot of terrorists versus law enforcement agents finds its visual equiv-
alent in Frankenheimer’s use of split-screen throughout the film. It serves as the visual
literalisation of the doubling of characters on both sides of the legal line. Viewers
allowed into the terrorists’ point of view are anchored even more solidly in this sub-
jectivity by the film’s obvious fascination with the technology of destruction, and its
ingenious assembly and deployment. A key scene has blimp pilot Michael Lander
(Bruce Dern) and his Black September handler Dahlia Iyad (Marthe Keller), one of
those rare female operators within the world of terrorism, test the apparatus. This
gives Frankenheimer an opportunity to showcase its destructive force with a sublime
image of a shredded barn wall through which light enters the darkened frame in a
myriad of elongated pinprick flashes.
When it comes to the two central terrorist figures, the film shows little interest in
the background and motivation of Dahlia, revelling instead in her erotic qualities as a
femme fatale. We know little about her, except for a partially German origin (explaining
Keller’s strong German accent), and her devotion to Black September and its organisa-
tional structure. Its destruction during a Mossad raid both accelerates the speed of plot-
ting and offers personal vengeance as an immediate motive for her actions. In contrast,
the film devotes considerable attention to Michael Lander, essential to the plot for being
the Goodyear blimp’s pilot. He had been captured during the Vietnam War and tortured
by his captors, and his bitterness about his country’s failures is exacerbated by his status
as a veteran in the present day, humiliated and dismissively shuttled around among dis-
interested and lethargic state institutions. Exceeding the personal control exerted over
him by his handler Dahlia, Lander’s very own death wish aligns with the suicidal impli-
cations of the attack. Each one of these characters, in turn, injects a thematic aspect of
American foreign intervention into the story. With Lander and his broken psyche, the
Vietnam War has come home to America to wreak terrorist destruction, while Dahlia
openly declares that her mission is to carry the damage that US foreign policy has caused
in the Middle East back into the heart of civil society.
If this story about terrorism is, to paraphrase the Freudian concept, a return of the
historical and political repressed – with a Miami football stadium turning into war-
torn Lebanon or My Lai – then the interaction of the two historical reference points
complicates the intrusion of the global into the national even further. Mainstream
American narratives about the Cold War have always emphasised the binary between
US and Soviet interests. US Middle Eastern policy, like the one about Israel and its
regional neighbours, and Southeast Asian policy, like the one about Vietnam, have
thus framed regional conflicts as proxies of tensions between Cold War power blocs.
The kind of terrorism that emerges instead from Cold War decolonisation, embodied in

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 186 steffen hantke

Black Sunday by the broken Vietnam veteran and the vaguely cosmopolitan Lebanese,
calls these dominant narratives into question. Terrorist violence does not arise from
the comfortingly familiar and simplistic binary of the Cold War, but from the messy
patchwork and overlapping grey areas of local and regional conflicts, and even from
the lingering trauma of past conflicts on this improperly mapped battlefield.

‘This Is No Longer Our Planet’: Good Terrorists in Captive State

Directed by Rupert Wyatt and released in March of 2019 with the tag line ‘This is no
longer our planet’, Captive State dissolves the latency of violence inherent in American
geographic and temporal spaces as seen in Black Sunday, and instead imagines terror-
ism as a justified and even virtuous backlash to a far more nefarious systemic violence
preceding it. The film carries on the tradition of the ‘America under alien occupation’
trope that started with Red Nightmare (dir. George Waggner, 1957) and produced
such notable science fiction novels as Thomas Disch’s The Genocides (1965) and
Mankind Under the Leash (1966), and M. J. Engh’s Arslan (1976). Outside the narrow
confines of science fiction readership, the genre reached popularity on the big screen
with Red Dawn (dir. John Milius, 1984) and on television with Amerika (1987), and
then migrated largely into science fiction, where it continues to thrive with films like
They Live (dir. John Carpenter, 1988) and television series like V (NBC, 1984), Falling
Skies (TNY, 2011–15) and Colony (USA, 2016–18). All differences between individual
texts aside, the trope lays out a scenario in which the US has yielded to an overwhelm-
ing outside force – sometimes figuratively alien, sometimes literally so – and is now
under its permanent military occupation and political control. Depending on how far
back the original takeover has occurred, terrorist resistance against the occupiers is
sometimes openly military, sometimes more covertly arranged to launch espionage
and targeted assassination. The occupiers’ hyperbolic alienness serves as justification
for the use of terrorist violence against them. Special attention is always reserved for
traitors and collaborators; while their motives are commonly explored with varying
degrees of curiosity, empathy is generally denied, indicting collaboration as morally
more egregious than the actual occupation. Generating a Manichaean world in which
the lines between good and evil are clearly drawn, the trope invariably assigns an
underdog position to the ‘true Americans’, a position of relative powerlessness with
terrorism as the only available strategy of resistance.
As a recent case study of the trope, Captive State follows this playbook meticu-
lously. Set in Chicago not far in the future, it imagines the world after the successful
invasion and occupation of aliens referred to as the Legislators. Their government,
called the Legislative, executes its political will through the collaborative human gov-
ernment that calls itself the Unity government. Science fiction fans might complain
about the film’s sketchy world-building, which leaves the ultimate goal of the aliens as
unclear as the details of the original takeover. In the vague diegetic chronology of the
film, the occupation is already an established fact, so much so that the city of Chicago,
which houses one of the underground installations where the aliens actually live, is
rendered as a post-industrial zone of economic deprivation, crisscrossed by zones of
exclusion and layered privilege.
Terrorism enters this world through an armed uprising against alien occupation
years ago, a failed attempt that has led to the punitive razing of the Wicker Park

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 terrorist gothic 187

neighbourhood and the intensification of surveillance and control of the surrounding

population. This surveillance turns out to be justified, as remnants of the original ter-
rorist network are in the process of organising yet another attack on the aliens. The
terrorist nature of this attack is written into the political mantra of the conspirators,
repeated throughout the film: ‘Light a match, and ignite a war’ – the hope that a
violent act, sufficiently popularised and mythologised and thus more symbolic than
pragmatic, will lead to a popular uprising not only across the US but around the world
(the imagined origin and direction of the global spread is indicative of the almost
reflexive belief in the global primacy of the US). The film spends the first hour in a
ceaseless forward movement through the organisational activities of the terrorists, cul-
minating in the attack that has Chicago’s deputy mayor unwittingly carry a bomb into
a meeting with representatives of the alien Legislators. The success of the attack leads,
in turn, to the authority’s crackdown, in which police officer William Mulligan (John
Goodman) tracks down and systematically eliminates all members of the terrorist cell.
As the investigation implicates and discredits his superior within the law enforcement
structures of the city, Mulligan is promoted to the position of police commissioner, a
position that marks him for a direct meeting with the Legislators in his turn at the end
of the film. Briefly before this meeting occurs, the film reveals Mulligan to be one of
the ‘Greeks bearing gifts’ of which the aliens are repeatedly warned to beware. As he
descends to the aliens’ underground facility, he is shown to carry an explosive device
of even more devastating destructive power than the one used in the previous attack,
though at this moment it remains ambiguous whether he has been a co-conspirator
from the start or is simply an opportunistic terrorist. As the film fades out with
Mulligan triggering the suicide vest, the closing credits show the success of his suicidal
attack, as locations on the global map light up with reports about successful uprisings
against alien occupation. He has lit the match – the war has started.
Much of what Captive State has to offer – an offer that failed to gain enthusiastic
support from reviewers and audiences – is simply an unpacking of the basic trope
running through its genealogy, from Red Dawn to Falling Skies. The terrorists are
heroic freedom fighters, ready to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. Some of them
are motivated by traumatic loss of parents or loved ones, making their involvement
with terrorism ‘personal’ – an ideological turn that elevates vengeful anger to politi-
cal rationality. Current friendships and family relations, to the extent that they are
in conflict with their single-minded political pursuit, strain their moral conviction.
The terrorists’ internal struggle caused by this strain further legitimises their actions,
especially since their counterparts among the collaborators in the law enforcement
community show little of such moral ambivalence. Mulligan as the central character
is a case in point, as the final plot twist that reveals him to have been a terrorist all
along also reveals the persistent lack of affect to be the result of rational planning, the
camouflage beneath which his wrath has been carefully concealed.
The film is calibrated carefully between the human collaborators, who are visible
throughout the entire story, and the Legislators, their masters and overlords, who only
appear in a few scenes, all the more radically inhuman for being barely glimpsed in
blurry cutaway shots or concealed inside full-body armour. The film’s immediate ire
is thus reserved for the depravity of human collaboration, while its distancing of the
Legislators invites a more reasoned animosity. What is, one is to wonder, the command
structure through which orders are handed down from above? Among the film’s most

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 188 steffen hantke

impressive images is a wide shot of Lake Michigan, seen from the Chicago shore-
line, with massive alien structures towering over the waterline at a distance, menacing
and intimidating though their function is unknown. The architectural metaphor
renders the Legislators not individually, as bodies or subjectivities, but as forms of
organised activity, as institutions, massive and unassailably distant. Complementing
these gothic castles straight out of Walpole or Radcliffe is the Legislators’ vast and
mysterious underground tunnel system where the aliens themselves have set up camp
on Earth (the underground dungeon being another staple of the classic gothic). All
terrorist activity occurs, literally, in the shadow of these towering or burrowing struc-
tures, aided by law enforcement’s invisible yet ubiquitous surveillance networks that
penetrate urban spaces, individual buildings and, in the shape of implanted tracking
devices, human bodies.
What makes the film a revealing case study of the Terrorist Gothic in the year of
its release is its careful handling of the story’s allegorical subtext. Back in the days of
the Cold War, the trope of alien occupation and terrorist human/American resistance
was organised according to the simple, or simplistic, binary that neatly divided the
American self from its alien other. By way of a cartoonishly clichéd and hyperbolic
representation of ‘world Communism’, the Cold War’s global imaginary provided a
ready-made spatial and geographic index of the enemy’s otherness. By essentialising
otherness in the literalised metaphor of the space alien, science fiction allows for this
binary to continue even without the simplifying index of the Cold War. As the meta-
phor always leaves more of a margin for interpretive flexibility as a specific topical
reference, it is the fuzziness of the science fiction trope that makes the narrative in a
film like Captive State ambiguous and flexible enough to construct a more complex
artifice on its foundations. Who exactly are the Legislators supposed to be, and who
are the traitors to humanity helping them? And, in an age of a virtually delimited
global imaginary, how literally do we have to read their arrival from ‘outer space’, the
ultimate marker of their otherness?
At first glance, American political polarisation during the Obama and Trump years
appears to replicate the old Cold War binary. But while, during the Cold War, good
American terrorists, like the ones in Red Dawn and Amerika, were bombing and
assassinating evil Soviet occupiers, contemporary polarisation generates a binary that
could swing either way. Read from what qualifies in the somewhat attenuated politi-
cal landscape of American politics as the progressive left, the Legislators look very
much like the repressive state of ‘law-and-order’ President Donald Trump (mobilising
heavily armoured, militarised forces to beat down peaceful protests against, of all
things, heavily armoured, militarised state forces, etc.). Read from the conservative
right, the Legislators resemble the tyrannical oversight of the Obama administration
(administering the citizenry with an intrusive healthcare system, staging ‘false flag’
atrocities to justify the erosion of the Second Amendment, ‘deep state’ sleeper cells
subverting legitimate state power, etc.).
As much as the film’s enemy resonates with both ends of the political spectrum, so
does its portrayal of the terrorist. On one end, the film signals toward the conservative
right by identifying individual members of the terrorist network as former members of
the military (special horror is reserved for the newsfeed showing the withdrawal of all
US troops from around the world upon the aliens’ arrival), or as Catholic priests, made
homeless by the aliens’ demolition of all places of religious worship and decrees that

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 terrorist gothic 189

criminalise religious worship itself.5 Not surprisingly, the representatives of religion

and the military are both white males. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political
spectrum, the film takes great care to identify the righteousness of terrorist action by
planting signifiers of the progressive left. The deified leader of the first terrorist attack
against the Legislators is black, while other members of the cell organising the attack
at Soldier’s Field are female and Asian American; there is one white male member of
the group who first appears in fishnet stockings and high heels. In other words, the
terrorist cell striking at the aliens is a veritable rainbow coalition of patriotic, commit-
ted Americans.
While the film signals toward such interpretive openness – as if not to offend either
the Democrats or the Republicans in the audience – its immediate historical context
skews it inevitably to the right.6 Political protest from the left since the 1960s has
largely eschewed terrorist violence, leaving the right with only the spurious insinua-
tions about leftist politics serving as collaboration with the nation’s enemies, real or
imagined. Right-wing terrorism, meanwhile, has habitually assumed the guise of armed
insurrection, as manifest in the sustained presence of martial threats within libertarian
discourse, culminating in the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Within this
discourse, alien occupation is easily legible as metaphor for urban gentrification and its
larger-scaled corollary, the creation of economic and ecological sacrifice zones. True to
the metaphor in the film’s title, Chicago reads as the urban extension of rustbelt dein-
dustrialisation imposed upon a conquered, hijacked, expropriated state against which
only terrorist insurrection will do. Discursive continuity is achieved, as Republicans
took control of that state, by the radical application of Reaganite anti-state sentiment.
The result, during the Trump years, is, paradoxically enough, a state controlled by
a political elite that poses in opposition to the very state it controls, pretending to
dismantle its nefarious institutions as it strengthens their grasp in pursuit of a differ-
ent agenda.7 Captive State, with its celebration of the libertarian terrorist, wearing the
colours of the rainbow flag, reflects this political reality – either as a state of political
confusion (producing an anger no less radical for its lack of clearly defined targets), or
as a reflection of the US’s entrenchment of right-wing politics as mainstream, recasting
the terrorist as disenfranchised patriot living out a paramilitary fantasy in hand-to-
hand combat with actual members of military and law enforcement.

Conclusion: ‘America First’ and the Global Audience

If Captive State provides a snapshot of gothic terrorism at the time of its release, the film
suggests a curious withdrawal of the imagination from the global. It would be too easy
to chalk up this withdrawal to the much-touted Trumpian ‘America First’ rhetoric, since
American hegemonic ambitions have remained undiminished by a presidential rhetoric
aimed at stirring nationalist fervour unburdened by political substance. To the extent
that the alien other is framed somewhat ambiguously as a literal alien, and to the extent
that this alien serves primarily as a metaphor for the domestic political opponent in a
highly polarised ideological landscape, the film shows first and foremost an America at
war with itself. After the drop-off of actual foreign terrorist attacks within the US after
9/11, international terrorism seems to have reverted from an actual historical reality and
lived experience back to being merely a figure of speech. A Republican insinuating ter-
rorist affinities, sympathies or ideological beliefs about a Democrat, or vice versa, does

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 190 steffen hantke

not only devalue the term by playing fast and loose with the definition. It also helps to
disavow the rise in right-wing terrorism – from the Oklahoma City bombing (1995) to
the mass shootings in Las Vegas (2017) and El Paso (2019).8 While a film like Black
Sunday allows its viewers access to the terrorist’s point of view, the identification it offers
is an uncomfortable one. All identification with Bruce Dern’s character aside, the terror-
ist’s subjectivity is fractured and pathological. No such affective and critical distancing
goes on in Captive State as it glamorises terrorist violence as a heroic act of last resort
– imagine that, an American film glamorising suicide bombing! That film’s surface flex-
ibility is allowing identification from both ends of the political spectrum. If gothic texts
like Captive State mark a shift in American politics to the right, the global as a proper
dimension of right-wing politics seems to have largely vanished from the picture. And
comfortably so, if the abject failure at the box office of Dan Bradley’s Red Dawn remake
(2012) is any indication: imagining heroic American terrorists fighting an actual occupy-
ing force that does not come from outer space has become even more preposterous in
2012 than it was in 1984.9
Nonetheless, gothic films about terrorism are not done with the global. How
could they be when in the larger space of global distribution the US film industry
remains a force to be reckoned with? Global audiences will readily and happily con-
sume films like Captive State, whatever their significance to a domestic US audience
might be. Economically speaking, these global audiences might turn out to be Captive
State’s primary target, given the film’s poor performance at the domestic box office.
These audiences might come away with altogether different readings of the terrorist,
‘misreading’ the film in accord with their own eccentric position toward America and
its popular culture. For a film like Black Sunday, this has always included the scenario
in which a Middle Eastern audience might find itself represented by evil terrorists,
dispatched violently by an American hero to the applause of an approving audience.
After the boom decade following 9/11, however, Hollywood has been churning out
fewer films of this type. More interesting, therefore, are recent films like Captive State.
What might a Russian or Chinese audience’s response look like when confronted with
stories about terrorism in a setting that imagines the US vanquished and occupied, and
terrorist tactics and violence justified as an expedient or even heroic course of action
to American characters? Russian audiences might still project Chechen terrorism on
to the Black September plot in Black Sunday, just as Chinese audiences might uneasily
wonder about similarities between the film’s fictional terrorists and the backlash aris-
ing from the state suppression of Uighur nationalism. It seems unlikely that Captive
State would, in its turn, be read by these same viewers as an invitation to take up arms
in glorious terrorist resistance against a state captured and administered by an alien
elite. And so the only meaning left is that the end of the American Century is finally
near as irreconcilably divided American audiences applaud terrorist violence in a war
the nation is conducting against itself.

Notes
1. Though the gendering of popular representations of the terrorist is a topic too complex to
take on in depth here, the question of whether terrorists are male or female is an example
of the trope’s flexibility. Popular culture often imagines female terrorists as figures mascu-
linised by the violence they inflict, just as male terrorists are often feminised by the acts of

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 terrorist gothic 191

seduction, self-effacement and compliance required as part of their disguise. Stereotypical

as these gendered qualities are, the shifting subjectivities implied in such narrative explo-
rations often carry, in equal measure, repulsion and attraction for the audience. Keeping
these ambiguities in mind, this chapter will refer to ‘the terrorist’ primarily as male, unless
textual or historical examples make a specific point about terrorists being non-male.
2. It is important to note that the distinction between gothic and not-gothic does not run along
lines separating fiction from non-fiction. There are, after all, fictional accounts of terrorisms
that are not gothic in nature. What undermines the gothic view of the terrorist in fiction – a
view in which the terrorist, even when he is evil and destructive, is also somehow charis-
matic and attractive – are depictions of terrorists that aim to create fully individualised
and genuinely complex, three-dimensional characters (a view that dissolves the ideological
generality into a host of potentially self-contradictory specifics), or depictions of terrorists
as inefficient bumblers (i.e. satire, as in the film Four Lions (dir. Chris Morris, 2010), which
also features qualities of the first category).
3. Just as the emphasis on mainstream productions with strong affinities for popular cinematic
genres sidelines interesting independent films on terrorism, so does the focus on the US film
industry marginalise the historical experience with terrorism of such nations as West Germany
(Red Army Faction), Italy (Red Brigades), Northern Ireland (Irish Republican Army) and
Spain (Basque separatist ETA). Further work, outside the confines of this chapter, would have
to take on mapping the relative distance – historically and cinematically – between them and
Hollywood.
4. In an analysis prefiguring the experience of 9/11, Chalmers Johnson points out that terror-
ism, ‘strik[ing] at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable’
(Johnson 2000, 33), is symptomatic of the fact that the benevolent self-image of America
being free of the sin of imperialism is achieved mostly by conducting the work of empire in
secrecy. Whenever ‘victims strike back after a secret American bombing, or a U.S.-sponsored
campaign of state terrorism’ (Johnson 2000, 9), the obvious explanation that this constitutes
a form of blowback always figures as an outlier in the American political vocabulary.
5. The film might take its cue here from John Carpenter’s They Live (1984), which features
a similar cleric, back in the 1980s, with an easily understood link to South American
Liberation Theology – a topical reference that, in 2019, must be replaced with the largely
imaginary Democratic attack on religion (as in Fox News’s carnivalesque meme of ‘the war
on Christmas’).
6. A similar set of conservative tropes, albeit without the fluidity and ambivalence neces-
sitated by the paradoxical claim to both state power and its terrorist other during the
Trump administration, already occurs in the previous cycle of right-wing activism. From
the Revolutionary War symbolism, to the paramilitary insurrectionist fantasy, the Tea
Party movement found its way into ‘America under alien occupation’ entertainment. See
Hantke 2014.
7. It is difficult to determine whether the mantra of the film’s revolutionary uprising, ‘Light
a match, and ignite a war’, is deliberately echoing the propaganda slogan reiterated time
and again in Veit Harlan’s Nazi propaganda film Kolberg (1945), ‘The people rise up, the
storm is unleashed’ (‘Das Volk steht auf, der Sturm bricht los’). Considering the extent and
transparency with which Trumpian politics draws from extreme right-wing rhetoric (e.g.
the populist, nativist ‘America First’ slogan of the Lindbergh candidacy), it is perhaps not
without significance that Harlan’s film also imagines the mobilisation of civilians, in light
of the German Wehrmacht’s military failure toward the end of World War II, and their
heroic and entirely self-motivated deployment as terrorists fighting against an imminent
alien occupation.
8. This trend is supported by recent statistics on terrorist violence. A 2020 report, published
‘by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, found that white supremacist groups

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 192 steffen hantke

were responsible for 41 of 61 “terrorist plots and attacks” in the first eight months of this
year, or 67 percent’ (Gross 2020).
9. Reviewing Amerika, the 1987 mini-series about America under Soviet occupation, John
O’Connor’s main critique (‘The root idea – that the United States would simply crumble
from within because of a national moral flabbiness – is monumentally implausible’) seems to
pave the way to the preferred mode of aliens being from outer space. See O’Connor 1987.

References
Black Sunday. 1977. Dir. John Frankenheimer. Perf. Bruce Dern and Marthe Keller. Paramount.
Captive State. 2019. Dir. Rupert Wyatt. Perf. John Goodman and Jonathan Majors. Participant
Media.
Gross, Jenny. 2020. ‘Far-Right Groups Are Behind Most U.S. Terrorist Attacks, Report Finds.’
New York Times, 24 October. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/us/domestic-terrorist-
groups.html.
Hantke, Steffen. 2014. ‘Aliens versus Tea Party Patriots: Falling Skies and the Post Apocalyptic
Survival Narrative in the Age of Obama.’ The Journal of Language, Literature and Culture
61, no. 2 (August): 117–32.
———. 2018. ‘Armchair Adventurers: Technology on the Global Battlefield in Films about
Drone Warfare.’ The Journal of Popular Culture 51, no. 6: 1,398–414.
Johnson, Chalmers. 2000. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire. New
York: Henry Holt.
O’Connor, John J. 1987. ‘Amerika – Slogging Through a Muddle.’ New York Times, 15 February.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/02/15/arts/tv-view-amerkia-slogging-through-a-muddle.html.
Schmid, Alex. 2004. ‘Terrorism – The Definitional Problem.’ Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 36, no. 2: 375–419.
Shaw, Tony. 2014. Cinematic Terror: A Global History of Terrorism on Film. London: Bloomsbury.

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 12

Neoliberal Globalgothic: The Trump

White House, the Alt-Right and the
Long-Heralded Death of the Dream
Linnie Blake

The United States is arguably the world’s oldest existing democracy. Its people benefit
from a vibrant political system, a strong rule-of-law tradition, robust freedoms of
expression and religious belief, and a wide array of other civil liberties. However, in
recent years its democratic institutions have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan
manipulation of the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice sys-
tem, flawed new policies on immigration and asylum seekers, and growing disparities
in wealth, economic opportunity, and political influence. (Freedom House, 2019)1

E scalating economic inequalities in the United States, and consequently across

the globe, can readily be traced to that nation’s 1980s adoption and international
promulgation of neoliberal economics. Concertedly undermining the power of trade
unions to maintain worker incomes whilst exporting manufacturing industry abroad
and slashing health, education and welfare budgets, neoliberalism promised a ‘trickle-
down’ of wealth to the poorest in order to justify massive cuts in corporation taxation
and taxes levied on the very richest. Leaving swathes of the United States a post-
industrial ‘rustbelt’, neoliberalism thus dispossessed generations of the core precepts
of national ideology: the equality of all Americans under a democratic system of gov-
ernance, opportunity for social and economic advancement, and judicial impartiality
for all.
In the light of this it is entirely unsurprising that neoliberal economics has signifi-
cantly impacted discourses of national identity in the United States and consequently
mass culture’s fictive representation and exploration of what it now means, in a global
neoliberal context, to call oneself an American. Those cultural products that adopt
the conventions of the gothic mode to engage creatively with the contemporary status
quo are particularly pertinent in this respect, a new form of Neoliberal Gothic having
emerged that is explicit in its exploration of the human cost of post-industrialisation,
governmental abnegation of responsibility for national welfare, and the fragmenta-
tion and polarisation of society by ethnic group, class and region.2 This chapter will
explore, therefore, a number of Neoliberal Gothic texts of the Trump presidency:
American Horror Story: Cult (2017) and The Handmaid’s Tale (2016–), both tele-
vision series, and the films Us (2019) and the Purge franchise (2013–18). This is
to demonstrate the ideologically riven state of the forty-fifth president’s America in

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 194 linnie blake

which the internet has linked hitherto geographically disparate individuals behind a
wall of cyber-anonymity and incited, in the process, highly polarised popular protests
that have ranged from demands for civil rights to out-and-out domestic terrorism. In
my analysis of these texts I will demonstrate, in other words, how the 2016 election
of Donald Trump consolidated neoliberalism’s forty-year dissolution of the American
social contract: oppositional factions, distinguished by biological sex, ethnic differ-
ence, class divergence and regional variance, now fighting it out as to what it now
means to call oneself an American in a global economy where individual and collec-
tive survival is far from assured.3
The campaign that led to the election of Donald Trump speaks volumes about the
world neoliberalism made. Billionaire and TV celebrity Trump cunningly positioned
himself as a Washington outsider determined to ‘drain the swamp’ of governmental cor-
ruption, extricate the nation from foreign entanglements, build a great wall along the
nation’s southern border, deny entry to people from countries associated with terrorism
(aka Muslims), repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and create twenty-five mil-
lion new jobs. None of these happened during the lifetime of his single term, of course,
but all were policies that spoke to forty years of free market economics – specifically
precarious employment and housing, health inequality, and the fear that immigrants
would both exacerbate crime and take jobs away from the native born. Trump’s pitch,
therefore, was to take a rhetorical stance against the impact of globalised capital on the
lives of ordinary Americans, and his rhetorical pandering to the ‘good people’ of the eth-
nonationalist right encapsulated this quite perfectly. Trump therefore positioned himself
as the only man willing to turn back the tide of globalised economics, the proto-fascistic
‘Make America Great Again’ strapline bespeaking a nostalgic yearning for the halcyon
days of America as a white, Christian nation, when the American Dream promoted
social mobility underpinned by strong economic growth, every generation became richer
than their parents, and property ownership was an attainable aspiration.4 Like Reagan,
another Republican keen to evoke the idyll of the Eisenhower years in his campaign
promises, Trump improbably allied himself with Protestant Evangelicalism, which
vaunts the family as society’s central institution and affirms traditional gender roles
within it, whilst paying lip service to the primacy of whiteness. This culturally regressive
ideology was inflected by Trump with a modern form of isolationism that harked back
to the American nineteenth century and simultaneously marshalled post-9/11 terrors in
promising to keep the country safe from foreign influence and attack. Making America
Great Again, in other words, was a largely rhetorical assault on the economic and cul-
tural fluidity of the free market globalism as it impacted the lives of ordinary Americans.
But it was not a concerted policy-driven assault on the precepts of neoliberal economics
as practised by the United States at home and abroad. The mission to Make America
Great Again, through the imposition of trade tariffs on China and others, was not, there-
fore, a repudiation of the United States’ status as global driver and indeed beneficiary
of neoliberal economics. It was a populist recognition that those Americans who had
been negatively impacted by the invisible hand of the market now needed to be placated.
Attacks on the flourishing economies of the East and on the free movement of people
(particularly from Latin America and the Islamic world) played well with the electorate,
of course. But Trump’s ‘America First’ policy was never a meaningful assault on neo-
liberalism itself, merely a performative protectionism that consolidated exceptionalist
ideology whilst offering nothing in the way of structural change.

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 neoliberal globalgothic 195

As I have intimated elsewhere, all this is perfectly captured by Ryan Murphy in

the seventh instalment of the TV series American Horror Story.5 Subtitled Cult, the
series takes place in the fictional suburb of Brookfield Heights, Michigan, in the period
immediately following Trump’s 2016 election and centres on a cult of killer clowns
who stalk an affluent suburban neighbourhood. The clown metaphor is, of course, well
chosen in that it enables Murphy’s highly affective resurrection of Twisty the Clown,
a psychotic serial killer from the earlier, 1950s-set series Freakshow (2014–15). More
importantly, however, it also evokes the common media caricature of Trump himself as
foul-mouthed killer clown, encapsulated in Matt Taibbi’s account of life on the Trump
election trail: Insane Clown President (2017). Cult, in other words, unleashes all the
carnivalesque proclivities of the Trump campaign on its audience, illustrating how, in
Taibbi’s words, Trump’s ‘pussy-grabbing vulgarity and defiant lack of self-awareness’
made him the perfect reflection of ‘the rot and neglect of the corrupted political system
he conquers’ for ‘a system unable to stop this must be very sick indeed’ (Taibbi 2017,
xxxv). For after forty years of neoliberalism, ‘very sick’ is an apt description of the
American body politic.
The series accordingly opens with a pre-credit montage of violence on America’s
streets and Trump actually proclaiming ‘I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any voters’. His promises to ‘build a great,
great wall on our southern border’ and ‘remove the rust from the rustbelt’ are signifi-
cant, of course. Both bespeak a popular distrust of the global economy, and of the
mobility of both goods and people that go along with it, whilst illustrating the real
economic hardship experienced by 99 per cent of Americans who continue to await
trickled-down wealth – many of whom would succumb to the Republican candidate’s
shocking claims and outlandish promises. Accordingly, the community of Brookfield
Heights is appropriately divided, the warring factions comprising blue-haired Kai
Anderson, a Trump supporter who greets the news of his election in the parental
basement by shouting ‘the revolution has begun’, ‘fuck you world’ and ‘USA! USA!
USA!’, and Ally, a married lesbian restaurateur and mother of son Ozzy, who refuses
to believe the election result ‘until I hear Rachel Maddow say it; she’s the only one
I trust’ (7.1).6 Across the series Kai and his band of murderous clowns will terrorise
first Ally and then the entire community, illustrating in the process how neoliberalism
deploys fear as a means of social control. For as Kai argues in the City Council cham-
bers, Americans have been frightened since 9/11, embracing their terror and, in the
process, giving politicians the ability to take their place ‘at the head of the evolutionary
table to shepherd the weak into the chosen promised land of truth and freedom’ (7.1).
Tom Chang, Ally’s friend and neighbour, may mock Kai as one of the ‘4Chan guys’
who feels ‘empowered to join the rest of us in civil society now that Poppa Bear Trump
is telling you it’s OK’, but he is mistaken in believing that the ‘temporary intifada’
(7.1) of the alt-right is nothing to be afraid of. Within a few scenes he and his wife are
slaughtered and Kai takes his place on the City Council. This is an appropriate role, of
course, given the Patriot movement’s belief that the only legitimate form of US govern-
ment exists on a local level.
Thus channelling the impact of neoliberal disinvestment in US infrastructure on
working men, Kai begins his murderous spree with the proclamation that ‘there is
nothing more dangerous in this world than a humiliated man’ (7.1): ‘you’ve got to give
a humiliated man a chance to redeem himself in his own eyes or else he’s at risk to be

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 196 linnie blake

drawn into darkness, like Germany after World War One’ (7.2). He then sets about
persecuting Ally as an avatar of bourgeois white liberalism with a series of violent
and murderous pranks that range from clowns having sex in the supermarket to the
slaughter of her friends and neighbours. Indicating just how frightened Americans have
become under neoliberalism, Kai’s actions reactivate Ally’s coulrophobia, claustropho-
bia and tropophobia.7 Having incited fear, then, Kai proceeds to inflame the racist
sentiments of the local population, throwing a condom full of urine at migrant work-
ers and ensuring that the beating that ensues is filmed for broadcast on the local news.
This, in turn, enables him to claim, in truly Trumpian style: ‘I grew up in this town and
I remember when our communities were safe but they’re not anymore.’ For Kai, too,
Mexicans are little more than drug dealers, ‘criminals and rapists’ (7.1).
As Cult is all too aware, then, the Trump election campaign and indeed the Trump
presidency were themselves underpinned by a decidedly political deployment of post-
modern philosophy that had emerged under neoliberalism and functioned, as I have
argued at length elsewhere, as its manifestation in the cultural sphere. Under Trump, of
course, the most obvious illustration of this was his cavalier disregard not only for the
truth of particular situations (such as the size of the investiture audience) but for the
very concept of truth itself. This agnotological turn took the form of a range of unattrib-
uted and unverifiable ‘alternative facts’ that emerged before and during the presidential
campaign and utterly proliferated afterwards, often manifesting as what Muirhead and
Rosenblum have called ‘conspiracism’ (2019): that Obama was born in Kenya, that
the Muslim Brotherhood were conspiring to impose sharia law on America, and that
Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats engaged in acts of child sexual abuse
and sacrifice in the basement of a Washington pizzeria.8 Needless to say, many of these
theories find their way into Kai’s own election strategy: ‘You are 40 per cent more likely
to be victim of a violent crime committed by an illegal immigrant,’ he asserts, arguing
that ‘murder and rape rates are higher than they’ve ever been’ (7.2). That his source is
Facebook bothers him not one iota.
Like the alt-right more generally, moreover, Kai also demonstrates a dark humour
as legitimation of his brand of American fascism that, as George Hawley has argued
(2017), is more likely to treat the Holocaust as a joke than to deny it ever happened.
Thus Kai celebrates Trump’s election by putting a pack of Cheetos in the blender and
painting his face with the resultant orange powder. Later, his sense of irony comes to
the fore, when a woman with a fear of caskets (feretrophobia) is sealed into a coffin
and left to die. Similarly Ally, whose wokeness stretches to a vehement condemna-
tion of ‘gendered names for pets’, is even manipulated into murdering her Mexican
employee Pedro and being branded ‘a lesbian George Zimmerman’ (7.2) in the pro-
cess.9 Thus Cult captures the culture of joyous ‘political incorrectness’ that charac-
terised both Trump’s election campaign and the noticeboards of the alt-right internet
where freedom of speech is equated with the right to offend and all who object are
mocked as ‘social justice warriors’ or ‘snowflakes’.
So, although the series descends into some rather silly identity politics when it is
revealed that Kai only became politically active at the behest of his court-mandated
anger management counsellor Bebe Babbitt (a former associate of Valerie Solanas,
who believes Trump’s utter misogyny will hasten a war between the sexes), its analysis
of the ideologically fragmented nature of American society remains on point.10 Cult
captures beautifully, for example, the ‘sex realism’ of the men’s rights movement that

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 neoliberal globalgothic 197

sees women’s equality as a direct threat to white masculinity. And in counterpoising

the transgressive carnivalesque of the new right and the anodyne joylessness of liberal
virtue signalling, it provides its own explanation for both Trump’s popular appeal and
the electorate’s disinclination to vote for Clinton, whose association with neoliberal-
ism far outweighed any electoral appeal to liberals granted by her biological sex.11
As his performance outside St John’s Episcopal Church on 1 June 2020 illustrated,
Trump had no difficulty wielding the Bible whilst violently curtailing the First Amendment
rights of those protesting against the historic enslavement and contemporary judicial mur-
der of African Americans.12 Such an overt display of Protestant religiosity is nothing new,
of course, being a key PR component of every neoliberal presidency since Reagan. Whilst
there is nothing puritanical about pussy-grabbing Trump himself, then, it remains the
case that his presidency has been characterised, in the words of the Global Justice Center
(2020), by ‘a systematic effort to undermine reproductive choice and bodily autonomy’
with ‘well-documented detrimental impacts on sexual and reproductive health, HIV and
AIDS services, and maternal mortality’ both nationally and internationally. And it is the
cynical hypocrisy of the American right’s neoliberal deployment of fundamentalist Chris-
tian scripture in its most misogynistic form that the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale takes as its subject.
Drawing consistently on the imagery and themes of the Female Gothic, in which
the protagonist finds herself imprisoned within patriarchal structures that she must
first understand and subsequently escape, the HBO adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s
novel of 1985 offers a highly gothic rendering of Gilead, the nation that emerges
from a fundamentalist Christian coup that replaces the United States with a theocratic
autocracy. Complete with shocking scenes of bodily mutilation, sexual humiliation
and patriarchal supremacism that would not appear incongruous in a gothic novel of
the eighteenth or nineteenth century, the series thus pairs Gilead and the United States
and deploys the metaphor of women’s subjugation to explore the dividedness of the
contemporary USA. For in Gilead the commodification of fertile women that under-
pins patriarchal capitalism itself is actualised – the Handmaids being both hoarded
by the ruling classes and exchanged with other nations for goods and services. Thus
predicated on the use and exchange values of fertile women, Gilead makes manifest
the ways in which women, as Shulamith Firestone argued (1970), exist as a sex class,
oppressed by the men who exploit their reproductive abilities by sequestering them
into the domestic sphere. In Gilead, moreover, the ‘branding’ of the act of impregna-
tion as ‘The Ceremony’ is significant, being a ‘nice and godly’ euphemism designed
to placate the wives of the ruling Commanders who must participate in their hus-
bands’ monthly rape of another woman, but who will, given an appropriately religious
nomenclature, ‘eat that shit up’ (1.8) as being the will of God. Branding is significant,
therefore, for as Naomi Klein argued in No Logo (2001), it has been the branding of
generic goods that has been a key tool of neoliberal globalism, ensuring global recog-
nition of specific products whilst conferring a certain legitimacy upon them, however
overpriced. As Christian Fuchs has argued (2017), Trump himself is ‘not just a presi-
dent, candidate and capitalist’, moreover, but a brand that constantly ‘celebrates itself
and thereby accumulates capital, power and followers’. Gilead may, in other words,
be a fundamentalist dictatorship but it has emerged from the neoliberal world and has
appropriated neoliberal capitalism’s strategies of hard and soft power, ranging from
beatings, incarceration and execution at one end of the spectrum to the ideological

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 198 linnie blake

interpellation of its citizens through spectacles and ceremonies at the other – all the
while encouraging adherence to Gilead as a brand. It is further notable that the fun-
damentalist patriarchy of Gilead and the racist misogyny of the Trump brand appeal
to the very demographic that has been most disadvantaged by the neoliberal system of
economic and hence social organisation.
This is most clearly seen in the figure of Nick Blaine, who was brought into the
Gileadean inner circle as a casualty of neoliberal economics ripe for radicalisation.
The closure of the steelworks in which he worked, his brother’s addiction issues and
his caring responsibilities in the absence of adequate health and social care all made it
difficult for Nick to obey the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism and refashion him-
self as endlessly mutable modality of the free market. For as Commander Price, in his
earlier incarnation as job centre adviser, puts it, ‘It’s hard making it in a society that
only cares about profit and pleasure’ (1.8). In the same way that it is understandable
why the disenfranchised may have chosen the Washington outsider Trump for POTUS,
it is entirely fathomable that Nick should join the Sons of Jacob – a group dedicated to
cleaning up the country in much the same way as Trump promised to make America
great again. For both Sons of Jacob and Trump electorate bespeak a populist backlash
against the neoliberal status quo that has been cynically co-opted by the very forces
of exploitation and oppression. Price’s reassurance that Nick is ‘not alone’ (1.8) is
the final coup de grâce – social solidarity being precisely that which is lacking in a
neoliberal culture that first removes traditional male employment and its attendant
opportunities for sociality and solidarity and then demonises the unemployed as shift-
less failures. Of course, the Sons of Jacob offer no more systemic change than did
Trump because the class system of the world before is left very much intact – though
with rather different people at the top of the pile. The Gileadean revolution is not as
revolutionary as it purports to be, in other words, precisely because it is based on the
premise that making ‘the world better . . . never means better for everyone. It always
means worse for some’ (1.5). Only systemic change that identifies the economic cause
of oppression and addresses the ways particular groups are differentially impacted by
capitalism can really make the world better, the series intimates. And Nick does seem
to come to recognise this. In time he will defy his Commander, first in his liaison with
June and later in her rescue – allying himself with one who is more oppressed than
he but whose oppression is testament to his own lack of freedom in a pronouncedly
unequal world.
If the motivations of The Handmaid’s Tale’s heroine June Osborne change as the
series progresses, from surviving Gilead to escaping it to destroying it, this self-same
trajectory is echoed in a number of cinematic offerings in which the protagonist is
hunted by those richer, more powerful and usually whiter than themselves. Coming in
the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which began with a collapse in mortgage-related
securities in the United States that led, in turn, to the collapse of the US and in turn
the global financial system, the Purge film franchise thus focuses on both the utter
precarity of neoliberal life and the psychological legacy of feeling unsafe within one’s
home, one’s community and one’s nation. Thus The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy
(2014), The Purge: Election Year (2016) and The First Purge (2018) address systemic
inequality by imagining another America in which fundamentalist Christianity is cyni-
cally deployed by a neoliberal party rebranded as ‘born again’ to both oppress those
deemed surplus to contemporary economic requirements and inculcate them further

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 neoliberal globalgothic 199

with the ideology of the markets. The party is the New Founding Fathers of America
(NFFA), elected to power in 2014 in the wake of economic collapse and promising
fiscal, psychological and spiritual recovery whilst planning to make the nation great
again through the eponymous Purge: an annual event in which all crime is legal for a
twelve-hour period during which emergency services, including law enforcement, are
suspended. By 2022, the opening title card of the first film tell us ‘Unemployment is
at 1%. Crime is at an all-time low. Violence barely exists.’ The reasons for this are
explained across the life of the franchise, opening with the affluent Sandlin family who
live in a flag-flying gated community near LA. Father James, an apathetic individualist
interested only in protecting his own family and profiting from the desire of others to
do the same, manufactures state-of-the-art security systems and these, to the chagrin
of his neighbours, have made him conspicuously wealthy at their expense. It is for
this success that the family are ultimately punished by the community, for although
terrible acts ‘are not supposed to happen in our neighbourhood’, the affluent are both
profoundly vicious and keen to ‘do our duty as Americans’ in killing the object of their
envy: the younger neighbours wearing the school uniforms of the privately educated
lest viewers fail to grasp the film’s critique of class privilege. Released during Barack
Obama’s second term, The Purge is an effective home invasion horror with a subtext
of ongoing wealth inequality in the United States, but its critique of the misdeeds of the
rich is confined to its caricature of wealthy suburbanites. The news report that plays
over the final credit sequence may gleefully tell us that sales of weapons and security
systems have caused the stock market to surge as fearful Americans seek to protect
themselves from their neighbours, but there is no structural critique of American capi-
talism or engagement with the lives of those beyond the gated communities of the rich.
The Purge: Anarchy takes a more concertedly political stance, focusing on the lives
of the poor who, in the words of Black Panther encoded revolutionary Carmello Jones,
‘can’t afford to protect ourselves’. The Purge, it is now observed, has nothing to do
with ‘containing crime to one night and cleansing our souls by releasing aggression’
and a very great deal to do with ‘money’. Focusing on those who find themselves out
on the streets of LA on Purge night, the film presents us with another highly divided
America: rich whites paying money to poor people who volunteer to be murdered as
spectacle, securing, in the process, financial stability for their children. Meanwhile the
NFFA sends death squads into impoverished neighbourhoods to ensure the death toll
amongst the poor meets government expectations. Certainly, there is some gratifying
slaughter of the 1 per cent here, and a promise from Jones that change will come now
the upper classes are bleeding. But the final credit sequence directs our attention less to
American poverty and more towards the necessity of gun control – ‘America the Beau-
tiful’ playing over footage of guns being loaded, children practising their shooting,
dollar bills and violence on the nation’s streets. This is juxtaposed, in pastoral mode,
to images of the beauty of the American landscape and Mount Rushmore’s reminder
of the efficacy of US democracy. That the film ends with an image of the American
flag made up of guns and knives underscores the message: violence is intrinsically and
inherently American.
For all Jones’s revolutionary passion, there has been no meaningful social change
in the seventeen diegetic years between The Purge: Anarchy and The Purge: Election
Year. But in the real United States a great deal had changed, the film being shot in
September 2015 as Trump and Clinton squared up to each other and voters became

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 200 linnie blake

increasingly polarised, not least on the issue of gun control. Under the oddly familiar
strap line ‘Keep America Great’, the film is set in Washington and focuses on Sena-
tor Charlene Roan, a rather softer, more liberal and decidedly more likeable Hillary
Clinton who is running for President on an anti-Purge ticket, having seen her entire
family murdered in childhood. Her opponent is the NFFA’s Minister Edwidge Owens,
a decidedly Trumpian figure, who revokes immunity for government officials on Purge
night in an attempt to get her killed: election rigging with a vengeance. Thus captured
by neo-Nazi paramilitaries, she is taken to a fortified cathedral to be sacrificed by the
NFFA whilst ‘murder tourists’ from around the world roam the streets, heavily armed
and dressed for the occasion; George Washington, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty
all appear prominently. Fleetingly we see that the Lincoln Memorial, memorial of the
last president to preside over an America Civil War, has been daubed with blood. Roan
is rescued in the nick of time by revolutionaries who manage to kill both President and
NFFA leader, and her landslide victory two months later promises the end of the Purge.
But in a manner that directly foreshadows the events of January 2021, when Trump
supporters stormed the Capitol protesting against the presidential election result, the
film ends with a news report saying that NFFA supporters are violently protesting
against the end of the Purge and demanding its reinstatement.
For all the outraged liberalism of the earlier films, then, it is the fourth film of the
franchise and the first to be directed by an African American that is the most signifi-
cant – precisely because it is the clearest in its delineation of an America at war with
itself and its attribution of blame to the world made by neoliberalism and legitimated
by the election of Donald Trump. Released in 2018, the second year of the Trump
presidency, The First Purge is a prequel that returns us to 2014, when the NFFA took
the reins of government and first argued that participation in a night of legal violence
was a patriotic means of cathartic self-expression. Rolling out an experimental version
of the Purge amongst the predominantly black and Hispanic communities of Staten
Island, the NFFA incentivised residents to stay with a $5,000 payment, with additional
monies should they actively participate in slaughtering their neighbours and film it
via contact lens cameras. The action then revolves around the community activist
and anti-Purge campaigner Nya, her brother Isiah, and Dimitri, her former boyfriend,
now a local drug dealer and gang leader whose journey from rapacious criminality
(‘you destroy this community 364 days a year,’ says Nya) to revolutionary spans the
film. Thus the heroes are all black (Nya at one point defending herself from a sexual
predator she calls a ‘pussy grabbing motherfucker’) and its villains are white: a motley
collection of armed white supremacists, Klansmen and Nazis, complete with robes and
SS uniforms. There is even a church massacre that echoes the actions of Dylann Roof,
who killed nine African American members of a Bible study group in a Charleston
church in 2015 in the hope of igniting a race war. The film ends with the progenitor of
the Purge, Arlo Sabian, reading a statement that declares the first Purge a success and
intimating that a nationwide Purge may take place as early as next year.
In their shift from broadly liberal allegory of America’s love affair with the gun
to their inescapable condemnation of Trump, his racist, misogynistic populism and
the murderous domestic terrorism of his most ardent disciples, the films in the Purge
franchise illustrate the death of consensus politics in the United States and under-
score the ways in which ethnic minority communities continue to be criminalised by a
neoliberal economic model that promotes the interests of the already-rich over those

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 neoliberal globalgothic 201

systematically deprived of the opportunities vaunted in nationalist myth. And as I

have written elsewhere, the gothic offers a flexible conceptual matrix whereby writers
and directors may depict the horror of such a world. Thus, films like Jordan Peele’s
Get Out (2017) deploy the conventions of the Female Gothic to point to the invidious
position of African Americans in the contemporary United States (Blake 2020). Series
like Lovecraft Country (2020), moreover, adopt the weird mythos of H. P. Lovecraft
not only to explore that writer’s racism but to draw parallels between pre-civil rights
America of the 1950s and the present. In a similar vein, Them (2020) undertakes a
highly problematic pornography of black suffering that delights rather too concertedly
in the physical and psycho-social punishment of a 1960s family from North Carolina
who move into the then-white LA suburb of Compton, itself built on the site of a his-
toric racial atrocity and appropriately haunted by it. All have clearly emerged from a
climate of racial conflict heightened by President Trump’s repeated refusal to condemn
the ‘good people’ of the American extreme right even when their actions turn murder-
ous (as in Charlottesville) or treasonous (as in the January 2021 storming of the Capi-
tol). Rather different, though, is Jordan Peele’s Us, the 2019 follow-up to Get Out, a
film that, Peele acknowledges in an interview with Steve Rose, is not really ‘about’ race
in America but about ‘wealth inequality’ (Rose 2019).
Prefaced by a title card that draws our attention to the ‘many underground tunnels
in the United States that have no known purpose’, the film opens in 1986, the second
year of Reagan’s second term of office. It is not by chance, in other words, that the film
begins in the 1980s, for it was across this decade that Reagan lay down the founda-
tions for the neoliberal world we continue to inhabit today, repudiating governmental
responsibility for the alleviation of poverty by halving the budget for public housing
and rent subsidies whilst eliminating altogether the Community Block Development
Grant that had sought to provide affordable housing and invest in poor communities
for a decade. Reducing capital gains and income tax for the rich, he would freeze the
minimum wage, cutting the budgets of federal education programmes, for Medicaid,
the Environmental Protection Agency and food stamps. It is against this background of
tax cuts for the rich and the abandonment of state responsibility for the poor that the
film opens, with a little black girl watching television. Behind the set are videos of some
significant horror films of the period, most notably C.H.U.D. (1984), in which radio-
actively mutated cannibals feast on the hapless homeless who shelter in the New York
subway; A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which the children of the suburban mid-
dle classes are slaughtered by the ghost of abject paedophile Freddy Krueger; and the
Steve Martin mad-science comedy The Man with Two Brains (1983). All foreshadow
the events that are to come. Most significant, though, is the commercial for the chari-
table event Hands Across America that is playing on the TV. As early as the 1980s, this
confirms, the non-profit sector had attempted to fill the gap in state provision for the
nation’s neediest citizens, this particular charity asking participants to join hands with
their neighbours to form a human chain across the nation, all for a $10 fee. In a climate
of socially atomised individualism, however, and with little public appetite for doing
anything but blame the poor for their failure to prosper, there were few participants and
a mere $15 million was raised. Watching the TV is Adelaide and the opening scene of
the narrative proper sees her wander away from her parents at the Santa Cruz board-
walk on the same night The Lost Boys (1987) was being shot, a film that itself depicted
vampirism as sexily preferable to growing to adulthood in Reagan’s America. Wearing

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 202 linnie blake

a Thriller T-shirt that itself references Michael Jackson’s own bifurcation (black/white,
saviour/paedophile, child star/horror video pioneer), Adelaide disappears for a period
into an underground facility before meeting a rather sinister version of herself and
returning, seemingly so traumatised that she is unable to speak.
If the division metaphor is already well established at the film’s outset, it contin-
ues apace when the grown-up Adelaide, her husband Gabe and children Zora and
Jason decamp many years later to their holiday home; their white friends Josh, Kitty
and their twin daughters inhabit an even more luxurious home nearby. These are the
affluent American middle classes, possessed of several homes and a boat and heedless
of the neoliberal lumpenproletariat until they literally come knocking at the door.
Jason’s double, Pluto, scarred by the fire he loves to play with, scampers in a decid-
edly simian manner. Umbrae, Zora’s double, is a murderous sadist with a terrifying
grin, and Gabe’s double, Abraham, is a slow but physically powerful killer. But it is
Red, the real Adelaide we discover, who can speak and who explains who they are.
‘We are Americans,’ she rasps. And like all Americans they want what nationalist
ideology has promised them. Beneath the surface of American middle-class life, Red
explains, is another world – that of the Tethered. Whilst the people above ground
live a life of joy and comfort, the Tethered’s life is one of suffering and pain. They
live in darkness and have only raw rabbits to eat, their actions being determined by
their above-ground selves to whom they are like shadows. Biologically, the Tethered
are clones, created by the government generations ago to control their above-ground
counterparts but abandoned when the experiment failed, trapped in a bizarre ballet
that echoes the activities of those on the surface but lacks any purpose or meaning.
The parallels to the self under capitalism are transparently clear, those who profit
least from the system being nonetheless tethered to it by the impossibility of imagin-
ing an alternative. Red is different though. Having full understanding of the stratifi-
cation of American society, she wields a pair of scissors as a weapon, their bipartite
structure again echoing that of the system she seeks to destroy. She and her family
may die in the endeavour but at the close of the film, millions of Tethered stand hand
in hand across the nation, their class solidarity contrasting markedly to the atomistic
individualism of the neoliberal America that proposed the Hands Across America
event even as the government set about disavowing its responsibility for the welfare
of its citizens. For in Trump’s America too, as Peele made clear in an interview with
Tasha Robinson (2019), the Tethered echo the fears of a nation in thrall to neoliberal
globalism, manifesting as ‘the mysterious invader that we think is going to come and
kill us and take our jobs’ or ‘the faction we don’t live near, who voted a different way
than us’. For whilst Trump’s Americans are ‘all about pointing the finger’, it remains
necessary to ask whether ‘maybe the monster we really need to look at has our face.
Maybe the evil, it’s us.’ The ‘us’ to whom he refers, of course, are the Americans who
have been so successful interpellated by the mode of economic organisation that their
elected representatives unleashed upon the world from the 1980s onwards that they
are unable to imagine an alternative to the systemic inequality that underpins it.
In its reading of the television series American Horror Story: Cult and The Hand-
maid’s Tale and of the Purge franchise and Us, this chapter has sought to explore
the ways in which a number of Neoliberal Gothic texts have set out to explore the
impact of neoliberal economics on the domestic politics of the United States and on
what it feels like, in our globalised century, to call oneself an American. Suffusing

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 neoliberal globalgothic 203

each of these texts has been an awareness that global neoliberalism underpins the
American war machine, international and domestic terrorism, the collapse of manu-
facturing industry, increases in hate crime, and the utter polarisation of American
society by class, ethnicity and region that has spilled over, under Donald Trump, into
an inward-looking agnotological civil war in which epistemological relativism and
indeed ignorance are deliberately propagated as a means of manipulating popular
opinion whilst protesting against the ongoing vitality of democracy itself.

Notes
1. Freedom House is a US government-funded non-profit NGO that researches democracy
around the world and advocates democracy, political freedom and human rights. It was
founded in 1941, with Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt serving as its first honorary
chairs.
2. For further analyses of Neoliberal Gothic, see Blake 2015a, 2015b, 2019a, 2019b, and
Blake and Soltysik Monnet 2017.
3. It is notable that regardless of the President’s party affiliations, or of party majorities in the
House of Representatives and Senate, neoliberalism has remained the chosen method of
national economic organisation since the 1980s. Under Republicans this has taken many
forms, most notably trade agreements like 1992’s NAFTA whereby the poorer partner
(Mexico in this instance) agreed to adopt neoliberal policies (including anti-union legis-
lation) at home in exchange for the manufacturing jobs brought by American corpora-
tions. The most extreme form of this (purportedly) free market meddling in other nations’
affairs, however, was (as Naomi Klein (2007) has argued) the monetisation of regime
change whereby the United States deposes existing leaders and governments and plun-
ders the nation in question of its resources whilst laying down the foundations of future
neoliberal governance. If such egregious examples were the work of Republicans, then
Democrats have also participated enthusiastically in promulgating neoliberal policies, both
Bill Clinton and Barack Obama arguing that economic inequality, capital flight and ethnic
segregation were better solved by ongoing economic growth and investment than actually
redistributing wealth. Both favoured public-private partnerships, non-profits and foun-
dations over state responsibility in other words, embedding the free market even more
concertedly at the heart of American government. Thus, embracing free trade and fiscal
responsibility, President Obama would stand hand in hand with Wall Street even when its
practices were at best unethical and at worst financially cataclysmic. It was Obama, as Tam
Harbert (2019) has shown, who bailed out the banks to the tune of $498 billion following
their sub-prime mortgage instigated crash of 2008.
4. A sentiment admirably captured in the ‘Make America White Again’ baseball cap worn by
Steve Buscemi’s character in Jim Jarmusch’s small-town zombie apocalypse offering The
Dead Don’t Die (2019).
5. The series has comprised thus far: Murder House, set in 2011, follows a family who move to
LA to inhabit a house haunted by its former inhabitants; Asylum, set in 1964 Massachusetts,
takes place in a hospital for the criminally insane; Coven is set in New Orleans, Louisiana,
during 2013 and focuses on the struggle between European and African covens for suprem-
acy; Freak Show, set in Florida in 1952, focuses on one of America’s last surviving carnivals
of curiosities; Hotel is set in 2015 LA, focusing on the staff and guests of a haunted, revenant-
owned and -infested hotel; Roanoak is set in North Carolina between 2014 and 2016, its
haunted farmhouse setting being home to a range of spectres from the original disappearing
colonists onwards; Cult; Apocalypse – seemingly the only direction the nation could go after
the Trump presidency: in the wake of a nuclear holocaust, the witches from Coven do battle

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 204 linnie blake

with the Antichrist from Murder House; and 1984 – a tribute to that decade’s slasher movie
phenomenon, set in a California summer camp. A further three seasons have been contracted.
6. Rachel Maddow, an out lesbian with a PhD from Oxford University, is host of the epony-
mous news show on MNSBC. Although presented by Ally as an archetypal liberal commen-
tator and affirming herself as such, she describes herself, in an interview with Tom Sturm, as
being ‘in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican Party platform’ (Sturm
2010), pointing to the way in which political discourse in the United States has swung wildly
to the right under neoliberalism.
7. Fear of clowns, confined spaces and tiny holes respectively.
8. Similar was the plot to impose a New World Order on Americans by taking their guns and
rounding them up into concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management
Agency under the control of the Department of Homeland Security.
9. George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of the unarmed high school student Trayvon Martin
in Sanford, Florida, on 26 February 2012, purportedly in self-defence, made him a hero of
the supremacist right.
10. Valerie Solanas, a 1960s radical feminist, is best known for writing the SCUM (Society for
Cutting Up Men) Manifesto in 1967 and attempting to murder Andy Warhol in 1968.
11. It was, of course, Hillary Clinton’s close relations with Wall Street that stoked two financial
bubbles (1999–2000 and 2005–8) and the Great Recession that followed the collapse of
Lehman Brothers. It was Hillary Clinton whose 1990s push for the financial deregulation of
Bill’s campaign backers – leading to the banks acting in imprudent, immoral and downright
illegal ways – led first to the financial bubbles of 1999 and 2005–8 and then the massive eco-
nomic collapse of 2008 itself. It was Hillary Clinton who got very rich off the back of this,
became a Senator and happily parroted CIA propaganda relating to Saddam’s Weapons of
Mass Destruction – leading to the ongoing destabilisation of the Middle East and the death
of some quarter of a million people. And it was Hillary Clinton who, as Secretary of State,
presided over the most hawkish (and indeed cataclysmic) foreign policy of modern times,
most notably in Libya, where her promotion of NATO-led regime change was not only ille-
gal but led to ongoing civil war and the emergence of the country as a hotbed of militancy
leading to the arming first of Boko Haram in Nigeria and then of ISIS in Syria and Iraq. And
Syria itself, a country ravaged by ongoing war, ten million of its people having been displaced
by Hillary’s involvement in the CIA-Saudi plot to overthrow Assad, even as her forays into
Ukraine and Georgia threatened to kickstart the Cold War all over again.
12. Trump has been widely criticised for deploying the police to clear Black Lives Matter pro-
testors from Washington’s Lafayette Square to facilitate his show of religiosity.

Film and Television

American Horror Story: Cult (FX, 2017)
C.H.U.D. (Douglas Cheek, USA, 1984)
The First Purge (Gerard McMurray, USA, 2018)
Get Out (Jordan Peele, USA, 2017)
The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu, 2016–)
Lovecraft Country (HBO, 2020)
The Man with Two Brains (Carl Reiner, USA, 1983)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, USA, 1984)
The Purge (James DeMonaco, USA, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco, USA, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (James DeMonaco, USA, 2016)
Them (Amazon Prime Video, 2020)
Us (Jordan Peele, USA, 2019)

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 neoliberal globalgothic 205

References
Blake, Linnie. 2015a. ‘“Are We Worth Saving? You Tell Me”: Neoliberalism, Zombies and the
Failure of Free Trade.’ Gothic Studies 17, no. 2: 26–41.
———. 2015b. ‘Trapped in the Hysterical Sublime: Twin Peaks, Postmodernism, and the Neolib-
eral Now.’ In Return to Twin Peaks: New Approaches to Materiality, Theory, and Genre on
Television, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Catherine Spooner, 229–45. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2019a. ‘The Monster in the Living Room: Gothic Television of the Neoliberal Age.’ In An
Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts, edited by David Punter, 406–17. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
———. 2019b. ‘Neoliberal Gothic.’ In Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion,
edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 60–71. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
———. 2020. ‘Burning Down the House: Get Out and the Female Gothic.’ In Jordan Peele’s
Get Out: Political Horror, edited by Dawn Keetley, 36–46. Athens, OH: Ohio University
Press.
——— and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, eds. 2017. Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in
the Neoliberal Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Firestone, Shulamith. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Freedom House. 2019. ‘Freedom in the World 2019: United States.’ https://freedomhouse.org/
country/united-states/freedom-world/2019.
Fuchs, Christian. 2017. ‘How the Frankfurt School Helps Us to Understand Donald Trump’s
Twitter Populism.’ Huffpost, 19 January. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-
fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_b_14156190.html.
Global Justice Center. 2020. ‘Reproducing Patriarchy: How the Trump Administration Has
Undermined Women’s Access to Reproductive Health Care.’ 2 November. https://www.
globaljusticecenter.net/blog/19-publications/1386-factsheet-reproducing-patriarchy-how-the-
trump-administration-has-undermined-women-s-access-to-reproductive-health-care.
Harbert, Tam. 2019. ‘Here’s How Much the 2008 Bailouts Really Cost.’ MIT Sloane Management,
21 February. https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/heres-how-much-2008-bailouts-
really-cost.
Hawley, George. 2017. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia University Press.
Klein, Naomi. 2001. No Logo. London: HarperCollins.
———. 2007. The Shock Doctrine. London: Penguin.
Muirhead, Russell and Nancy L. Rosenblum. 2019. The New Conspiracism and the Assault on
Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Robinson, Tasha. 2019. ‘Jordan Peele’s Us Turns a Political Statement into Unnerving Horror.’
The Verge, 22 March. https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/9/18257721/us-review-jordan-
peele-get-out-lupita-nyongo-winston-duke-elisabeth-moss-tim-heidecker-horror.
Rose, Steve. 2019. ‘Jordan Peele on Us.’ The Guardian, 9 March. https://www.theguardian.
com/film/2019/mar/09/jordan-peele-on-us-this-is-a-very-different-movie-from-get-out.
Sturm, Tom. 2010. ‘Wonk and Circumstance.’ Valley Advocate, 6 May. https://web.archive.org/
web/20140203080207/http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=11725.
Taibbi, Matt. 2017. Insane Clown President. London: WH Allen.

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 13

New Weird Technologies:

Subverting Neoliberal Globalisation
through Hybridity
Elsa Bouet

B oaventura de Sousa Santos has argued that globalisation is not a ‘spontaneous,

automatic, unavoidable and irreversible process which intensifies and advances
according to an inner logic and dynamism strong enough to impose themselves on any
external interferences’ (2006, 395). It is not, in other words, an uncontrolled force
which can be tapped into by all nations equally; rather ‘globalization results from a
set of political decisions which are identifiable in time and space’ (ibid.), and in fact
promotes exclusion stemming from neoliberal policies that maintain the structural
inequalities constructed during the colonial era. This continuity between colonial and
neo-colonial structures is referred to as ‘coloniality of power’ by Aníbal Quijano, who
argues that Europe constructed itself as ‘the central place of the new pattern of world-
Eurocentered colonial/modern capitalist power’ (2000, 217–8) and created a

‘racial’ social classification of world population – expressed in the ‘racial’ dis-

tribution of work, in the imposition of new ‘racial’ geocultural identities, in the
control of productive resources and capital, including salary, as a privilege of
‘Whiteness’ – [which] is basically what is referred to in the category of coloniality
of power. (2000, 218)

Quijano here exposes the global constructions of racialised identities who are deemed
exploitable, a subjection that has been maintained from colonial times to the present
through global capitalist structures. As Samir Amin argues, technology plays an integral
role in the creation and structuring of inequalities which enables the North to profit from
the South. He outlines the five monopolies which facilitate the coloniality of power:

technological initiative, the control of financial flows at the international level (the
most internationalized facet of capital), access to the natural resources of the entire
planet, control of the means of information and communication, and, last but not
least, monopoly of weapons of mass destruction. (Amin 2000, 602)

While technological initiative is here listed as its own category, it is clear that technol-
ogy is an inherent part of the other four monopolies and that it enables the sustaining
of global inequalities. However, as David Arnold argues, the role of technology in colo-
niality is not one of an ‘advanced’ civilisation dominating another, but one of exchange
in which indigenous knowledge was ‘appropriated, hybridized, or empirically arrived

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 new weird technologies 207

at, then became part of Europe’s store of technical know-how (with its colonial origins
often quickly forgotten)’ (2005, 99). That is to say, indigenous technology is itself incor-
porated to further the North’s hegemony and thus technology becomes an integral tool
of coloniality.
This chapter will look at the ways in which three novels – Octavia Butler’s Dawn
(1987), China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011) and Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016)
– represent coloniality as inhumane and monstrous, while also deploying gothic posthu-
man hybrids to contest the horrifying subjugation of the colonised other. Starting with
Octavia Butler’s Dawn, the chapter will analyse the ways in which the Oankali invaders
seemingly dictate the terms of their trade with humans, saving them from extinction in
exchange for their DNA. The Oankali serve as both a mirror to coloniality of power
and its disruptors: they initially represent invaders who exploit and harvest those they
dominate and control through technology, yet they also offer the potential to decolo-
nise trade through equal exchange symbolised in hybridity. China Miéville’s Embassy-
town similarly questions the trade between the colonised alien Ariekei and their Terran
invaders, since the Ariekei find themselves exploited for their biotechnology that, once
harvested, would give Terrans further military advantage, facilitating their colonisa-
tion of the rest of the universe. It is only through the creation of a hybrid language
that the unfair terms of trade and domination can be dismantled and the Ariekei and
Terran Embassytowners can live equally. Tade Thompson’s Rosewater also represents
exploitation to gain further technological, military and financial advantages through
exploitation both of an alien other and of Nigeria, where the alien is located, and
Rosewater also deploys hybridity to decolonise exploitative structures. Read together,
these novels not only evoke the brutal past of colonialisation but also unveil the ways in
which politics and economics have reformulated previous colonial structures through
neoliberal institutions that are represented as inhumane. These three novels dismantle
these structures of coloniality through hybrids, who promote global solidarity and col-
lective decision making, and the sharing of technology as a way to undo the hierarchies
and the exploitation fostered by an imperialist globalisation.
The New Weird novels analysed in this chapter represent globalisation as a struc-
ture maintaining colonial inequalities as they illustrate how technology is extracted
from indigenous populations and used by alien colonisers not only to dominate their
other, but also to control the flow of resources and capital in the shape of a labour
force deemed expendable. In doing so, these novels also illustrate that the technologi-
cal domination is reinforced through coloniality. The New Weird is characterised by
its similarities to the gothic and science fiction (Luckhurst 2017, 1,045; Miéville 2009,
510). Similarly to the gothic, the New Weird serves ‘as a place for potentially radical
disarticulations and reformulations of traditional binaries, starting with self and other,
subject and object’ (Luckhurst 2017, 1,053), and this can be read to include the binaries
of coloniser and colonised, objectified under the modes of the colonising labour market.
Fred Botting argues that technology has become a familiar permutation of the gothic:

With technology become pervasive, however, such technological monstrosity is seen

as no more than an everyday condition. There is nothing special about monstrosity
in an age of cybernetics and Frankenstein pets. The future, once so monstrous, has
already collapsed on an indifferent present. Gothic cedes to ‘cybergothic’: cloaked in
reassuringly familiar images, technology envelops humanity in a resolutely inhuman
system. (2008, 14)

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 208 elsa bouet

The uncanny of the gothic has collapsed into the familiarity and everydayness of
technology, one that represents familiar, inhumane monsters and structures to which
we have become indifferent, and this can include the structures of colonial exploita-
tion. The gothic configuration of the cyborg, the monster or the hybrid means that a
‘posthuman gaze looks on humans as monsters’ (Botting 2008, 46), monsters that
exclude, alienate and exploit. Justin Edwards locates this technological monstrosity in
capitalist production: ‘technological mutations of the apparatus of production require
the disciplining of the body into the production of labour to create the body-machine’
(2015, 7) and this gothic cyborg critiques the construction of productive bodies, pro-
ductive and enriching external powers. Yet gothic texts can contest this deployment
of technology that alienates and de-individualises us, and destroys empathy (Edwards
2015, 10). Dawn, Embassytown and Rosewater deploy posthuman hybrids to ques-
tion the positioning of colonial powers as subjects exploiting the colonial object and to
reify the everyday monstrous technological economic infrastructures that have main-
tained the coloniality of power.

Octavia Butler’s Dawn: Genetic Trade and Controlling Consent

Octavia Butler’s Dawn has been read as evoking the anxieties surrounding mass
extinction of a nuclear holocaust during the Reagan era (Nanda 2013, 774), the
effects of his cutting back of welfare on communities of colour (Jesser 2002; Smith
2009) and more broadly as a novel addressing the historical and ongoing racial abuse
and discrimination of African Americans in the US (Mann 2018; Hampton 2010).
However, the novel can also be read as addressing the impact of the Reagan admin-
istration’s laissez-faire approach to global trading structures, which have served to
reinforce America’s global hegemony at the expense of the developing world (see
Zeiler 2015). Dawn focuses on the genetic trade happening between the alien Oankali
and the humans they have rescued from a global nuclear holocaust. The Oankali
rescue human beings from extinction by taking the bodies of survivors from Earth
on to their biotechnological spaceship, where they are kept in suspended animation.
The Oankali’s intention is to nurse and move survivors back to Earth so that they can
repopulate the planet. In exchange, the Oankali are seeking to obtain genetic material
from human beings which they incorporate into their own and which they need to
survive. Lilith is Awakened and slowly becomes familiar with the Oankali, described
as tentacular and ‘utterly alien’ (Butler 2007, 14) and she is eventually chosen to
teach her fellow humans to become functional communities that will collaborate to
repopulate the Earth. The Oankali are not the only beings benefiting from the genetic
material trade, as Lilith too is changed to become stronger and to heal faster. Yet,
the trade is imposed on to Lilith, whose freedom, movements and agency are con-
trolled by the Oankali, recalling the conditions of slavery and placing the Oankali as
the technologically domineering entities controlling Lilith’s movements. At the same
time, the novel challenges the coloniality of power achieved through technology by
promoting exchange through hybridity.
From early in the novel, Lilith questions ‘the price’ of the Oankali’s help (Butler
2007, 15), which no one was left conscious enough to request or negotiate. For Joe
Heidenescher, Dawn raises questions pertaining to consent that not only relate to

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 new weird technologies 209

biological determinism but suggest that people should be ‘free agents in communi-
ties organised by economic, politic, and social consent of the members’ (2019, 56).
This very lack of consent leads to abject events such as slavery and genocide (ibid.).
Heidenescher points out that consent also includes ‘the process in which free agents
consent to an exchange of goods, services, labor, and currency (liberal economy)’,
and that Marxism argues that economic consent cannot be given, since financial
structures are often unknown by and imposed on to the wider population, whether
at a national or a global level (ibid.). Indeed, Lilith wakes up alone in a room she
cannot leave and associates her captivity with a history of slavery and exploitation
at the hands of profiting beings. As she Awakens, she notices a scar on her abdomen,
though she is not aware of what ‘she had lost or gained’ (Butler 2007, 6), since the
operation was performed while she was sleeping and without her consent. Lilith asks
the Oankali about this but they remain silent. Her interactions with them are quickly
framed in economic terms as ‘[s]he offered to trade her answers for theirs: Who
were they? Why did they hold her? Where was she? Answer for answer. Again, they
refused’ (Butler 2007, 8), and thus the Oankali are represented as dictating the terms
of the trade. Lilith becomes aware of her lack of agency in her trade and exchange
with the Oankali and decides to resist by not providing them with the answers they
seek: ‘she had to risk bargaining, try to gain something, and her only currency was
cooperation’ (Butler 2007, 8), so she too becomes silent. Lilith here resists her sta-
tus as an unwilling participant in an interspecies trade, framing globalisation as a
monstrous structure in which the terms of extraction are dictated by technological
domination silencing and denying consent from their colonised captives.
After resisting, being put back to sleep and Awakened again a few times, Lilith is
let out of her room and taught the Oankali language and customs, and even changed
biologically to operate the ship which works by recognising the Oankali biological
signature. Interacting with the Oankali, she gains their respect and is put in charge of
Awakening human beings to repopulate the Earth. Gregory Hampton suggests that
Lilith is ‘put in the position of a trader to mankind despite her quest to save the exis-
tence of human identity’ (2010, 73). As a hybrid and thus no longer fully human,
she takes the position of a middle-person trading for the preservation of humanity,
yet taking on the features of her colonisers. In this sense, she is reminiscent of what
Frantz Fanon called ‘the national bourgeoisie’, the ‘business agent’ (1963, 153) of the
‘intermediary type’ (1963, 179), seemingly working in the interests of the Oankali and
allowing them to gather DNA from human beings, while evoking the neo-colonial
structures that reshape identities to facilitate the colonisers’ extractive enterprise and
use of labour. While evoking this colonial dynamic, the novel also seeks to disrupt this
trade pyramid of exploiter, intermediary and exploited. Hampton suggests that Lilith
transcends her trader role by becoming a messenger telling humanity it must ‘redefine
itself if it is to survive’ (2010, 73), that it can no longer continue its monstrous history
of domination through technologies deployed to destructive ends.
While the Oankali initially reflect coloniality, the novel also uses them to interro-
gate and reformulate humanity’s deployment of technology to dominate. Humanity’s
nuclear self-annihilation is symbolically linked to Lilith’s mysterious operation,
which entailed the removal of a cancerous growth, which allows Dawn to challenge
the Oankali’s trade from exploitative to benevolent. The Oankali link Lilith’s cancer

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 210 elsa bouet

to humanity’s degenerative impulse to exploit, the trait which must be redefined if it

is to survive:

You are hierarchical. [. . .] It’s a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence

served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge
it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all [. . .] That was like
ignoring cancer. (Butler 2007, 39)

Here Jdahya, Lilith’s Oankali guide once she is out of her room, points to the global
lack of scrutiny for and failure to tackle systemic inequalities, which are maintained
and at times silenced by those in power. Lilith eventually links this to the global poli-
tics she was studying before the war, when she was seeking an alternative political
system to the imperialist ones of the Cold War era. She notes that all that was offered
on her anthropology curriculum was the economic and political structures of the two
competing nations, as it was ‘the cultures of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. that counted’ (Butler
2007, 132). On this account, technological and imperial might are the only attributes
of value, since they enable exploitation and expansion, yet led to the destruction of
the world. Tate, a human Awakened to go back to Earth, suggests that this destruc-
tion was unavoidable, since ‘no matter which two cultures gained the ability to wipe
out one another’ (ibid.), they would have done so. Jdahya, Lilith and Tate realise the
ways in which technology drives territorial, economic and political expansion, at
the expense of the people colonised, and they thus challenge the deployment of tech-
nology that enforces binaries of power that seek to erase alternatives, thus framing
colonial structures as inhumane.
Lilith pointing to the division of the world by two imperialist camps, that of the
USSR and the US, highlights the wilful erasure of the colonised nations and other non-
imperial modes of being. Lilith explains that her desire to study anthropology was
motivated by a desire to find ‘saner ways of life’ (Butler 2007, 132), not based on self-
destructing exploitation or colonialism. The focus on the binary alludes to possibili-
ties opened by the ‘Third Way’ during early decolonisation, since newly decolonised
nations resisted alignment with either bloc, seeking to formulate alternative politics
to capitalism or communism. This strategy was co-opted into the expression ‘Third
World’ in order to stigmatise former colonies as impoverished and underdeveloped (see
Kennedy 2017, 107–11), thus erasing the history of their exploitation. Lilith looking
for a political alternative or a Third Way recalls Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third
Space, a space away from binaries where difference can be negotiated to allow for
greater connections between cultures. The Third Space allows for ‘conceptualizing and
international culture, based not on exoticism or multiculturalism or the diversity of
cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity’ (1995, 209). The
concept thus prioritises interactions based on lateral exchanges promoting connections
as opposed to hierarchised difference. By becoming a hybrid and pointing to the exis-
tence of neo-colonial structures, Lilith opens up a move beyond coloniality.
Lilith fulfils this role in her ability to ‘produce posthumans’ (Goss and Riquelme
2007, 446), or new hybrids, which is enabled by the Oankali. The colonial dynamic
evoked in the relations between technologically domineering Oankali and humanity
serves to mirror global neo-colonial dynamics: ‘the technological imaginary’s impera-
tive, imperial aspect can stand for hierarchical thinking per se as both its cause and
its purest form’ (Goss and Riquelme 2007, 435). Yet by having hybrid children with

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 new weird technologies 211

both human and Oankali DNA, Lilith dismantles this hierarchy of colonised and colo-
niser, of extractor and extracted. Lilith’s perception of the Oankali shifts from seeing
them as ‘captors’ (Butler 2007, 6) to understanding that humanity was being ‘rescued’
(Butler 2007, 141), and not just from the nuclear holocaust, but from its inherent
propensity to create binaries and to deploy technology to serve its imperial, exploit-
ative enterprise. Lilith’s hybridity allows her to reframe how we understand trade
through the Oankali, who are natural traders since they trade themselves (Butler 2007,
24). Shocked at this revelation, Lilith seeks clarification, wondering if the Oankali
mean slavery, to which they reply, ‘No. We’ve never done that’ (ibid.), reiterating
that they change other species by giving them beneficial traits, just as they have given
Lilith an ability to heal more rapidly. Unlike the Awakened humans who reproduce
past hierarchies by treating one another as ‘property’ (Butler 2007, 78), the Oankali’s
genetic trade means their species is constantly evolving, and for them, this is natural:
‘we do it naturally. We must do it. It renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving spe-
cies instead of specialising ourselves into extinction and stagnation’ (Butler 2007, 40).
Survival is not that of the fittest but one of ‘acquir[ing] new life’ (Butler 2007, 41),
of fostering change and integrating difference to promote exchange. Lilith is told:
‘Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you.
Your hierarchical tendencies will be modified and if we learn to regenerate limbs and
reshape our bodies, we’ll share those abilities with you’ (Butler 2007, 42). Instead
of deploying technology to profitable, exploitative ends, the Oankali use it to foster
hybridity and equal exchange.

Miéville’s Embassytown and Technological Exploitation

Miéville’s Embassytown similarly evokes the neo-colonial structures of unequal trade.
In the novel, Terrans from a nation called Bremen settle on Arieka, the last planet of
the known immer, meaning universe, and build an outpost city they call Embassytown.
Communication with the Ariekei, also known as the ‘Hosts’, is difficult, since their
language is beyond human comprehension: instead of it being arbitrary, words spoken
through their two mouths literally refer to the thing they are talking about and they are
unable to lie. Terrans have found a way to communicate with the Ariekei by cloning
humans in Embassytown, which allows for greater empathy between the two doppels
who can use their two individual mouths to reproduce the Ariekei language, and they
can therefore trade. The doppels are referred to by a compound of their two names
such as EdGar or MagDa. The seemingly peaceful relations between Embassytown-
ers and Ariekei come to an end when a new Ambassador named EzRa is sent by the
home power of Bremen to check on the running of its colony. EzRa is the result of ‘an
experiment’ (Miéville 2012, 101) to create further empathy between two friends. This
experiment was conducted to cause the Ariekei to become addicted to EzRa’s speech so
as to make them more pliant, but Bremen did not expect that this would cause a civil
war to break out between the Ariekei who attempt to beat their addiction and those
wanting more of EzRa’s speech. As Embassytown-born Avice witnesses the events, she
takes it upon herself to teach the arbitrary nature of language to the Ariekei so that they
can speak back to Bremen and gain independence, not just from their addiction but
from their technological hold, their lies and their invasion. In this sense, Embassytown
portrays foreign diplomacy and trade as an imperialist tool that obscures the ways in
which technology is deployed to neo-colonial ends.

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 212 elsa bouet

Travis Alexander suggests that the trade occurring between Bremen and the Host is
done ‘in exchange for a basically nonviolent occupation’ (2020, 226), but we also learn
that this was not always the case since ‘there had been violent confrontations, deaths,
between our species, in the early years of contact’ (Miéville 2012, 131), and while the
Ariekei outnumbered Terrans on their home planet, Bremen built its outpost using
its military advantage, hinting to a lingering threat of violence towards the Ariekei.
Occupation is not the only way in which violence is enacted on the Ariekei. Anthony
Lang argues that Miéville’s Embassytown represents international law and relations as
neo-colonial forms of brutality, since ‘violence and coercion become the central way in
which the contract and commodity exchange are enacted’ (2015, 219). International
law has therefore ‘imperial origins’ (ibid.) that ensure that the exchange of commodi-
ties benefits and is dictated by the coloniser, and in Embassytown this is achieved in
the vagueness of the contracts of exchange with the Ariekei, who like Lilith in Dawn
are silenced. Only Ambassadors speak with the Ariekei, described as ‘[p]owers like
subaltern gods’ (Miéville 2012, 14). Ambassadors have exclusive access to the Ariekei
and their biorigging, items which are ‘moulded from fecund plasms by the Hosts with
techniques [Terrans] could not merely mimic, but that were impossible according to
[their] sciences’ (Miéville 2012, 101), a form of biotechnology that proves valuable
to Bremen. Their technologies thus appropriated, the Ariekei become silent entities
to be spoken about and spoken for by the Bremen Ambassadors, who construct both
the ‘representation and re-presentation’ (Spivak 1994, 70) of the Ariekei subalterns
who are forced into a trade dictated by an exploitative Bremen, who never make the
terms of exploitation public knowledge yet benefit from Ariekei indigenous technology
to reinforce their hegemony. As such, Avice is left rather ‘vague on the details of the
barter’ with the Ariekei, but understands that Bremen also gets food, ‘gems and bits
and pieces’, and gold (Miéville 2012, 90). It becomes unclear whether the Ariekei get
anything at all in return, despite ‘exhaustive, careful negotiations’:

With the arrival of each immership, terms agreed between Staff and Hosts (with the
imprimatur of Bremen’s representative) were communicated, the vessel would leave
with those details and Ariekene goods and tech, returning on its next round with what-
ever we had promised the Ariekei in return. They were patient. (Miéville 2012, 88)

Whether the Ariekei receive anything in exchange for all the goods they trade with the
space-faring Bremen remains unstated. Even more so, Bremen exploits the Ariekei’s
inability to conceptualise a lie to ensure they cannot give fully informed consent to the
trade, thus furthering their technological and economic hold on Arieka and the rest of
the immer by obtaining bioriggery from the Ariekei.
The neo-colonial coercive trade dynamics are further exposed by Wyatt, one of
the Bremen viziers overseeing the activities of the Ambassadors, who suggests that
independence is an illusion that obscures political and financial interference in the
former colonies:

‘Berit Blue did secede, with only the tiniest war.’ He held thumb and forefinger
minutely apart to show how small the war had been. ‘Dracosi’s independence was
totally peaceful. Chao Polis is midway through thrashing out a plan with us for
regional autonomy. [. . .] They are free . . . and they’re ours.’ (Miéville 2012, 270–1)

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 new weird technologies 213

Colonies are able or allowed to gain a status of independence, yet control is retained
over these; the word ‘free’ suggests that this is at no cost to Bremen, who retains
ownership over the territories in question; the illusion of peace and benevolence thus
hides the coercion into trade partnerships. Avice has internalised Bremen’s ideology
as benefactors to former colonies, since she repeats that Bremen ‘would never let a
colony collapse’ (Miéville 2012, 272), yet she has also witnessed ‘landscapes deserted
by design, failure, and in one or two instances, mystery’ (Miéville 2012, 273) in
her travels in the immer. Bremen’s policies reflect the structural impoverishment of
decolonised nations by structural adjustment programmes (see Amin 2000; Hickel et
al. 2021; Kennedy 2017, 81, 117). This suggests that Bremen willingly lets its colo-
nies perish once they are no longer of interest, presumably because they are either no
longer profitable or no longer willing to be owned by Bremen and desire to negotiate
for more equitable trade terms.
Eventually, Avice understands this strategy because as long as Embassytown and
the Ariekei are coerced into the terms of the unfair trade, Bremen will protect them:
‘No matter if the cost of transportation outweighed the prices of trinkets and exper-
tise shipped back, they wouldn’t let this town go, so long as we were theirs’ (Miéville
2012, 273). Embassytown is profitable for Bremen, ready to invest in the survival of its
settlers only because it offers returns in the shape of precious metals, further biorigging
and unknown technological marvels, which would allow it to further its hegemony.
Wyatt openly confesses that the face of benevolence towards its former colonies is a lie
by admitting that if it served Bremen’s interests to let Embassytown gain full indepen-
dence, they would let them go (Miéville 2012, 273). However, Embassytown provides
a far too useful way station for further exploration and expansion since it is on the
edge of the known immer. As Wyatt discloses, ‘there’s always something’ (Miéville
2012, 273) in the immer, a new technology to be found and exploited to maintain
Bremen’s colonial, political and financial hegemony. As Avice hears this disclosure, she
considers that ‘[t]o control a source of beautiful half-living technology, of curios, of
precious metals in near-unique molecular configurations might have been desirable. To
control the last outpost, a jumping-off to an expanding frontier, was nonnegotiable’
(Miéville 2012, 274), and that the port, instead of facilitating universal transit and
migration, will serve to facilitate Bremen’s acquiring new technology, wealth and ter-
ritories, and to strengthen their occupation of Embassytown and Arieka.
This lack of negotiation is epitomised in the breakdown in communication between
the Ariekei and the Terrans, notably led by the arrival of the Terran-born Ambassador
EzRa. EzRa is the result of an experiment conducted by Bremen, as noted above. As
such, EzRa connects Bremen’s technological advances and ideological deception to its
neo-colonial strategies. Ambassadors used to be cloned and trained in Embassytown
and Bremen’s production of EzRa symbolises its acquisitionist tendencies: ‘All Embas-
sytown had was its monopoly on Language, and with EzRa, Bremen had tried to break
that’ (Miéville 2012, 271). Embassytown’s only means of production and economic
resistance to its home power is being taken away from them, reinforcing Bremen’s
hegemony. Bremen deliberately produced EzRa to inflict an addiction on the Ariekei
since they knew that EzRa’s speech would intoxicate and incapacitate some Ariekei,
although Bremen did not foresee the extent of the impact. This infecting the Ariekei
is described as an ‘elegant imperial manoeuvre. Counterrevolution through language
pedagogy and bureaucracy’ (Miéville 2012, 272). The willed intoxication of the

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Ariekei is a neo-colonial strategy implemented to keep them either co-operative or

inert so that Bremen can pursue its goals of acquiring more technological wonders to
retain its interstellar financial and political domination.
As Alexander argues, language in the novel is a means both to impose colonial dom-
ination and to resist it: ‘[i]t is owing to this liberatory effect, then, that the turn to
language – despite being an exchange of a native language for that of an occupier – can
be understood as a postcolonial solution’ (2020, 223). Language provides the means
of countering Bremen’s ideological and technological impositions, and its unequal
trade terms. The Ariekei learn the arbitrariness of language, and thus become aware of
Bremen’s exploitative deceit. As they learn, they discover that ‘Language spoke [them]’,
that they were products and productive subalterns as ‘the words that wanted to be city
and machines had [the Ariekei] speak them so they could be’ (Miéville 2012, 393).
Bremen constructs the monstrous language for the Ariekei to conceptualise and pro-
duce Embassytown as well as the biorigging Bremen required. As Avice teaches the
Ariekei language, they learn linguistic difference and to express and think subjectively,
and therefore to lie and transcend their status as objects. However, the Ariekei’s lies are
not those of deceit, but that of speaking in metaphors, which in Ariekei is spoken as
‘𝑡𝑟𝑢𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔/𝑙𝑖𝑒’ (ibid.). As Sheryl Vint argues, the fractal reflects a new language in which
the ‘two terms can never cancel one another out’ (2015, 55), thus ‘opening up the pos-
sibility for better communication with humans since this new language is one humans
may share’ (2015, 54). In other words, it is a language that fosters exchange without
domination. Speaking in metaphors allows the Ariekei to formulate truths in the guise
of lies and thus offer a counterpoint to Bremen’s ideological deception. While the Ariekei
do have to change their language and phenomenology, they influence Embassytowners
too, since the language they speak transmutes into ‘Anglo-Ariekei’ (Miéville 2012, 403),
a hybrid compound which allows Embassytown to regain agency over their language,
gain independence and move toward peace between humans and the Ariekei. As Avice
reflects, this new language means that ‘it’s not humans but the new Ariekei that’ll ambas-
sador between the city and the settlements’ (Miéville 2012, 401) of addicted Ariekei, and
potential future trading partners, suggesting diplomacy will be based on the capacity for
truth and transparency of the Ariekei language. Avice declares ‘we can run ourselves’
as humans and Ariekei can collaborate together to determine the terms of their trade
and interactions with others. Avice also points to the inescapability of future colonial
endeavours: ‘We’ll have knowledge to sell. Uniquely detailed maps. [. . .] We have to
establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to
explore’ (Miéville 2012, 404). Only through co-operation and the hybrid language that
promotes exchange can they obtain ‘something to offer’ (Miéville 2012, 404) to avoid
their annihilation. Avice here pessimistically suggests that to break the imperial hold
Bremen has and prevent future attempts at colonialisation, Embassytown and Ariekei
need to empower and protect themselves from further invasion by capitalising on their
own knowledge and goods as a way to gain independence from coloniality, thus pointing
to how entrenched these structures are.

Tade Thompson’s Rosewater: Second Invasion and Extraction

In Rosewater, a series of alien landings occur leaving specific sites contaminated, sim-
ilarly to the zones left by the Visitors in the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic

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 new weird technologies 215

(1972) or Area X in Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014). The events narrated in

Rosewater centre on the 2012 landing in London, as it is said to be the only time when
the alien has survived. The alien entity was ‘just a rock enclosing a large sentient being’
(Thompson 2018, 75), referred to as Wormwood. This being has ‘seeded the entire
biosphere with new macro- and microorganisms’ (Thompson 2018, 75), fungi referred
to as ‘xenoforms’, and supposed to be ‘biological machines, biotechnology rather than
living organisms’ (Thompson 2018, 276). These xenoforms can interact with certain
humans’ skin, giving them psychic abilities, and they are known as ‘sensitives’. Sensi-
tives are also able to navigate the ‘xenosphere’, the network of alien and human fungi
where information circulates freely. Humanity is unsure whether these organisms were
‘stowaways, or an invasion attempt’ (Thompson 2018, 75), and as such Wormwood
is attacked by Britain in 2012. Wormwood flees, ‘travelling a subterranean path with-
out discernible pattern’ (Thompson 2018, 317) and becomes a city-like bulge above
ground located in Nigeria, with a network of underground tunnels, almost reminiscent
of an ‘iceberg, with most of it below the surface, but it’s also like a tumour, budding
and infiltrating’ (Thompson 2018, 318). Wormwood becomes a valuable resource
since it has introduced new species which can be weaponised, created sensitives which
can retrieve information, heal and revive human beings and offer the potential to solve
the climate crisis. Fearing the change brought by the xenoforms, America implements
isolationist policies and stops interacting with the rest of the world. With Britain left
weakened because of its war against Wormwood and the disappearance of the US
from the global arena, a power vacuum is to be filled. The novel centres on the ways in
which Nigeria is attempting to harvest the technological and scientific benefits of what
seems to be a monstrous Wormwood to fill that vacuum, while other nations have
infiltrated Nigeria in order to get hold of what has been treated as a natural resource.
To that effect, Rosewater points to the technological and financial structures that seek
to maintain a hold over Nigeria’s resources, including human labour, inhumane cap-
italist structures that seek to exploit while also deploying posthuman hybridity to
suggest ways to dismantle coloniality.
Rosewater is the name of the satellite city surrounding the bulge of Wormwood
and the novel narrates Kaaro’s recruitment to the secret services called S45 through
an intermediary named Klaus, a Belgian agent whom Kaaro refers to as ‘one of
those anthropologist-type white people with their fearlessness and leather toughness’
(Thompson 2018, 118). The character is thus framed as a coloniser deploying stereo-
types about Africa, evoking Belgium’s brutal colonialisation of the Congo, as well as
summoning Europe’s wider colonial history by having an agent potentially working
for Europe from Brussels. Klaus talks about Nigeria in terms which suggest it is easily
exploitable:

I love this country of yours. There is so much money to be made here. There is oil
and gas. You have a population that is massively superstitious, including the intel-
ligentsia. Churches and mosques exert a powerful amount of influence on people,
families, and the government. You have terrorist cells, you have a paranoid execu-
tive who has a personal babalawo installed in the state house. You have laws against
homosexuality. China and Russia are squabbling over who will be the new United
States and everybody is scared, man. They need what you have. I have the clients
and the contacts in government. I have financial savvy. (Thompson 2018, 121)

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 216 elsa bouet

Klaus makes it clear that he is ready to exploit the institutions that he has infiltrated and
has the connections which can enrich him or his employers, who remain unnamed. His
ambiguous reference to ‘they’ makes their identity unclear – Nigerian or otherwise – but
Klaus secretly works on behalf of a nation trying to benefit from Nigerian energy resources
and Wormwood’s technology, and since he has contacts in an unnamed government he
can facilitate their foreign interference. He boasts that he has the financial means to do so,
which clearly outlines his ability as stemming from a power that can invest in meddling in
the economic affairs of other countries.
Klaus hints at the continuation of colonial structures despite the disappearance of
the US on the international stage. Nigeria and other large economies are trying to fill
the void left by the fall of the US, as demonstrated in the quote above. There is also a
theory that the ‘Chinese sent an experimental virus to copy the xenoforms with a view
to create their own synthetic strain’ (Thompson 2018, 200), this in order to remain
competitive against Nigeria since it owns such a technological marvel. Nigeria under-
stands its potential global advantage with Wormwood, as S45 tells Kaaro:

Everyone, every nation wants a part of it. There’s a theory that the Americans went
into seclusion because of its existence. If we could befriend it, there’s the scientific
data, the contact with unknown species, the health benefits, the defence applica-
tions . . . it could help us clean up the environment. We, Nigeria, can be the first
nation to engage it. Think of what it would mean. (Thompson 2018, 313)

Nigeria could emerge as the new superpower by deploying the same strategies that
previous neo-colonial powers have. They might profit from scientific advances derived
from the study of, and interaction with, Wormwood, pursuing medical and military
development. Notably, solving the climate crisis comes only as an afterthought to gain-
ing the technological edge, and the profit this would ensure.
S45 is also framing the exploitation in terms of ‘befriending’ Wormwood, not as
cultural exchange, but in a way that will allow for the exploitation of its technology,
and reproduces the paradigms of colonial encounters and exploitation. As O’Connell
argues, Nigeria’s encounter with Wormwood is in fact a second contact narrative, as
the colonial encounter with Britain was Nigeria’s first contact with an other: the ‘novel
filters its second contact invasion narrative through a deep mediation of global capi-
talism’ (O’Connell 2020, 114), and this is indeed visible through Oyin Da’s response:
‘We have more experience than any other Western country in dealing with first con-
tact. What do you think we experienced when your people carved up Africa at the
Berlin conference?’ (Thompson 2018, 314). Oyin Da, an anarchist sensitive who works
against the Nigerian government’s injustice, points to the 1884 Berlin Conference when
European powers divided Africa among themselves to facilitate its exploitation, struc-
tures which have continued to evolve to maintain the exploitation of Africa despite
its official independence. In doing so, Oyin Da suggests that Nigeria has knowledge
and experience to move beyond the mimicry of colonial paradigms, instead fostering
exchanges with Wormwood. However, the neo-colonised status of Nigeria puts this
possibility for sharing knowledge with Wormwood in jeopardy. Dare, a farmer who
rescued the human avatar of Wormwood named Anthony, explains that ‘The Nigerian
government takes it cue from colonial masters always’ (Thompson 2018, 342). Despite
Nigeria gaining the technological means to free itself from coloniality, global structures
remain in place to exploit its resources.

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 new weird technologies 217

Oyin Da introduces Kaaro to Anthony and he is able to visit Wormwood, also

referred to as Utopicity, and it is possible to see Wormwood as an expression of a
decolonised utopia. O’Connell argues that the utopian impulse offered in Rosewater
qualifies as ‘weak utopianism’, following Derrida’s concept of ‘weak messianism’ as
a messianism without messiah, a utopianism without utopia. He argues that it lacks
an event that will usher forward utopia, and instead Wormwood/Utopicity may bring
about humanity’s death, although this is left uncertain in the formal closure of the
novel (2020, 124). While no real salvational event is taking place – as it does, for
example, in Roadside Picnic (where an alien artefact is said to grant the wish for uni-
versal happiness, freedom and satisfaction) – Rosewater suggests that utopia can only
be achieved through a departure from conceptual models that create hierarchy. In this
sense, the death of humanity

sets the ground for a work of salvaging the future from the detritus of the western
imposed futures industry; however, Rosewater’s weak utopianism similarly sug-
gests that its world-saving cannot be taken for granted and must be also be [sic]
figured as a death, as a world-ending. (O’Connell 2020, 126)

Rosewater does not point to a literal death of humanity, but to the death of the inhu-
mane structures that do not treat all humans as equal. Frank Wilderson’s concept of
Afropessimism articulates a pessimism towards notions of universal humanity, since
Black people have been and are being treated as ‘props, implements for the execution
of White and non-Black fantasies and sadomasochist pleasures’ (2020, 15). Universal
humanity far too often signifies the Western prioritisation of white wealth, well-being
and development at the expense of the welfare of Black individuals and nations. In this
sense, not all beings are deemed humans since Black people are deemed expendable
and exploitable. This is made evident in Rosewater since the US attempts to ‘[f]ind a
way to keep themselves uninfected’ (Thompson 2018, 374) conceptualised as a ‘way
for America to stay human’ (Thompson 2018, 386): their clinging to stay uninfected,
unlike Nigerian citizens, symbolises their devaluation of human beings that are unlike
them, reinforcing their notion that to be human is to be the driver of neoliberal prin-
ciples promoting Western global hegemony, at the expense of the humanity of those
who are colonised. Doing so, Rosewater indicates that utopia can only be achieved
when this paradigm ends and that this event is yet to occur.
Rosewater promotes more entanglements and hybridity to signify the end of the
hierarchisation that structures both the global economy and the conception of human-
ity. This is achieved through the fostering of hybridity through Kaaro as a sensitive
working through the alien fungi and Anthony who is both a human avatar and the
sentient dome Wormwood. As Anthony introduces himself to Kaaro, he explains that
‘Your people call me Wormwood’ (Thompson 2018, 323). He is both sentient and the
biodome, first suggesting that there is a greater connection between the landscape and
the sentient, embodied entity that is Anthony. Analysing Area X in Annihilation, Andrew
Strombeck argues VanderMeer’s world is ‘fundamentally dislodged from human modes
of apprehension’ since it is ‘undoing a conceptual divide between nature and society’
(Strombeck 2020, 1,367). Similarly, the incomprehensibility of Wormwood being both
a place and a being confronts a Eurocentric epistemology of binary between self and
space, and self and other, thus reconceptualising not only the colonisers’ relationship to
a place, but also their exploitation of the people and their land. As a sensitive, Kaaro is

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 218 elsa bouet

able to experience this reconceptualisation in the xenosphere: ‘The information is bidi-

rectional for us, instead of unidirectional’ (Thompson 2018, 77). Instead of information
or orders coming from above by S45 or Klaus, Kaaro is able to exchange information
laterally, rather than hierarchically. This furthers the need to undermine structures that
promote the exploitation of a nation and its people for the benefits of a few, and instead
foster exchanges benefiting all. The fact that Wormwood operates without ‘discernible
pattern’ (Thompson 2018, 317) or without discernible orders, without the directions
imposed on it by tangible yet invisible powers, means that it is able to share its ‘global
store of information in the very atmosphere, a worldmind that only [sensitives] can
access’ (Thompson 2018, 76). This indicates that globalisation could fulfil an aim of
equality, provided that its structures are changed through reconfiguring notions of who
is deemed human by moving beyond exploitation. As Kaaro gets into Wormwood, he is
surprised that ‘there is no central function. There are no grand thoughts or instructions
issuing forth’ (Thompson 2018, 355), and Wormwood symbolises utopia by putting an
end to the horrifying grand narratives that do not construct everyone as human.
These novels’ depictions of a weird other beyond comprehension of the human
characters not only bring to light a history of domination, exploitation and colonialism
that is silenced, but also reify the monstrous structures and mechanisms that facilitate
imperialism. From the Oankali’s technological harvesting of DNA that enables what
seems to be at first enslaving Lilith and humanity, to Bremen’s technological military
superiority obtained through extraction and imposition of unfair trade terms, to the
exploitation of Wormwood for technological and financial gains, these novels show
how technology is obtained and deployed to achieve and maintain the coloniality of
power, notably through the imposition of trade terms that are unknown and cannot
be consented to. The powers represented all deploy technology to further extract tech-
nology or biotechnology from their other and financially gain from them. Initially, the
Oankali seem to be benefiting from their harvesting human DNA, Bremen from biorig-
ging and the location of Embassytown which will allow for further expansion, and for-
eign powers from the technological and financial advantages brought by Wormwood,
all in ways that evoke neo-colonial dynamics. However, the novels promote resistance
to a global hierarchisation and exploitation through the use of technology by showing
the ways in which technology can be a way to foster hybridity as opposed to dominat-
ing the other, and thus be deployed to mutually beneficial ends. Lilith, Kaaro and Avice
change through their technological encounters with aliens, changing them too; these
interactions show that exchange can still be beneficial and profitable, since instead of
risking the lives of an entire species through a war brought on by imperialism and a
desire for financial gain, the posthuman hybridity gained promotes more mutualistic
relations that disarticulate past and current monstrous colonial structures and hint
towards a globalisation that can offer global, universal prosperity only if it moves
beyond exploitation.

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 14

Uncanny Globalgothic Ecologies:

Animate Intimacies
Chloé Germaine

Introduction

A s the climate crisis deepens and its effects continue to be experienced unevenly
across the majority world, the globalgothic becomes entangled with ecologi-
cal thought. In the past decade, diverse writers have been exploring climate futures
through speculative genres in fiction. Common themes and modalities are emerging
despite differences in geographical location and political context. This chapter identi-
fies one common modality as animism, which is a relational concept of subjectivity
and sociality derived from the beliefs and practices of indigenous people across the
majority world. Animism is an ontology that insists that the world is alive and ‘that to
be means to participate in this aliveness’ (Vetlesen 2019, 16). That is, animism necessi-
tates a recognition of human embeddedness in a more-than-human world and, as such,
offers a compelling means to think through the crisis of the Anthropocene towards
modes of being-with that offer better futures for all life on the planet. Such a thought,
however, is not utopian: it elicits a confrontation with what the philosopher Timothy
Morton has called ‘dark ecology’, an ecological awareness that has much in common
with what philosophers in the West identify as ‘uncanny’ because of its defamiliarising
effects (Morton 2016, 26). It also confronts the vulnerability, suffering and damage
that characterise life in the Anthropocene. Dark ecology, a gothicised discourse, tem-
pers a straightforward appropriation of animism by the West as a utopian solution to
the climate crisis. Indeed, the turn to animism already complicates the universalising
assumptions behind the Western term ‘Anthropocene’, the name for a geological and
historical epoch in which humans have altered planetary conditions, and one that
suggests that all humanity is equally responsible for the ensuing crisis. As many critics
have noted, such a designation elides the historical and ongoing effects of imperialism,
capitalism and colonialism in creating climate change, as well as effacing the ways
in which its effects tend to fall most severely on those communities least responsible
(Moore 2016; Satgar 2018; Yusoff 2018). As Kathryn Yusoff argues, ‘imperialism and
ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been
in existence’ (2018, 12). In its alternative cosmologies, ontologies and epistemologies,
animism reveals the violence inherent not only in these global systems that have driven
climate change, but in the modes of thought in which they are grounded and through
which they are justified and normalised (Vetlesen 2019, 72). Recognising the damage
and violence entailed in the dark ecologies of the Anthropocene, then, and particularly

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the unevenness of both the causes and effects of climate change across the globe both
historically and in the present, this chapter reads the interconnections between animist
modes of thought and the globalgothic, identifying the ways in which recent fiction
explores the uncanny and intimate relations disclosed by our growing awareness of
the climate crisis.

Ontologies of the Anthropocene: The New Animisms

and Environmental Crisis
My reading of animism as a modality of the globalgothic is indebted to the new ani-
misms, a discourse that has emerged in anthropology in the last two decades. New
animism is an ontological turn in anthropology that is concerned with ‘the relationship
between Modernist or Cartesian approaches and the not-so-peculiar-after-all recogni-
tions of the mutual constitution and generative interactivity of “persons” and “things”’
(Astor-Aguilera and Harvey 2018, 1). As Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey
suggest, new animism proposes a relational approach to subjectivity and social rela-
tions and so eschews the definition of animism as a ‘belief in spirits’ defined by colo-
nial anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in Primitive Culture (1873). New animists
consider Tylor’s definition a projection of mind/body dualism on to indigenous people;
it is grounded in the logic of inversion that pervades Western thought whereby beings
are ‘closed in upon themselves, sealed by an outer boundary or shell that protects
their inner constitution from the traffic of interactions with their surroundings’ (Ingold
2006, 11). This boundary is a part of a conceptual apparatus that divides the world
into subjects and objects and is precisely what new animists challenge in their writ-
ing about the practices and beliefs of indigenous people. Animism no longer means
the imputation of spirit to non-living things, then, but describes a variety of subject-
subject ontologies that contrast with the subject-object division that characterises
Western thought, science and society. Suggesting the relationality of animism, Graham
Harvey (2014, 13) points to the influence of A. Irving Hallowell’s work on ‘Ojibwa
Ontology’ (1964) and its phrase ‘other-than-human persons’, variations of which now
abound in ecological writing too. Harvey credits Hallowell with developing the idea
that relationality is not merely theoretical but pervades many cultures, arguing that
‘to engage with animism necessarily involves being provoked to think more carefully
about what it means to be a person’ (2014, 15). Such thinking characterises Eduardo
Kohn’s writing on indigenous people in Amazonian Ecuador, for example, leading
him to theorise reality as a mutually constitutive ‘ecology of selves’ comprising human
persons, more-than-human persons and the spirits of the dead (2013, 16). Likewise,
Rane Willerslev’s work with the Siberian Yukaghirs emphasises an ontology wherein
boundaries between self and other, living and dead, human and animal ‘are perme-
able and easily crossed’ (2007, 54). Both Willerslev and Kohn re-evaluate Cartesian
assumptions about the structure and composition of thought and the ground of human
subjectivity. As these examples of new animism reveal, its aim is not to objectify ani-
mism as an object of study outside of which the European anthologist might stand, but
to take indigenous thought seriously.
The inclusion of indigenous perspectives and ideas from the majority world is vital
in developing ecological thought and action. As Jason Moore’s concept of ‘cheap nature’

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 223

aims to show, colonial and capitalist societies are founded on metaphysical assumptions
that sanction the exploitation of both human and ‘natural’ resources (2016, 2). Moreover,
as multiple ecological thinkers and activists point out, Western nations have presided over
growing global inequality and climate chaos, the effects of which are not evenly distrib-
uted. Moore draws on Bruno Latour’s concept of the Great Divide in his discussion of
the climate crisis to identify the philosophical and conceptual ground for this exploita-
tion. Latour states that the Great Divide inaugurated by the so-called ‘moderns’ in the
so-called ‘West’ – both contested terms – first separated humans from non-humans, and
‘nature’, before then separating ‘us’ – that is, Westerners – from ‘them’ – that is, the rest
– including indigenous and colonised people (1993, 11–12). One of the other operations
of the Great Divide was to de-animate the earth, an argument to which Latour returns in
his most recent ecological writing as he describes one of the shocks of the Anthropocene
emerging from a confrontation with an earth that strikes back (2017, 70). Despite his
stated aim to move beyond the divide inaugurated by the so-called ‘moderns’, however,
Latour’s theorisation both here and in Actor Network Theory (ANT) more broadly relies
on and so perpetuates the idea of animism as primitivism (Lillywhite 2018, 102). In
this way, Latour echoes the problematic misreading of animism present in the works of
colonial anthropology discussed above. This issue notwithstanding, Latour’s description
of our coming to awareness of an animated earth in a time of climate change accords
with new animists’ diagnoses of the Anthropocene. Arne Johan Vetlesen, for example,
identifies the crises of the present as emanating in the way Western thought has denied to
‘concrete units of nature any inner duration, inner motion, and internal becoming’ such
that we have come to regard nature as ‘something we are set deeply apart from rather
than being a part of’ (2019, 72). He suggests that ‘if the Anthropocene is the historical
product of anthropocentrism, it is also what forces us to abandon it and search for alter-
natives – alternatives whose first assignment is to be less destructive to the natural world
that humanity depends upon’ (2019, 9). For Vetlesen, animism offers an alternative to
much of Western philosophy, which finds itself ‘ill-equipped’ for the crisis (2019, 6). New
animist thinking follows calls from indigenous communities to consider animism not as
a ‘primitive’ resource but as a ‘higher’ form of political consciousness (Hau de no sau nee
1978, 91). Jemma Deer also develops a ‘generalised animism’ as a radical way of thinking
about a planet in crisis (2021, 1), adding her voice to the growing call for re-engagement
with modes of thought that have been marginalised and repudiated, modes of thought
that emphasise intersubjectivity, ecological embeddedness and entanglement rather than
individuality and division.

Speculative Fiction and the Globalgothic:

Entanglements across Space and Time
Before I offer a case study focusing on globalgothic fiction from a particular context
(the Nigerian diaspora), I want to develop the arguments of this chapter by identifying
animism as a modality emerging across a range of speculative fiction from the majority
world. My diverse, albeit brief, sample will serve to illustrate the varied manifesta-
tions of animism in fiction that deals with climate crisis, as well as its synergies with
the gothic. I designate the fiction in this sample as ‘speculative fiction’, an umbrella
term encompassing multiple genres, including fantasy and science fiction. Speculative

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fiction (SF) has been variously used to designate paradigm-changing and hypothetical
storytelling and imaginative fiction dealing with events that are non-existent in reality.
Nonetheless, as Margaret Atwood contends, SF also deals in things that ‘really could
happen’ (2011, 6). Recently, the anthropologist Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer has identi-
fied ‘speculative fiction’ as the mode best equipped to deal with the unimaginability
of the apocalypse (2019, 4). For Wolf-Meyer, speculative fiction is kin to social theory
because it explores the rules that undergird society and its human, and more-than-
human, relationships (2019, 5). SF is also necessarily future-oriented, a ‘what if?’
exercise aimed at an unfathomable future, exploring the potential intensification or
mutation of present conditions (Wolf-Meyer 2019, 20). However, the Anthropocene
complicates the unidirectional sense of time that Wolf-Meyer attributes to SF, since
the climate crisis is characterised by irruptions of past events and conditions, and by
legacies of human history dating back at least 300 years, if not further. In tackling the
problem of the contemporary climate crisis, then, SF necessarily evokes the gothic,
which is that quintessential literary mode dealing with irruptions of the buried past
in the present and the ‘descent into disintegration’ such irruptions precipitate (Baldick
1992, xix). It is my contention that the entangled temporality of the Anthropocene
necessitates a particular hybridisation of genres and modalities that characterises
contemporary globalgothic fictions.
One example of such hybridisation is Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), which
locates the ecogothic in the Sundarbans mangrove of India and Bangladesh, in a decay-
ing, abandoned temple dedicated to the goddess Manasi Devi. The legend of Manasi
Devi and her compact with a trader in the eighteenth century brings together disparate
characters in the modern world who have been affected in various ways by environ-
mental degradation. The text explicitly identifies this period of mercantile capitalism
and early globalisation as the beginning of the Anthropocene. This contentious peri-
odisation is later problematised in the novel as characters discuss the history of slav-
ery, and so suggest that the eighteenth-century acceleration of trade was enabled by
the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of indigenous people in the Americas, and
the ecological and economic violence of plantations. The novel’s recognition of the
long history of the Anthropocene, of its complex global flows and interconnections,
is echoed in its narrativisation of the migration of both animals and humans and their
entwinement. The novel is set in the present and eschews supernatural machinations,
but its exploration of more-than-human relationships, an ecology of selves, requires
a dose of the uncanny and the fantastic: it relies on a Todorovian hesitation in its
refusal of a mechanistic, rational explanation for unfolding events. An interesting
companion to Gun Island is The Gatekeeper (2017) by Singaporian writer, Nuraliah
Norasid. The novel imagines a high-tech fantasy world in which humans and non-
human sapiens have come to live uneasily together, though the latter are continually
threatened by the government’s expansion of its cities. The novel shares with Gun
Island an emphasis on human embeddedness in a more-than-human cosmos. In both
novels, other-than-human persons, to borrow Hallowell’s phrase, figure in the form
of snakes and emphasise a mythic dimension to the world humans inhabit. The ani-
mist modality emerges in these globalgothic stories, then, through their recourse to
mythology. Where Ghosh draws on stories from Bengali Hinduism, Norasid’s Medusa
character, Ria, evokes Greek and Malay myths. Through the genres of magical real-
ism and fantasy respectively, Ghosh and Norasid imagine curiously animate worlds,

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 225

where ancient creatures disrupt a seemingly modern present and warn us about our
responsibilities to more-than-human kin.
Indigenous futurist writers elsewhere in the majority world explore gothic themes
of entrapment and persecution through dystopian imaginings of climate-crisis-ravaged
futures. Australian Aboriginal writer Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Young Adult dystopia
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and Métis writer Cherie Dimaline’s The
Marrow Thieves (2017) extrapolate the logic of colonial pasts into futures in which
indigenous peoples have become subject to ever more invasive and violent rule. In The
Marrow Thieves, the Western extractive disposition towards the lands it has colonised
turns to the bodies of the indigenous people of North America. The remaining descen-
dants of the indigenous population are hunted and killed for their bone marrow, a
resource that is reputed to restore Western people’s ability to dream and stave off an
incurable madness spreading through society. In Kwaymullina’s novel, the titular char-
acter is forced to succumb to a machine that will extract her memories and the secrets
of the Tribe, threatening their absolute destruction. Each book offers an explicit politi-
cal commentary on the ways in which the bodies and cultures of indigenous people
continue to be exploited by Western societies, as well as an indictment of the ways in
which settler colonialism exerts its effects in the present, through the climate crisis, but
also in forms of social and political marginalisation. The animist modality evoked in
the books suggests that it is in the most intimate, immaterial locus of the self, in memo-
ries and dreams, that the survival of indigenous peoples resides, and with it, hope for
a radically different future. This privileging of the immaterial as the source of resis-
tance and power accords with Jemma Deer’s notion of radical animism as entailing a
non-separation between spirit, or psyche, and the material, terrestrial ground of being
(2021, 7). The books thus evoke a radically animist sensibility in contradistinction to
the extractive materialism of the colonisers, who would reduce indigenous people to
merely bodies, a material resource, according to the logic of the Great Divide.
So far, the texts in this sample evoke the gothic effect of the irruption of the past
in the present, and the mode’s thematic concern with persecution. The final set of
texts bring a gothic preoccupation with invasion, colonisation and transformation,
evoking Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), as well as various vampire narratives,
through stories of alien contact. This hybridisation of gothic themes with science fic-
tion hails from the Nigerian diaspora in the USA and the UK in works that could
also be described as ‘Africanfuturism’. So defined by one of its leading proponents,
Africanfuturism is science fiction rooted in the culture, history, mythology and point
of view of the African world (Okorafor 2019). Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2014) and
Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) are set in a modern-day and near-future Nigeria
respectively and deal with the science fiction trope of ‘first contact’ with aliens. Both
books relate the gothic themes of contagion and the breach of bodily borders, lead-
ing to seemingly ‘monstrous’ transformations, to their reworking of science fiction
tropes. Here animism manifests to disrupt the logic of inversion that pervades Western
thought because in each novel the alien invasion breaches not only planetary borders,
but the very bodily ‘shell’ that Western thought holds as a barrier to the environ-
ment (Ingold 2006, 11). As with the other novels sampled here, too, past, present
and future intermingle, creating uncanny temporalities in which the past returns in
the present, and the future, particularly that promised by colonial capitalism, is radi-
cally destabilised as alien creatures erupt from the water and the soil. The texts also

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 226 chloé germaine

evoke the mythic dimension of the animist modality I have been tracing here, in their
hybridisation of animist beliefs and practices present in modern-day Africa with Chris-
tianity, and with narratives of scientific progress, including speculations about clean
energy. In so doing Okorafor and Thompson eschew narratives about the progression
of human society from ‘primitive’ beliefs to scientific rationalism, imposed by colonial
anthropologists and capitalist ideology alike. That is, they suggest that animism is not
a quality particular to so-called pre-modern societies, but rather that it is entangled
with modernity. Writing from South Africa, Harry Garuba makes a similar claim, sug-
gesting that animism is a materialist mode of thought ‘embedded within the processes
of material, economic activities and then reproduces itself within the sphere of cultural
and social life’ (2003, 269). Garuba’s ‘animist materialism’ refuses a divide between
pre-modern and modern worlds; he identifies an animist unconscious that pervades life
in modern Africa. Okorafor’s and Thompson’s exploration of this animist unconscious
mingles gothic sensibilities with the future-oriented trajectory of SF.
Through this sample of diverse texts, I identify animism as an emerging modality
in contemporary fiction across genres. As a mode, or sensibility, within speculative
fiction, animism emphasises human relations with the non-human, with the mythic or
cosmological dimension to those relations, a rejection of subject-object borders and
associated hierarchies, and a non-linear conception of time. This is not to suggest that
such features define animist cosmologies across the majority world, nor that the texts
disclose animism as the social reality of indigenous populations. Rather, animism is
developed through the globalgothic as a sensibility that decentres Western modes of
thought and being, which tend to de-animation, mechanism, separation, boundary
policing, extraction and exploitation. In this sense, the texts develop their animist sen-
sibilities in the same way as anthropologists working in the so-called new animisms.
As Alf Hornborg suggests, new animism is less about categorising other beliefs as it
is about challenging so-called ‘Modern’ modes of knowledge production (2006, 21).

Uncanniness, Intimacy and the Environment

Animate worlds are intimate ones: human sociality is extended to the more-than-
human world; boundaries between selves are provisional because being is relational;
and transformations of the self into other forms and other selves is possible, though
fraught with the danger of confusion and disintegration. These forms of intimacies
evoke notions of the gothic and the uncanny, especially when they appear in the work
of Western philosophers and eco-critics. Deer elaborates upon animism in exactly
these terms, arguing that it discloses ‘the uncanny reality of a “self” inhabiting, and
inhabited by, a world not materially separable from it’ (2021, 82). If Deer describes
animism through the uncanny, it is not because the latter explains the former, but
because the gothic and the uncanny are European negotiations of the kinds of animate
intimacies banished by European Enlightenment thought as irrational, primitive and
childish. Indeed, as Diane Long Hoeveler argues, gothic can be understood precisely
as a response to such Enlightenment proscriptions, a staging of all that ought to be
rejected by the modern bourgeois citizen in preparation for the ‘brave new world of
reason’ (2010, 10). That Freud was concerned with the power of uncanny irruptions
to destabilise the bourgeois individual (and society) well over a century later, in part
inspired by his own reading of gothic literature, suggests the project was not entirely

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 227

successful. The contemporary climate crisis has resurrected these uneasy negotiations
in the form of ideas such as ‘dark ecology’ (Morton 2016), the ‘eco-gothic’ (Smith and
Hughes 2013) and Spivak’s notion of ‘planetarity’, which she develops as a response to
neoliberal globalisation and its rendering of our earthly home as uncanny (2003, 74).
These uncanny and gothic formulations suggest that the climate crisis has revealed to
Western thought the very thing it has long denied: the animacy of the world, and the
agency of its more-than-human inhabitants, the liveliness of matter and of the systems
in which all are embedded. As speculative fiction across the majority world takes seri-
ously indigenous ontologies and ways of knowing, then, it necessarily mingles these
with Western perspectives coloured by the gothic and the uncanny, with those themes,
effects and tropes that have historically been used to variously repudiate, negotiate and
reveal an animate world with which we are necessarily intimate.
Morton’s formulation of dark ecology is indebted to the uncanny, albeit described
in very different terms to its use in Freudian psychoanalysis. Morton presents his
‘dark-uncanny’ ecological thought as an antidote to the ‘demystification’ of humanistic
accounts of culture, politics and philosophy, as a way of reinvigorating belief in a world
that is ‘mysterious and magical’ (2016, 26, 50). Uncanniness manifests, too, in the
apprehension of scale necessitated by the planetary crisis, in the profoundly disorient-
ing apprehension of a planetary system and its imminent collapse (Morton 2016, 36). I
link this scalar dimension of the ecological uncanny to Spivak’s articulation of uncanny
planetarity, which she develops not explicitly in response to the climate crisis, but as a
repudiation of neoliberal concepts of globalisation. For Spivak, the era of globalisation
has inaugurated a sense of scalar disorientation that has much in common with the
‘unheimlich’, albeit one that jettisons the family drama of traditional psychoanalysis
(2003, 72). Rather, the planet itself becomes ‘the signifier of the uncanny’ (2003, 89).
These theoretical reformulations of the uncanny pertain to the globalgothic’s concern
with interconnected beings across space and time, from Ghosh’s gun merchant fleeing
his obligations to an ancient goddess in the eighteenth century, both of whom appear to
haunt a globe-trotting writer in the twenty-first century, to Thompson’s account of the
emergence of an alien consciousness, whose body has long since rotted to dust on a far
distant planet, in the body of a modern Nigerian woman in The Rosewater Insurrection
(2019). Such stories re-enchant the world through the modality of animism – in the way
Garuba argues – but in so doing make the familiar unfamiliar. As Deer suggests, this is
animism as ‘the strange and unsettling disturbance of that most familiar and familial
of places: the home’ (2021, 10). That is, where globalgothic reveals such scalar spatial
and temporal interconnections, it makes uncanny a particular grounding of existence,
one that is individual and rooted in the present moment.
This synthesis of ecological thought with animism also entails a confrontation
with otherness, often expressed in terms of monstrosity and fear, that nonetheless
requires a recognition of responsibility. Victor’s rejection of his monster is perhaps
the archetypal scene of such a confrontation in the gothic, but it turns on an ethical
relation with which the mode has been preoccupied since its inception. Here I briefly
elaborate on some interconnections with modern ecological thought and this aspect
of the literary gothic. Dealing first with animist and ecological philosophers, I empha-
sise the gothic terms in which the planetary crisis is understood. Deer explains the
climate crisis as an ‘animate’ problem because it brings humans ‘face-to-face with a
non-human other, with a living thing that they do not recognize as a fellow – despite

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 228 chloé germaine

their once intimate relation’ (2021, 10). Deer also suggests that the crisis ‘concerns
the becoming-monstrous of the human: the precipitous mutation through which our
way of living is revealed to be no longer compatible with the planet’ (ibid.). Morton
is more explicit in his description of a ‘monster in the dark mirror, and you are a cone
in one of its eyes’, encouraging his reader to become ‘creeped out’ by humans and
their planet-destroying actions (2016, 100–1). Here, what was once familiar (being-
with nature) has become strange, and is encountered as such, and what seems familiar
(modes of human production and consumption) must be reconfigured as monstrous.
These de-familiarising confrontations are staged in ecological writing to underscore
‘the responsibility we bear to human and non-human others, as well as the capac-
ity, or incapacity, to respond’ (Deer 2021, 10). Tsing et al. consider the capacity
for human ‘destruction’, and our subsequent incapacity to act, in gothic terms, too,
emphasising the ‘monsters’ and ‘ghosts’ that inhabit Anthropocene landscapes (2017,
3). However, the value of the gothic in exploring ecological and ethical relations
goes beyond its vocabulary of (un)homeliness, monstrosity and otherness. As Dale
Townshend suggests, the gothic literary aesthetic evokes – through a persistent preoc-
cupation with scenes of hospitality – emotional affects prompted by the impossibility
of ethical relations (2020, 42–3, 47). Townshend traces the interplay of oppositional
versions of hospitality that structures gothic literature, showing how the mode reveals
the violence that is bound up in language itself when the ‘other’ is taken in by a host
(2020, 44). Exposing the violence of this ‘ordinary’ hospitality, the gothic takes steps
toward ‘radical’ hospitality. The latter unsettles the mastery of the host, though, in
the gothic, this is most often expressed as a kind of monstrous parasitism (Townshend
2020, 45). Vampires, ghosts and monsters, in Townshend’s analysis, threaten the
‘ipseity’ of the host, pointing to the (im)possibility of wholly unconditional ethical
relations (2020, 46).
As I will discuss in the case study below, the interplay of alien guests and human
hosts in recent globalgothic evokes just these concerns with the seeming impossibil-
ity of ethical relations, but in the context of a more-than-human world and animist
modes of sociality. Here the globalgothic accords with the direction of ecological
thought, which aims at exposing anthropocentric biases. For example, Morton notes
that Freud’s ‘anthropocentric reading of Oedipus’, which underwrites the latter’s
conception of the uncanny, of course, ignores the Sphinx, ‘the ambiguous female
monster lurking on the edge’ (2016, 137). In Freud’s family drama, there is nothing
but Oedipus and his parents, and Oedipus thinks he acts autonomously (ibid.). For
Morton, the climate crisis punctures this ipseity, inducing terror, yes, but pointing to
wholly different structures of ethicality. Spivak conceives of such relational ethics in
planetary terms, appropriate for the globalgothic:

If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary

creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us; it is not
our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away. (2003, 73)

There is a tension here, then, between a traditional gothic concern with human rela-
tions (conceived of in the literary gothic through scenes of monstrous hospitality in
a domestic sphere) and the animist, planetary modality of the globalgothic, since the
latter rejects the very model of subjectivity on which the former is grounded. As I

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 229

shall show, whilst continuing to evoke monstrous scenes of vampirism and parasit-
ism, globalgothic texts that evoke an animist modality offer alternative configurations
of subjectivity founded on relationality, taking place in a world ‘not composed by
and for humans but one in which humans are part of a larger relational commu-
nity’ (Astor-Aguilera and Harvey 2018, 3). This is the difference between ‘individual’
and ‘dividual’ persons. ‘Dividual’ is a term derived from studies in South Asian and
Melanesian contexts (Marriott 1976; Strathern 1988), but now more widely applied
by the new animisms to insist that relationships, and not the self, are the crucial mat-
ter of ontology (Astor-Aguilera and Harvey 2018, 2). In Townshend’s account of the
gothic, reciprocity entails violence because it is founded upon the mastery of the self,
which necessitates the obliteration of the other. The rendering vulnerable of this self
(as master, or host) in gothic novels that stage scenes of radical hospitality, then, reveals
that the self is always already founded on an obligation to the other. This horrifying
revelation, as it is negotiated in the gothic, most often results in a violent repudiation
or expulsion of the other, the monster. In contrast, globalgothic animist texts reconfig-
ure scenes of hospitality within the context of a properly relational concept of subjec-
tivity, rejecting the individual in favour of the dividual, and at a planetary scale. The
radically different formulation of ethics that arises is far from utopian, however, and
radical relations retain the violence and destruction of the Anthropocene.

Unwelcome Guests, Uncanny Irruptions and Intimate

Atmospheres in Rosewater and Lagoon
Lagoon (2014) and Rosewater (2016) stage affective encounters with the planetary
through the arrival of aliens who erupt from the soil and water of Nigeria. These irrup-
tions lead to scenes of violence, largely perpetrated by the human ‘hosts’, and a series
of uncanny shifts as the positions of host and guest become unsettled. Though framed
by both writers as revisions of the ‘first contact’ narrative from within a former colony,
the novels partake of gothic concern with hospitality, rehearsing exchanges between
parasitic guests and violent hosts as human characters adjust to a new mode of being
that unsettles the very boundaries of the self on which modern human thought rests.
In Lagoon, the alien ambassador is welcomed into the home of the principal character,
marine biologist Adaora, after having taken a human form and name. The women
deliberately choose a name (Ayodele) that will confuse Adaora’s abusive husband,
disrupting his sense of mastery by preventing him from identifying the origins of the
strange guest. Such name games, common in early gothic novels where guests and hosts
alike often take names not their own, partake in that gothic concern with the ‘problems
of language’, and, specifically, the ways in which a proper name misrepresents and
silences the ‘absolute other’ (Townshend 2020, 44). Immediately refusing the ‘tortuous
interrogation’ (ibid.) to which a guest is subjected under ordinary conditions of hospi-
tality, Ayodele quickly reveals herself to be ‘absolutely foreign’ (Okorafor 2014, 31).
This foreignness first manifests in the sounds she emits when changing form, a sound
that human bodies cannot process, and which makes Adaora fall to the floor, vomiting.
Soon, Adaora’s home becomes the epicentre of the alien’s visit and crowds gather in
both protest and support of the alien presence. The carnival atmosphere gives way to
violence as Nigerian soldiers fire on the alien, are themselves violently transformed by

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 230 chloé germaine

Ayodele, and the crowd torches and loots the house. The scenes at Adaora’s home are a
microcosm of the violence spreading across Lagos in the wake of the alien’s arrival, and
the sense of radical unhoming it precipitates.
The shifting role of the alien from guest to host, explored in Lagoon, pushes the
bounds of ordinary hospitality. Ayodele first describes the aliens as ‘guests who wish
to become citizens’, making a claim of belonging that pertains to both Nigerian soil
and identity. Such a claim exceeds the bounds of ordinary hospitality and the aliens
(and those mistaken for them) are attacked by angry, frightened mobs. Undeterred,
the aliens go further. Ayodele offers, in a gesture of seeming reciprocity, to share the
alien technology, allowing Nigeria to eschew its dependence on oil, neo-colonial gov-
ernance by the IMF, and the rampant corruption this has produced. Here, the aliens
transform from guests into hosts, exemplifying the etymological confusion of the lat-
ter word, which ‘means both “foreigner” or “stranger” and “enemy” simultaneously’
(Townshend 2020, 44). The abundance offered by the aliens sounds utopian but is
more properly a wholly unconditional offer of hospitality ‘without reserve or limits
in time, space and numerical calculation’ which, as Townshend notes in his Derridean
reading of the gothic, ‘can never be practically achieved as such’ (2020, 46). The offer
unsettles the ipseity of the host, here the people and government of Nigeria, though
by the close of the novel an uneasy accord seems to have been established, albeit one
that will bring Nigeria into conflict with other nations. This first contact narrative
has a peculiarly gothic structure, then, taking place somewhere in that uncanny zone
between ordinary hospitality, with its inherent violence, and an impossible, radical
hospitality yet to be established by the close of the novel.
The alien guests of Rosewater are more obviously parasitic, producing monsters
and infections as they interpenetrate earthly ecosystems. The alien, known as ‘Worm-
wood’, is a biomass embedded in the earth’s crust, with a small dome protruding above
ground in the centre of the ring-shaped town, Rosewater. The narrator, Kaaro, describes
Wormwood as a ‘tick on the earth’s surface’ and ‘a tumour, budding and infiltrating’
(Thompson 2016, 355, 318). He discovers that Wormwood’s release of millions of
microscopic ‘xenoforms’ into the earth’s biosphere is its means of colonising the planet
by stealth. The xenoforms are parasites, penetrating the neurones of living creatures in
order to build a vast, living network for the sharing of information about life on earth.
The novel’s thematic concern with the idea of the parasite is most often represented
through the aesthetics of abjection and the mental and physical degeneration of human
hosts infected by an aggressive ‘algorithm’ working through the xenosphere. However,
this SF reworking of the gothic theme of vampiric colonisation refuses the expulsion,
or exorcism, of the unwanted guest parasite (as, for example, in Sheridan Le Fanu’s
‘Carmilla’ (1872)) and points to a space beyond ordinary hospitality by unsettling the
distinction between symbiosis and parasitism. The fungal microorganisms that have
entangled with Kaaro’s own neural pathways ‘open’ the xenosphere to him, welcoming
him into a ‘communal’ ‘thoughtspace’, a repository of human, and more-than-human,
consciousness (Thompson 2016, 352, 328). Here he makes his own fortress but can
also penetrate the most intimate locus of the other, becoming an unwanted guest him-
self. This unsettling of host/parasite relations queers the notion of intimacy in terms
that echo Neel Ahuja’s account of ‘intimate atmospheres’ of the Anthropocene (2015).
Ahuja describes how ‘minerals, mosquitoes, settlers, gases, solar rays and other bodies
share in reproductive metabolisms crossing scales, species and systems’ (2015, 367).
These queer intimacies emerge from ‘lateral connections between distant bodies that

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 231

appear violent as an inherent feature of their shared existence’ (Ahuja 2015, 368). Read
as a progenitor of queer intimacies through its transformation of the earth’s atmosphere
into a communal thought-space, Wormwood refuses the moralising figuration of the
parasite, welcoming its human hosts into shared forms of existence that equally reject a
fantasy of equal reciprocity, and the hierarchy of host and parasite.
As in Lagoon, shifting roles of host and guest play out in Rosewater with uncanny
effect. Nigeria is explicit about claiming itself as the host country of the alien, even
though Wormwood first landed in London, but it is also clear that the alien hosts the
inhabitants of Rosewater by providing free, clean energy, and an uneasy independence
from the Nigerian state. The periodic openings of the dome extend the alien’s hospital-
ity by providing healing effects for those in the vicinity. All physical and some men-
tal ailments are cured during the opening, though ‘there are reconstructions that go
wrong’ and crews with flamethrowers are dispatched to deal with reanimated corpses
in the aftermath (Thompson 2016, 9). These uncanny effects of the opening of the
dome, including reanimated and reconstituted bodies, dramatise ‘the impossibility
of sustaining a silent, non-conditional and limitless opening towards the other that
grounds the ethical relation’ in explicitly gothic terms (Townshend 2020, 46). There
is also a vampiric attack on ‘sensitives’, which manifests in the xenosphere as a suc-
cubus, calling itself Molara. Kaaro visits a mind fortress of one of Molara’s victims
and sees a ghost-thing with its mouth attached to the back muscle of her avatar.
‘[A] slow stream of blood drips down’ and ‘a pulsing blood vessel that I do not recognize
. . . spurts away Bola’s life force’ (Thompson 2016, 156). This is a vampiric attack at
the heart of Bola’s fortress, representative of her imagined ipseity. The vampiric Molara,
however, does not act on behalf of Wormwood as a whole. She is a rogue ‘infection’.
Anthony – the ambassador for the alien entity – describes a more symbiotic relationship
with earthly organisms, including the human after whom he names himself, and who
is ‘at the heart’ of his being (Thompson 2016, 248–9). Anthony refutes the idea that
there is any longer a separation between human and alien, insisting that their beings are
entangled across the biosphere. From within Anthony’s consciousness, Kaaro expresses
a similar feeling: ‘This is not alien to me. It feels familiar. I am part of this. I have
been for a long time’ (Thompson 2016, 354). Such are the (un)heimlich revelations of
Kaaro’s exploration of the xenosphere. These uncanny intimacies are not resolved in the
novel. There is neither a complete invasion of the aliens, nor the promise of a reciprocal
co-existence. Rather, Kaaro looks to an uneasy future, which he describes as akin to the
experience of climate change: an inexorable planetary shift that is almost impossible
to conceptualise. In both novels, then, a literal irruption (from the ground and ocean)
inaugurates uncanny, planetary affects, including the disruption of domestic and politi-
cal structures and the disintegration of anthropocentric mastery. Unlike eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century gothic novels, however, which tend toward the expulsion of
parasitic guests or the overthrow of violent hosts, the uneasy and yet-to-be determined
futures of Lagoon and Rosewater resist both the impossibility of unconditional ethical
relations and the restoration of ordinary relations.
Alien encounters render new ethical relations necessary because they reveal the self
to be a relational, permeable and more-than-human mode of being. As discussed above,
such a conception of the self evokes Western notions of the uncanny because it unrav-
els the fantasy of the bounded individual and entails threats of ‘total participation and
confusion’ (Willerslev 2007, 29). Willerslev notes that ‘the notion that a human being
can be both himself and a deceased relative, let alone that he can transform himself

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 232 chloé germaine

into various animals, is simply inconceivable within canonical Western thought’ and,
further, that the Western ‘mind-world dichotomy . . . provides an almost entirely dis-
torted account of the nature of human perception’ (2007, 29–30). Yet, the characters
of Rosewater and Lagoon experience being ‘I’ and ‘not I’ simultaneously through the
modes of shared existence inaugurated by alien contact. Kaaro’s inexperience as a ‘sensi-
tive’ early in the novel means he falls prey to total confusion, spending months in recov-
ery after being unable to extricate himself from the identity of a man whose mind he
invades. Later, though, he can participate in shared being with the alien, Anthony, such
that ‘his memory is now my memory . . . thousands of years in there, drifting in space’
and, though he fears ‘madness’, Kaaro remains both part of the alien consciousness
and anchored to himself (Thompson 2016, 341). Lagoon stages a more visceral scene
of the risk entailed in relational being when Ayodele reconstitutes violent soldiers into
wriggling ‘heaps of raw meat’ on Adaora’s lawn (Okorafor 2014, 136). Perturbed by
Adaora’s distress at this transformation, Ayodele hastily transforms the mass of flesh into
a plantain tree, taking ‘the elements of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium,
phosphorus, potassium, sulphur, sodium, chlorine and magnesium . . . and rearrang[ing]
them into a plant’ (Okorafor 2014, 137). Adaora wonders about the consequence for
the men’s ‘souls’, recognising that if matter is never created nor destroyed, only changing
form, then the same is true of the soul stuff entangled with it. For Adaora, who welcomes
the aliens, the threat of dissolution gives way to the potentials of a transformation that
can sustain both human and animal personhood simultaneously: she becomes fish-like
in her underwater visit to the alien ship. Adaora’s body becomes that of a ‘giant metallic
blue fish’, and she grows gills, a sign that her body is porous and open to exchange with
its environment (Okorafor 2014, 251). Underwater, Adaora realises that it has become
impossible to tell ‘which were the aliens and which were the earthlings’ and worries
what the effect will be of staying too long (Okorafor 2014, 252). However, she also
reveals that she was, in fact, born with fish-like features and a preternatural propensity
for the water, suggesting that her present transfiguration comes, in part, from a latent
potentiality in her human body. Adaora’s and Kaaro’s experiences with the aliens suggest
that if the threat of total confusion inherent in the animist sense of self can be avoided,
then there exist exhilarating opportunities for metamorphosis and exchange, a way to
partake in the liveliness of the more-than-human world.
These experiences also suggest that animism entails becoming intimate with others,
with extending the bonds of human sociality to more-than-human persons. In a decen-
tring of anthropocentric perspectives, the opening of Lagoon is narrated by a sword-
fish, the form later taken by Adaora, expressing her anger with the humans for the
devastation their oil pipeline has wrought in the ocean. The swordfish also considers
the possibility of her impending death and shares her past-life memories, revealing her-
self as a more-than-material being (Okorafor 2014, 4). The swordfish is transformed
by the aliens according to her own desire to become faster and stronger. Indeed, it is
the animals who participate in exchange with the aliens first. They are embraced by
the pulsating colours of the ship underwater, growing new tentacles, bony growths and
other appendages so that the water is soon ‘teeming with aliens and monsters’ before
the humans encounter the alien ambassador (Okorafor 2014, 6). Later, Ayodele tells
the representatives of Nigeria’s government that she first entreated the ‘people’ in the
water, holding them to be no different in stature from humans. Beyond the personhood
of animals, alien contact in Nigeria also brings into focus other ‘people’ inhabiting
the landscape, including inorganic beings. The ‘Bone Collector’ is an assemblage of

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 uncanny globalgothic ecologies 233

ancient spirit and modern materials residing within the Lagos-Benin Expressway. It
rises like a ‘huge snake-like slab of concrete’, making a sound of ‘ecstasy’ as it absorbs
the fleeing passengers of abandoned cars (Okorafor 2014, 207). In this scene, the
aliens once again demonstrate their radical hospitality, with one offering its entire
body to satiate the Bone Collector’s appetite. Other creatures awaken too, roused by
the offer of the alien host. These include mythic creatures older than the modern city of
Lagos, including Udide – the story weaver – who emerges from her cavern. Udide takes
over as narrator to tell the story of Nigeria, a story with its origins in the ‘soily cosmos’
of the land, but its future in the new digital networks, entangling past and present
(Okorafor 2014, 194). Indeed, Udide is given the last words of the novel, promising to
‘leave my web’ and ‘become part of the story’ (Okorafor 2014, 293).

Conclusion
The globalgothic fiction I have explored in this chapter negotiates uncanny effects on
a planetary scale, going well beyond the domestic dramas of the European gothic.
Nonetheless, it relies on gothic structures and affects that emerge in the space between
ordinary and radical hospitality, which are a central preoccupation of the mode. This
concern with hospitality, and its implications for the fantasised ipseity of the self, is
reconfigured through the modality of animism, which posits an entirely relational,
more-than-human concept of subjectivity and sociality. Gothic proscriptions against
animate intimacies, then, along with the terrors of radical hospitality, modulate, in these
animist tales, into a gesture toward an uneasy but wholly different future for humans
and other-than-human beings on the planet. Such stories refuse a utopian appropria-
tion of animism in a time of climate crisis because the shared and participatory modes
of being they imagine are shot through with the violence of the Anthropocene. Global-
gothic animist fiction also reworks the gothic theme of the uncanny irruption of the
past in the present imagining thoroughly entangled temporalities, such as that described
by Udide, whose story emerges from the ‘always mingling past, present and future’
(Okorafor 2014, 194). Western materialist and mechanistic dispositions towards the
earth are punctured by the power of myth, memory, desire, ghosts and other immaterial
aspects of being. At the same time, these works are often firmly futurist, intermingling,
as in Lagoon and Rosewater, elements of African spiritualities with scientific ideas and
science fiction scenarios. Such a synthesis contends that animist ontologies are not a
relic of the primitive past, which have been superseded by modernity, but a necessary
puncturing of the very fantasy of modernity itself. Globalgothic entreats its readers to
consider different modes of knowing and being for the Anthropocene, emphasising
communal, participatory, contingent and entangled being-with, during a time when
many creatures, including many humans, are feeling the uncanny and unhoming effects
of climate crisis.

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 15

Pandemics and Globalgothic

Johan Höglund

T he pandemic has haunted gothic since its inception. The same medieval cul-
ture that produced the architecture out of which gothic emerged also engendered
texts and artwork that depict the plagues that decimated human populations dur-
ing this period. The European gothic cathedral was often decorated with skeletons
performing the Dance Macabre, foreshadowing the corpses that rise in early gothic
texts such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796), and prefiguring the mass death that occurs in Mary Shelley’s The
Last Man (1826). Similarly, plague narratives such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales (1387–1400), William Langland’s Piers Plowman (1370–86) and Daniel Defoe’s
widely read A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) all influenced the first gothic texts
not simply by providing their authors with themes, characters and imagery, but also
by furnishing a paradigm of terror and pending doom. Like the pandemic, early gothic
summons a destroying darkness that rises apparently from within, that slowly reveals
itself through signs upon the body, and that travels secretly along familial ties so that
a parent can be seen to breathe ‘death upon . . . his own children’ (Defoe 1722, 233).
Gothic, just like the pandemic narrative that pre-dates it, struggles to explain such
abject darkness, but it still theorises it as a deserved punishment from God or the bitter
harvest of a long secular history of structural violence.
Out of these beginnings, the pandemic has become a dominant theme in glo-
balgothic, and as such it has informed different types of gothic narrative, from the
xenophobic and heteropatriarchal tales of apocalypse that circulated in Britain dur-
ing the twilight of the British Empire, where contagion originates in the sexually or
racially foreign ‘other’, to radical twenty-first-century narratives where pandemics
are described as collapsing the Cartesian binary that sets humanity apart from extra-
human ecology, and where white heteropatriarchy appears as a pathogen, rather
than as an antidote. This spreading of pandemic gothic has not occurred simply
within the mode itself; gothic figures of contagion have entered a global social and
political vocabulary, from Karl Marx’s 1867 description of capitalism as vampiric,
to the characterisation of African immigrant workers as zombies in the twenty-first
century (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002). Thus, (pandemic) gothic can be said to
constitute a global ideational and cultural pandemic in itself. Out of its immodest
beginnings in Britain and the US, its central figures of contagion have spread across
the planet, infecting both traditional narrative forms and political conversations,
replicating and mutating in unpredictable ways before returning utterly changed yet
still recognisable to the spaces that once spawned them. In this way, pandemic gothic
is inherently globalgothic.

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 pandemics and globalgothic 237

This chapter explores the long, shifting and increasingly global tradition that is
the gothic pandemic narrative via three sections that focus on three discrete narrative
strains. The first such strain can be termed ‘imperial’ and emerges with gothic in the
nineteenth century, a time when new knowledge of the role that microbes play com-
bined with the frenzied attempt by European and US nations to expand and secure
global economic and military control. In this strain, contagion is described as arising
out of the entities that are perceived to threaten heteronormative capitalist and impe-
rial nation states: economic and military competition, the insurgent subaltern, the anti-
capitalist and revolutionary precariat, the migrant, women and the queer. The second
strain can be described as a reaction to this first conservative, misogynist and xenopho-
bic strain, but it also has roots in early gothic accounts of capitalist modernity. In this
second type, subaltern, feminist and other marginalised voices ‘write back’, telling sto-
ries where the pandemic arises out of modernity/capitalism/colonialism and where the
figure of horror, the patient zero, is white heteropatriarchy. The final strain discussed
in this chapter further collapses normative positions by narrating pandemics that open
doors to new (post)human modes of being and becoming in a world understood as
positively tentacular, multispecies and infectious. While gothic has long investigated
and challenged the anthropocentric borders that separate humanity from other forms
of life (and death) – from ecology – this strain has become increasingly widespread in
the wake of new discoveries within evolutionary biology, and with the realisation that
the planet is currently experiencing a massive, ecological crisis of which Covid-19 is
an element.

From the Great Dying to the Virocene

Pandemics are a biological fact of life but also an intrinsic part of human social and
economic history. This is exemplified by the devastating pandemic that followed in
the wake of Columbus’s arrival in America in 1492. The Great Dying that was pro-
duced by the so-called ‘Columbian Exchange’ of viruses and bacteria from Europe
eradicated approximately fifty-five million human lives (Koch et al. 2019), leaving the
continent open for conquest and delivering a blow to human life from which the Indig-
enous population has never recovered. Malaria, cholera and yellow fever epidemics
also accompanied the colonial effort in other parts of the world, affecting the colonis-
ers but even more so the vulnerable slave labourers or indentured servants imported
to develop plantations in the West Indies, Asia or Africa. The Spanish influenza and
HIV pandemics also followed the paths established by colonialism, and both produced
much higher death rates in the Global South than in the Global North (Johnson and
Mueller 2002; Piot et al. 2001). While the Covid-19 pandemic replicates the trajec-
tories of these previous global illnesses, Jude L. Fernando (2020) and Andreas Malm
(2020), among others, have argued that it is importantly different because it develops
out of the climate emergency produced by global, extractive capitalism. Fernando even
contends that Covid-19 has ‘ushered in a new planetary epoch—the Virocene’ (2020,
635). He defines this as a time when ‘the intensity of virogenic activity’ has become so
substantial that it must be recognised ‘as an embodied force of nature’ (2020, 636–7).
In this way, the Covid-19 pandemic is a discernible product of, but also a contributing
force to, what many geologists and scholars have termed the Anthropocene (Crutzen
2000; Chakrabarty 2009, 2018; DeLoughrey 2019) or, with an eye to the systems

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 238 johan höglund

that have in fact produced the climate crisis, the Capitalocene (Moore 2015). When
discussing how the globalgothic pandemic narrative develops up until the present, and
the role that it plays in contemporary gothic across the world today, it is necessary to
consider both how pandemics have historically shaped human societies globally, and
the point in time that Covid-19 clearly marks. This point, as Fernando puts it, is the
entry of the planet into the Virocene.
This, in turn, means that it is essential to acknowledge that while pandemics do
not only travel along routes established by extractive colonialism, material, social and
economic conditions nonetheless determine how they are experienced. Affluent strata
of global society have always been able to escape or resist pandemics more effectively
than the poor. This is very true of the Covid-19 pandemic that was made possible
by a world ‘spatially and temporally compressed by capitalism’ and during which ‘a
minority of the world’s population—comprising wealthy, well-connected, or otherwise
privileged groups—has been able to use its elevated socioeconomic status to occupy
(relatively) environmentally safe locales’ (Fernando 2020, 637). To study the global-
gothic pandemic narrative is to explore the tensions built into this precise situation.
It is to investigate how some globalgothic mobilises capitalism and imperialism – and
the modernity that these systems have made possible – as antidotes to global ills. It is
also to consider the globalgothic counternarrative that sees pandemic as a consequence
of the extractive, structural violence that sustains global capitalism and colonialism.
Finally, it is to explore globalgothic’s capacity to shed the anthropocentric perspectives
that arguably inform the first two lines of inquiry, to imagine the pandemic as a plan-
etary strategy designed to address a global ecological crisis, and to acknowledge the
viral, bacterial or fungal agents of pandemic as species that merge with other species
and that trigger new forms of life and being.

Imperial Pandemic Gothic

If the Virocene era is a product of racist and extractivist capitalism and colonial-
ism, as Fernando argues, this project was organised from Europe for Europeans and
expanded from this part of the world to formally cover, by the end of the nineteenth
century, most of the Earth’s land mass. As argued by Gurminder K. Bhambra (2007)
and Walter Mignolo (2011), modernity was made possible by this very development.
It was the surplus of consumables, resources and labour produced via slavery and the
colonisation of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia that provided the material
base that enabled the emergence of the (exclusionary) Enlightenment ideals, the scien-
tific discoveries of this era, and large-scale (latterly fossil-fuelled) industry. Gothic rises
out of this precise development in Britain, and it travels, pandemic like, along the same
routes as the imperial ambitions of the European empires. In particular, what Patrick
Brantlinger (1988) has termed ‘imperial gothic’ has found global purchase. Its central
figure of contagion, the blood-sucking, mind-transforming and infectious vampire, a
character that devolves during the latter part of the twentieth century into the zombie,
has travelled the globe, merging with similar, already existing gothic entities, but often
retaining its status as a signifier of abject, non-normative otherness.
Imperial gothic can be defined as a cultural form set on protecting the racial, eth-
nic, sexual, economic and military borders on which nationalist imperialism relied. As
Brantlinger and Stephen Shapiro (2008) have argued, it is a particularly virulent strain

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 pandemics and globalgothic 239

during moments of imperial and capitalist crisis, when these borders are threatened. As
argued first by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848), and
more recently by Immanuel Wallerstein (2004), Naomi Klein (2007), Andrew Gamble
(2009) and Jason W. Moore (2015), crises are endemic to capitalism. These crises are
foremost economic and ecological, but they are also epistemological and ontological.
They can thus stimulate revolutionary, non-normative and intersectional ideas on gen-
der, race and class. As much scholarship has detailed, the capitalist/colonial project was
organised around an exclusionary white, heteropatriarchal figure (see Mies 1986; Moore
2016; Braidotti 2017). The normative social order this figure helped organise made any
notion of sexual and racial deviation or transformation fundamentally disturbing. As a
subgenre of the gothic, imperial gothic works to reinforce precisely the economic, geo-
graphical, sexual and racial borders on which capitalism/colonialism relies in its efforts to
identify exploitable and expendable lives and environments. However, in doing so, it also
draws attention to the porousness of these borders.
What can be referred to as the imperial contagion narrative grows out of a number of
gothic texts that connect contagion to anxieties prevalent in heteropatriarchal capitalist
society. The female vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) is typically read as a
disturbing lesbian figure. Her bite confers not simply death, but also desires that clearly
challenge the ordained patriarchal sexual order of the time. Florence Marryat’s rediscov-
ered The Blood of the Vampire (1897) also features a female vampire, the beautiful but
deadly Harriet Brandt. Born in Jamaica from a violent and clearly racist British father
and a similarly depraved Creole mother, Brandt is unambiguously racially tainted. While
the novel recognises and critiques the violence that characterises the colonial plantation
that gave birth to Brandt, it simultaneously casts her as fundamentally different, hostile
and abject because of her mixed-race background. The physician Dr Phillips, represent-
ing late-nineteenth-century medical/anthropological (pseudo)science, declares that the
‘girl is a quadroon, and she shews it distinctly in her long-shaped eyes with their blue
whites and her wide mouth and blood-red lips!’ (Marryat 1897, 138–9), and adds that
‘that which is bred in her will come out sooner or later, and curse those with whom she
may be associated’ (123). As a racialised woman, Brandt appears as an insidious and
infectious challenge to white Anglo patriarchy and to the empire as an institution, and
as such, she must be destroyed. Even Harriet eventually realises this, and she takes her
own life by drinking chloral.
These texts pave the way for, or coincide with, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), the
first vampire text to imagine vampirism not simply as infectious and deadly, but as
pandemic. Like Marryat’s novel, this seminal imperial gothic narrative was written
at a time when Britain was haunted by economic depression, when Germany loomed
ever larger as colonial and capitalist competitor, and when Irish nationalist, anarchist
and socialist ideas circulated widely. Its appearance coincides, further, with a moment
at which what Elaine Showalter (1990) has termed ‘sexual anarchy’ shook established
society, and when early microbiology had begun to comprehend how illnesses, includ-
ing venereal diseases such as syphilis, were transmitted. Dracula responds to and com-
bines the anxieties that arose out of these different concerns. He emerges out of a
liminal ‘East’, sporting disturbing transformative powers that enable him to cross bor-
ders essential to his time. Defined in the novel as a degenerate and a Lombrosian born
criminal, Dracula is at the same time hypermasculine and feminine, authoritative and
queer, human and animal, black and white. In this way, Dracula is the abject negative

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of the white heteropatriarchal subject around which British society was organised. The
fact that this is an otherness that can be transmitted via his vampiric bite and blood
is what makes him truly frightening. His project, to ‘create a new and ever-widening
circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless’ (Stoker 1897, 49), is fundamentally
pandemic in its nature.
After its publication, Dracula travelled, much like the vampire himself, across
waters and into new territories, in the process spreading a genre paradigm where ill-
ness is associated with non-normative modes of being and becoming. Those infected
by the bite of the vampire are typically transformed into figures reminiscent of the
queer, the radical, the racialised, the feminised and the Indigenous. By being cast as
vampire, they are changed into a form of (un)life that, as Judith Butler (2004) terms
it, is ungrievable and can be destroyed with impunity. Indeed, the four white men
that set out to kill Dracula jointly enact a rape fantasy by impaling and beheading the
now-vampiric Lucy Westenra, a nineteen-year-old woman to whom three of them had
recently proposed marriage.
While Dracula was a success from the very start, what elevated it to the status of
foremost globalgothic pandemic text was F. W. Murnau’s unsanctioned retelling of the
novel as Nosferatu (1922). An early German expressionist movie and a classic of glo-
balgothic horror, Nosferatu relocates the story of vampiric invasion to Germany in the
1830s. In the process, as noted by Patrick Hogan (2006) and many others, the vampire
count is transformed from aspiring oriental gentleman to a monster reminiscent of
the caricatures of the Jewish people that had begun to emerge in 1920s Germany. The
cinematic success of Nosferatu further energised this narrative and Dracula appears
in US, Mexican, Turkish and Italian film during the first half of the twentieth century
(Aubrey 2020). In the US, the vampire takes many different forms, but in films such
as Vamp (1986) or Vampire’s Kiss (1989) figures of this kind are increasingly cast, as
Dale Hudson notes, as ‘African and Asian Americans . . . so that their expulsion from
the nation signals social inequalities within US multiculturalism that sustain white
privilege’ (2007, 127). Similarly, in John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998), the white hero
– the misogynist alpha male Crow – patrols the borderlands of New Mexico with his
paramilitary unit, in search of vampires that seek to invade the American Southwest.
The ending of these narratives, where the patient zero of the pandemic is impaled
and/or dragged out into the daylight to be beheaded or to erupt into flames, cements
the idea, central to colonialism, that the sexually, culturally, ethnically, politically and
racially other must be managed and exorcised with violence, that they are brutes to
be exterminated. In the imperial globalgothic narrative, this is the fate meted out
to those who challenge white colonial hegemony, who cannot be usefully inserted into
the modes of production established by global capitalism, and who defy its authority
through types of gendered and sexual difference.
The most extreme mutation of this imperial strain raises the stakes both by its
capacity to depict how a pandemic ravages multiple parts of the globe and by casting
the military as the most important bulwark against an unruly and infected subaltern
insurrection. Ever since Hollywood, the US Department of Defense and the arms
manufacturing industry formed an alliance in the 1920s, a development that gave rise
to what McKenzie Wark (2007) and Timothy Lenoir and Henry Lowood (2008) have
termed the ‘military-entertainment complex’, the struggle between white hegemonic
forces and the politically, racially and sexually other has been cast as a desperate yet

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 pandemics and globalgothic 241

grand military confrontation. In US gothic horror, the military is often cast as the
last but also most powerful vanguard of modernity, and its branches machine-gun
and bomb those infected by viral pandemics into submission. This occurs in World
War Z (2013) where the pandemic emerges out of Korea, one of the many US battle-
grounds in Asia. Similarly, in Jonathan Maberry’s Patient Zero, and in Christopher
Farnsworth’s The President’s Vampire (2011), pandemic contagion is a result of viral
engineering performed by Islamic terrorists. The infantrymen and special forces sol-
diers that combat these developments are the collective inheritors of the role the four
white men play in Stoker’s original novel. Meanwhile, the vampire has been sup-
planted by the voracious and cannibalistic zombie, who is disturbingly reminiscent, in
these narratives, of the Indigenous, the refugee, or the inner-city poor trapped within
the neoliberal gig economy.

The Anti-Colonial/Capitalist Pandemic Narrative

The strain that casts militarised and capitalist modernity as the world’s best hope
against racialised and sexualised pandemics is arguably the most widely spread and
commodifiable globalgothic pandemic narrative. However, globalgothic pandemic
fiction also complicates, critiques and collapses this initial dominant strain. Indeed,
gothic has often been theorised as a visceral reaction to heteropatriarchal capitalist,
colonial Enlightenment modernity, and as such, it has given rise to another strain
where pandemic arises out of modernity/capitalism/colonialism itself.
As discussed, there are good historical reasons for depicting gothic contagions
in this way. Pandemics have followed in the way of colonial/capitalist extractivism,
moving from the metropolis to Indigenous land to wreak genocidal havoc. The most
notable example of this is the aforementioned Columbian Exchange. The initial
transfer of infectious bacteria and viruses was accidental, but British colonial officers
in America also distributed blankets from smallpox hospitals among the Indigenous
population in 1760, in an attempt to decimate Indigenous lives further (Poupard,
Miller and Granshaw 1989). Similar genocidal strategies were used in places such
as Canada (Daschuk 2013) and Australia (Finzsch 2008). Once modern biology had
begun to understand how pathogenic microbes infect (human) bodies, steps were
taken to transform potentially pandemic illnesses into powerful biological weapons,
turning the modern state into a potential engine of targeted epidemic destruction.
The Geneva Protocol outlawed the use of such weapons as early as 1925, following
the devastation of World War I, but this has not hindered research and production
(Barras and Greub 2014, 500).
The notion that the modern capitalist colonial state and its agents are purveyors of
pandemics, rather than guardians against them, surfaces in some of the early gothic
texts. For example, John Polidori’s novella The Vampire (1819), famously conceived
alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), casts a genteel British nobleman as the
source of contagion and violence. However, it is not until the mid-twentieth century
that this strain of pandemic globalgothic becomes truly significant. A crucial text is
Richard Matheson’s influential I Am Legend (1954), describing a world that has suc-
cumbed to a global vampire pandemic. The narrator, the only human to have survived,
uses the daylight to hunt sleeping vampires and to slowly reduce their numbers. He
continues to do so until the vampires, now organised into a new society, put him on

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trial and execute him as the murderer he has become. This novel was the inspiration
for George Romero’s pathbreaking Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie that
most clearly marks the transition from the vampire to the zombie as the dominant
symbol of contagion in gothic. While this figure metastasises into a subaltern other
in films such as World War Z, it is in this influential movie redolent of the violence
white, heteronormative society exerted within the US and in spaces such as Korea and
Vietnam. Thus, the figure of horrific contagion is no longer the sexually ambiguous
oriental other, but undead members of the dominant, white, middle class, and the
hero-protagonist, fending off the onslaught, is depicted as a young black man. When
the protagonist survives the assault of the zombies only to be shot and burned by a
white posse, this radical critique of racist structural violence is further strengthened.
In Night of the Living Dead, the undead are made to rise because of radiation from
a space probe returning from Venus – a scenario that directly locates the pandemic’s
origins in modernity itself. In Romero’s The Crazies (1973), this connection is made
even more plainly when a military viral bioweapon codenamed ‘Trixie’ is released into
the water of an American village, turning the people there into self-destructive mur-
derers before spreading to other parts of the US. A similar story plays out in Stephen
King’s novel The Stand (1978), where the US Department of Defense has weaponised
the common influenza virus, codenamed ‘Captain Trips’, and accidentally released it
into the population, producing a global pandemic that kills most human beings in a
matter of months. Similarly, in David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977), an experimental
skin-graft procedure on a young woman injured in a traffic accident turns her vam-
piric. She now survives by syphoning blood from other people with a phallic append-
age that extends from her armpit, in the process infecting the people she feeds off. As
in Night of the Living Dead, patriarchal, heteronormative modernity is the source of
the pandemic and its institutions of order are helpless before it.
This is also a strain that travels widely and that informs a great number of con-
temporary globalgothic texts to this day. Japanese survival horror computer game
Biohazard (1996), adapted into the Resident Evil film franchise (2002–16), identi-
fies an international capitalist powerhouse – the Umbrella Corporation – as the
origin of a global zombie pandemic. In South Korean zombie series Seoul Station
(2016) and Train to Busan (2016), and in Danish Netflix series The Rain (2018–
20), large corporations are also to blame for devastating pandemics. Notably, the
military takes on different roles within these narratives. In Korean Peninsula (2020)
and British 28 Days Later (2002), they function as vehicles of heteronormative
oppression when they corral and incarcerate the uninfected, killing men for sport
and raping women in an excuse to repopulate the Earth. As I have discussed else-
where (Höglund 2022), Indian Netflix mini-series Betaal (2020) describes govern-
ment special forces soldiers as killing Indigenous ‘tribal’ people in Northeast India,
thus paving the way for powerful, international mining corporations. When British
zombies suddenly rise out of the mountains within which the Indigenous popula-
tion has confined them, the soldiers are the first to become infected and to spread
the contagion on.
Alongside Betaal, one of the most plainly postcolonial globalgothic pandemic nar-
ratives is the Canadian First Nations film Blood Quantum (2019). This powerful text
utilises the trope of the zombie pandemic to highlight the still-ongoing violence of
colonial capitalism. In the film’s first scene Gisigu, a Red Crow fisherman and elder,

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 pandemics and globalgothic 243

finds that the salmon he has caught and gutted will not stay still; they keep flipping
on the hard stones of the beach. Gisigu calls his son, the reservation police chief
Traylor, and soon discovers that the salmon are not the only creatures that act strangely
or refuse to stay dead. At the local jail outside the reservation, Traylor’s wayward sons
Joseph and Lysol, from two different relationships, are stuck in a cell with a terrify-
ingly ill white man. Before long, these protagonists, and everyone else in the movie,
are attacked by the ravenous undead. A zombie pandemic has seized Quebec and is
spreading across the world.
The title Blood Quantum refers to the racial laws that the early American settler
state used to define Native American status. They were essential in the production
of racial categories in the US after the revolution, and in the assignation, or denial,
of privileges that came with formal citizenship in the nation. Though it effectively
entrenched Native communities into the political, economic and social order of settler
society, the controversial Indian Reorganisation Act of 1934 allowed Native people a
modicum of self-determination and returned some stolen land. Blood quantum laws
were used in this context to determine which people of Native descent had the right
to call themselves Indigenous, and who – as a result – could stake a claim on the land.
During the Jim Crow era, similar racial laws were used to determine who had the right
to black and white facilities in the American South and in other parts of the US. Appar-
ently as a legacy of this legislation, some Indigenous nations now require a degree of
Native ancestry for inclusion, or for the performance of specific functions within a
nation (see Ratteree and Hill 2017).
The film Blood Quantum turns the notion of blood purity, and the history of
genocidal colonialism in the US, on its head when it turns out that the virulent zombie
pandemic affects only white settlers. Red Crow people are immune to the illness but
not, unfortunately, to the violent hunger and violence performed by the undead succes-
sors of European settlers. Now in its ‘zombie’ phase, white settler culture literally keeps
trying to consume Indigenous life. The source of the pandemic is never explained, but
it is theorised by one of the Red Crow characters:

The earth is an animal. Living and breathing. White men don’t understand this.
That’s why the dead keep coming back to life. Not because of God. Because this
planet we’re on is so sick of our shit. This old, tired, angry animal . . . turned these
stupid fucking white men into something she can use again: fertiliser.

In other words, the planet itself has become fed up with the extractive capitalism that
feeds the white settler majority. The zombie virus is an attempt to restore ecological
balance and to renew a tormented planet. First Nations people are exempt from this
cleansing, yet they also suffer from the eruption of violence.
For the Red Crow community, taking shelter on the reservation, the arrival of the
undead plague is an encounter with a reality that is at the same time strangely different
from and uncannily similar to the life they have been leading since the arrival of Colum-
bus. The situation is especially precarious since the reservation has become a refuge
for uninfected white people who are seeking shelter from the violent pandemic. This
reversal of positions of power, agency and vulnerability does not bring out the best in
all members of the community. In particular, Lysol struggles to contain an anger clearly
rooted in 400 years of intergenerational trauma. While Gisigu, Traylor and Joseph work

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 244 johan höglund

to preserve both Indigenous and settler lives, Lysol’s anger in combination with his new-
found position of power erodes him and the people around him. As Mi’kmaq director
Barnaby observes in an interview, Lysol is essentially a ‘self-loathing postcolonial Native
person, because he grew up in an environment that was trained to fucking hate him’
(Barnaby quoted by Aubrey 2020). This self-loathing manifests in blatant misogyny and
in a self-destructive trait so strong it almost obliterates the people on the reservation.
In the final scene, only his brother Joseph, Joseph’s mother Joss, and Joseph’s newborn,
mixed-heritage infant remain, alone in the archipelago outside Quebec.

The Multispecies Pandemic Narrative

While the origin of pandemic and the nature of those who defend humanity are dras-
tically different in the first two strains, both strains consider the pandemic as an evil
that infects human society whether these societies are identified as Indigenous and anti-
colonial or as modern and capitalist. The final narrative strand problematises this very
notion by viewing the pandemic agent as a legitimate and symbiotic species tasked with
maintaining a planetary biodiversity that the Homo sapiens may be a part of, but that
this species has drastically disturbed. This relatively new strand thus refuses to recog-
nise a number of a priori concepts central to Western thinking. The critique launched
against this thinking is rooted in early posthuman thinking and models such as Donna
Haraway’s (1991) composite cyborg, and also in Indigenous ontologies that resist the
compartmentalisation of the human and nature into separate entities. This rethinking
has also, since the turn of the millennium, been accelerated by a much-improved under-
standing of evolution and the role that bacteria and other microscopic life forms play
in daily life. One of those who championed this new revolutionary research was Lynn
Margulis, who in 1998 observed that all ‘beings alive today are equally evolved. All
have survived over three thousand million years of evolution from common bacterial
ancestors. There are no “higher” beings, no “lower animals,” no angels, and no gods’
(1998, 3). This groundbreaking understanding of microbiology and evolutionary biol-
ogy has informed thinking about such notions as individuality and humanity (see, for
instance, Gilbert, Sapp and Tauber 2012), and inspired new scholarship in the environ-
mental humanities, including Haraway’s (2016) influential suggestion that humanity
inhabits what she terms the Chthulucene. While Haraway certainly acknowledges the
role that extractive colonialism and capitalism have played in bringing about the cur-
rent planetary crisis, her concept sheds light not primarily on these systems, but on the
way that life on Earth has always been multispecies, tentacular and richly monstrous.
From this perspective, the third strand of the globalgothic pandemic narrative rec-
ognises the extractive war capitalism has waged on the planet for the past 500 years,
but rather than focusing on the marginalised human communities who have suffered
from this war, it widens the ontological perspective to consider the destructive impact
that capitalism has on all forms of entangled life. By thus considering global plagues
from a multispecies, rather than an anthropocentric, perspective, this strain notes, with
Margulis, the absurdity inherent in the idea that (capitalist) humanity, as essentially a
‘mammalian weed’ (1998, 119), could possibly save the planet except by abandoning its
extractive ambitions. By proposing that the vehicle for planetary survival is the pandemic,
this strand narrates transformations or erasures of humanity as a species and, simultane-
ously, of the anthropogenic systems that are destroying the planet.

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 pandemics and globalgothic 245

As in the second strand, the pandemic on which these texts centre has typically been
engineered by capitalist, militarist modernity itself. This is the case in Sam Miller’s
Blackfish City (2018), set in a future city carried by the ocean, where a debilitat-
ing, sexually transmitted disease called ‘the breaks’ turns out to be a failed company
experiment to bond people with nanomachines. At the same time, however, it is also
a door to an identity-changing, more-than-human state where the afflicted has access
to all the people who have passed the illness on. However, the most carefully explored
example of this scenario is arguably M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts (2014)
and its prequel The Boy on the Bridge (2017). These texts chart the outbreak of a
fungal pandemic that transforms human beings into mindless ‘hungries’, leaving only
a few communities to carry on the work of finding a cure under the stewardship of
what remains of the military.
In The Boy on the Bridge, such a cure is discovered in the brain tissue of an infected
but still rational child: a new hybrid species that is both fungal colony and Homo
sapiens. This new species is far more resilient than its predecessor, and the millions of
hungries that roam the Earth do not perceive it as food. After having discovered the
treatment, the protagonist of the novel, the young savant Stephen Greaves, realises
that he faces a crucial choice. If he reveals the existence of the treatment, this new
species will be hunted and farmed for their immensely valuable brains, further pro-
longing the life of the militarised order that sustains the dystopian world in which he
finds himself. Refusing to be party to such a development, he infects himself with the
fungus, taking his secret with him. The protagonist of The Girl with All the Gifts is
one of these hybrid children – a small blonde girl named Melanie. Despite Greaves’s
efforts to save the new young species, she and others of her kind are kept in an under-
ground facility where they are stimulated by education but eventually euthanised and
analysed in the hope of discovering a cure. Despite the military’s constant presence,
the base is sacked by survivalist ‘junkers’ and Melanie escapes with her sympathetic
teacher, and a couple of soldiers and scientists. Drifting across a world destroyed by
the pandemic, but even more so by destructive military attempts to prevent it from
spreading, they come across a forest of seemingly petrified fungal trees growing out of
the bodies of dead hungries. Being told that these wait for some kind of environmen-
tal trigger so that they can make the virus airborne, Melanie sets them on fire. As the
fungal spores are released into the sky, she explains her action:

If you keep shooting them [the hungries] and cutting them into pieces and throw-
ing them into pits, nobody will be left to make a new world. Your people and
the junker people will keep killing each other, and you’ll both kill the hungries
wherever you find them, and in the end the world will be empty. This way is better.
Everybody turns into a hungry all at once, and that means they’ll all die, which is
really sad. But then the children will grow up, and they won’t be the old kind of
people but they won’t be hungries either. They’ll be different. Like me and the rest
of the kids in the class. (Carey 2014, 456)

Even when the pandemic was not produced by human agents of modernity, and
when it has no strange, transformative powers that let humanity continue as a new
breed, globalgothic sometimes represents the destruction of humankind as a solution
to (ecological) crisis. Oana Aristide’s novel Under the Blue (2021) takes place during

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 246 johan höglund

a devastating pandemic and tracks two disparate developments over two different lin-
ear chronologies that eventually reach the same moment in time. One of these begins
in the Arctic Circle and consists of a series of conversations between an immensely
advanced artificial intelligence named Talos XI, and the two scientists who have cre-
ated and programmed this entity. The other focuses on the middle-aged artist Harry
in London. Consumed by an important project, he does not at first notice how society
is failing around him due to the rapidly spreading illness. At the very last minute, he
escapes an all but empty London for his cottage in the country, informing only the
attractive young woman in the apartment next to his where he is heading. After he has
spent a few weeks alone in the cottage, this woman shows up with her sister, a physi-
cian who worked on the frontlines of the pandemic until everything collapsed. The
two women explain to Harry that the deadly plague is a virus thawed by global warm-
ing out of the permafrost: ‘It’s like when Native Americans first came into contact with
Europeans. They snuffed it from damn near all of our infectious diseases’ (Aristide
2021, 73). They also tell Harry that in order to escape a nuclear holocaust caused by
melting nuclear power plants, they must escape south, through Europe into Africa.
In the other plot line, Talos XI is slowly introduced to history, scientific discovery
and human ethics. The idea is that he will use his enormous capacity to analyse a wide
range of disparate data to predict the future. Knowing the future, humanity will be
able to act to avert catastrophes of various kinds. Talos XI is an able AI, and he does
predict the demise of humankind, although by that stage, the pandemic has already
begun its irreversible journey across the Earth. Only one of the scientists survives to
be told that Talos XI expected humanity to succumb because of ‘radicalised humans
wishing to save the planet’ (Aristide 2021, 73), not because of a virus emerging out of
the thawing permafrost. Then, the AI is not entirely dissatisfied with the demise of the
species: ‘Nature in its entirety is simply more interesting than humans,’ it explains to
the scientist. ‘Nature can conceivably come up with more than I can. Humanity can’t.
Billions of one species and zero of others equals less knowledge’ (271). Talos XI has
also figured out that two women who are travelling south with Harry are of the same
mind. Stating irrefutable evidence that they are immune to the virus, and that they
have inoculated Harry, Talos XI claims that ‘[t]hey know they have the cure. They
have just decided against helping’ (273). Their journey to Africa may still be predi-
cated on a desire to lend assistance of some sort, but the recipients of this help are ‘just
not human’ (274).
It can rightly be argued that texts such as Under the Blue and The Girl with All
the Gifts do not clearly state that what they identify as ‘humanity’ are in fact those
(formerly) privileged citizens of the Global North who built the system that produced
the planetary emergency of which the pandemic is a part. In the eagerness to indict and
obliterate the centrality of this privileged category, these narratives fail to recognise the
combined and uneven nature of the planetary emergency. That said, the only type of
humanity that appears to be left alive in The Girl with All the Gifts are those either
sheltered by the remnants of a militarised modernity, or those feeding off its carcass.
With this category out of the way, a new type of life on the planet can commence.
This makes the multispecies globalgothic pandemic strain into a story of death and
the apocalypse, but equally one of evolution and (planetary) survival. The exit from
a world-system or world-ecology of constant systemic environmental violence is pre-
mised on an embrace of the multispecies nature of life itself, but it is also, if less clearly,

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 pandemics and globalgothic 247

a departure from the systems and the human figures that engineered this violence. In
this way, the anti-colonial/capitalist and the multispecies pandemic narratives come to
very similar conclusions.

Conclusion: Reading Globalgothic in the Virocene

To read globalgothic in the Virocene is to study the emergence and global circulation
of tropes of contagion that are central to how humans across the world think about
pandemic illness, but it is just as much to explore how central tropes of contagion are
for human thinking about economic, social and ecological history. As this chapter
highlights, the different and constantly mutating strains of the globalgothic pandemic
narrative establish very different frameworks within which the history and current
state of colonialism, capitalism, empire, modernity, indigeneity, gender and society are
located and understood. Borders are erected in globalgothic, but only to be permeated,
violated and torn down. Agents of militarised modernity stand guard against the insid-
ious natures and contaminants carried by those who refuse the authority they exude,
protecting the vulnerable that huddle behind their backs. Or, the same agents turn
voraciously on the communities that refuse insertion as undead consumers into the
logic of late capitalism, and that have long struggled to survive the relentless onslaught
of neo-colonialism. Or, the ecology that human beings have always been a part of finds
a way to turn the invasive mammalian weed that is rapidly eroding conditions for life
on the planet into fertiliser, leaving a different type of human being to walk into an
uncertain future.
In the Virocene, these different strains and their conflicting yet concurrent sto-
ries of pandemics are not simply fiction, but narratives that demand our attention.
Covid-19 has made it abundantly clear that human beings inhabit this planet in very
different ways, and that the epistemological machinery that separates the grievable
from those who need not be mourned (the old, the precariat, the non-white) is hard
at work. Covid-19 has simultaneously shown that the pursuit of certain social and
economic positions, and the pleasures and privileges such positions convey, is produc-
ing an enormous backlash in the form of global poverty, unrest, planetary ecological
crisis, and the emergence and inevitable circulation of pandemic illness. These are
precisely the topics of the globalgothic pandemic narrative. The stakes examined by
gothic have always been high. In its global form, it sheds light on modernity, capital-
ism and colonialism from many different directions. In the Virocene, casting such
light, and studying both the details that emerge and the shadows that that light cre-
ates, has never been more important.

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 16

Medical Globalgothic: Organ

Harvesting and the Red Market
Laura R. Kremmel

D
‘ o you know how much the human body is worth, Mulder?’ Agent Dana Scully
asks her FBI partner in the episode of The X-Files called ‘Hell Money’ (1996).
She answers her own question: ‘It’s worth a fortune.’ When a confused Agent Mulder
replies, ‘There’s no long-term business sense to dying,’ he fails to recognise that there
is, just not for the body in the morgue. This episode depicts the vulnerabilities and
inequalities on which organ procurers in the illegal ‘red market’ prey to ensure their
business will remain profitable.
Potential donors participate in a game of chance: to win a large sum of money,
they put their names in a jar. In another jar is a token to win the money, amongst
other tokens with body parts on them. A name is chosen, and then a prize or punish-
ment. Players remain in the game for two reasons. First, their financial situations and
immigrant status have left them in desperate need of the prize for which they regularly
gamble their biological material. Second, they are bound by a dedicated belief in the
concept of hungry ghosts, the souls of dead ancestors angry that their kin travelled
to this foreign land. Visualisations during the game and subsequent organ extraction
reveal these angry ghosts to be one and the same with the organ transplant doctor
collecting biological tribute. When Hsin Shuyang wants out of the game after attempt-
ing to win payment for his daughter’s acute lymphocytic leukaemia treatments, the
rhetorical strategies used to keep him playing include emphases on privilege (‘You’ve
been luckier than most. All this time, and only one bad draw’), temptation (‘The pot is
almost two million dollars’), hope (‘The money could help save your daughter’s life’)
and intimidation (‘No one leaves the game. Those are the rules’). Unsurprisingly, the
FBI discovers that the system is rigged, that all the tokens are the same: players are
expendable and interchangeable in their fates. Agent Scully does not express concern
about the treatable form of cancer Shuyang’s daughter suffers, failing to acknowledge
that it is only treatable for those who can afford it. For the uninsured, very little
is treatable, regardless of developments in modern medicine. But exclusion from the
American medical system as patients does not exclude them from it as donors.
The episode exemplifies several trends in broader coercive techniques employed in
the illegal organ harvesting and even legal organ transplant trades, as well as the socio-
economic inequality necessary for such inherently unequal systems to function. The
larger geopolitical system of organ procurement and transplantation feeds the hungry
ghosts of medical capitalism, even amidst the rhetoric of donation as a selfless act to
save a life. Illegal organ harvesting and the methods of coercion and dehumanisation

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used in the red market conjure gothic rhetorical structures and imagery, more so than
the graphic surgical horror scenes that one might expect. In fact, narratives centred
on the donor experience rarely include these body horror scenes in favour of a slower,
more sickening dismantling of its victims and their agency.
The gothic texts I examine here prioritise the perspectives of organ ‘donors’ at the
complex intersections of consent and coercion. My use of the word ‘donor’ in this
chapter broadly indicates bodies from which organs are procured and does not indicate
willing and knowing consent. I argue that, reflective of broader geopolitical networks,
the systemic structures that manufacture physical, psychological and economic vulner-
abilities to facilitate the red market contribute more to the horrors of these fictions than
the scenes of organ removal themselves, despite the opportunity for graphic scenes of
gore so central to the contemporary gothic aesthetic. Stories told by members of the
‘donor’ class reverse the dehumanisation necessary to harvest their biological material,
exposing the systems that exploit them while, at the same time, failing to dismantle
them. To return to The X-Files, these stories expose the game as rigged but also reveal
that no participant would testify against those who run it. The game may pause, but,
because no donor narratives emerge to dismantle it, it does not stop. Drawing on the
tradition of narrative medicine – a concept developed by Rita Charon to describe the
‘narrative skills of recognizing, absorbing, interpreting, and being moved by the stories
of illness’ usually encouraged in medical practitioners – Anna Gotlib describes one of
its precepts: ‘the stories we tell about ourselves and each other are not passive docu-
mentations of events, but actually do things’ (Charon 2008, 4; Gotlib 2009, 66). The
gothic’s prioritisation of the stories red market systems erase recovers a subjectivity its
victims have been denied. Denial of narrative is cyclical, both a cause and a result of the
geopolitical categorisation of populations as homo sacer – to use Giorgio Agamben’s
term – ‘who may be killed and yet not sacrificed’, a state stripped of bios, or ‘a way of
life’ with political potential (1998, 8–9). In other words, such populations are exploit-
able because their narratives are silenced, and their narratives are silenced because the
system exploits them. Acknowledgement and legitimisation of such narratives is thus a
direct challenge to this system.
Organ transplantation became medically viable only in the late 1960s, and the
report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Defi-
nition of Brain Death redefined death to be more conducive to successful transplants
of all kinds in 1968 (Russell 2019, 6–12). Agamben puzzles over the concept of brain
death in the context of procuring organs, asking, ‘What was the zone of life beyond
coma?’ (1998, 161). He concludes that such cases of liminality

[delimit] a space of exception in which a purely bare life, entirely controlled by man
and his technology, appears for the first time. And since it is precisely a question not
of a natural life but of an extreme embodiment of homo sacer . . ., what is at stake
is . . . the definition of a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide
(and that is, like homo sacer, ‘unsacrificeable,’ in the sense that it obviously could
not be put to death following a death sentence). (1998, 164–5)

In seeming agreement with Agamben, Dick Teresi makes no effort to hide his scepti-
cism towards the reliability of brain death and the criteria to assess it, describing the
Committee of the Harvard Medical School as a group of sinister, naïve or incompetent

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 252 laura r. kremmel

men looking for ways to shorten hospital stays for cases of vegetative state or irrevers-
ible coma in the Intensive Care Unit, which, as Teresi puts it, ‘warehouse[s] potential
organ donors’ (2012, 242). He writes, ‘You are dead not when your heart cannot be
restarted, you can no longer breathe, or your cells die, but when you suffer a “loss
of personhood”’ (2012, 89–90). I understand Teresi’s phrase ‘loss of personhood’ in
Agambian terms, the introduction of biopolitics, or the disappearance of the indi-
vidual self – or bios, ‘qualified life’ – to be replaced by homo sacer within a population
available to the system’s control. Even once the committee set out its criteria for brain
death, Teresi explains that American states have followed them inconsistently, with
even less regard for ‘personhood’ shown in cases that deviate. It is unsurprising that
such changes increased fears about liminal undead medical states, and a number of
scholars have connected these events to the rise of George A. Romero’s zombies and
all subsequent zombies who are only vulnerable to brain death.1
The association of brain death with zombies – a historically Haitian tradition – is
fitting as organ transplant has always been fraught with concerns about racialised
donor and recipient classes. Dr Christiaan Barnard, who performed the first heart
transplant, passed up an earlier opportunity to perform this surgery because he wanted
to wait for a white donor. As Emily Russell puts it, ‘For this historic “first”, Barnard
worried the political dimensions would swamp the story of medical accomplishment’
(2019, 13). Such reactions were inevitable, however, when the second heart transplant
in 1968 threw this caution to the wind: the heart of Clive Haupt, a man of mixed race,
was transplanted into Philip Blaiberg, a white man. As a contemporaneous article in
the American magazine Ebony pointed out,

If Dr. Blaiberg completely recovers and again walks the streets of Cape Town, a
most ironic situation will ensue . . . Haupt’s heart will go literally to hundreds of
places where Haupt, himself, could not go because his skin was a little darker than
that of Blaiberg. (Cited in Russell 2019, 12–13)

The sociopolitical apartheid system’s reduction of Haupt’s value to the biological

material he could provide to a member of the privileged class is just one of many
indicators of biopolitical inequality surrounding organ transplantation more broadly.
Russell’s Transplant Fictions (2019) and Sara Wasson’s Transplantation Gothic
(2020) go into detail about the development of brain death as a concept, the anxiet-
ies surrounding it, and its lasting contributions to the horror and gothic traditions. I
merely gloss over them for the sake of pointing out the complexity and subjectivity
of these definitions that impact both the legal and illegal organ procurement trades. I
also do not go into any detail about operating scenes where organs would be removed
or transplanted. Rather, I focus on the frighteningly extensive systems that demar-
cate some populations as worthy of receiving transplants and others as obligated to
‘donate’ that are exposed and interrogated in gothic fictions, indicative of global for-
mations of biopolitical power. Teresi discusses the idea of ‘personhood’ in relation to
brain death and organ donor consent, but this concept of recognising individuals as
fully human with lives and experiences that matter is in constant question when whole
populations are denied their own subjectivities and reduced to biological material.
The classification of comatose as ‘not living’ is thereby extended to marginalised and
silenced populations treated as homo sacer, the network of organ brokers, surgeons

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 medical globalgothic 253

and recipients never considering their own actions to be murder. Like the comatose
patient, donor class ‘personhood’ is replaced by the biocapital of their organs.
The sale of human organs is illegal in every country except Iran and Singapore, the
implication being that it should remain an altruistic act in all types of donation, though
many European countries follow a rule of ‘opt-out’ or ‘presumed consent’ (Kara 2017,
111; Atkinson 2016, 619). Transplantations like the Haupt/Blaiberg case are defined as
deceased or cadaveric donations from patients who are expected to expire in the operat-
ing room if their death has not already been declared,2 while living donations of organs
like kidneys produce a second patient for whom to care, the donor. Investigative activist
Siddharth Kara and director of Organs Watch Nancy Scheper-Hughes describe the sys-
tems of illegal living donation in livid detail. Both document the stark economic divides
between people coerced or bribed into selling their organs and the financially powerful
recipients, doctors and brokers who drive the well-organised red market systems. While
poverty and desperation are the common denominators among their findings, also prev-
alent were the related factors of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, immigration status and
education that prevent an escape from poverty and leave potential donors vulnerable to
predatory brokers, who promise them the funds to feed their families without any reason
to keep those promises.
Scheper-Hughes describes unsuccessful attempts to shut down the red market oper-
ations she encountered around the world, including in Israel, Moldova, Istanbul, the
Philippines, Brazil, South Africa and Russia, as well as the systemic roots in organ
destinations, countries that often escape accusations of organ harvesting like the
United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. In an interview with National Public
Radio (NPR), she told one man who had considered illegally purchasing an organ for
his dying father that ‘No one is going to sell half a liver unless they’re so desperate that
they’re under a kind of a death threat themselves’ (Conan 2009). She explains that
globalisation has expanded the capabilities for organ transplantation, simultaneously
causing heightened scarcity of available organs and new avenues of exploitation to
find them. She writes,

the human organ markets still conform to an earlier model of mercantile global
capitalism, one that bears some resemblance to the Atlantic slave trade. Like the
slave routes of old, the traffic in human organs requires ‘donor’, ‘recipient’ and
‘transfer’ nations. (Scheper-Hughes 2004, 34–6)

It is unsurprising, then, that Kara includes a chapter on organ harvesting in his book on
modern slavery, claiming that it was the most difficult to write because it is shrouded
in secrecy and danger, an indication of the many unheard stories of exploitation that
gothic narratives might represent. Among the donors he encountered in West Bengal,
Bangladesh, Nepal and Mexico, some had been lured from their homes by the promise
of work only to discover that the work was donation. Some were forced to donate in
environments in which they were regularly beaten and raped; some were told their kid-
ney would grow back, or did not even know what a kidney was. All were released from
the hospital without post-surgery care and became significantly disabled as a result
(Kara 2017, 113–31). These studies explore living donation, but others, like the 2016
documentary Human Harvest and Ethan Gutmann’s 2014 exposé The Slaughter, docu-
ment cases of Chinese criminals executed for their organs, a practice David E. Jefferies

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 254 laura r. kremmel

calls ‘the nationalization of cadavers’ (1998, 642). Both types of harvest entail an exten-
sive geopolitical system requiring the active participation of countries beyond those
from which organs are harvested.
This does not mean, however, that every participant in the system’s many networks
is fully aware of the clandestine vulnerabilities the system perpetuates to function.
These narratives of exploitation remain invisible, not just because they are geographi-
cally remote or because their donors soon expire, but also because the system relies
on their silence to endure. The fictional gothic works I discuss in this chapter do not
explore the impoverished conditions of ‘demolished person[s]’, as Scheper-Hughes
refers to unwilling donors (Conan 2009). Instead, these fictions depict a representative
dehumanisation and coercion of whole populations by geopolitical power structures,
with particular attention to the impenetrable global biopolitical networks and prac-
tices that exploit them.

Coma: The Expendable Patient Class

Written just a decade after the newly established rules for brain death, Robin Cook’s
1977 bestseller novel Coma might seem to be removed from the real, global examples
given above, at the same time demonstrating the dangers of power inherent to medical
hierarchies. In the novel, medical resident Susan Wheeler uncovers a plot to induce
coma through the application of carbon monoxide to patients in Operating Room 8,
for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Coma patients are moved to the Jefferson
Institute, a chillingly futuristic storage facility where patients are hung from the ceil-
ing by wires until their biological material is needed by a wealthy recipient. Unlike the
cultural perception that countries like the United States would be more likely to import
than export biological material procured through ethically questionable means, the
novel shows the Jefferson Institute selling domestically, while the film shows organs
being sold internationally.
The selection process for these patients is nondescript: a steady number of patients
scheduled for a range of routine procedures who just happen to end up in OR 8. As
such, the system flattens social, political and economic distinctions while highlight-
ing the inequalities between doctor and patient. The very status of being a patient
becomes one of marginalisation and devaluation. As I have written elsewhere,3 the
novel is a prime example of the fears inspired by changes in medicine that instigated
a need for the medical humanities as a discipline, changes such as increased inclusion
of technology at all levels of hospital administration and the subsequent redefinitions
of death and of doctor-patient relationships. We see the starkest evidence of this in
the newly formed ICU, in which Susan attempts to combat assessments of patients via
recorded ion levels and urine output with questions about ‘the human element’ (Cook
1977, 44). When she asks, ‘Does anybody have any idea why this horrible thing has
happened to this patient?’ the response is ‘What horrible thing?’ and nervous check-
ing of tubes and lines (Cook 1977, 44). The average patient – already privileged in
that they can afford basic medical care – simply becomes part of a machine that
needs to be maintained, its moving parts removed and replaced when needed without
acknowledgement of ‘personhood’, or bios, from most members of the medical team
in any department save anaesthesia and pathology, departments most interested in the
stories bodies tell.

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 medical globalgothic 255

This underground operation is directed by the Chief of Surgery, Dr Stark, and all
procurement operations occur within legally sanctioned facilities: Boston Memorial
Hospital and the Jefferson Institute. From there, organs are purchased and shipped
to presumably legitimate hospitals and waiting recipients. This is not the backroom
OR that we see in The X-Files, in other words. As Wasson points out, ‘Rather than
a threat from a single ambitious scientist in the vein of Moreau or Victor Franken-
stein, here menace inheres in a system of state and corporate forces shaping medical
sites. In these fictions, the gravest threats are institutions’ (2020, 67). Speaking for the
network as a whole, Dr Stark explains to Susan, ‘Sometimes there are situations where . . .
the common folk, if you will, cannot be depended upon to make decisions which will
provide long-term benefits. The common man thinks only of his short-run needs and
selfish requirements’ (Cook 1977, 298). Claiming that they stand on the brink of medi-
cal achievement, he describes laws that protect patients as barriers to progress:

Our legal system is not geared to handle our needs. My God, they cannot make
a decision to terminate a patient even after it is certain that his brain has turned
to lifeless Jell-O. How can science proceed under a public policy handicap of that
proportion? (Cook 1977, 299)

Couching his complaint in a false claim of medicine as an apolitical field striving against
political restraints, Dr Stark may not politicise his choice of victims, but rather creates
new classes of privilege and vulnerability within the doctor-patient divide. Susan’s resis-
tance to support the ideologies of the medical class for which she is training demotes
her to the patient class, and she is wheeled away to OR 8.
Coma’s realism and the credibility of its author – himself a surgeon – had sig-
nificant impact on public perceptions of organ transplantations and what it means to
become an organ donor. Cook encouraged these connections in his ‘Author’s Note’,
which claims, ‘This novel was conceived as an entertainment, but it is not science fic-
tion. Its implications are scary because they are possible, perhaps even probable.’ This
is followed by an example of an advertisement placed by a man willing to ‘sell any
portion of body for financial remuneration to person needing an operation’ (Cook
1977, 306). The note includes dramatic examples and peer-reviewed sources, playing
up Cook’s expertise to warn of organ scarcity unless the public increases voluntary
organ donation. Despite this goal, the public reacted to organ donation with horror,
cancelling surgeries and causing a significant drop in organ donor registrations (Bell-
ing 2010, 444–5). Coma introduced a fear that organ donation might become organ
harvesting, pointing to the exploitable vulnerability of the patient class, suggesting
that the systemic abuse of underprivileged minorities inherent to the red market might
occur in the hospitals they trust, hidden from their knowledge.
Thus, the horror of Coma and even The X-Files is not grounded in the gore of
actual organ procurement, though doubts about the validity of brain death certainly
invite such horrors. Instead, the fear is grounded in the pervasive, impervious and
secret systemic structures that degrade human life because they can. As Wasson writes,
‘Transplantation requires a shift in the cultural imaginary that makes it easier to think
of human bodies in terms of disaggregated parts’ (2020, 22). The red market perpetu-
ates the very systems of inequality through which it thrives. In the most unsettling
gothic examples, victims do not even recognise their own exploitation.

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 256 laura r. kremmel

Never Let Me Go: Born into a System of Biolabour

Two dystopian novels hide the abuse of donors so deeply in the societal structure
that their victims barely even question the rights of others to their own bodies: Kazuo
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit (2006, translated
into English in 2008). The worlds in both novels contain the elaborate creation of
whole classes of people for the sole purpose of solving the organ scarcity problem of
which Cook warns. The gothic tendency to call attention to the characters othered
by such systems reintroduces an unsettling sense of dread, unease and repulsion that
exposes the superficial inequities that encourage a societal acceptance of the processes
that deny ‘personhood’, deny bios, and reduce some to bare life. This experience of
denied humanity for fictional marginalised populations brings up ethical questions
easily directed to and derived from real marginalised populations on a global scale.
A first-person narrative told by Kathy, a member of the ‘donating’ class, Never Let
Me Go depicts a population of clones developed for the sole purpose of providing bio-
logical material for ‘normals’. They give a series of donations – typically four, though
some do not survive past two or three – before they ‘complete’, meaning their bodies
are fully harvested for all useful materials. Details of what organs are taken each time
are never given, only that the donors are in constant states of recovery after they begin
their donations. The clones grow up accepting this purpose without interrogating it.
With the exception of the teachers responsible for their early indoctrination, the clones
are kept separate from ‘normals’, who share a particular repulsion for them. Before
beginning their donations, clones become carers for donors, enabling and perpetuat-
ing a system designed to exploit them by providing supervision as much as care. Sean
McQueen points out the ‘biocapitalism’ of this system, in which the clones take on
multiple forms of labour to produce not only their own organs but also, through caring,
the organs of their fellow clones (Ishiguro 2006, 199). The 2010 film version, directed
by Mark Romanek, gives the clones wrist monitors that they scan when they leave and
enter buildings. There is no need for this in Ishiguro’s novel, where Foucauldian disci-
pline is maintained by their surveillance of each other and eventually themselves, their
behaviour dictated by their unquestioned marginalised roles. The division between car-
ers and donors is the first separation they feel from each other, another medical class
system used to weaken any possibility of organised rebellion.
The subjugation of the clones is so complete that the only resistance they can muster
is asking for more time before beginning donations, and even for that they ask per-
mission. This simple and ill-fated act of rebellion constitutes the climax of the novel,
and they learn more about their position as expendable and subhuman, something they
have been shielded from by consorting only with clones and hospital staff. The school
they had attended was an unconvincing experiment in humanity, designed to show that
clones could be raised as cultured and creative individuals and to prove they had souls.
To prove that a population upon whose exploitation so many disproportionately rely
have souls threatens the system predicated on their inhumanity. Medical benefit is only
possible if the donors are considered either willing to sacrifice themselves or unworthy
of agency. It is unsurprising, then, that attempts to humanise the clones, let alone grant
them anything as lofty as a soul, are met with resistance: the school is closed and the
activists who supported it ruined. As Sarah Atkinson writes of the novel, ‘Where two
bodies intentionally share the same genetic make-up, superiority and dominance are

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 medical globalgothic 257

granted on the grounds of which body is authentically human’ (2016, 616). The success
of the school proved to be its own undoing as it became clear that recipients of clone
organs preferred to think of their sources as mere materials without subjectivities of their
own, simultaneously demonstrating the power of the donor narrative and a susceptibil-
ity to willing disbelief. Miss Emily, in charge of the school, explains,

for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think
about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren’t really like
us. That you were less than human, so it didn’t matter. (Ishiguro 2006, 263)

It is not murder if the victim is not human; it is not sacrifice if the clone is homo sacer.
She continues, ‘How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable,
how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There
was no going back’ (Ishiguro 2006, 263). Revealing the humanity of clones – equivalent
to their sources or ‘possibles’ – does not stop a system in which the worst human fears
about disease and mortality are alleviated by the butchering of a class treated with repul-
sion and exclusion. Even their strongest supporters are dedicated to them only with
great difficulty. ‘We’re all afraid of you. I myself had to fight back my dread of you all
almost every day,’ Miss Emily says. ‘There were times I’d look down at you all from my
study window and I’d feel such revulsion’ (Ishiguro 2006, 269). The clones’ role in the
organ harvesting trade alone instigates this visceral reaction, as they look no different
from anyone else and have shown they could easily pass for non-clones. The system is
predicated on maintaining a belief that clones are fundamentally different and inferior.

The Unit: Personal Responsibility for Becoming Homo Sacer

Despite the denial of a soul, bodily autonomy, a future and basic humanity, the clones
are not held responsible for their status and what they must do. At the same time
that no one pities them, no one blames them either. This is not the case in Ninni
Holmqvist’s The Unit, in which the donor class is blamed entirely for creating its own
fate. Whereas the clones rarely talk openly about who they are and what they are
meant to do, donors in The Unit are constantly reminded of their own worth or worth-
lessness. While Never Let Me Go creates structures based on conformity and indoc-
trination, The Unit creates structures based on guilt and inadequacy. Told through the
first-person narration of Dorrit, who has newly arrived at the Second Reserve Bank
Unit for biological material, the novel depicts a society in which lives devoted to repro-
ductive relationships are deemed the only lives worth saving. Women who reach the
age of fifty and men who reach the age of sixty without starting a family or fulfilling
a comparable irreplaceable role are rounded up and sent to a unit for their remaining
days, only to emerge one organ at a time. When it becomes clear they will enter the
unit, this population is referred to as ‘dispensable’.
The argument is that the dispensables have become a drain on the state, that they
can no longer be permitted to benefit from society without making themselves produc-
tive. Thus, bodies that should have been productive by providing children will now be
productive by providing biological material to those who made better choices. Dorrit
upsets this system by proving she is not beyond child-bearing age, developing a rela-
tionship with one of the other dispensables and becoming pregnant, an occurrence that

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 258 laura r. kremmel

is deeply disturbing to the staff who had already discounted her as futureless except
through her forced donations. On the other hand, those whose bodies have contrib-
uted to the state by providing children seem to be falling apart. Unlike other literary
examples and unlike the rules for organ donation in most countries, the dispensables
are told excessive sentimental details about the recipients of their organs, even shown
pictures of them and the families they boast.
This one-sided sentimentality further drives a wedge between the classes of donor
and recipient, the recipient described in almost saint-like terms for the gifts they give to
society and the suffering they endure, a suffering, it is always pointed out, that is never
of their own doing. Upset about her friend giving a final donation, Dorrit is told the
same story of the woman who received her friend’s pancreas. The staff member paints
a picture of a selfless woman, a widow with an elderly mother and four children, who
also has Type 1 Diabetes,

so it isn’t something self-inflicted . . . Since you don’t have children you perhaps
can’t imagine what it must be like to look after four children on your own, while
worrying about a senile parent and at the same time dragging around an IV
stand, giving yourself injections and taking medication, under constant medical
supervision. (Holmqvist 2008, 105–6)

Not only is it important that this woman is not to blame for her condition, unlike
Dorrit, but it is also noted that her suffering is caused by caring for those who need
her, sacrificing her own comfort for her dependants. As Benedetta Liorsi writes, ‘The
social and political community of productive and economically valuable individu-
als, benefiting from the dispensable’s biopolitical control, turn into depositories of
health and thus into producers of wealth in the social world’ (2019, 990). In other
words, these stories are meant to encourage a dispensable’s commitment to their own
health for the sake of others, despite constant insinuations of their own selfishness.
An investment in the health of dispensables is an investment in the health of valued
members of society, an establishment of what Liorsi calls ‘patienthood’ ‘ante-tempus’,
or ‘before time’: preventative medicine taken to extremes. Unrelenting rituals of stig-
matisation and blame make the hierarchy of deserving and undeserving populations
clear. Dorrit, however, tells the reader that, as a writer, she can imagine this woman’s
life perfectly and would give anything to trade places with her. What’s more, the
recipients are told nothing of their donors, nothing of the people forced to end their
lives prematurely to contribute to lives and lifestyles that excluded them. Telling this
widowed mother about the talented artist, loved among her friends, who died when
her pancreas was harvested ‘would be unethical’ (Holmqvist 2008, 108). The gothic’s
placement of a dispensable as narrator continuously upsets these divides and hierar-
chies by acknowledging Dorrit’s abilities and worth while putting the reader in her
vulnerable position.
Gothic fictions, then, insist on the value of donor narratives that recipients of
organs and even the medical staff that facilitate this system want to deny. For the
dehumanised donor class to have a narrative forces the acknowledgement that they
also have subjectivity and worth, admittance of bios that the system cannot afford.
According to Wasson, this denial is not restricted to literature and speaks to a larger
geopolitical set of assumptions in medicine. She writes,

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 medical globalgothic 259

Representations of intense distress are often seen as unhelpful by healthcare prac-

titioners, medical humanities scholars, and disability studies scholars. Each of
these three constituencies has good reasons for historically discouraging attend-
ing closely to – or ‘dwelling on’ – expressions of individual anguish in physical or
emotional extremity. Yet prioritizing narratives with a positive slant can mean that
some people’s experience may be implicitly denigrated. (Wasson 2020, 24)

It is to the benefit of systems that rely on inequitable classes of doctors and patients,
donors and recipients, to not only denigrate such experiences but deny their exis-
tence altogether. We see this in the way Dorrit’s therapist refuses to acknowledge her
desire for meaningful life. When she says things like ‘I suppose I used to believe that
my life belonged to me . . . But I’ve changed my mind. I don’t own my life at all, it’s
other people who own it’ and ‘I live and die so that the gross national project will
increase, and if I didn’t regard that as meaningful, then my existence here would be
unbearable’, the therapist replies with questions like ‘And you want to have a bear-
able existence?’, insinuating that such a desire among dispensables is surprising and
unusual, even undeserved (Holmqvist 2008, 103–4). The mere existence of therapists,
like the excessive surveillance cameras, is to ensure that dispensables do not attempt
suicide before their usefulness has been exhausted, not to validate their experience
or help them through it. The stories themselves are not treated with any value, even
among the dispensables themselves, who frequently apologise to each other for nega-
tive words or moods.
Despite all the rhetoric about the value of reproductive, caregiving bodies, Dorrit’s
pregnant body does not save her, exposing the fragile construct of values used to force
one population in service to another representative of larger systems of biopolitical
inequality. Already deemed dispensable, she cannot create a precedent that violates
these careful divides by returning to the world as ‘needed’: upward mobility is not
an option. Based on the choices she made in her own life that led to her denigrated
status, the staff claim she would not be a ‘good role model’ for a child. This decision
alone, however, disrupts the firm privileging of reproductive and caregiving bodies. If
creating a family of dependants does not make one worthy, then what does? Dorrit’s
choice to live as though ‘[her] life belonged to [her]’ rather than the system seems to
be enough to condemn her to a stigmatised donor class. Despite the luxurious facilities
of the unit, the language of punishment is pervasive, and Dorrit’s reproducing body is
too little, too late.
In the most unsettling indication of indoctrination and internalisation of self-pun-
ishment, Dorrit manages to escape with the help of a nurse who recognises the psycho-
logical abuse and medicalised murder of an entire class of people whose only crime is
independence. But then Dorrit returns, sneaking back into the unit and rejoining the
rest of the dispensables as if nothing had happened. She gives birth and gives the baby
up for adoption, knowing that she herself will not live long afterwards. It is not quite
the suicide through final donation request that others choose, but the rejection of an
opportunity to live is little different. Through the psychological compliance with a
system that reduces her to her body, Dorrit denies her own future, accepting her own
worthlessness even when given the chance to sneak into the ‘needed’ class. Similar sur-
render affects the clones in Never Let Me Go as it impacts their ability to recover from
a donation. In both, suicide is available as an act of escape, but it is an act that loses

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 260 laura r. kremmel

all power when the system still reaps whatever biological matter it can from the body.
Death merely feeds the system that drove these populations to it.

Visible Bodies, Invisible Horrors

Despite their clear dystopian classifications, these two novels echo real-world societies
in which there is an expectation that certain groups will be willing to sacrifice bio-
logical material, either to support themselves or to support their families, as Kara and
Scheper-Hughes have shown. In speaking specifically of drug trials and ‘assisted repro-
ductive labor’ – two forms of ‘biolabor’ – Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby
argue for such work to count as ‘labor’ in a ‘post-Fordist economy’ and point to the
outsourcing of the most dangerous work to China and India, among other countries,
in which ‘in industry parlance, these patients are praised for their “compliance” (their
adherence to protocols and study schedules) and treatment naïveté (the relative lack
of exposure to drugs, which means that trial data are “cleaner” and easier to read)’
(2014, 162). We see this same compliance praised in the literature included in this
chapter. Cooper and Waldby conclude that

the persistent inequalities that continue to shape the consumption and production
of healthcare cannot be forcefully addressed unless we also confront the nature of
the capitalist labor relation itself – a labor relation that, in the current conjuncture,
crucially depends on the exposure of certain bodies to uninsured risk. (2014, 164)

The fictional classes of clones and dispensables, then, could stand in for the many
disproportionately at-risk biolabouring groups marginalised by race, class, economic
status, gender, ethnicity or religion, all considered exploitable or expendable. The
gothic, by focusing on the narratives of the donor class – the unseen population denied
narrative agency over experiences of exploitation, coercion and violence – exposes and
disrupts methods of dehumanisation used broadly by the geopolitical power structures
of the red market.
In contrast, I end by considering a visual example at the other end of this spec-
trum, one that demonstrates the erasure of donor narratives through objectification and
anonymisation: the exhibitions Body Worlds and Bodies. The Body Worlds exhibition
features skinned and plastinated human bodies posed performing athletic activities
while exhibiting a full range of muscle and bone: running, dancing, playing sports,
playing instruments, having sex, and displaying parts of their own bodies in artistic
fashion. This sounds grotesque, but it is not, certainly not compared to the blood, gore
and guts of contemporary horror films. Instead, the images look unreal, inhuman: they
are colourful but clean, exposed but not organic. As plastination suggests, they look
like plastic. Though knowledge of what they are is certainly upsetting to some – like the
knowledge of what the clones are in Never Let Me Go – the visual appearance of the
bodies themselves may be uncanny but not horrific or disgusting. Gunther von Hagens
devised this method of preservation and presentation in 1995, and the exhibition has
expanded to cities across the world. A similar exhibit owned by Premier Exhibitions,
Bodies: The Exhibition, opened in 2005 to much more controversy than its predecessor.
They call their process ‘polymer preservation’, though the education resources on both
websites describe the techniques as nearly identical. Both websites put their exhibits

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 medical globalgothic 261

in the context of education, though Bodies is more clearly interested in spectacle and
entertainment.
Unsurprisingly both exhibits have been met with controversy, accused of a general
disrespect for the dead and also criticised over the questionable origin and informed
consent of these bodies. Bodies: The Exhibition is at least partially made up of an
exploited population that, if it gave consent, did so under duress. For a time, it was
required to include a disclaimer on its website, the result of a 2008 New York settle-
ment, part of which read,

This exhibit displays human remains of Chinese citizens or residents which were
originally received by the Chinese Bureau of Police. The Chinese Bureau of Police
may receive bodies from Chinese prisons. Premier cannot independently verify that
the human remains you are viewing are not those of persons who were incarcerated
in Chinese prisons. (Lantos 2011, 5)

The disclaimer is no longer displayed on the Bodies website. Despite actively pointing
fingers at its copycats, Body Worlds itself may not be in the clear. In 2004, the California
Science Center conducted an ethics evaluation that determined that all bodies at the time
were documented, including causes of death and consent. Despite this, many still express
suspicions, including Christine Montross, who asks,

How likely is it, really, that a woman of childbearing age signed up to be plastinated
and died while pregnant? And how likely is it that that same woman’s partner or
family would have agreed to have the woman and her fetus plastinated and dis-
played, even if she had expressed a desire for such a thing while living? (2011, 52)

While Body Worlds and many of the educational institutions that have hosted it have
been adamant about their own ethical transparency, there is still much unknown, and
even von Hagens’ home country of Germany has raised suspicions both about its facto-
ries in China, which are ‘near detention camps where many prisoners are executed’, and
about the possibility ‘that he purchased bodies of mental patients from Novosibirsk’
(Schulte-Sasse 2011, 82). Norman L. Cantor argues that Body Worlds has kept better
records of its donors through the Heidelberg Institute for Plastination, and that, by
2005, 6,500 people had volunteered to be plastinated (2010, 278–9). Donors to the
exhibit today may be lining up to sign up for plastination – the website sharing their
motivations for doing so – but that does not mean it has always been that way.
The fact is, we just do not know, and that is my point. The issues raised by these
exhibits could, of course, be put in the context of a whole history of displaying bod-
ies without consent. Body Worlds and all the exhibits it inspired demonstrate that
what we see – the exhibit itself – is far less disturbing than what we do not see: the
circumstances that led the bodies of these unidentified individuals to be displayed for
thousands of strangers, preserved in such a way that they will never decay. In Body
Worlds, audiences assume the position of organ recipients, never learning who their
donors were, how they were treated, or how they came to be donors. The exhibit fails
to acknowledge that such stories might exist, fixated on the donation rather than its
origin. The bite-sized quotes from supposed donors listed on the website do not align
with any actual body or body part. Of these points, Uli Linke observes that Body

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 262 laura r. kremmel

Worlds has been so careful to remove the human from its displays that it is designed to
‘annihilate compassion’, a powerful tool in narratives of subjugated populations and
one that could be used for anger and action (2012, 83). As Wasson poignantly writes,
the gothic offers

a willingness to hear fear and despair. This latter willingness is no small thing
– research has shown significant lack of appetite to hear such stories, including
among healthcare practitioners. When illness narratives do not end in such moves
of coherence, hope, or healing there remains an ethical necessity to witness, both
to validate the speaker and to correct the wider cultural temptation to privilege
survivors’ stories over those who do not – quite – survive. (2020, 148)

Negative medical stories are just as powerful as positives ones, if not more so. Though
Dorrit may frustrate the reader by returning to the unit, where she will die as dispens-
able, her last act is to write: a letter to her daughter and the memoir that we are read-
ing, a document that must have illegally escaped the unit as its writer would not. The
gothic texts analysed here show that there is a story, even if it is not identical to the
story that victims of the red market would tell. It is these unheard stories and unseen,
pervasive geopolitical structures that the gothic challenges by prioritising the role of
the dehumanised and exploited other through the narrative of circumstances, leading
them to contribute to a disturbing system with which those who never even know their
names extend their own lives, lives worth more than biological material.

Notes
1. See Luckhurst 2015 and Belling 2010, among others.
2. See Teresi 2012 for the intricacies of different declarations of death and their history.
3. See Kremmel 2022.

References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Atkinson, Sarah. 2016. ‘Care, Kidneys and Clones: The Distance of Space, Time and Imagination.’
In The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead
and Angela Woods, 611–26. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Belling, Catherine. 2010. ‘The Living Dead: Fiction, Horror, and Bioethics.’ Perspectives in Biology
and Medicine 53, no. 3 (Summer): 439–51.
Bodies: The Exhibit. 2021. https://luxor.mgmresorts.com/en/entertainment/bodies-the-exhibition.html.
Body Worlds. 2021. https://bodyworlds.com.
Cantor, Norman L. 2010. After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver. Washington,
DC: Georgetown University Press.
Charon, Rita. 2008. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Conan, Neal. 2009. ‘The International Organ Trafficking Market.’ NPR, 30 July. https://www.npr.
org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111379908.
Cook, Robin. 1977. Coma. New York: Signet.
Cooper, Melinda and Catherine Waldby. 2014. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research
Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Gotlib, Anna. 2009. ‘Stories from the Margins: Immigrant Patients, Health Care, and Narrative
Medicine.’ International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2, no. 2 (Fall): 51–74.
Holmqvist, Ninni. 2008. The Unit. Translated by Marlaine Delargy. New York: Other Press.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. 2006. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage Books.
Jefferies, David E. 1998. ‘The Body as Commodity: The Use of Markets to Cure the Organ
Deficit.’ Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 5, no. 2: 621–58.
Kara, Siddharth. 2017. Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Kremmel, Laura R. 2022. ‘Medical Humanities and the Gothic.’ In Twentieth-Century Gothic,
edited by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn and Bernice Murphy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Lantos, John D. 2011. ‘Introduction: Plastination in Historical Perspective.’ In Controversial
Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses, edited by John D. Lantos,
1–16. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Linke, Uli. 2012. ‘Body Shock: The Political Aesthetics of Death.’ In Images of Power and the
Power of Images: Control, Ownership, and Public Space, edited by Judith Kapferer, 80–98.
New York: Berghahn Books.
Liorsi, Benedetta. 2019. ‘The Ante-Tempus Novel: Prevention and Patienthood in Recent
Speculative Fiction.’ Textual Practice 33, no. 6: 983–1,003.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. ‘Biomedical Horror: The New Death and the New Undead.’ In Technol-
ogies of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin D. Edwards,
84–98. London and New York: Routledge.
McQueen, Sean. 2016. Deleuze and Baudrillard: From Cyberpunk to Biopunk. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Montross, Christine. 2011. ‘Resisting the Allure of the Lifelike Dead.’ In Controversial Bodies:
Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses, edited by John D. Lantos, 48–54.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Russell, Emily. 2019. Transplant Fictions: A Cultural Study of Organ Exchange. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2004. ‘Parts Unknown: Undercover Ethnography of the Organs-
Trafficking Underworld.’ Ethnography 5, no. 1 (March): 29–73.
Schulte-Sasse, Linda. 2011. ‘Vive la différence: Gunther von Hagens and his Maligned Copycats.’
In Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses, edited by
John D. Lantos, 79–89. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Teresi, Dick. 2012. The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadavers
– How Medicine Is Blurring the Line between Life and Death. New York: Pantheon Books.
Ulaby, Neda. 2006. ‘Origins of Exhibited Cadavers Questioned.’ NPR, 11 August. https://www.npr.
org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5637687.
Wasson, Sara. 2020. Transplantation Gothic: Tissue Transfer in Literature, Film, and Medicine.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
The X-Files. 1996. Season 3, Episode 19: ‘Hell Money’. Directed by Tucker Gates. Aired 29 March.

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 Part III:
Modes

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 17

Globalgothic Translations and

Migrations: From Britain to Brazil
Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos

Novels without Borders

T he novel has been equated with modernity itself (Magris 2015) as ‘the only
genre to have emerged under the conditions of epistemological and historio-
graphic self-consciousness that characterize the modern period’ (McKeon 2000, 254).
From its inception, this most migratory of literary forms has enabled an intense and
intensive process of exchange, with novels informing other novels, with novelists cre-
ating, borrowing, appropriating or challenging subject matter, narrative techniques
and devices. Language has never been an insurmountable barrier, translation having
been a powerful tool facilitating its spread over space and time. This modern genre
made its entrance into Brazilian ports in the early nineteenth century and soon came
to be adopted as a major instrument in the effort to inquire into a national identity.
However, the novel’s movement in space also entailed a displacement in time, thus
making collide two uneven and combined temporalities – the developed European cen-
tre, already bourgeois and industrialised (notwithstanding its internal differences), and
the peripheral country, newly out of colonial rule and involved in its construction as a
nation. The rise of the Brazilian novel owed much to what Brazilian writer Machado
de Assis has phrased ‘external influx’ (Assis 1992b, 813) in a process that has been
characterised by one critic as the ‘permanent mixture of European tradition and the
discoveries about Brazil’ (Candido 2017, 29). This chapter explores the particular
contributions of the gothic to Brazilian fiction and examines how its conventions have
been deployed to deal with aspects of Brazilian life that the project of nation-building
silenced. Gothic ideas and trappings were functional to acknowledge the presence of
the country’s Other – the enslaved, in this case – and express the anxieties this presence
entailed. Gothic flowed over the English borders and crossed the seas to become glo-
balised. As the appropriation of its conventions in nineteenth-century Brazil suggests,
‘globalgothic’ is a term that need not refer exclusively to the contemporary context
and can have its spatio-temporal coordinates expanded.
Brazil’s independence from Portugal in 1822 was the beginning of a long process
of nation-building, whose underpinning was ‘the disparity between the slave society
of Brazil and the principles of European liberalism’ (Schwarz 1992b, 19). With the
enforcement of Portuguese as the country’s official language by statesman Marquês
de Pombal in 1758, oral culture, which had prevailed during colonial times – even
settlers and enslaved Africans spoke ‘tupi’ (the general Indigenous language) – became

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 268 sandra guardini vasconcelos

residual. Written discourse and European printed matter came gradually to grow in
importance and predominate over orality. In the historical formation of Latin Ameri-
can societies, Uruguayan critic Ángel Rama stresses the centrality of ‘the lettered city’,
in which writing and intellectuals would play a decisive role in the configuration of
urban institutions. Europe then provided the cultural artefacts that these intellectuals
would look to for models, examples and ideas. It was thus that there were novels in
Brazil before there were Brazilian novelists (Meyer 1973).
In the 1800s, a passer-by who walked the streets of Rio de Janeiro, or a reader
whose eyes might be caught by the adverts in the newspapers that circulated in that
town, would have a direct experience of the hegemony of European novels that came
to be increasingly available in Rio from the first decades of the century, mainly after
the suspension of censorship in 1821. The proverbial cultural asynchrony that many
scholars pointed out as one of the consequences of Brazil’s peripheral condition is
challenged, therefore, by the availability of printed matter coming ‘from Europe on
packet boats every fortnight, in the form of books, periodicals, and newspapers’
(Schwarz 1976, 16).
For rental or sale in the apothecaries and bookshops, or loan in the circulating
libraries of the imperial capital, the local book market offered French, British and
Portuguese novels, famous and anonymous novelists, a medley of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century works, feuilletons, historical, gothic, sentimental novels, novels of
adventure – in sum, a little bit of everything that had been produced in the genre in
Europe in the previous century and a half. In the words of Brazilian critic Marlyse
Meyer, they comprised a true internationale romancière, or what she has described
as a ‘tidal wave of novels that overflowed from the English Channel’ (Meyer 2007).
So, rather than a reduced canon, a significant assortment of titles and authors, from
the very well known to the minor or forgotten, co-existed in the same cultural space,
with different literary traditions and periods producing a temporal compression that
brought together novels published in the Old Continent over a long stretch of time.
Whether in the original or in translation, they came to be integrated into a literary
system still in the making, as part of the amalgam of European models that Brazilian
writers could negotiate, incorporate, renew, recreate, gloss or refute.
Among the wide range of novels available to the Brazilian reader, the canon of
the gothic mode – Horace Walpole, Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis,
William Beckford – was advertised, rented and sold as well as mentioned by critics
and novelists. In the wake of his huge success in Europe, Sir Walter Scott had all his
novels translated into Portuguese and was a household name in Brazilian letters.
Gothic elements, which were a staple resource of novelists like Charlotte Brontë,
William Harrison Ainsworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and George W. M. Reynolds,
also became familiar to readers in general. Thus, the arrival of gothic novels in
imperial Brazil and their long-standing availability in the bookshops and circulating
libraries in Rio de Janeiro beg the question: if gothic is a literature of self-analysis
which emerges when ‘the individual comes to see him- or herself at the mercy of
forces which in fundamental ways elude understanding’ (Punter 1996, 112), what
role did it play in this new context and what kinds of interests and anxieties did it
respond to? This is a pertinent question in view of the striking differences between
the English and the Brazilian historical conditions. Newly emerging out of colonial
rule, Brazil was far from experiencing the problems of a country grappling with

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 globalgothic translations and migrations 269

the effects of industrialisation and urbanisation, key factors in the dissolution of

old community ties, in the migration from the countryside to the cities, and in the
formation of a new urban culture, which would intensify in England throughout the
nineteenth century. These are factors that, as we know, caused significant anxiety
because of the changes they brought about to traditional and long-established ways
of life.
With slavery as Brazil’s economic engine, liberal ideas like free labour, legal egalitari-
anism and universalism were out of place (Schwarz 1992b) since they had no correspon-
dence with material reality. As a genre that rose as a means of expression of bourgeois
values, the novel enacted the individual’s struggle for autonomy in a world undergoing
momentous social, economic and political changes. In a slaveholding society, with a
small urban middle class, the concept of autonomous individual in the European sense
was not the norm. The social divide between the elite, free workers and the enslaved
was practically unbridgeable. Moreover, with 70 per cent of individuals illiterate, as
the 1872 General Census of the Empire – the first to be organised – blatantly revealed,
Brazil was a nation that could not read. Novels and any other reading materials were,
therefore, destined to a tiny, predominantly white minority and included topics quite
distant from their actual social experience, like the conflicts between aristocratic and
bourgeois values, social mobility, marriage for love versus marriage of convenience,
money and economic interest. The rise of the novel in Brazil therefore reflected the
asymmetrical relations between core nations and periphery in that the former exported
literary models and forms that the latter later borrowed and acclimatised. This is what
Franco Moretti refers to when he argues that the novel that rises on the periphery of
the literary system is a ‘compromise between foreign form and local materials’ (Moretti
2000, 60), or, in Schwarz’s terms, a ‘misfit between ideology and reality’ (Schwarz
1992a, 41). It may not be inopportune to add that core and periphery are used here not
to refer to a static or essentialist model, but to a relationship that is entirely historical
and therefore provisional, signalling an economic and power relation, as Immanuel
Wallerstein has defined it in his world-systems theory.
It is thus that in Brazil the gothic is at a far remove from its origins in late-eighteenth-
century England. As ‘the underside of enlightenment and humanist values’ (Botting
1996, 2), gothic novels engaged with the topics mentioned above, but displaced them
in time and space. In lieu of the bourgeois home, medieval buildings – castles, abbeys,
dungeons, vaults – were the site of narratives that dealt with the fears and anxieties
pertaining to a changing present. In a young nation still in the making, without a feudal
past, the conventions of the gothic rang false when transplanted to a local narrative,
as a perceptive man of letters remarked in the preface to a story published in Jornal do
Commercio on 28 and 29 May 1839. He claimed that he wished to discard them, leav-
ing out castles, feudal lords and the supernatural, because he was interested in the lived
experience of his own present, rather than in fantastic stories rooted in the past (Brito
1960, 197). However, the prosperous sugar plantation in which the story is set does not
preclude the authoritarianism, tyranny and violence so common in the classic gothic.
Ann Radcliffe, ‘the first poetess of romantic fiction’ in Sir Walter Scott’s words, was
a household name in the imperial capital and her novels circulated in other regions
of the country as well. While an edition in Portuguese of The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794) was on offer in a bookshop in Rio de Janeiro as early as 1842, her novels
were still being used in the 1860s and 1870s as a term of comparison in newspaper

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articles ranging from faits divers to political news. In a crônica1 published originally in
Ilustração Brasileira on 15 January 1877, amid comments about Ponson du Terrail’s
Rocambole, Machado de Assis tells his readers that he has read ‘the novels by Ann
Radcliffe’ (Assis 1992a, 357).
It was two Minerva Press novelists, however, that came to have a direct impact on the
production of Machado and José de Alencar, the two most important Brazilian writers in
that period. Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1796) and Mrs Elizabeth
Helme’s St. Clair of the Isles (1803) were translated very early into Portuguese and found
their way, each in its own way, into the work of both authors. Nonetheless, gothic themes,
situations and trappings were often deployed in various novels throughout the nineteenth
century, as clear evidence of how they were appropriated to deal with the tensions of
class, race and gender in a social order in the making. This chapter intends to discuss these
translations and address the questions posed above. In this move, it engages with issues
such as Brazil’s slavery system, with power relations, and how the gothic served as a tool
for tackling them in the works of three nineteenth-century novelists: two women writers
whose novels have only recently been rediscovered; one novelist belonging to the literary
establishment, in one of his less canonical fictions.

Travelling Gothic
‘Regina Maria Roche was Ireland’s Ann Radcliffe – at least for a time’ (Power 2018,
35): this is a comparison certainly grounded on the fact that The Children of the
Abbey was met with general acclaim, with many reprints throughout the nineteenth
century. Yet, its translation into Portuguese was not consequent on the transatlan-
tic reach of Minerva Press’s2 titles, but rather on André Morellet’s French version,
Les Enfans de L’Abbaye, the source used by A. V. de Costa e Sousa and rendered as
Amanda e Oscar, ou história da família de Dunreath (Lisbon, Tipografia Rollandiana,
editions in 1829 and 1837). Its fame in Brazil owes more to a reference by one of the
country’s most important writers than to its overall circulation or acknowledgement
by the literate world.
In what was a rare event in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, José de Alencar
left a memoir in which he reminisces about how and why he became a novelist. While
Balzac, Chateaubriand, Fenimore Cooper, Walter Scott and others receive special men-
tion in this first-hand account, it was a small collection of books3 that he read to the
women in his house when he was still an adolescent that left an indelible impression on
him. A passage in Amanda e Oscar – that in which Amanda’s father dies – moves his
mother and her friends to tears: ‘The ladies, their heads down, . . . could not control
their sobs’ while he himself in tears tried to console his mother and her friends. Alencar
wonders whether it was ‘the continuous and repeated reading of novellas and novels
that first impressed on my mind the preference for this literary form, my favourite
among all’ (Alencar 1959, 133). Later, as a law student, when he started penning his
own materials, he remarks he had two moulds for the novel, one of which was owing
to his early reading experience:

A gloomy one, fraught with mysteries and fears; this I had received from the novel-
las I had read. In it, the scene opened on the ruins of a castle, shrouded by the pale
moonlight; or on some gothic chapel dimly lit by a lamp, its light reflecting on a
tombstone. (Alencar 1959, 136)

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Throughout its fifty-eight chapters, The Children of the Abbey (Alencar’s Amanda e
Oscar) presents a very well-structured plot, which begins and ends in the same place,
Tudor Hall, drawing a perfect circle. Like most of the women’s novels of its time, it is
the story of the protagonist’s journey in search of her place in the world, with marriage
at the centre of its plot. It is a narrative of apprenticeship, in which the heroine is sent
away from home and from the protection of her family and forced to confront the
misfortunes and tribulations of the world outside. There, her moral fortitude and prin-
ciples are put to the test in a plot that, recurring to narrative devices, machinations and
intrigue, deals with real problems experienced by eighteenth-century women: aban-
donment, motherhood, choice of partner, adultery, chastity, celibacy.
Unlike the Radcliffean gothic, in which the supernatural and the uncanny play a
pivotal role, the gothic touch in The Children of the Abbey is brought by the setting –
ancient buildings that are described as dark and gloomy; ‘relics of druidical antiquity’,
like the Castle of Carberry, ‘a large Gothic pile’, with its ‘ancient towers’, battlements,
moat and ‘the remains of a draw-bridge’ (Roche 1877, 146–7); or Dunreath Abbey,
‘Gothic and gloomy in the extreme, [that] recalls to one’s mind all the stories they ever
heard of haunted houses and apparitions’ (Roche 1877, 442). In its chapel, Amanda
experiences the usual contrivances of the genre: strange noises, a spectral figure and
revelations. As the novel’s damsel in distress, Amanda has to face terrible ordeals and
implacable persecution before wrongs are set right, injustices are remedied, the guilty
are punished and there is the triumph of goodness, truth and virtue. Very much in
eighteenth-century fashion, in the end Roche vindicates poetic justice and reaffirms
the principle of retribution. Formally speaking, the novel is characterised by an accu-
mulation of adventures, an emphasis on plot, the characters’ lack of psychological
density, little analytical complexity and contrived resolutions. Thematically, neverthe-
less, Roche touches on fundamental issues such as social conciliation and the fear of
sexuality, sources of anxiety in her time.
The gothic imaginary lingered on in Alencar’s mature work and its echoes can be
heard in some of his regional and historical novels, as I have discussed elsewhere.4 His
As minas de prata (1865–66) stages an intricate sequence of events that comprises
battles, fights and tournaments; mysteries and disguises; suspense; a certain narrative
frenzy that involves many subplots; a castle that is a prison; a buried treasure. These ele-
ments, typically found in the feuilleton, are at the service of creating psychological fear
as episodes of tyranny and violence are interlaced with historical facts relating to the
colonial times in Brazil. Similar elements make up the backbone of Elizabeth Helme’s
St. Clair of the Isles, the novel that Machado de Assis mentions on several occasions
in his work: in the short stories ‘Pecuniary Anecdote’5 and ‘Ayres e Vergueiro’;6 in the
novels Helena7 and Quincas Borba;8 in the novella Casa velha.9 The transnational cir-
culation of St. Clair benefited considerably from Mme de Montolieu’s early translation
into French in 1808, A. V. de Costa e Sousa’s into Portuguese in 1827, and A.S.C.’s into
Brazilian Portuguese in 1825, which is the one Machado had access to.
A classic Minerva Press novel, St. Clair of the Isles combines adventure with the
fabric of everyday, domestic existence enveloped in suspense and mystery, and set in
ancient, gothic buildings. Clan life, family feuds, usurpation, banishment, a child born
out of wedlock – the novel deals with a number of plot devices and twists to finally
close with a happy end that celebrates bourgeois domesticity. In her essay about the
fictional use Machado makes of this ‘Scottish tradition’, Marlyse Meyer argues that
rather than a realistic ploy to lend weight to verisimilitude and to the fictional real

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 272 sandra guardini vasconcelos

(since Helme’s novel was in fact widely read), the references to St. Clair have more to
do with the situation of each individual character shown in the act of reading it than
with any of the gothic devices it may deploy. Machado de Assis is a realist writer who
has been said to produce a realistic representation by means of non-realistic tech-
niques, thereby unsettling the system of representation. Like Edgar Allan Poe, another
of his gothic models, he problematised the notion of the real while making unreason
into one of his major themes in both novels and short stories. Though residual, his
indebtedness to the gothic vein transpires from some of his stories, as is the case in ‘Um
esqueleto’ (A Skeleton) and ‘Sem olhos’ (Eyless).10

Brazilian Female Gothic

Antonio Candido has argued that the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel was ‘an
instrument of discovery and interpretation’ of the country and of its physical and
human reality, which contributed to a certain renunciation of the imagination or
resulted in the co-existence of realism and fantasy in the work of the early novelists
(Candido 2017, 429). Using the real as ballast, they were primarily concerned with
verisimilitude and with the description and exploration of human relations in society.
However much they were intent on mapping the geographic and social environment
– the customs and social types – the novels nonetheless often opened up cracks in this
objective surface to make space for the fantastic and for excess.
Only recently has the gothic been appropriated as a heuristic category to deal with
the unrealistic aspects that can be read in both canonical and non-canonical works.
Somehow the appropriation of the gothic has helped burst the narrow margins of what
has been until not long ago considered to be the nineteenth-century literary canon,
always restricted to a small number of male novelists. As in other literary traditions,
female writing confronted all sorts of constraints and limitations in the nineteenth cen-
tury, never making it into Brazilian literary historiography until feminist criticism strove
to bring it to the foreground. At any rate, in spite of the endeavour, and in spite of the
importance of acknowledging it, this novelistic output generates interest less for liter-
ary than for historical reasons, which lie in those women writers’ evident engagement
with issues such as female education and marriage, and in their concern with the plight
of the Indigenous and of the enslaved people. Female Gothic has famously thrown into
question the homeliness of the home as a sheltering place for women, and it has been
a territory in which to explore issues pertaining to women’s experience, motherhood,
patriarchal power, authority and family. Feminist gothic criticism has endeavoured to
discuss what is specifically ‘female’ and ‘gothic’ in the work of women writers associ-
ated with the subgenre, and engaging with this debate would be outside the scope of
this chapter. Suffice it to say that some of the main concerns of women’s gothic have
been the self, female sexuality and female identity. These are topics that somehow were
alien to the narratives I discuss in this chapter, in which values such as individuality,
freedom and identity were not within reach of characters submitted to the slave system
or to patriarchal power. Even if those narratives have limitations and are formally and
linguistically conventional, their choice of a female narrator and point of view repre-
sents a valuable contribution in a literature whose perspective was predominantly male.
Two of those female writers whose work had sunk into oblivion to be recovered
only in the past few years evince the relevance and functionality of incorporating gothic

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 globalgothic translations and migrations 273

elements to give voice to all that was marginal in a society ruled by a small wealthy and
white male minority. Their affiliation to the gothic may come as a strategy to depict
their experience in a society that excluded women, the enslaved and the Indigenous
peoples. In that sense the home would stand for the gothic castle, as suggested by Kate
Ferguson Ellis, who argues that rather than ‘a safe refuge’, the home was often ‘a place
of danger and imprisonment’ (Ellis 1989, x). Premised on the principle of the separate
spheres, the home was the ersatz castle, where male power was exercised directly and
gender relations were experienced in the raw. Unlike their male counterparts, women
were writing from within this patriarchal order as those communicating their place in
a conflicted family structure, one that could nurture but also confine them. In many
instances, the ‘ghosts’ haunting the house were tyranny, domestic violence, past secrets
or crimes.
Not much is known about Ana Luísa de Azevedo Castro (1823?–69), who pub-
lished D. Narcisa de Villar in 1859 under a pseudonym, although she seems to have
received an education that enabled her to build a career as a teacher and headmistress
at a girls’ school, an asset that very few women possessed at the time. A narrative
frame – consisting of a prologue and an epilogue – opens Castro’s debut novel, fea-
turing an elderly Indigenous woman who tells a small audience a ‘legend of colonial
times’ – the story of an evil spirit, according to her. Narcisa de Villar, a young lady of
noble descent, leaves Portugal after her parents’ death in order to live with her three
brothers in the south of Brazil. The eldest of the rich and influential Villars, Dom
Martim, is a farmer and the governor of the colony of Ponta Grossa and exercises
his power tyrannically. Living apart from her siblings, Narcisa grows up in solitude,
tended only by a loyal Indigenous woman, Eugênia, and her son Leonardo, of mixed
race. When her greedy brothers impose an arranged marriage on Narcisa, she realises
the real nature of her feelings for Leonardo and they decide to elope. A dangerous sea
crossing takes them to the Ilha do Mel, where the three brothers find and murder them,
but not before past secrets come to light: Eugênia, the daughter of the tribe’s chief, and
Dom Luís de Villar had been lovers and Leonardo was his son. As the narrator tells
her listeners in the prologue, the island is said to be haunted and terrible apparitions
are reported to have been seen by farmworkers.
To this very melodramatic narrative, with all the usual clichés of the typical feuil-
leton (villainous male characters, a pure and innocent protagonist, sharp contrasts
between good and evil, etc.), some elements have been added that associate it with
the gothic. The family and the home that should welcome and protect the heroine
become a hostile environment. Narcisa’s isolation and vulnerability contrast with her
brothers’ despotism, spirit of revenge and violence, and the characteristic patriarchal
plot is tinged with supernatural suggestions: the furious tempest that presages the
events on the island; the shrieks of an owl; the cries of a small, black nocturnal bird
known to frighten children and even the bravest men in the woods; the two white
shadows that cross the sea from the island to Ponta Grossa and become doves on
the way back. More properly a romance than a novel, D. Narcisa de Villar enacts
the anxieties arising from patriarchal culture, and gives a voice to its Others. Castro
not only denounces male tyranny over women in her tale, but also draws a sharp
contrast between the villainy and greed of the Portuguese and the nobility of the two
Indigenous characters. By moving her narrative back to the year 1699, she was able
to critique her own present without causing an uproar; by resorting to some gothic

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 274 sandra guardini vasconcelos

conventions, she could touch on quite sensitive issues that were generally either
idealised or silenced in the canonical novels.
In Úrsula (1859), by Maria Firmina dos Reis (1822–1917), otherness is embodied
in the enslaved. For almost a century Úrsula was forgotten until it was rediscovered in
the 1970s and started to be celebrated for its pioneering content. A self-taught woman
of mixed race (black father and white mother), Reis published the first abolitionist
women’s novel in Portuguese. Written in the flowery language that was so charac-
teristic of Romanticism, Úrsula tells a conventional story of thwarted love, persecu-
tion and revenge. The enslaved Túlio rushes to Tancredo’s help when a serious riding
accident on a country road almost kills the young lawyer. With his life in considerable
danger, Tancredo receives the patient care of young Úrsula, also intent on nursing her
ill, paralytic mother. The couple falls in love and when Tancredo is restored to health
he proposes to her and also buys Túlio’s freedom in return for his assistance. While
both men are away, Úrsula’s uncle (her mother’s brother) appears, falls madly in love
with her at first sight and starts a relentless pursuit of her, which will only come to an
end after all the main characters are killed, and Úrsula goes mad and dies. Her uncle,
Comendador Fernando P*, is a cruel villain, whose exaggerated characterisation bor-
ders on caricature: a proud, implacable, vengeful, sinister man, with the fiery eyes of
the tiger, responsible for the murder of Tancredo and Túlio, as well as the deaths of
Úrsula’s father, Úrsula herself, and of the enslaved Susana. Forebodings, the allusion
to midnight as the mysterious hour, the graveyard, the ‘imaginary ghosts’ (Reis 2018,
149) that eventually haunt remorseful Comendador Fernando – they all help create a
gothic atmosphere and lend a melodramatic quality to the narrative.
Overly clichéd and implausible, the story is maudlin, the characters are completely
unidimensional, and the plot is thin and predictable; with instances of overwrought
emotions, a well of tears and intense suffering, it is comparable to a bad novel of
sensibility. However, like Castro’s novel, Úrsula makes the home a place of suffering
and tyranny for the women, rather than a place of shelter and protection. Fear and
excess pervade the narrative, and though ghosts and supernatural events are absent,
some conventional gothic elements are deployed, like the heroine’s persecution, the
murderer’s conversion and reclusion in a convent, with his ensuing repentance and
death. In spite of the novel’s poor literary quality, Reis pulls off as her major feat two
chapters in which she gives narrative voice to the two enslaved characters, Túlio and
Susana, who reflect upon themselves, upon their lives and upon the system that vic-
timises them. Unprecedentedly, Túlio and Susana are not figures in the background,
but individuals with a story and a conscience. Even if both characters are depicted as
flawless and lack complexity, by making their voices heard Reis denounces the cruelty
of the slave system and draws attention to the suffering of the enslaved. It is no small
achievement to make them into subjects of discourse at a time when pro- and anti-
abolitionist arguments were dominating Brazilian politics.
In colonial and imperial Brazil, patriarchal authority and the slaveholding order
granted men absolute power and right of property over women and enslaved peo-
ple, submitting them to their discretionary will and whim. While the home was a
woman’s territory and domain, the household was a man’s responsibility and over it
he presided. By the main house, the slave quarters (senzalas) in the sugar and coffee
plantations were large habitations where the enslaved could be chained at night, to
prevent escape. Torture was common and from the pillory, outside, hung the rope

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 globalgothic translations and migrations 275

to hang or beat them. Rape and sexual abuse against enslaved women were rou-
tine. These gruesome practices meant that no ghosts or unearthly phenomena were
necessary to create scenes of horror in the literary texts that dared depict them.
Terror, in the case of Castro’s and Reis’s novels, derives not from what is external,
unknown or ghostly, but from persecution, cruelty and oppression, which does
not make the characters’ experiences less disturbing. Thus, just as in their English
counterparts, Brazilian domestic spaces, which should offer safety and protection,
become unheimlich. Predatory and demonic relations like those depicted in these
novels convey a nightmarish vision of family life and, by extension, of the Brazilian
social order.

Gothic and Slavery

Gothic conventions were put to very conservative use as well. In Joaquim Manuel de
Macedo’s As vítimas-algozes. Quadros da escravidão (The Victims-Assailants. Pictures
of Slavery) (1869), rather than slavery it is the enslaved that are depicted as mon-
strous, frightening figures. While Túlio and Susana are rendered as good, honourable,
idealised characters, Macedo’s portrayal of the enslaved takes on much more sombre
and ominous overtones. The three narratives that comprise Macedo’s exploration of
the relationships between slave-owning farmers and their slaves are imbued with a
sense of impending horror, as the stories of the slaves Simeão, Pai-Raiol and Lucinda
unfold. A thesis runs through As vítimas-algozes, which the three protagonists illus-
trate. Macedo advocated the slow and gradual abolition of slavery, which he believed
to be an evil and a destructive force for both masters and slaves. However, instead
of assertively condemning the enslavement of fellow human beings, the pictures he
paints show the point of view of the white elite who, at the time his work came out,
were witnessing a rise in the number of escapes, thefts and crimes perpetrated against
proprietors and overseers. Heated ongoing arguments around emancipation were a
consequence of widespread fear, since according to many historians, this is how the
enslaved were reacting and showing their agency against a system that commodified
and subjugated them. Macedo’s contention in the voice of his narrator – that slavery
was destructive for the masters and corruptive for the enslaved – sounds very much
like non-commitment, a refusal to see slavery for what it really was. Paradoxically, in
view of his standpoint, he put up a defence of abolition by representing the enslaved
as fiends and the slave owners as generous, kind and understanding people. The three
narratives debunk the good intentions the narrator professes in his interventions.
While there is not a word of censure against the farmers, the narrator consistently
resorts to gothic traits to characterise the three black protagonists, whom he draws in
true appalling colours.
Metaphors like ‘social cancer’, ‘serpent’, ‘beast’, ‘plague’ and ‘moral syphilis’ punc-
tuate the stories, to define the nature of the institution that the third-person narrator
would like to see banished for the sake of the slave owners. His is the stance of the
white male proprietor, whose views he purports to represent while calling attention to
and warning against the ‘black danger’. The three novellas give an account of slaves
who became a threat in and to the lives of their masters, while the narrator’s com-
ments, resembling a lecture, frame and also pervade the sinister events involving the
manors and slave-quarters where the stories are set.

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 276 sandra guardini vasconcelos

In the first narrative, Simeão has been raised in a farmhouse enjoying all the perks
of a domestic servant. Yet, on realising his true enslaved condition, he grows to hate
his owners and concocts a plan to rob and murder the whole family. In the second,
Pai-Raiol is a sorcerer who destroys his master’s family by engaging Esméria’s help in
his plot to seduce their master Paulo Borges, and then by poisoning Paulo’s wife and
children. In the third, Lucinda, a ‘perverted’ mucama,11 corrupts Cândida, her master’s
young daughter, encouraging her to become a flirt. She then arranges for Cândida
to get involved with and be seduced by a foreigner, who used the fake name Alfredo
Souvanel and was sought by the police.
Generally speaking, what brings these three narratives together is the intention to
demonstrate the instinctive behaviour of the enslaved, always driven by hatred, rage,
envy, lust, resentment. Their masters, on the other hand, are depicted as benevolent
and caring people, undeserving of the fate that awaits them. They tell stories of slaves
who become a nightmare and a threat to their masters, always portrayed as victims
of the cruelty and crimes committed against them. The narrator intends to warn
his readers against this danger and argue for the abolition of slavery not really for
the sake of the enslaved, but above all in the interest and to the benefit of the slave
owners. Even if Macedo was fully aware of the evil effects of the institution on those
who were bought and sold as commodities, however, he advocated that the abolition
should be a gradual process so as not to bring any losses to the elite. As he claims in
the foreword,

To work so as to make clear and explicit the turpitude of slavery, its evil influence,
its moral and congenital deformities, its bad instincts, its horror, its dangers, its
infernal action, is also to contribute to condemn it and make sweeter and more
pleasant the idea of emancipation that annihilates it. (Macedo 1991, 4)

Although the three protagonists are punished – Simeão is hanged, Pai-Raiol is killed by
another slave in a fight, and Lucinda goes to prison – and the stories have a moralistic and
didactic denouement, their characterisation and the emphasis given to their monstrous
traits hope to instil or reinforce fear in the readers. Macedo spoke thus to an audience –
the manorial class – that certainly shared the feeling of impending menace that inhabited
their own homes. While ghosts are immaterial, insubstantial, he meant to raise the ghost
of an idea, which could be summed up as ‘banish slavery’, hammered in throughout the
book. His reasons were not humane or humanitarian but utterly political. In the three
very melodramatic accounts, each of the main characters personifies the slave system
by embodying all the evils of the institution. His protagonists are drawn as monstrous
figures and, in the case of Pai-Raiol, his scars, physical deformity, heinous laughter and
repugnant appearance make him a devil incarnate. The othering of the enslaved Afri-
cans and Creoles is a rhetorical and ideological weapon deployed in favour of the white
elite, whose point of view the narrator represents. As a warning and in defence of the
manorial houses and farms, he creates an atmosphere of terror in domestic settings that
are suffused with vice, violence, ungratefulness, treachery, debauchery and pretence. As
vítimas-algozes is a statement against the ‘black danger’ and a demonstration of the risks
of destruction and corruption of the white by the enslaved. The home – here short for
property – becomes a site of horror and fear. Rather than a haven, it embraces the sinis-
ter and encapsulates the poison that disrupts the family and the social order.

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 globalgothic translations and migrations 277

Either from a progressive or from a conservative perspective, the borrowings from

the gothic tradition helped these writers deal with anxieties that were characteristically
Brazilian. Only by engaging head-on with what was the most serious social, economic
and political problem in nineteenth-century Brazil could they have dealt with the igno-
miny of the slave system – as Castro and Reis did, in defence of the enslaved, or as
Macedo did, even if this meant to disapprove it for the wrong reasons. Translating the
gothic into national terms was a strategy to face the challenge of not ignoring altogether
the thousands of black people that worked on the farms or in the homes, or that walked
in the streets. In the mythology of Brazilian identity, there was room for the miscegena-
tion of the white and the Indigenous, but the enslaved and the free blacks were blotted
out. Bringing them on to the literary stage and either giving them voice or denounc-
ing the destructive power of the slave system by resorting to and deploying the gothic
vocabulary is an achievement that needs acknowledgement.

Notes
1. Crônica is a hybrid form half literary, half journalistic. ‘Chronicle’ does not translate it
adequately, which is why I have kept the word in Portuguese.
2. Minerva Press, founded by William Lane in 1790, was the most famous publishing house
for gothic novels in England. The Minerva Press novels were generally written by women
and many were very successful among the reading public.
3. ‘Our romantic repertoire was small; it was composed of a dozen works among which Amanda e
Oscar, Saint-Clair of the Isles, Celestina, and others I no longer remember’ (Alencar 1959, 134).
Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Portuguese are mine.
4. See Vasconcelos 2012, 2016.
5. ‘Never again would he hear her girlish songs; no longer would it be Jacinta who made his
tea, nor, at night, when he wanted to read, would she be the one to bring him his well-
thumbed old copy of St. Clair of the Isles, a gift from 1850’ (Assis 2018, 567).
6. ‘She talked with him long hours, taught him some games, read to him St. Clair of the Isles,
that old story of some outlaws on the isle of Barra’ (Assis 1871, 22–3).
7. ‘The next morning Estacio rose late and went straight to the dining room where he found
Dona Ursula sitting placidly in her comfortable chair by the window, reading a tome of St.
Clair of the Isles and for the hundredth time melted to pity by the sorrows of the outlaws
on the Isle of Barra: excellent folk and most moral book, even though tedious and heavy.
The matrons of that age used it to kill many long winter hours, fill many a quiet evening,
and unbosom the heart of its surplus of tears’ (Assis 1987, 19); ‘Dona Ursula was in the
sewing room, rereading some of her Saint Clair. On the other side of the table, Helena was
putting the finishing touches to a piece of crochet’ (Assis 1987, 36).
8. ‘As soon as Rubião turned the corner of the Rua das Mangueiras, Dona Tonica came in
and went to her father, who’d lain down on the sofa to reread the old Saint-Clair of the
Isles, or The Outlaws of Barra. It was the father and daughter’s whole library. Siqueira
opened the first volume and let his eyes rest on the beginning of Chapter II, which he
already knew by heart’ (Assis 1998, 190).
9. ‘It was the same novel she had read when she visited the year before; she wanted to read it
again: St. Clair of the Isles or the Outlaws of Barra. She put her hand into her pocket and
pulled out her glasses, then her snuff box, and placed them on her lap’ (Assis 2010, 123).
10. See Vasconcelos 2018.
11. In Brazil and Portuguese Africa, a slave, usually young, who lived close to her masters,
helped with the housework and chaperoned the women in the family on their outings. She
could also be her master’s children’s wet nurse.

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 278 sandra guardini vasconcelos

References
Alencar, José de. 1959. ‘Como e porque sou romancista.’ In Obra completa, vol. 1, 125–55. Rio de
Janeiro: Editora José Aguilar.
Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de. 1871. ‘Ayres e Vergueiro.’ Jornal das Famílias 9 (January):
17–26.
———. 1987. Helena. Translated by Helen Caldwell. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 1992a. ‘Aleluia! Aleluia!’ In Obra completa, vol. 3, 356–8. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar.
———. 1992b. ‘A nova geração.’ In Obra completa, vol. 3, 809–36. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar.
———. 1998. Quincas Borba. Translated by Gregory Rabassa. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
———. 2010. Casa velha – The Old House. Translated by Mark Carlyon. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto
Cultural Cidade Viva.
———. 2018. The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa
and Robin Patterson. New York and London: Liveright.
Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge.
Brito, Francisco Paula. 1960. ‘O enjeitado.’ In Os precursores do conto no Brasil, edited by
Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, 197–219. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira.
Candido, Antonio. 2017. Formação da literatura brasileira (Momentos decisivos). 2 vols. Rio de
Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul; São Paulo: FAPESP.
Castro, Ana Luísa de Azevedo. 2000. D. Narcisa de Villar. Florianópolis: Ed. Mulheres.
Duarte, Eduardo de Assis. 2020. ‘Maria Firmina dos Reis and the First Afro-Brazilian Novel.’ In
Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel, edited by Ana Cláudia Suriani
da Silva and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, 84–106. London: UCL Press.
Ellis, Kate Ferguson. 1989. The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic
Ideology. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Helme, Elizabeth. 1837. St. Clair of the Isles, or, The Outlaws of Barra: A Scottish Tradition.
London: George Virtue.
Ledoux, Ellen. 2017. ‘Was There Ever a “Female Gothic”?’ Palgrave Communications 3, no. 17,042.
https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.42.
Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de. 1991. As vítimas-algozes. Quadros da escravidão. São Paulo: Ed.
Scipione; Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.
McKeon, Michael. 2000. ‘Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the
Novel.’ Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel: Special Issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12,
nos. 2–3 (January–April): 253–76.
Magris, Claudio. 2015. ‘A Cryptogram of its Age.’ New Left Review 95 (September–October):
95–107.
Meyer, Marlyse. 1973. ‘O que é, ou quem foi Sinclair das Ilhas?’ Revista do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros 14: 37–63.
———. 1993. ‘Mulheres romancistas inglesas do século XVIII e romance brasileiro.’ In Caminhos
do imaginário no Brasil, 47–72. São Paulo: Edusp.
———. 1996. ‘Prólogo: Sinclair das ilhas.’ In Folhetim: uma história, 21–52. São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras.
———. 1998. ‘Machado de Assis lê Saint-Clair das Ilhas.’ In As mil faces de um herói canalha e
outros ensaios, 31–107. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ.
———. 2007. In Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, A formação do romance inglês. Ensaios teóricos.
São Paulo: Editora HUCITEC; FAPESP [inside flaps].
Moretti, Franco. 2000. ‘Conjectures on World Literature.’ New Left Review 1 (January–February):
54–68.
Muzart, Zahidé Lupinacci. 2008. ‘Sob o signo do gótico. O romance feminino no Brasil, século
XIX.’ Veredas 10: 295–308.

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Pinto-Bailey, Cristina Ferreira. 2013. ‘Na contramão: a narrativa abolicionista de Maria Firmina
dos Reis.’ Belo Horizonte: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://www.letras.ufmg.
br/literafro/29-critica-de-autores-feminios/316-na-contramao-a-narrativa-abolicionista-de-
maria-firmina-dos-reis-critica.
Power, Albert. 2018. ‘Regina Maria Roche (1764–1845).’ The Green Book: Writings on Irish
Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature 11: 35–41.
Punter, David. 1996. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day, vol 1. London: Longman.
Rama, Ángel. 1996. The Lettered City. Translated by John Charles Chasteen. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Reis, Maria Firmina dos. 2018. Úrsula. Belo Horizonte: Editora PUC Minas.
Roche, Regina Maria. 1877. The Children of the Abbey: A Tale. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Sá, Daniel Serravalle de. 2018. ‘O romance gótico e as mulheres: questões de política sexual.’
Itinerários 47: 13–23.
Schwarz, Roberto. 1970. Ao vencedor as batatas. São Paulo: Liv. Duas Cidades.
———. 1976. ‘As ideias fora do lugar.’ Movimento (26 July): 16–17.
———. 1992a. ‘The Importation of the Novel to Brazil and its Contradictions in the Work of
José de Alencar.’ In Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited by John Gledson,
41–77. New York and London: Verso.
———. 1992b. ‘Misplaced Ideas: Literature and Society in Late-Nineteenth-Century Brazil.’ In
Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, edited by John Gledson, 19–32. New York
and London: Verso.
Süssekind, Flora. 1991. ‘As vítimas-algozes e o imaginário do medo.’ In Joaquim Manuel de
Macedo, As vítimas-algozes. Quadros da escravidão, xxi–xxxviii. São Paulo: Ed. Scipione;
Rio de Janeiro: Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa.
Vasconcelos, Sandra Guardini. 2012. ‘Sentidos do demoníaco em José de Alencar.’ Special Issue:
Gothic. New Directions. Ilha do Desterro 63 (January–June): 271–92.
———. 2016. ‘Tropical Gothic: José de Alencar and the Foundation of the Brazilian Novel.’ In
Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture: The Americas, edited by Justin D. Edwards and
Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, 198–217. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.
———. 2018. ‘Machado de Assis’s Nightmarish World: Displacements of the Gothic in Brazil.’
In Latin American Gothic in Literature and Culture, edited by Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno
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Williams, Anne. 1995. ‘Introduction: Gothic Fiction’s Family Romances.’ In Art of Darkness:
A Poetics of Gothic, 1–24. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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 18

Gothic Literary Travel and

Global Tourism
Lucie Armitt

I n her introduction to Globalgothic, Glennis Byron observes that ‘the late twenti-
eth century saw a growing number of articles and books appearing on new national
and regional gothics, from Kiwi gothic to Florida gothic, Barcelona gothic to Japanese
gothic’ and continues by identifying ‘increasing evidence of the emergence of cross-
cultural and transnational gothics’ that ‘were intrinsically connected to . . . the
development of an increasingly global economy’ (Byron 2013, 1). The geographical
regions identified here are also popular (if in some cases pricey) tourist destinations.
As is well known, this ‘global economy’ is, in actuality, an economy dominated by
a comparatively small number of nation states, which have acquired the sometimes
geographically inaccurate label ‘Global North’.1 Tourism is in effect, then, world-
wide travel originating predominantly from the Global North, even when its point of
departure is located in well-developed economies located in the world’s southern hemi-
sphere, such as South Africa, Australia or New Zealand, among others. This chapter
considers the gothic’s preoccupation with travel, examining how that travel becomes
intertwined with global tourism. As the narratives under discussion make clear, that
tourism often shadows the routes of historic colonialism and, at times, even risks the
perpetuation of a perceived cultural inequality as its by-product.
Like tourism, gothic narratives offer a safely packaged exploration of the relation-
ship between humanity, the home (heim), the unhomely/uncanny (unheimlich) and
space: architectural and natural, claustrophobic and agoraphobic. A former PhD student
of mine undertook, as part of her methodology, a ghost tour of the City of Caves site
in Nottingham, a popular tourist attraction usually offering history-based tours. This
specialist tour was, reputedly, led by a spirit medium. On entering the caves, the guide
assured the visitors not to worry if they encountered a ghost, for that ghost would not
follow them home (Bevan 2018). Such ‘reassurance’ surely provokes anxiety: the prom-
ise of a ghost not following you home places in one’s mind the previously unconsidered
possibility that it might do exactly that. Indeed, there is a political precedent for this
idea. The concept of coming home, but bringing the ghost with you, is a metaphor for
the end of the colonial period. Shelley Trower tells us that ‘Two directions of imperial-
ist movement are well-established within Victorian and Gothic studies: the movement
of the explorer or imperialist adventurer outwards to regions perceived as exotic; and
the return movement, of foreign bodies and objects, often experienced as an invasion’
(Trower 2012, 200). The ghosts of imperialism remain evident in many long-haul tourist
destinations and several of the narratives discussed in this chapter. We begin, however,

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 gothic literary travel and global tourism 281

in the Pyrenees, that mountainous region bordering France and Spain, the setting for the
start of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794).
Radcliffe is reputed to have been a limited overseas traveller, her experience largely
restricted to terrain covered in her travelogue, A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794
through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, with a Return Down the
Rhine . . . (1795). Nevertheless, her imagination extends well beyond her experience,
travel and fear becoming intricately and intrinsically linked in her writing. Hence,
in The Mysteries of Udolpho, written in the same year as Radcliffe visited Northern
Europe, her young protagonist, Emily St Aubert, travels across the more southerly
Pyrenees, establishing a gothic precedent for journeys into the unknown to superim-
pose strangeness (étrangeté) on to the foreign (étrangère). Emily begins the route as a
tourist on an ‘expensive excursion’, with ‘leisure to linger . . . and to indulge the sub-
lime reflections’ of the scenery, but when her father decides on a steep downhill route
towards Roussillon, we witness the coach driver ‘doing homage to a cross, that stood
on a rock impending over their way’, before re-mounting the coach and

in spite of the rough road . . . rattl[ing], in a full gallop, along the edge of a precipice,
which made the eye dizzy to look down. Emily was terrified almost to fainting; and
St. Aubert, apprehending still greater danger from suddenly stopping the driver, was
compelled to sit quietly, and trust his fate to the strength and discretion of the mules.
(Radcliffe 1992, 25, 28, 30)

This shift from pleasure to terror has, here, a realist explanation based upon the nar-
rowness of the road, the precipitousness of the drop and the apparent fear-induced
bravado of the driver. Nevertheless, uncanniness starts to build, first when they begin
to suspect they are lost, then as night falls, then as they encounter a ‘wanderer’, a fire
and a travelling community, which our narrator typifies as ‘haunt[ing] the wilds of the
Pyrenees and liv[ing] partly by plundering the traveller’ (Radcliffe 1992, 32, 40). All
these and other fears en route prove groundless, but cumulatively they build an atmo-
sphere of travel-based anxiety which anticipates the real terror that surrounds their
eventual destination, Castle Udolpho, in which Emily finds herself confined following
her father’s death.
Travel, then, is intrinsic to the gothic, even if some of that travel is ‘armchair travel-
ling’ by proxy. As the phrase ‘holiday reading’ implies, tourism is innately connected
with storytelling, and as the phrase ‘dark tourism’ implies, the otherness of the tour-
ist attraction can easily be accommodated within a gothic frame. Gothic emerged
alongside the popularity of the Grand Tour for the upper and upper-middle classes.
The Grand Tour typically took travellers on a route of cultural education, starting in
Paris, from which ‘travellers usually proceeded to the Alps and then by boat on the
Mediterranean to Italy. They would usually visit Rome and Venice but their tour might
also include Spain, Portugal, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic’
(Knowles 2013). It is the kind of travel that Ellen Moers seems to be describing when
she talks about the importance of Radcliffe’s writing as a ‘device to send maidens on
distant and exciting journeys without offending the proprieties’; faced with gothic
antagonists, ‘her heroines are forced to do what they could never do alone . . . scurry
up the top of pasteboard Alps, spy out exotic vistas, penetrate bandit-infested forests’
(Moers 1978, 126). Here, we especially notice Moers’s use of the word ‘pasteboard’.

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According to Davydd J. Greenwood, ‘Monuments and history were not built for con-
sumption in the sense of converting them into commodities and carrying them away’
(Greenwood 2004, xvii), but it is interesting just how many of those sites have repack-
aged themselves, in part or in whole, as gothic attractions: Bran Castle in Romania,
Himeji Castle in Japan, Lanarch Castle in New Zealand, the Castle of Good Hope in
South Africa, Bhangarh Fort in India and Casa Loma in Canada constitute a few such
examples (Morton, Lagrace and Erdekian 2020). Not infrequently, the ghosts of colo-
nial violence reside in such walls, repackaged, uncomfortably, as ‘pasteboard’ tourist
entertainment.
That engagement with sites which replicate and, through endless returns, reinforce
an engagement with something that never wholly pre-existed (including, in some cases,
a nostalgia for a falsely idealised sense of lost empire) resonates both with the concept
of the counterfeit, as propounded by Jerrold E. Hogle, and with déjà vu, as explored
within a gothic context by David Punter. For Hogle, the very allure of all gothic relies
on counterfeiting, a ‘faking’ of the past (Hogle 2012, 496). This concept finds an echo
in déjà vu, something akin to the residue or after-effect of an experience. As Punter
argues, déjà vu provides us with

a sense that we have been here before, but although we are certain that we hear the
echoes, sense the haunting, of a prior state, what is uncertain is . . . the memory of
the coherence of the self which, perhaps, experienced it. (Punter 2012, 256)

These concepts conjoin in narratives of gothic tourism, within which one travels between
one ruin and the next, re-enacting a counterfeit encounter with a commoditised past,
buying into a belief of having ‘really’ been here before.
The unwitting interloper arriving after an arduous journey is a prerequisite for
conventional gothic travel. Even Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’
(1839) begins with a journey undertaken by a traveller ‘abroad’:

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year,
when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone,
on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found
myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House
of Usher. I know not how it was – but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense
of insufferable gloom invaded my spirit. (Poe 1986, 138)

This experience is not exactly what we might hope for on approach to our chosen
holiday destination, but it is typical of the gothic requirement for the interloper (the
reader’s representative) to transition from ‘the outer world of daylight order’ into an
interiorised ‘dream- (or rather nightmare-) space’ (Armitt 1997, 90). There is a note of
ambling ennui to this passage; our traveller may be disenchanted by the terrain and the
view, but there is no avowed note of purpose articulated. It is akin to the package tour-
ist, enduring but little enjoying a pre-paid excursion. Nevertheless, the House of Usher
provides a poor example of tourism in another sense, in that heritage gothic, arguably
the mainstay of gothic tourism, depends upon architectural longevity, whereas this
house is about to collapse, turning a dreary excursion into an adrenaline rush as the
narrator barely escapes with his life:

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 gothic literary travel and global tourism 283

my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder – there was a long tumul-
tuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters – and the deep and dank
tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments. (Poe 1986, 157)

Despite first appearances, the pretext for our narrator’s arrival falls entirely within the
parameters of what Joanne Watkiss identifies as the typical pattern of gothic hospital-
ity. The guest’s arrival, she notes, balances upon ‘a mutual demand between host and
guest . . . By crossing the boundary that dictates ownership of the home (even when
invited), the guest usurps the position of host, as the needs of the guest are put first’
(Watkiss 2012, 524). In Poe’s story, it transpires that there has, indeed, been a prior
agreement between guest and host. We learn that the ‘proprietor, Roderick Usher, had
been one of [our narrator’s] boon companions in boyhood’ and that the invitation
had been sufficiently affecting to require ‘no other than a personal reply’, by which
we may understand a requirement to present himself in person (Poe 1986, 139). As
he approaches, each phase of entry seems to denote a distinct stage in the traveller’s
metamorphosis from interloper to guest. First, he ‘rode over a short causeway’, before
‘A servant in waiting took my horse’, securing his status as insider. Then he ‘enter[s] the
Gothic archway of the hall’ where he is met by a second attendant, ‘A valet, of stealthy
step’. From here he is escorted ‘in silence, through many dark and intricate passages
in my progress to the studio of his master’ (Poe 1986, 141). When he finally meets
Roderick, the initial interaction between guest and host reflects the delicate power
dynamic Watkiss has identified: ‘Upon my entrance, Usher arose . . . and greeted me
with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cor-
diality’, despite him then conceding that his face ‘convinced me of his perfect sincerity’
(Poe 1986, 142). By the end of the tale, no such ambiguity remains: ‘From that cham-
ber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast’, and now the causeway forms the marker of
safe retreat, beyond the reach of the collapsing masonry (Poe 1986, 157).
Poe’s gothic tales of North American travel are not restricted to ‘The Fall of the House
of Usher’. In ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’ (1844), set in a small range of hills in
Virginia, we read the story of Augustus Bedloe, an ‘emaciated’ figure whose ‘complexion
was absolutely bloodless’ and whose eyes, though ‘abnormally large’, are ‘so totally vapid,
filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes of a long-interred corpse’ (Poe 2019, 1).
Travel frames the prehistory of Bedloe (for he is being treated by Dr Templeton, a physician
and ‘a traveller in his younger days’) and also constitutes Bedloe’s daily routine, for each
morning he ‘set off alone, or attended by a dog, upon a long ramble among the chain of
wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville’ (Poe 2019, 1–2).
One day, Bedloe’s walk takes him further into the mountains, where a winding gorge pres-
ents itself. Now Bedloe casts himself in the role of pioneer:

I could not help believing that the green sods and the gray rocks upon which I trod
had been trodden never before by the foot of a human being. So entirely secluded,
and in fact inaccessible, except through a series of accidents, is the entrance of the
ravine, that it is by no means impossible that I was indeed the first adventurer – the
very first and sole adventurer who had ever penetrated its recesses. (Poe 2019, 2)

While Bedloe’s experience seems initially unrepresentative of tourism as déjà vu, we

then remember that his retrospective retelling constitutes a revisiting of the ‘already

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 284 lucie armitt

seen’ – or, in this case, the increasingly unseen. For next he tells us that a mist descended
and he became disorientated, stumbling on ‘for several hours’ in ever-thickening mist,
resorting eventually to ‘an absolute groping of the way’ (Poe 2019, 2). It is at this
point that ‘an indescribable uneasiness possessed [him] – a species of nervous hesita-
tion and tremor’ (Poe 2019, 2). As in The Mysteries of Udolpho, his fear is based
partly on physical danger (‘lest I should be precipitated into some abyss’ (Poe 2019, 3))
and, here, on racist imaginings: ‘I remembered, too, strange stories . . . of the uncouth
and fierce races of men who tenanted [the] groves and caverns’ of the mountains
(Poe 2019, 3). Almost immediately a ‘half-naked man’ comes tearing down the hill-
side, pursued by a hyena. Reflecting that he is dreaming, Bedloe rests under a tree.
When he awakes, the tree has become a palm tree and he is

looking down into a vast plain, through which wound a majestic river. On the mar-
gin of this river stood an Eastern-looking city, such as we read of in the Arabian
Tales . . . On every hand was a wilderness of balconies, of verandas, of minarets,
of shrines, and fantastically carved oriels . . . Besides these things, were seen, on
all sides, banners and palanquins, litters with stately dames close veiled, elephants
gorgeously caparisoned, idols grotesquely hewn, drums, banners, and gongs, spears,
silver and gilded maces. (Poe 2019, 3)

This shift from actual footfall to dreamscape returns us to Hogle’s concept of the coun-
terfeit, as the geographical specificity of North American topography blurs into an
exotic and unspecified ‘foreign’ vista. Dream becomes nightmare, however, as Bedloe
enters the city and is jostled by a milling crowd. He tags on to ‘A small party of men,
clad in garments half-Indian, half-European, and officered by gentlemen in a uniform
part British’, but inevitably the crowd turns against them and Bedloe is struck in the
temple by a dart, ‘made to imitate the body of a creeping serpent . . . with a poisoned
barb’ (Poe 2019, 4). The denouement of the story confirms this is indeed déjà vu:
Bedloe is the physical double of a deceased friend of Templeton’s (Oldeb), who died
in India, having been struck by just such a poisoned dart. The resemblance attracted
Templeton to Bedloe, and we note that not only does the doctor’s name coincide with
the site of the wound but, as our narrator also observes, Bedloe’s name is Oldeb back-
wards. A week later, Bedloe is also dead, having reportedly taken a fever on his trip
through the Ragged Mountains. In his obituary, we are told that Templeton applied
leeches to the wound, but those leeches had been infiltrated by a local species of
‘venomous vermicular sangsues’, differentiated by its ‘writhing or vermicular motions,
which very nearly resemble those of a snake’, or indeed the darts of his dream
(Poe 2019, 6).
Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ (1888) is a narrative of British
imperial India told from the perspective of Jack Pansay who, unlike Bedloe, actually
travels there, more specifically to the hill station of Simla in the region of Himachal
Pradesh, popular with nineteenth-century British imperialists because of its mild cli-
mate. The landscape of the area is captured vividly but not positively in Kipling’s
story. Where Poe’s narrator provides an Orientalist dreamscape of an unspecified
‘Eastern’ locale, Kipling’s narrator offers us both a more literal and a more melan-
choly perspective on the landscape, much more resonant of our traveller in ‘The Fall
of the House of Usher’: ‘The scene and its surroundings were photographed on my

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 gothic literary travel and global tourism 285

memory. The rain-swept sky . . . the sodden, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the
black powder-riven cliffs’ (Kipling 2021, 6). Again, like Poe’s house guest, Jack is a
horseman but, unlike him, he never reaches his destination. For most of the story he
is cantering or galloping across country, or wandering along a busy road, but alone.
The source of his solitary situation is a failed romance which provides the ghostly
rickshaw of the title. His former lover, Agnes, will not relinquish their relationship,
despite him meeting a new lover, Kitty. Agnes stalks Jack, insisting that their break-
up is ‘a hideous mistake’ and that they will eventually be reunited (Kipling 2021, 5).
The rickshaw becomes the signifier of Agnes’s presence, even in death, for her death
happens as inexplicably as it does suddenly and is, appropriately for a tale of endless
motion, mentioned only en passant.
In ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, we observed a peculiar combination of
actual distance and projected proximity, articulated through the counterfeit illusion of
Orientalism. In ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, one might expect Jack’s actual presence in
India to result in a closer relationship with local people. On the contrary, right from
the start of Kipling’s story, an isolationist tone is established:

One of the few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After
five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three
hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and
Batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official caste . . . and at
the end of twenty [years] he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman
in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.
(Kipling 2021, 3)

Despite the mention, here, of ‘some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official caste’,
no Indian character is individuated in this story. Only the four local men (jhampanies)
who pull Agnes’s rickshaw are identified at all, and then only collectively and in rela-
tion to their narrative function. Kipling’s white British characters engage only with other
white British characters. The analogy, in tourist terms, might be made with those British
holidaymakers who travel to Spain’s Costa Blanca to enjoy a fried breakfast and fish and
chips for, as Ritwik Deo notes in The Guardian newspaper, ‘The British living abroad see
themselves as expats rather than immigrants’, whereas ‘Indians in the UK don’t get that
choice’. Indeed, Deo continues,

The Indian just off the plane at Heathrow, the Pakistani out for his maiden walk on
Oxford Street, the Lithuanian finding his way around St Pancras are all too acutely
aware that it is not their country. They must ingratiate themselves as soon as possible.
Our expat has no such dislocations. (Deo 2012)

The distinction, he observes, derives directly from the kind of imperial context outlined
in Kipling’s story: ‘It is mere cognitive dissonance born out of centuries of dominion
over large swaths of the world. From Delhi to Darfur, the correct way to drape a napkin
on your knees or manipulate dinner cutlery was the British way’ (Deo 2012).
B. M. Croker’s ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ (1893), also set in British colonial
India, relies on interaction between British and Indian characters, despite still being
told from the perspective of two white British women, Mrs Julia Goodchild and our

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 286 lucie armitt

narrator, Mrs Nellie Loyd. Their husbands are working away, and the women decide
to undertake a ‘three days’ journey’ from Karwassa, a British enclave, into the more
remote country around Chanda, to meet up with them for Christmas (Croker 2015,
96). En route, they stay in travellers’ bungalows, buildings originally built for those
travelling on government business, but here used simply as state-owned accommo-
dation. The women are travelling with local Indian assistance provided by Nellie’s
husband’s ‘peon’ (messenger), Abdul, described by Nellie as ‘a treasure’ who can
‘cook, interpret, forage for provisions, and drive bullocks’ (Croker 2015, 98). The
first two nights pass without incident, but on the third they are forced to retire to
an isolated, dilapidated bungalow which, as Melissa Edmundson observes, ‘allow[s]
Croker to critique the British presence in India through the motif of the haunted house’
(Edmundson 2010, 94).
The haunted house is the mainstay of all gothic tourism, not simply as heritage ruin
and stage set, but because such dwellings rely on visitors for their definition: nobody
lives permanently in such an abode. Certainly, the Dâk bungalow at Dakor, which
Croker describes as having ‘a forlorn, desolate, dismal appearance’ and ‘look[ing] as if
it had not been visited for years’, qualifies (Croker 2015, 100–1). First Nellie and the
next night Julia are woken by the apparition of a ghostly young British traveller, writ-
ing at the desk with his back to the slightly open door. Each woman then witnesses the
khansamah (caretaker) and another local man (‘a strange servant in a yellow turban,
with cruel, greedy eyes’ (Croker 2015, 104)) creep in behind him, stab him in the back,
steal his money, drag his body outside and bury it in the garden. The following day
both women demand an explanation of the house’s history from a local villager, whom
Nellie spitefully and unnecessarily introduces to the reader as ‘An old witch of a native
woman’ and whom Julia verbally ‘attack[s] . . . quite viciously’ in her determination to
elicit an explanation of what has gone on (Croker 2015, 105). In response, the woman
starts to dissemble: ‘Devils . . . How I knowing? . . . I only poor native woman’ before
being cajoled further into the more coherent reportage that ‘The bungalow had a bad
name, no one ever entered it, and in spite of the wooden shutters there were lights in
the windows every night up to twelve o’clock’ (Croker 2015, 106).
The woman’s dissemblance, though perhaps understandable in the face of Nellie and
Julia’s disparagement, is nevertheless uncomfortable to read: it resonates with the kind
of cultural self-denigration that Anne Storch identifies with certain modes of global her-
itage tourism. The staged excursion to the local village is, Storch notes, one of the most
damaging pieces of global tourist artifice, wrapped up in a false cloak of authenticity,
requiring the locals to ‘perform otherness and marginalisation in rather ironic ways:
they appear as mock impersonations of the other’. Storch continues by citing the work
of ‘the blogger and tour operator Jim Heck’, who recalls on one such visit ‘watch[ing]
this poor kid trying desperately to start a fire rubbing two twigs together. He looked
up at me and said woefully, “Zamani, Mzee, tuna kibiriti!” Roughly translated, “A
long time ago, Mzee, we used matches!”’ (Storch 2019, 82). In effect, Nellie and Julia
are partaking in such an excursion, treating Abdul as their ‘local’ guide, despite him
being as unfamiliar as they are with the area. While the women make the best of the
spartan accommodation, they are noticeably more judgemental about the locals, even
before the ghostly incident, reducing the khansamah to a kind of pantomime villain,
with his ‘evil look’, ‘hobbl[ing]’ gait, his reported description in the visitors’ book as ‘A
Dirty, lazy rascal’ and ‘murderous-looking ruffian’, not to mention their account of him

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peering through the window at them, having ‘the face of some malicious animal . . .
His eyes glar[ing] and roll[ing] as if they would leave their sockets’ (Croker 2015,
101–3, passim). These descriptions would be risible were the politics underlying them
not so damaging.
Despite the obvious racial stereotyping at work here, Edmundson identifies a more
progressive politics in Croker’s story, deriving primarily from the role played by the
women. For her, the bungalow’s haunted house status speaks to the dereliction of
empire. She explains how, following the 1857 failed Indian rebellion against British
rule, these government-owned bungalows attracted politicised graffiti, leading to their
abandonment, and ‘Because of their violent pasts, these places were often thought to
be haunted’ (Edmundson 2010, 96). By the end of the story, Edmundson argues that
the women’s shared encounters with the ghosts of the past have made them reappraise
their relationship to British imperialism: ‘Croker uses not only the ghosts as warn-
ings of the negative effects of empire, but she also establishes the female narrators as
witnesses to these ghosts. These women, therefore, become privileged critics of the
English imperial presence’ (Edmundson 2010, 94). I am less convinced than Edmund-
son that Nellie and Julia’s experience enlightens them about their complicity with
imperialism, but I do acknowledge that the female villager’s earlier act of dissemblance
finds its match in their subsequent frustration, as they jointly try to explain their mis-
adventure to their husbands: ‘Of course, they were loudly, rudely incredulous . . .
vainly we re-stated our case . . . they merely laughed still more heartily’ (Croker 2015,
107). A kind of rehearsed inequality accompanies this exchange: the men condescend-
ingly tease their wives about their over-stimulated imaginations, while the women
attempt persuasion through insistence. Julia’s response even demonstrates her readi-
ness to adopt the stereotypical masculine perspective on feminine instability, as if this
role-play renders her more credible in their eyes: ‘Look here . . . I laughed at Nellie as
you laugh at us’ (Croker 2015, 107, original emphasis), before concluding by insisting
on abandoning the men with the revealingly qualified instruction that ‘you two dig, or
get people to dig’ up the garden to unearth the buried remains of the ghostly traveller
(Croker 2015, 107, my emphasis).
In these stories of India, the colonialist encounter shapes the actions of our travel-
ling protagonists, irrespective of whether or not they incorporate sustained interaction
between British colonisers and the local population. In 1928, however, an American
traveller and explorer, William Seabrook, travelled to the Caribbean island of Haiti,
and wrote The Magic Island as an account of that experience. A former French col-
ony, Haiti had been independent since the Haitian Revolution (1793–1804), despite
ongoing territorial disputes with the neighbouring Dominican Republic and increasing
interference from the United States of America. What makes Seabrook’s travelogue
of Haiti different from the stories discussed above is that he recounts tales told to
him by Haitian citizens themselves, drawing on local superstitions, folklore, and what
both he and George A. Romero, who writes the introduction to the 2016 edition, call
‘voodoo’.2 Most famously for our purposes, Seabrook brings to European readers’
attention one of the first accounts of the zombie. In his chapter ‘Dead Men Working
in the Cane Fields’, Seabrook recounts a narrative of early-twentieth-century slavery
in which the workforce comprises the undead, those recently buried but who have lain
insufficiently long to begin decomposing. Ripped from their graves, they are ‘endowed
by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life’ and forced into heavy farm labour

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(Seabrook 2016, 93). Seabrook, rather like a typical writer of ghost stories, adopts
a hearsay narrative structure in this part of his text, physically present but listen-
ing to the voice of a local farmer, Constant Polynice. It is Polynice’s account that we
read, albeit as retold in Seabrook’s words. Seabrook and Polynice are discussing ‘fire-
hags, demons, werewolves, and vampires’ when Polynice raises the topic of zombies
(Seabrook 2016, 92). Though Seabrook assures us that Polynice is sceptical about
other gothic monsters, he is less so about zombies, reacting to Seabrook’s own scepti-
cism through a series of rhetorical questions:

‘Why do you suppose that even the poorest peasants . . . bury their dead beneath
solid tombs of masonry? Why do they bury them so often in their own yards, close
to the doorway? Why, so often, do you see a tomb or grave set close beside a busy
road or footpath where people are always passing?’ (Seabrook 2016, 94)

Polynice then offers an anecdote about a team of zombies working for a local farming
couple, Ti Joseph and his wife Croyance. They insist that the workforce comprises
‘ignorant people from the slopes of Morne-au-Diable, a roadless mountain district
near the Dominican border’ (Seabrook 2016, 95), an ironic reversal of the modern-
day situation, in which Haitians have been reported to have been used as modern-day
slaves in Dominican sugar fields (Castel 2017).
Croyance, however, starts to feel pity for her charges and decides to give them a
day out at the Mardi Gras. As David Picard observes, ‘Historically, festivals, carni-
val processions and pageants have always provided points of meaningful connectivity
and spectacle for visitors’ (Picard 2006, 1). Here, Picard’s ‘connectivity’ finds especial
resonance: ‘the concentrated time-space frame of the festival help[s] to make visible
the social life of “foreign” townscapes and landscapes that while rich in historic and
architectural significance often lacked animation’ (Picard 2006, 1). Nothing needs ani-
mation like a zombie workforce and Croyance’s naïvety catches her out. On arrival,
she buys the zombies ‘Tablettes pistaches’, or ‘candy, in shape and size like cookies,
made of brown cane sugar . . . sometimes with pistaches, which in Haiti are peanuts’
(Seabrook 2016, 98). According to folklore, zombies must never be fed meat or salt,
presumably because salted meat and fish was the ‘staple diet of slaves on many sugar
plantations’ and it would result in their revitalisation (Kennedy 2007). These nuts
have, however, been previously salted, and no sooner are the zombies fed than they
arise, head back to the hills, and ‘each before his own empty grave began clawing at
the stones and earth to enter it again; and as their cold hands touched the earth of their
own graves, they fell and lay there, rotting carrion’ (Seabrook 2016, 99).
Despite Seabrook’s attempts to focus on Haiti in his travelogue, an unforeseen ‘con-
nectivity’, to use Picard’s term, results in this ghost following him home to the United
States. What erupts from beneath the surface of Polynice’s tale is how much Haiti is
haunted by the lasting horror of slavery, despite its historic existence as a free state. Ti
Joseph grows sugar cane for the ‘Haitian-American Sugar Company’ (Seabrook 2016,
95), itself a representation of the United States’ continued (neo-colonial) control of
sugar production in Haiti, and following the original Haitian uprising, much of the
sugar plantation work formerly based on slave labour in that region travelled north
to Louisiana. As Tiya Miles explains, the pecan praline that is such a common sweet
during American Thanksgiving is also the legacy of slavery. Notoriously difficult to

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 gothic literary travel and global tourism 289

cultivate commercially, pecan trees take decades to mature, and ‘the kinds of nuts they
produce [being] wildly variable in size, shape, flavor and ease of shell removal’, the
white plantation owners ‘turned the impossible work over to an enslaved person with
vast capabilities, a man whose name we know only as Antoine . . . It was Antoine who
successfully created what would become the country’s first commercially viable pecan
varietal’ (Miles 2019).
As readers of travelogues we expect to be transported to foreign lands in our imagi-
nations, even from our armchairs. As readers of gothic travel we might expect also
to be transported physiologically, our flesh-and-blood bodies responding via chills or
goosebumps. Some journeys are literally more chilling than others, none more so than
polar travel. Polar tourism has expanded dramatically since the 1950s and, whilst the
catastrophic dangers of global warming in the Arctic are well known, Shijin Wang et al.
observe that ‘This warming amplification effect played an important role in the appear-
ance of new landscapes, tourism climate comfort, outdoor leisure environment, acces-
sibility, and tourist economy’ (Wang et al. 2020, 5). What remains clear, however, is
that the presence of humans in the polar regions is highly problematic, for ‘Tourism
and climate change are interrelated. Tourism itself contributes significantly to global
greenhouse gas emissions, summing up to 12.5% of total global emissions’ (Scott et al.
2010, cited in Wang et al. 2020, 7). Just as we saw earlier, tourism trends often follow
in the footsteps of historic expeditions inspired by nationalist or colonialist endeavour
and, in the polar regions, these voyages include some of the most arduous of all jour-
neys, such as the failed expedition to find the Northwest Passage between the Arctic
Ocean and the Pacific, led by Sir John Franklin, in 1845–48. What is striking is how
easily such voyages became transformed, both through failure and through the reputed
conduct of the crew in extremis, into gothic horror narratives. In 2018, Franklin’s
fateful journey was adapted as an episodic television drama, titled The Terror (prod.
Ridley Scott and David W. Zucker). In this adaptation, the gothic implications of the
expedition are partly, as in the original, reflected in the cannibalism to which the crew
resorted and, in the drama, through the presence of a creature, half polar bear and half
supernatural predator, which tracks them and devours those (including Franklin) who
do not die from the horrific behaviour of their shipmates.
Such narratives combining actual travelogue with supernatural folklore provide the
impetus for Michelle Paver’s Dark Matter (2010), a novel focusing upon a fictional sci-
entific exploration to the Arctic by three young men: Gus, Algie and our narrator, Jack.
Set in 1937, it falls right in the middle of the period of early-twentieth-century British
Arctic expeditions. The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, their destination, takes
its name from the Old Norse meaning ‘cold edge’ (‘Svalbard Travel Guide’, 2021),
a phrase which especially lends itself to the reader’s aforementioned physiological
response: ‘goosebumps’; ‘chills down the spine’; the sense of being ‘on edge’ deriving
from a ‘frisson’ (French for ‘shiver’). In the former mining settlement of Gruhuken,
they locate a ruined miner’s hut and, in front, ‘a driftwood post planted in a cairn of
stones’ which they call the ‘bear post’ (Paver 2011, 64). Cairns are a long-established
navigational aid in the bleak polar winter and carry strong folkloric connections.
According to the Russian geographer Vyacheslav Mizin, they are believed to house the
souls of victims of violent death (Mizin 2013, 320). As in The Terror, there is certainly
plenty of evidence of predatory polar bears in Dark Matter, but the ‘bear post’, again
as in the television series, attracts a more supernatural dread. Looking back at camp

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from a raised vantage point, Jack sees ‘a man standing in front of the cabin, by the bear
post . . . [wearing] a tattered sheepskin coat and a round cap, and ragged boots’ (Paver
2011, 82). Left alone, whenever he looks from the cabin window, he fears the bear
post has moved ever closer and, in terror, he finally destroys it. Almost immediately,
a powerful Arctic storm blows up, simultaneously a source of torment and relief, for
Jack identifies it as ‘a known, physical force: a rush of snow-laden air, generated by
pressure differentials . . . it’s better than the stillness’ (Paver 2011, 169). By morning,
however, that stillness has returned, and from the window, Jack observes,

Where the bear post had been, a figure was standing.

. . . It cast no shadow.
It stood utterly still, watching me. In one appalling heartbeat I took in its wet
round head and its arms hanging at its sides . . . I felt its will coming at me in
waves. Intense, unwavering, malign . . . It belonged to the dark beyond humanity.
It was rage without end. A black tide drowning. (Paver 2011, 175–6)

When a visitor from neighbouring Longyearbyen arrives to visit Jack, we learn the story
behind the bear post. He tells of the scapegoating, tyrannising and eventual murder of a
trapper, shunned for being a stranger and ‘ugly’ (Paver 2011, 200). Later, Jack dreams
himself into the victim’s shoes, revealing the full violence of his death:

Now I’m tied to the bear post. Now I’m afraid. I can’t see. I can’t speak. I have no
tongue. I smell paraffin. I hear the crackle of flames. I know that someone nearby
is holding a torch.
Now I hear the clink of metal dragged over rocks . . . It’s coming closer. I can’t
get away. I’m bound hand and foot. Clink. Clink. Closer. (Paver 2011, 223–4)

The ‘clink’ is that of heavy knives, usually employed to chop up a seal carcass. Blinded,
his tongue severed, this trapper experiences horror particularised through a sustained
attack aimed at both his body and his senses. Paver’s novel, similarly, carries at its
periphery the larger environmental horror created by a senseless human violation of
this biosphere, a violation exacerbated by polar tourism.
Not all gothicised travel involves extreme geography, but that need not prevent
it from conveying horrifying indoor content. Venice attracts more than its share of
gothic narratives, despite or perhaps because of its popularised image as a romantic
holiday destination. In Wilkie Collins’s 1889 novel The Haunted Hotel, the hotel in
question is a recently refurbished Venetian palace. In part, this novel evokes the trav-
elogue aspect of Sigmund Freud’s essay on ‘The “Uncanny”’ (1919) and the attached
connection he forges between travelling and the fear of numbers:

For instance, we naturally attach no importance to the event when we hand in an

overcoat and get a cloakroom ticket with the number, let us say, 62; or when we
find that our cabin on a ship bears that number. But the impression is altered if two
such events . . . happen close together – if we come across the number 62 several
times in a single day . . . addresses, hotel rooms, compartments in railway trains . . .
(Freud 1990, 360)

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Freud’s choice of the number 62 is sometimes attributed to it being his age at the time
of writing, but it might perhaps have been more appropriate to select the number 13,
a number so closely associated with travel and superstition that fear of it has its own
name: triskaidekaphobia. Many hotels still avoid numbering any of the guest rooms 13,
and some high-rise hotels equally avoid labelling a particular floor as the 13th.
According to the American travel site ‘Your Mileage May Vary’, ‘When skyscrapers
started being built in 1885, it was rare for a hotel or other building to be more
than 12 stories high’, due to pervasive superstition among the construction industry
(‘The Real Reason Why’, 2021).
Bizarrely, in The Haunted Hotel, Collins reverses this trend. Here, in the description
of the transformation of the palace into a hotel, two rooms are presented for the read-
er’s especial attention, both ‘of such comparatively moderate size, and so attractively
decorated, that the architect suggested leaving them as they were . . . distinguished as
Number Fourteen . . . [and] Number Thirty-eight’ respectively (Collins 2015, 109–10).
Henry Westwick, brother to Lord Montbarry, the owner of the former palace, comes to
stay in room 14, but finds that ‘He never slept at all’ and completely loses his appetite
(Collins 2015, 34, 126). When strangers to the Montbarry family stay in the room,
nothing ill befalls them, but when Henry’s sister, Mrs Norberry, stays there, ‘her repose
was disturbed by a succession of frightful dreams; the central figure in every one of
them being the figure of her dead brother, the first Lord Montbarry’ (Collins 2015,
129). It is her maid who explains to her that

When Mr Henry Westwick was here . . . he occupied the room his brother died in
. . . For two nights he never closed his eyes . . . It’s my conclusion that something
happened to my lord, which we none of us know about, when he died in this house.
His ghost walks in torment until he can tell it – and the living persons related to
him are the persons who feel he is near them. (Collins 2015, 131)

Unlike those hotels which commonly skip from room 12 to 14, or 12 to 12A, in Col-
lins’s novel, the hotel manager decides to renumber room 14 as ‘13A’ and his own
as the (perceived unlucky) 14 (Collins 2015, 132). Henry’s brother Francis arrives
and stays in newly renumbered 13A. The groundlessness of such numerical fears is
conveyed when, despite the renumbering, a ‘mysteriously offensive odour’ remains
and proves ‘so unutterably sickening that [Francis] threw open the window and put
his head out into the fresh air’ (Collins 2015, 135–6). When Agnes stays with Lord
and Lady Montbarry’s children in that room, one daughter notices a small mark
on the ceiling and exclaims, ‘It’s a spot of blood! . . . Take me away! I won’t sleep
here!’ (Collins 2015, 164). Agnes, drifting off to sleep alone, is suddenly awoken by
‘she knew not what’ and senses ‘the chill of a sudden terror gripped . . . round [her]
heart . . . She was not alone in the room!’ (Collins 2015, 170–1). The image that greets
Agnes and the reader is surprisingly horrific for its time: ‘Midway between her face
and the ceiling, there hovered a human head – severed at the neck, like a head struck
from the body by the guillotine’ (Collins 2015, 172). Giving further ironic depth to
the addition of the suffix ‘A’ to the room numbers, this one proves to have a genuine
(A)nnexe: a hidden compartment concealed within the structure of the mantelpiece.
Here is located the original head (Lord Montbarry’s) of which Agnes has witnessed the
ghostly replica. Amusingly, though hotel managers believe guests to be preternaturally

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 292 lucie armitt

preoccupied by triskaidekaphobia, in Collins’s hotel the tourists outside the room are
oblivious to the horrors connected with room numbers. As Henry struggles to con-
tain his repulsion at the gruesome discovery, he overhears ‘trivial questions about the
amusements of Venice, and facetious discussions on the relative merits of French and
Italian cookery’ coming from the corridor (Collins 2015, 188).
There is something characteristically ‘touristy’ about this small talk outside the
gothic chamber. Gothic tourism never brings us into actual physical contact with hor-
ror; it pre-packages it as entertainment. We enter, in person or via print, a circumscribed
space, experience the thrill contained therein, and retreat to our everyday lives. Hogle’s
analysis of the counterfeit has been shown to be intrinsic to gothic tourism; indeed,
its pleasures almost emerge from that sense of artifice. This chapter began by suggest-
ing that our fears may convince us that the ghost encountered might follow us home.
Perhaps that is one reason for our purchasing of souvenirs: counterfeit miniatures of
an original of dubious authenticity; they do follow us home, but on our own terms.
We buy them to remember, but also to effect closure. Not all souvenirs are welcome,
however. We have also noted how that foray out and back again carries a haunting
imperialist legacy of racial inequality which continues, as Deo observed, via an ongoing
duplicitous relationship to home and abroad. Historically, we have seen how gothic
travel evolves from a means of capturing in print the awe-stricken response of the
first, socially privileged tourists and their responses to classical sites in Europe into a
pre-packaged global mass entertainment industry. Finally, Punter’s reading of déjà vu
reminds us that gothic is a passport to places we believe we have visited already: as we
apparently set off into the unknown, our travelogues interconnect with all those who
have gone before, gone further, gone ‘wild’, then gone home.

Notes
1. The potential lack of clarity surrounding the usage of this term is reflected in the Oxford
English Dictionary’s own definition of it. It defines ‘Global North’ as ‘the countries of the
world which are characterised by a high level of economic and industrial development,
considered collectively; contrasted with Global South’. Global South is then defined as ‘the
countries of the world which are regarded as having a relatively low level of economic and
industrial development, considered collectively; contrasted with Global North’ (OED).
2. It should be noted that, although both writers use this term, it is a pejorative form of the
correct term Vodou/Vodoun.

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 19

Gothic and Global Travel Writing

Sofia Aatkar

T ravel writing and the gothic seem an unlikely pair. While gothic literature
is commonly associated with fiction and fantasy, travel writing, more so than
most other literary genres, is often considered a more factual and objective mode of
reportage. However, monstrous marvels in medieval travelogues, supernatural rep-
resentations of racial and cultural Others in colonial-era travel writing, and ethereal
encounters in contemporary travel texts from around the globe point to the idea that
a gothic aesthetic has haunted travel writing for centuries.
In this chapter, I consider two Black-authored travel narratives, both of which
describe journeys to the Caribbean. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), in her Tell
My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), and Amryl Johnson
(1944–2001), in her Sequins for a Ragged Hem (1988), both subvert imperial gothic
tropes and contribute to the diasporic gothic and the postcolonial gothic respectively.
Hurston and Johnson describe personal encounters with figures and belief systems
which might appear otherworldly to a Western readership, such as zombies, ghosts,
and what Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert refer to as
‘diaspora religions’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 1997, 2–3). Unlike a selection of
their travel author predecessors who used gothic sensibilities to an imperialistic end,
Hurston simultaneously demystifies and defamiliarises ‘gothic’ elements of Caribbean
culture and Johnson illustrates how apparitions are integral to postcolonial collectiv-
ity. I begin by examining examples of imperial gothic literature to illustrate how Tell
My Horse and Sequins for a Ragged Hem offer a response to gothic stereotypes con-
cerning the Caribbean.

Imperial Gothic
An emphasis on alterity is at the centre of the imperial gothic. The conception of
gothic literature is typically associated with texts set in Europe, such as Horace
Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udol-
pho (1794). However, Paravisini-Gebert notes that, towards the end of the eighteenth
century, gothic authors began to realise ‘that Britain’s growing empire could prove
a vast source of frightening “others” who would . . . bring a freshness and variety
to the genre’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 229). In this way, texts which utilised colonial
spaces as gothic settings and represented colonised people as sources or instigators
of horror contributed to the colonial project because, in the words of Sarah Ilott,
they ‘made monstrous that which was nationally or racially other’ (Ilott 2019, 20).
Critics of imperial gothic literature such as Ilott and Susanne Daly reference fictional

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works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) as examples of imperial gothic texts,
but we might add ‘The Story of Henrietta’ (1800) by Charlotte Smith and Hamel,
the Obeah Man (1827) by Cynric Williams to the list. These two narratives demon-
strate that the Caribbean has been represented as a region to be feared in the work of
European gothic authors, too.
The othering tropes exhibited by the fictional works mentioned above are also
evident in nineteenth-century travel writing about the Caribbean, in which the region
‘was depicted as the site of the mysterious’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 231). This is
particularly conspicuous in the way in which travel writers represented the dias-
pora religions Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert refer to, such as Vodou (associated with
Haiti), Obeah (associated with Jamaica), Quimbois (associated with Martinique) and
Santería (associated with Cuba). Alasdair Pettinger notes that, since the publication
of Hayti, or, The Black Republic (1884) by Spenser St John, which details events of
child sacrifice and cannibalism and links them to African diasporic religion, ‘travel
accounts became obsessed with vaudoux’, with travel writers choosing to attune
‘their readers to the sound of distant drums, booming from the interior after nightfall’
(Pettinger 2004, 419). P. d’Hormoys’s L’Empire de Soulouque (1862) is among the
travel narratives Pettinger mentions and contains a testimony describing a ceremony
and the discovery of a child’s leg on a nearby beach, although there is no concrete
proof the two events are connected. Another text Pettinger cites is one renowned for
its blatant racism and pro-imperial ideology, James Anthony Froude’s The English in
the West Indies (1888). The following quote from Froude’s narrative demonstrates
how nineteenth-century travel writers represented diaspora religions in a way which
patronised their practitioners and advocated an imperial presence in the Caribbean:

In spite of schools and missionaries, the dark connection still maintains itself with
Satan’s invisible world, and modern education contends in vain with Obeah worship.
As it has been in Hayti, so it must be in Trinidad if the English leave the blacks to be
their own masters. (Froude 2010, 97–8)

Froude forges a connection between the practice of Obeah and immorality by align-
ing the belief system with hell, and he simultaneously evokes the idea that an English
presence and rule are necessary to rescue Obeah worshippers from Satan’s world.
The English in the West Indies thus contributes to the rhetoric that colonialism was
a benevolent act, as Froude implies that English missionaries were saving Caribbean
people from their own supposed barbarity. With their references to the gothic tropes
of human sacrifice, superstition and sin, travel writing such as that by d’Hormoys and
Froude fed the perception that the Caribbean was a region rife with threat and fright.
This perception is precisely what Hurston is writing to correct in Tell My Horse, a
travel narrative dedicated to explaining the cultural and social importance of Vodou
in Jamaica and Haiti.
The following discussion of Tell My Horse and Sequins for a Ragged Hem illustrates
how examples of global travel writing play an intervening role in what gothic encoun-
ters symbolise within the travel writing genre, and how elements of the diasporic gothic
and postcolonial gothic manifest in a literary genre outside of fiction. Through their
treatment of subject matter such as diaspora religions and encounters with supernatural

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figures, Hurston and Johnson acknowledge how elements of Caribbean culture which
have been utilised to incite fear in previous travel writing about the region can be integral
to cultural and personal identity in the islands they visit.

Tell My Horse
Lovalerie King observes of Hurston’s impressive oeuvre that the author ‘often wrote
against the grain’ (King 2012, 6). King’s summation is certainly applicable to Tell My
Horse, in which Hurston is committed to countering the gothic stereotypes associ-
ated with the Caribbean’s diaspora religions and defamiliarising Western readers from
their own literary and cultural contexts. Thus, Hurston’s contribution to diasporic
gothic travel writing is twofold: while working to better acquaint her readership with
elements of diaspora religion in Haiti, she also unsettles her readership’s assumed
knowledge of what constitutes ‘gothic’ by expanding and deepening their awareness
of gothic figures.
In her travel narrative, Hurston recounts the time she spent in Haiti and Jamaica
and reveals what King describes as her ‘groundbreaking research’ in Caribbean culture
and religion in the two islands (King 2012, 36). While she was there, it was Hurston’s
primary intention to document information about Vodou rituals, loas (deities), folk-
lore and culture.1 She spends significantly longer in Haiti, and consequently two of
the book’s three sections narrate her time spent there: Part 1 is titled ‘Jamaica’, Part 2
‘Politics and Personalities of Haiti’, and Part 3 ‘Voodoo in Haiti’. The final part
of Tell My Horse contains a chapter which shares the same title as the travelogue.
‘Tell my horse’, or ‘parlay cheval ou’ in Kreyòl, is a phrase uttered by those who are
mounted by Guedé, an invisible yet powerful loa, who then communicates through
them. According to Hurston, those who are mounted cannot do anything of their own
volition; instead, they are ‘under the whip and guidance of [Guedé,] the spirit-rider’
(Hurston 2009, 221). However, she observes that some Haitians feign being possessed
so that they can utter controversial truths or publicly express resentment. Hence, ‘tell
my horse’ is an apt name for a text in which Hurston denounces ‘the malicious lies of
foreigners’ that include Haitian Vodou in ‘stereotyped tales of virgin worship, human
sacrifice and other elements’ (83). Instead of confirming these stereotypes, Hurston
documents her experience of the ceremonies and beliefs of the same denomination in
Tell My Horse.
Gothic literature set in the Caribbean, Paravisini-Gebert observes, has focused
chiefly on African diaspora religions as symbolic of the region’s ‘threatening reali-
ties, of the brutality, bizarre sacrifices, cannibalism, and sexual aberrations that filled
the imagination of authors and their audiences with lurid, terror-laden imagery’
(Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 232). Hurston confirms this in her own travel narrative.
While in Haiti, she hears of secret societies such as Cochon Gris, Secte Rouge and the
Vinbrindingue who are suspected of conducting acts of human sacrifice and cannibal-
ism. In a conversation about the societies with a ‘well-known physician’, Hurston
learns how the practice of Vodou and the customs of these secret societies became
conflated (Hurston 2009, 207). The well-known physician explains to Hurston:
‘“Many white writers who have passed a short time here have heard these things
mentioned and knowing nothing of the Voodoo religion except the Congo dances,
they conclude that the two things are the same”’ (208–9). Throughout Tell My Horse,

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Hurston educates her readers on Vodou’s non-threatening practices, thus illustrating

how the religion is separate from the activities of Haiti’s secret societies which have,
incorrectly, become conflated with the diaspora religion.
With many demonising, othering representations of diaspora religions published
in previous accounts of the region like those Paravisini-Gebert and the well-known
physician describe, Hurston occupies a challenging position: her travel narrative needs
to present Vodou in a way that shows it is not something to be feared but also in a
way that does not homogenise or flatten what makes the belief system distinct. At the
outset of ‘Voodoo in Haiti’, Hurston makes it clear that Vodou is similar in its origin
to other religions which exist across the globe, but that the belief system has its roots
in Africa. She explains: ‘Voodoo is a religion of creation and life. It is the worship of
the sun, the water and other natural forces, but the symbolism is no better understood
than that of other religions and consequently is taken too literally’ (113). Here, Hur-
ston works to normalise Vodou by explaining the religion in terms that will be familiar
to her Western readership, but also prompts them to consider that their perception
of Vodou may have been formed through misinterpretation and misrepresentation.
Throughout the third section of Tell My Horse, Hurston proceeds to inform her read-
ers about the intricacies of Vodou practices and deities.
Hurston never pretends that hers is a ‘full account of either Voodoo or Voodoo
gods’, as it would ‘require several volumes . . . to cover completely the gods of Voodoo
practices of one vicinity [in Haiti] alone’ (131). However, the gods and ceremonies
she does include in Tell My Horse are the subjects of detailed description, and this is
one of the ways in which she demystifies the diasporic religion. For example, the first
god Hurston discusses in this section is Damballah. Throughout her five-page charac-
terisation of him (116–20), Hurston includes information on the types of offerings he
favours, why his followers sacrifice a pair of chickens in his honour on Wednesdays,
songs people sing to him, and his association with snakes, although significantly, the
text takes care to correct ‘the casual observer’ who believes that snake-worship is prev-
alent in Haiti. According to Hurston, ‘[t]his is not accurate. [The animal] is treated
with reverence because it is considered the servant of Damballah’ (118). From the start
of ‘Voodoo in Haiti’, then, Hurston acknowledges the complexity of loas and thus
signifies that she’s writing against the reductive representation of diaspora religions
penned by previous travel authors, such as d’Hormoys and Froude.
A separate chapter in ‘Voodoo in Haiti’ describes the ceremonies Hurston was
invited to witness and participate in while visiting the hounfort (parish) of Dieu Donnez
St. Leger in Arcahaie. Following the death of another houngan (Vodou priest), Dieu
Donnez is called on to perform the ceremony Manger des Morts. Hurston describes the
specific preparations which take place before the feast, such as chickens and pigeons
being cooked without seasoning and how the deceased body is covered with a blanket
(141). During the ceremony, Hurston records a particularly remarkable event: ‘The
body of the dead man sat up with its staring eyes, bowed its head and fell back again
and then a stone fell at the feet of Dieu Donnez’ (142). The movement of a dead body
and the appearance of a stone speak to the kind of supernatural events depicted in tra-
ditional gothic literature, but Hurston’s explanation of the stone’s importance demon-
strates that it is nothing to be feared. She notes that the stone’s presence signifies that
‘the loa or mystere which had lived in the dead man and controlled him was separated
from him. He could go peacefully to rest and the loa would be employed by someone

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else’ (142). Hence, even though the stone’s unexplained appearance initially spooks
Hurston, her account of the ceremony is not legible as gothic because she takes care to
clarify that it represents something positive to the other participants of the ceremony.
Hurston recounts an additional extraordinary incident, whereby she witnesses
spirit possession first-hand during the same ceremony: ‘the face of the [possessed]
man had lost itself in a horrible mask. It was unbelievable in its frightfulness. . . .
A feeling had entered the place. It was a feeling of unspeakable evil’ (144). Hurston
describes how Dieu Donnez successfully drove the spirit away and is amazed at how
other onlookers ‘did not take refuge in flight. They pressed nearer Dieu Donnez’ (144).
Hurston experiences fear during the incident, to be sure, but crucially, she makes it
clear that she is alone in feeling truly frightened; the other onlookers (who we assume
are Haitian) draw nearer the possessed man to better see the removal of the evil spirit.
Although Hurston characterises the events she witnesses as ‘very interesting and ter-
rifying’ (141), she declines to represent the ceremonies as monstrous. She offers a
response to the colonial gothic travel writing script by penning detailed and accessible
descriptions of Vodou ceremonies and by registering the emotions of other partici-
pants. In this way, Hurston makes the point that diaspora religion is not something
to be feared; incidents such as those involving the stone, the body and possession are
simply new and out of the ordinary to her.
Another way Hurston demystifies Vodou is by drawing on a popular convention
from the travel writing form: the inclusion of visual media. ‘Voodoo in Haiti’ contains
not only thorough written accounts of the ceremonies Hurston participates in, but also
photographs depicting several people and objects significant to each ceremony. For
example, images of a Vodou altar (115), the signature of a god (132), a houngan in
full ceremonials (149), drummers (154), a ritual in which the houngan kisses a sword
(156), offerings to deities (165, 168), and ceremonial chants taking place (171) are
peppered throughout this section of the book. In travel writing, it is not uncommon
to find images or illustrations accompanying a written narrative. Indeed, in her discus-
sion of late-nineteenth-century travel writing, Sara Mills lists photographic evidence
as one of three ‘main devices which are used to authenticate [a travel text]’ (Mills
1991, 136). While the photographs in Hurston’s narrative certainly promote the veri-
similitude of her account, they also function as a debunking device in that they allow
her readership visual insights into a phenomenon which has been highly mythicised.
Despite giving her readers the opportunity to witness elements of a Vodou ceremony
for themselves, several of the images Hurston chooses to include in her narrative may
contain scenes which are unfamiliar to a Western audience. In particular, the image
depicting the signature of a god is likely to be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar
with diaspora religion in Haiti. Hence, although Hurston includes visual media in
Tell My Horse, Vodou may retain some of its alterity from the perspective of a
Western audience.
Images are not the only non-textual media in Tell My Horse. In the book’s Appen-
dix, Hurston includes a section titled ‘Songs of Worship to Voodoo Gods’, where she
provides the lyrics to religious songs in French and the written musical scores which
accompany them. The musical element of Vodou ceremonies, as Pettinger notes, has
often been reduced to ‘drums, booming from the interior after nightfall’ (Pettinger
2004, 419). Hence, the photograph of the drummers performing during the ceremony
(Hurston 2009, 154), coupled with the songs of worship and sheet music in the book’s

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Appendix, is highly significant in a text concerned with the representation of Vodou.

The addition of this media provides Hurston’s readership with visual and musical
insights into Vodou customs and invites them to appreciate the technicality of the
ceremony; but in a similar way to how the photographs hold the Western reader at
arm’s length, the melodies and rhythms are inaccessible to all who cannot read music.
Instead of shrouding Vodou in gothic tropes, Hurston uses non-textual elements to
counter some of the enigmas surrounding the religion while simultaneously shielding
it from a colonial worldview.
While Hurston works to demystify elements of Vodou ceremonies, she also takes
care to unsettle and expand her readership’s conception of the gothic by introducing
otherworldly figures which are important in Haitian culture, illustrating elements of
the diasporic gothic in the process. According to Maisha Wester, the Black diasporic
gothic introduces new monsters. Instead of repurposing the same horrors from Euro-
pean gothic texts, Black writers subversively ‘defamiliarise (white) Western Gothic
readers by switching paradigms, . . . introducing monsters from black folk traditions’
(Wester 2019, 292). This, Wester argues, forces ‘readers to acquaint themselves with
black folk myths and thus to acknowledge and grapple with the ways the cultures of
these myths have been silenced to become the ghosts of Western culture’ (Wester 2019,
293). Throughout Tell My Horse, Hurston discusses figures from both traditional
Western gothic tales and Black folk traditions, such as the zombie and the duppy.
Although the zombie frequently appears in horror narratives, Hurston’s depiction
defamiliarises this ‘gothic’ figure from that which exists in Western imaginations. For
in Haitian folklore, ‘zombies do not physically threaten people; rather the threat comes
from the vodoun practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual
by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved’
(Edwards 2016, 15). Exemplifying this point, Hurston observes that zombies are mis-
treated by those who wake them in the sense that they are worked as beasts of burden,
used to perform an act of revenge, or sacrificed to settle a debt to a spirit (Hurston 2009,
182). Much like Vodou, the zombie has been the victim of colonial othering in West-
ern gothic literature: demonified to represent something threatening outside of its cul-
tural context. The contrast between zombie-as-aggressor in Western horror fiction and
zombie-as-victim in Haitian culture is further evidenced when Hurston recounts stories
people shared with her about their encounters with zombie figures. In one instance,
Hurston writes of a mother who saw her recently deceased son among a group of silent
labourers. According to the mother’s testimony, the labourers were being worked hard
by an overseeing foreman. When her son saw her, he regarded her ‘without recognition
or sound’, and when the mother returned with help a short period after, her son was
no longer in the group and the foreman denied there ever being someone of her son’s
likeness working for him (192–3). The victim status of zombies in Haiti is also revealed
when Hurston describes the precautions families take to ensure that their departed
loved one is not transformed into a zombie. For instance, families will watch the grave
for thirty-six hours after burial, cut open or poison the body to make certain that the
family member is indeed dead, or equip the corpse with a knife and position their arm
so that anyone trying to tamper with the body after the burial will be injured (191).
Evidently, in Haiti, zombies suffer at the hands of the living and are thus figures to be
pitied rather than feared. This conception of zombies differs greatly from the represen-
tation of the figure in Western cultural media to the extent that the defamiliarisation

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 gothic and global travel writing 301

process Wester suggests is key in Black diasporic gothic texts still occurs, not because a
new monster has been introduced, but rather because Tell My Horse informs its read-
ers of the zombie’s origin and casts a figure already familiar to Western audiences in an
alternative light.
Hurston is writing with the assumption that her readership does not believe
zombies are real, but she attempts to debunk their assumption in the same way she
demystifies aspects of Vodou ceremonies: by including a photograph from her own
experience with an ‘authentic’ case (180). She is permitted to visit a zombie, Felicia
Felix-Mentor, who according to the records, ‘suddenly took ill and died and was bur-
ied’ in 1907 but was found twenty-nine years later walking along a road (196–7).
Hurston takes care to capture the ‘dreadful’ sight of this zombie with her ‘blank face’
and ‘dead eyes’ (195), but what might be more disturbing to a twenty-first-century
reader are the circumstances under which the image was taken. Hurston describes
how she took Felicia’s photo as follows: ‘The doctor uncovered [Felicia’s] head for a
moment but she promptly clapped her arms and hands over it . . . Finally the doctor
forcibly uncovered her and held her so that I could take her face’ (195). There is an
uncomfortable sense of voyeurism here. From Hurston’s description we understand
that the photograph was captured without the patient’s consent and against her will.
This passage in Tell My Horse further illustrates the victimhood of zombies in Haiti, as
their suffering is perpetrated not only by the individual who re-awoke them, but also
by those who treat them as a spectacle.
Another figure Hurston discusses at length in Tell My Horse is that of the duppy.
According to folklore in Caribbean islands such as Jamaica, duppies are troublesome
spirits who bother living people. In the first part of her travel narrative, ‘Jamaica’,
Hurston provides information about the malevolent spirits, relaying to her reader-
ship that they ‘lived mostly in silk-cotton trees and in almond trees’, that they can be
detected because people within a duppy’s vicinity experience a heat and a swelling
sensation in their head, and that you can protect yourself from a duppy by drinking
tea made from Spirit Weed (25). Wester provides a succinct summary of how a duppy
is formed when she writes that, in Jamaican folktales, a ‘soul is composed of a good
half which immediately travels to Africa/heaven at the moment of death, and a bad
or earthly half which lingers with the corpse for three days after death and, without
ritualistic precautions, becomes a duppy’ (Wester 2019, 293–4). Like with zombie pre-
vention, relatives take care to ensure their deceased loved one will not return as a duppy.
For example, at a funeral Hurston is witness to some of these ritualistic precautions
being taken, such as a ‘pillow with parched peas, corn and coffee beans sewn inside’
being placed under the head of the deceased person. As an extra precaution, the same
relatives ‘took four short nails and drove one in each cuff of the shirt as close to the
hand as possible . . . the heel of each sock was nailed down in the same way’ (Hurston
2009, 42). Here, Hurston is acquainting her readership with figures from Black folk
myths like Wester suggests of Black diasporic gothic texts, and in doing so, she expands
what ‘gothic’ constitutes outside their familiar literary and cultural contexts.
Throughout Tell My Horse, Hurston writes back to stereotypical representations of
Vodou like those found in L’Empire de Soulouque and The English in the West Indies.
She demystifies the diaspora religion by acquainting her readers with the intricacies of
its practices and loas, and by including images and musical scores within her narrative
while allowing some alterity to remain. She reveals that there is very little of which she

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is frightened when attending Vodou ceremonies, even if some of the events were sur-
prising or unexplainable to her. In addition, Hurston exhibits elements of the diasporic
gothic by unsettling her readers’ expectation of what can be considered gothic. She
achieves this by including ‘new monsters’ and by revealing how the traditionally gothic
figure of the zombie is interpreted outside of Western contexts. Like Tell My Horse,
Sequins for a Ragged Hem includes references to supernatural figures in the Caribbean
region, but instead of focusing on zombies and duppies, Johnson’s narrative describes
her encounters with a female apparition.

Sequins for a Ragged Hem

Amryl Johnson was born in Trinidad but moved to Britain in the mid-1950s when she
was eleven years old. In Sequins for a Ragged Hem, Johnson recounts a return jour-
ney to the Caribbean region approximately three decades after her migration, during
which she travels to Trinidad, Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, St Lucia and Dominica
over a period of six months. Sequins for a Ragged Hem and Tell My Horse differ
from one another in style, objective and the position from which their authors are
writing. The previous section of this chapter discusses how Hurston writes in an
accessible fashion to educate her readership about diaspora religions in Jamaica and
Haiti, and how she includes non-textual elements to verify her written account. On
the other hand, Sequins for a Ragged Hem is inward facing, predominantly con-
cerned with recording Johnson’s supernatural encounters and the inner journey she
undergoes throughout her travels as she is repeatedly perceived as a foreigner in her
region of origin. In contrast to Hurston, Johnson is unconcerned with convincing her
readership of her narrative’s truthfulness, and even emphasises her own unreliability
throughout her text. For example, Johnson regularly includes phrases such as ‘I was
straddling two worlds. One was reality, the other dream state’ (Johnson 1988, 68)
and ‘there was a hole in my memory’ (53), which lend the narrative a hazy, ethereal
quality and echo the supernatural experiences it describes. Rather than a quest for
knowledge, a search for belonging is at the centre of Sequins for a Ragged Hem.
While it is apparent that Hurston is an outsider in the Caribbean in the sense that
she is travelling from the United States of America with the purpose of educating
herself (and her readership) on elements of Caribbean culture, Johnson’s position is
more complex. Indeed, in returning to the region where she was born, she embodies a
diasporic traveller or returnee: someone who is travelling to a ‘home in the past as a
place “left behind”’ (Ravi 2018, 66). However, from the outset of her travel narrative
Johnson is positioned as an outsider, alienated by the Caribbean people she encoun-
ters throughout her trip despite her efforts to blend in.2
It is important to note that the form of isolation discussed below is different in
character to the one well established in gothic literature. Certainly, many gothic writ-
ers substantiate the motif of loneliness by employing unfamiliar, remote settings as the
backdrop for terror-inducing events, or through a plot whereby their protagonist is
imprisoned by a supernatural being. In contrast, Johnson’s isolation occurs because
the setting is familiar to her and yet she is not recognised as being from the region,
and in the case of Sequins for a Ragged Hem, the supernatural being provides the con-
nection Johnson craves. Johnson signifies her exclusion immediately after she arrives
in Trinidad, her first destination, when an airport official asks her accusingly, ‘“You

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live here but you hold a British passport?”’ (Johnson 1988, 10). She is again identified
as an outsider when she makes a mistake crossing a busy road and is called ‘“some
blasted tourist”’ by an irate driver (26), when a stranger asks her ‘“Where you from,
Miss? America?”’ (72), and when she is unable to understand French patois: ‘I felt
isolated. Isolated by words I could not understand’ (177). Johnson’s Caribbean roots
are rendered unrecognisable, and much like a ghost, she is deemed not plausibly of
this space/place. This sense of dislocation is often seen in global travel writing when
the author returns to a place in which they consider themselves to have roots, with
authors such as Jamaica Kincaid in her A Small Place (1988) and Gary Younge in
his ‘My Mother’s Small Island Taught Me What Independence Really Means’ (2016)
further exemplifying this in a Caribbean context.3
Although ghosts are often thought of as individuals, Jennifer Lawn recognises that in
postcolonial literature, ‘[t]he figure of the ghost . . . aligns with models of collective his-
tory’ (Lawn 2006, 149). Although Lawn discusses ghosts, history and the postcolonial
experience in New Zealand, Sequins for a Ragged Hem illustrates that her observation
is also applicable to examples of Caribbean travel writing. Indeed, although Johnson is
isolated by the people she meets throughout her journey, she forges a connection with a
female ghost who can be read as intimately symbolic of historical events in Caribbean
history. In the following section, I discuss the significance of Johnson’s supernatural
encounters within the travel writing genre, linking them to her desire to belong and the
postcolonial gothic.

Ghosts and Caribbean Collectivity

Given the fact that Johnson feels alien when she travels within the Caribbean, the
appearance of a supernatural being throughout her journey seems pertinent. The
hauntings have a lasting effect on the author, and this is apparent in the book’s intro-
duction, in which Johnson acknowledges that the travel text exists because of the
spirit’s persistence: ‘Sequins for a Ragged Hem came in response to experiences which
begged for posterity. The ghosts would not leave me alone. They kept coming back
to tease’ (Johnson 1988, 1). Throughout her journey, Johnson regularly encounters a
female ghost or spirit which takes on different forms. Sometimes the female appari-
tion appears as an intangible aura: ‘[a] force once again threatened to overwhelm
me. I could sense a presence in the room’ (15–16). On other occasions, however, the
apparition seems to have a more substantial, physical form and interacts with the
author. This is evident when Johnson is participating in Carnival during her stay in
Trinidad and senses the female spirit: ‘I felt her presence barely seconds before I was
once again taken down. This time it would be death by drowning. No. I came up
again. Once. Twice. Three times . . . I came to the surface struggling for air’ (52).
The female apparition in Sequins for a Ragged Hem has been interpreted in a variety
of ways. For instance, Johnson, reflecting on her own experiences, believes the ghost
‘to be an ancestral figure’ (1), whereas critics such as Isabel Hoving suggest that the
female ghost ‘stands for all women on the island’ (Hoving 2001, 71). Building on
Johnson’s and Hoving’s readings, I discuss how the spaces in which the female appa-
rition appears speak to notions of the postcolonial gothic and simultaneously grant
Johnson a sense of connection within the Caribbean, signalling that she is a part of the
region’s collectivity despite not being recognised as such by its people.

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As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, travel writing has long been entwined
with gothic tropes. On this subject, A. V. Seaton identifies four categories of ghost
within travel literature:

‘Experimental ghosts’, who appear present to others at a distance from where they
are physically at that time; ‘crisis ghosts’, who appear at times of individual or
collective trauma, such as war or bereavement; ‘post-mortem ghosts’, who appear
soon after the death to those whom they have loved or known; and ‘true ghosts’,
who appear unexpectedly to strangers, years, even centuries, after their death.
(Seaton 2019, 105)

Seaton’s characterisation of crisis ghosts resonates with Ilott’s observation concerning

the use of gothic tropes by twentieth-century postcolonial authors. Drawing on texts
such as Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997), Ilott argues that ‘the gothic
provides postcolonial authors with a shorthand for articulating repressed histories
and recounting past traumas through a language of haunting and spectrality’, adding
that gothic literature can ‘function as a talking cure for colonial violence’ through its
reinscription of these violent and repressed histories (Ilott 2019, 21). Certainly, the
supernatural events recorded in Sequins for a Ragged Hem reflect Seaton’s and Ilott’s
assertion that hauntings and collective historic trauma are linked in travel writing and
postcolonial literature.
Although there is no geographical pattern to Johnson’s supernatural experiences –
they are not contained within a specific place or island – there is an emotional geog-
raphy to them, as they frequently occur in spaces symbolic of trauma or mourning for
Caribbean communities. Rather than being connected to events such as war as Seaton
suggests, or familial guilt like in Ilott’s analysis of The God of Small Things, Johnson
encounters the female apparition in sites associated with slavery or colonisation, such
as a sugar mill, the sea and a Carib Reserve. The sea represents a site of historic trauma
in the context of slavery, as thousands of people lost their lives in the Atlantic Ocean
while being transported from West Africa to the Americas, either through disease or
injury, because they died by suicide, or because they were jettisoned for insurance pur-
poses.4 Correspondingly, the female apparition often induces for Johnson the sensation
of being submerged in water.5 In addition to the feeling of being drowned while partici-
pating in the Trinidadian carnival as cited above, Johnson has a similar experience in
her family home. While lying in bed one morning soon after her arrival, Johnson has
a vision of a woman whose facial features begin to melt and describes the moment she
returns to her perceived reality as follows: ‘I started. What the hell–? I was on my own
again, breathing clear above the surface of the water’ (Johnson 1988, 16). Many of
Johnson’s brief, less intense encounters, which are typically towards the beginning of
the novel, result in Johnson returning to her present time and location by breaking the
surface of the water, as though she has, in that moment, escaped immersion.
Furthermore, the female apparition routinely appears while Johnson is in the sea.
For example, while visiting Tobago Johnson experiences the dropping sensation of
walking from shallow water out to sea as a decapitation: ‘Decapitated. Just head and
neck on a shimmering silver platter. Decapitated. Just head and neck. When I inclined
my head I could find no reflection. . . . I panicked’ (83). Immediately after her imagi-
nary decapitation, Johnson records how she ‘made [her] way out of the water, slowly.

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 gothic and global travel writing 305

The brooding shadow followed’ (84). Additionally, while travelling on a boat between
two islands, Johnson suddenly feels ‘locked in’ and then senses the spirit trying in
vain to escape from the boat: ‘Somewhere a force was struggling to free itself. . . . But
the door remained shut. Eventually, its energy spent, it wafted to the floor. A wisp of
its former substance . . . only the bare bones reached me’ (135). Comprehending the
connection between her location and the behaviour of the spirit, Johnson repeats to
herself five words: ‘Is that how it was?’ (135). Here, the spirit is invoking for Johnson
a sense of the confinement experienced by enslaved people being transported via ship
from West Africa to the Caribbean. The ‘language of haunting’ which Ilott identifies
in postcolonial gothic texts is evident in Johnson’s travel narrative, too. By using the
numinous to discuss past traumatic events, Johnson communicates that the communal
trauma engendered by slavery is not contained to the generations who experienced
the horrors first-hand; instead it lingers, rippling through to present-day descendants
and beyond.
Many of the people who survived the journey from Africa to the Caribbean later
died in slave colonies which were established to produce commodities such as sugar,
rum and coffee. It is therefore fitting that Johnson has another supernatural experi-
ence while visiting an old sugar mill in Tobago, which she describes as being ‘stained
with the dried syrup, blood which had been wrung ounce by ounce from African
men, women and children’ (144). Upon approaching the wheel of the mill (which
she characterises as an eye), Johnson is once again overcome: ‘That eye where veins
strung taut at right angles to the pupil pulsed and throbbed inside a living force. . . . I
was in danger of being drawn so close to the hub I would be sucked into the vortex’
(144). The affective extent of the hauntings in Sequins for a Ragged Hem seem to go
beyond the ‘language of haunting and spectrality’ which is characteristic of twentieth-
century postcolonial gothic texts (Ilott 2019, 21). The fact that Johnson’s supernatural
experiences also incite near-death sensations and their physicality indicate an intimate
connection and a deep empathy for the people who endured enslavement, as the author
experiences torment in the same places they suffered.
Thus far, the locations of Johnson’s supernatural experiences have been predomi-
nantly linked to the collective history of slavery shared by Afro-Caribbean people.
However, towards the end of Sequins for a Ragged Hem, it becomes clear that the
apparition aligns with the collective history of the Caribbean more broadly when
Johnson encounters the ghosts at a Carib Reserve in Dominica. Johnson weaves
the description of her encounter into the depiction of the Reserve and its residents:
‘I could feel myself close to the hub. I was arriving. . . . History had come alive, been
lifted off the page into the shape of reality. The spectres had been given some form of
substance’ (Johnson 1988, 240). Writing on this quotation, Peter Hulme suggests that
the ‘disturbance to the narrating self’ could have been caused by the expectation that
‘the spectres she encountered [would] be the ghosts of slavery, but she finds a different
and unexpected history which “lifts off the page” to become reality once she enters the
Reserve’ (Hulme 2000, 272). Almost in acknowledgement of the many victims who
died when European colonial powers invaded the Caribbean, Johnson senses the pres-
ence of many ghosts while at the Reserve, commenting that she found it impossible to
look because ‘the ghosts [were] stacked too high’ (Johnson 1988, 240). These passages
indicate that Johnson is not only sensitive to the residual trauma of people who were
enslaved, but that she also harbours a profound compassion for the people native to

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 306 sofia aatkar

the Caribbean pre-European colonisation, too. Although Seaton suggests that ghosts
often appear in travel narratives at ‘times of individual or collective trauma’, in Sequins
for a Ragged Hem, ghosts are connected to spatiality instead of temporality, as they
occur when the writer inhabits sites significant to collective trauma.
The bond between Johnson and the female apparition is key within the author’s
search for belonging throughout her journey. To be sure, Johnson is denied acceptance
in her region of origin as many of the Caribbean people she meets identify her as an
outsider to the region; however, the ghost allows Johnson to nurture a spiritual, histori-
cal and cultural connection to her region of origin by manifesting in spaces significant to
slavery and colonialism. Her spiritual connection to the region is affirmed on the closing
page of Sequins for a Ragged Hem when it appears as though Johnson and the ghost
become one. Johnson concludes her journey and her narrative at her family home in
Trinidad, where the ghost approaches her, and their desires coalesce: ‘She was so close
now I was wearing a second skin. Difficult to separate my will from hers and say the
impatience was not my own’ (273). Thus, Sequins for a Ragged Hem illustrates that
the gothic not only functions as a talking cure for colonial violence as Ilott suggests, or
as a manifestation of historic trauma like Seaton proposes, but that hauntings can also
symbolise a sense of connection through the materialisation of a shared history. Indeed,
the female apparition offers Johnson further healing as a diasporic returnee, in the sense
that she grants her both a spiritual and a historical connection to her region of origin.
Denise de Caires Narian suggests that, in Johnson’s work, ‘the present is read
through the past’ (de Caires Narian 2007, 65). This statement is certainly applicable
to Sequins for a Ragged Hem, in which Johnson’s then present-day journey is infused
with spiritual connections to the Caribbean’s history. The fact that Johnson’s spiritual
encounters occur in spaces of trauma for former Caribbean residents, such as the sea,
sugar mills and at a Carib Reserve, illustrates the link Seaton and Ilott identify between
hauntings and traumatic experiences in the work of travel writers and postcolonial
gothic authors respectively, and demonstrates that the link persists in an example of
global travel writing, too.
Both Tell My Horse and Sequins for a Ragged Hem demonstrate that global travel
writing plays an intervening role in what gothic encounters symbolise within the travel
writing genre. Hurston demystifies diaspora religion, an element of Caribbean culture
which has previously been couched in a supernatural aesthetic. Furthermore, she illus-
trates elements of the diasporic gothic in a travel writing context by introducing figures
from Black myths and by recasting familiar figures from Western gothic literature in
an alternative light. Reading Tell My Horse alongside Sequins for a Ragged Hem illus-
trates the stark differences in how travel writers approach gothic subject matter. While
Hurston positions herself as an observer and casual participant in Vodou ceremonies,
Johnson demonstrates how her supernatural encounters are integral to finding a sense
of connection as a diaspora returnee.

Notes
1. Alasdair Pettinger notes that the term ‘Voodoo cannot be mistaken for an English word. . . .
its oo sound and internal rhyme aligns it (for imperial ears, at least) with the language of chil-
dren and savages (cf. gris-gris, ju-ju, mumbo jumbo)’ (Pettinger 2004, 420). Hence, although
Hurston uses the term ‘Voodoo’ throughout Tell My Horse, I will refer to the religion as Vodou.

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 gothic and global travel writing 307

2. I discuss Amryl Johnson’s efforts to belong in the context of cultural performativity in my

doctoral thesis, ‘Caribbean-British Travel Writing, 1948–2018’ (2018).
3. This sense of dislocation upon returning is also evident in disciplines outside of literary
studies. For example, in their study of Bajan-British people returning to Barbados, Robert
B. Potter and Joan Phillips (2006) discuss how the Caribbean heritage of the returnee con-
flicts with their English identity and causes feelings of marginalisation.
4. In 1791, 133 African people were thrown overboard the Zong, which was owned by the
Liverpool-based slave-trading organisation Gregson, and crewed by British sailors. The
incident came to be known as the Zong Massacre. This is just one (known) example of
slaves being thrown overboard for insurance purposes, but, according to James Welvin,
‘[j]ettisoning cargo was commonplace’ (Welvin 2011, 112).
5. Johnson also published a poetry collection, Long Road to Nowhere (1985), in which she
describes the same journey as that undertaken in Sequins for a Ragged Hem. In Long
Road, Johnson also narrates her spiritual experiences which often take place in watery
locations, such as in the poem ‘How Do You Feed the Ghosts?’.

References
Aatkar, Sofia. 2018. ‘Caribbean-British Travel Writing, 1948–2018.’ PhD diss., Nottingham
Trent University.
Daly, Susanne. 2014. ‘The Imperial Gothic.’ The British Library. https://www.bl.uk/romantics-
and-victorians/articles/the-imperial-gothic.
de Caires Narian, Denise. 2007. ‘Amryl Johnson: Audacious Poet – and Sister (1944–2001).’
Wasafiri 16, no. 33: 64–5.
Edwards, Justin D. 2016. ‘Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas.’ In Tropical Gothic in
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Vasconcelos, 13–25. New York: Routledge.
Froude, James Anthony. 2010. The English in the West Indies, or, The Bow of Ulysses. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hoving, Isabel. 2001. In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers.
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Hulme, Peter. 2000. Remnants of Conquest: The Island Caribs and their Visitors, 1877–1998.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hurston, Zora Neale. 2009. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. New York:
Harper Perennial.
Ilott, Sarah. 2019. ‘Postcolonial Gothic.’ In Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Com-
panion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 19–32. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Johnson, Amryl. 1985. Long Road to Nowhere. London: Virago.
———. 1988. Sequins for a Ragged Hem. London: Virago.
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bridge University Press.
Lawn, Jennifer. 2006. ‘From the Spectral to the Ghostly: Postcolonial Gothic and New Zealand
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Mills, Sara. 1991. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
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Olmos, Margarite Fernández and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. 1997. ‘Introduction: Religious
Syncretism and Caribbean Culture.’ In Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the
Caribbean, edited by Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, 1–12.
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Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2002. ‘Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean.’ In The
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no. 4: 415–25.
Potter, Robert B. and Joan Phillips. 2006. ‘Both Black and Symbolically White: The “Bajan Brit”
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Ravi, Srilata. 2018. ‘Diasporic Returnees and Francophone Travel Narratives.’ In Postcolonial
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 20

Folk Horror and the Globalgothic

Timothy Jones

F olk horror – seemingly committed to the small-scale, the insular, the local and
the pre-industrial – is, in fact, a product of globalisation, and manifestation of
the globalgothic. The genre is part of a wider ‘hauntological’ turn in popular culture
(see Fischer 2017) which excavates the pop cultural materials of the past, turning them
to present needs. Folk horror strategically rereads the twentieth-century gothic to pro-
duce an imaginary paganism and a subjunctive national history as a response to the dis-
contents of an increasingly globalised cultural economy. Folk horror’s canon is freshly
assembled, and while it has been framed as a natural, pre-existing category, this chapter
will argue that it is a contemporary imaginative resource which reassures its audiences as
much as it horrifies. For Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards, globalisation ‘engenders a
context of unbelonging through the rupture of communities’ and ‘registers the anxieties
that arise from national, social and subjective dissolution, including an endless media-
critical interrogation of identities, genders, races and classes’ (Botting and Edwards
2013, 23). Folk horror is not that interrogation; if anything, it provides relief from it,
reinstituting a sense of stability and even belonging. While Botting and Edwards argue
that globalgothic shreds ‘the nostalgic fantasy of a return to an untainted local culture’
(Botting and Edwards 2013, 18), folk horror responds to globalisation by imagining
exactly this return.
This chapter sketches the origins and shape of folk horror as a popular category,
describing its concern with the local, and the imaginative uses it finds for both folk
and paganism. While the genre is beginning to take on international dimensions, the
chapter is not an attempt to describe folk horror as a phenomenon that appears natu-
rally at various sites across the globe, where the folkloric and the macabre happen to
meet. The genre seems to suggest engagement with a variety of global histories and
cultures, yet present discourse on folk horror generally avoids African and Asian texts,
downplays various indigenous traditions, and overwhelmingly focuses on Anglo and
European folklores. This chapter argues that folk horror’s origins lie not in folklore
per se, but in more recent British culture. The genre – especially in key texts like The
Wicker Man (1973) – is concerned with developing a sense of tradition which allows
audiences to imagine fantastical heritages and national or regional identities which
disaffiliate from contemporary versions of these categories.
Folk horror points towards the past; it offers historical fictions, or fictions of the
present where the past bleeds in. Witches are burned and dolmens are danced around.
Yet its retrospective concerns tend to obscure the novelty of the idea itself. While there
are records of odd, early uses of the term, its passage into critical currency and popular
meaning has only occurred over the last decade. The origins of the term matter less

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 310 timothy jones

than its general adoption; its popularisation is usually attributed to Mark Gatiss’s use
of the phrase in the 2010 BBC documentary series A History of Horror to describe
and group together three films – Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s
Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) – which folk horror audiences now refer
to as a ‘trilogy’. Nobody really spoke of ‘folk horror’ at the time that these films were
produced. Folk horror, understood as folk horror, is a phenomenon of that last decade
that assembles both past and contemporary texts, crossing media and pertaining to
film, television, literature and even music.
Interest in the genre is particularly visible on social media platforms such as
Facebook and Instagram. Folk horror-themed conferences and gatherings are arranged
via digital platforms. There is also a thriving zine scene which pairs folk horror aes-
thetics with a touch of the hauntological and psychogeographical; these publications
invariably take advantage of social media’s ability to connect those with special inter-
ests. Titles include Hellebore, Rituals and Declarations, Weird Walk and Black Dog.
Sticker packs and T-shirts are sometimes available in limited quantities. Folk horror
has an audience, but more than this, it has a cult. It is championed by a group of advo-
cates who operate as fans, creators, organisers and publishers. This is a vibrant scene,
largely based in Britain, but with increasing international reach, whose publications
and interests contribute to the constitution of the genre. Folk horror is defined by the
pop-critical discourse which surrounds it as much as by the texts which sit at the centre
of its canon.
The ‘trilogy’ of Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker
Man all offer various takes on witchcraft and paganism. Vincent Price stalks the coun-
tryside as Matthew Hopkins, raping and burning; a violent sex cult is established after
a demonic skull is unearthed by the blade of a plough; and Edward Woodward is
burned as a sacrifice for fecundity by Christopher Lee’s merry crew. Alongside the
films, literary works such as Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift
(1973) and M. R. James’s stories (1904–1925ish) are categorised as folk horror; vari-
ous remote locations see one time bleed into another. At least as much attention is
paid to their television adaptations (Granada’s The Owl Service in 1969 and the BBC’s
A Ghost Story for Christmas from 1971 to 1978), as well as oddities like Penda’s Fen
(1974). If these together make up the centre of folk horror’s canon, an increasingly
wide range of texts are arranged around them. These are sometimes recovered from
the past, just as the canonical texts have been – junkshop curiosities like the Reader’s
Digest publication Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1973) are now coveted by
fans. Equally, there are new entries in the field. A Field in England (2013) is a greyscale
psychedelic trip through the English Civil War. Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney
(2014), set in the 1970s, imagines folk traditions of egging and sacrifice much older.
To engage with folk horror’s canon presumes an epicurean dissatisfaction with
readily available mainstream fare, and a commitment to the archive. As Mark Fisher
observes, ‘VHS, DVD and YouTube’ have made ‘practically everything . . . available
for rewatching’ (Fisher 2014, 2). Ironically, the capabilities of the digital archive, once
a science fiction prospect, return us to the materials of the past. The past, however, is
always changing. Works once considered minor or obscure are rehabilitated. Given the
acclaim and influence now afforded to The Wicker Man, it is strange to read earlier
criticism which sees things differently. For Leon Hunt, ‘The Wicker Man . . . had no
influence whatsoever on what was left of the British horror film and stands outside

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 folk horror and the globalgothic 311

any of its dominant traditions’ (Hunt 2002, 96). The unlikeliness of such a claim now
suggests the extent to which folk horror has rearranged views of British horror. While
the ‘folk’ dimension of folk horror’s key films seems obvious now, it was less so in the
first thirty-odd years of their reception, where they tended to be read as ‘occult’ or
‘supernatural horror’ (see Hunt 2002). The films of the trilogy were more likely to be
considered alongside Night of the Demon (1957), The Devil Rides Out (1968), The
Omen (1976) and various others. A different set of emphases emerge in this earlier
criticism, relating to gender politics, sexual freedoms and 1960s counterculture (see
Hunt 2002). The attribution of genre makes a difference here; folk horror becomes an
interpretive frame that throws a particular light across the texts that are so labelled.
Adam Scovell’s notion of a folk horror ‘chain’ is particularly influential in the con-
temporary readings of the genre. For Scovell, the folk horror text brings together four
narrative tropes – isolation, skewed morality, an interest in the landscape, and a hap-
pening or summoning (Scovell 2017, 17–19). The genre coheres through ‘unconscious
ley lines between a huge range of different forms of media in the twentieth century and
earlier’ (Scovell 2017, 183). This is a strategy of association and connection which allows
readers and viewers to discover (dowse?) the genre by recognising the tropes in one text
or another. While Scovell sees these tropes as describing the diegetic interests of the folk
horror text, they also – unsurprisingly – shape the critical discourse about the genre, so
that these are themes that commentary returns to.
While the origins of the term are strongly connected to British cultural produc-
tions, folk horror has, more recently, begun to travel. The American production The
Witch (2015) reheats Hawthorne’s seventeenth-century New England, while Midsom-
mar (2019) transports The Wicker Man to a pristine corner of Sweden with terrific
frocks but less charisma. The retrospective discovery of folk horror in American texts
such as Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ (1948), Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1974)
and Stephen King’s ‘Children of the Corn’ (1977) is under way (see Murphy 2019). For
Scovell, the genre can be discerned in ‘a huge range of pastoral narratives from around
the world, in movements such as Czechoslovakian Magic Realism, Australian Outback
films, American Backwaters films, early European silent cinema and Japanese ghost
stories’ (Scovell 2017, 8–9). It is ‘the evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods of
a forgotten lane’, but also ‘the loneliness in a brutalist tower block’ (Scovell 2017, 183).
Like globalism itself, folk horror traverses; it is driven by a set of interests and disposi-
tions held by its audience as much as any quality in the texts themselves. While seem-
ingly committed to the peculiarities of place and history, folk horror emerges through
the auspices of the internet, which enables a delocalised cultural economy. It imagines
itself emerging out of the lives of folk, their lore and traditions, but treats folk as both
grotesque and ornamental.
Scovell acknowledges that ‘Folk Horror, whilst often appropriating . . . folkloric
themes and aesthetics (as well as history itself), is never all that fussed with a genuine,
accurate recreation of folklore. It instead plays it through broad-stroke ideas which . . .
often build into genuine . . . rewrites of history and culture’ (Scovell 2017, 28). This
preparedness to play fast and loose with history is, of course, the prerogative of fiction.
However, reading folk horror as globalgothic raises the questions proposed by Glennis
Byron. Does folk horror become a culturally homogenising force, ‘rewriting local tradi-
tion as commodity’ (Byron 2013, 2)? And to what extent does this rewriting ‘give form
to anxieties attendant on the processes of globalisation: anxieties about such issues as

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 312 timothy jones

the stability of local or national identities and cultures, about the impact of transna-
tional capitalism or the workings of technology’ (Byron 2013, 5)? Folk horror voices
the dismay emerging from the disruption of national and regional identities; it even
consoles its audience by fabricating an imaginative past which potentially restores a
sense of heritage and community. In doing so, folk horror registers a disaffiliation with
contemporary national and regional identities. More than a set of tropes, folk horror
is a strategic assembly of texts and a way of reading concerned with ideas of the past,
locality and folk, a form of cultural work.
Folk horror’s notion of the folk is instrumental to this work; unlike a mobile and
dislocated globalised population, the folk unquestionably belong in place. Folk hor-
rors imagine remote locales and thrive on what Piers Haggard, director of The Blood
on Satan’s Claw, termed a ‘sense of the soil’ (qtd in Parnell 2019, 165). The Wicker
Man presents Summerisle as a Hebridean island; M. R. James slightly reimagines
Suffolk’s seaside towns in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’ or ‘A Warning
to the Curious’. These texts might nearly allow readers to mark out the location
of their narratives on real maps. This tendency becomes more pronounced in folk
horror’s non-fictional manifestations. Verity Holloway writes of the Akenham Devil
for Hellebore zine, giving dates and locations for the parish discord which probably
sits behind the legend (Holloway 2020); the Reader’s Digest’s Folklore, Myths and
Legends of Britain is structured as a gazetteer. Articles in Weird Walk provide direc-
tions and recommend Ordnance Survey map numbers with some frequency (see
Hornsby, Nicholls and Tromans 2020). What’s important to the genre, however, is
the texture of locality more than any particular location in itself. Localness is empha-
sised, but it doesn’t really matter where.
Folk horror stages encounters between outsiders and the folk who belong in which-
ever particular locale. It usually focalises its narration through the visitors rather than
the locals. Place is made to seem novel and strange, as is local culture. James’s pale
scholars are never at home when they find themselves haunted. Holloway notes how
difficult it is to actually find Akenham (Holloway 2020, 28). Neither Alison, Roger
nor Gwyn really belong in the remote Welsh valley described in Alan Garner’s The
Owl Service – although Huw Halfbacon perhaps does. Everybody in the valley knows
what is about to happen, except for the three young adults it is going to happen to.
Sergeant Howie is attracted to and repelled by the peculiar folk of Summerisle, but
does not understand the trick that has been played on him until far too late in the
piece. Local knowledge is more authentic and more vividly coloured than cosmopoli-
tan understandings; what the folk know is usually borne out by the story. They till the
fields, gather the faggots, bustle in the hedgerows and, perhaps more than anything,
look on as violence is enacted. They are more visible in the films than on the page, and
are usually associated with the notion of a pagan survival. Yet while the folk are asso-
ciated with locatedness and authenticity, the irony is that folk horror often describes
entirely invented folk communities that do not, in fact, belong where they are said to.
Summerisle might be a Hebridean island, but it is inhabited by people who do not have
Hebridean accents.
Folk horror begins to show its roots at moments like this, for the idea of a folk has
always been largely imaginary. Georgina Boyes has described how the idea has been
created and used, especially by the folk revival. At the turn of the twentieth century, the
‘existence of the Folk . . . was taken as fact. Somewhere, remote and isolated, there still

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lived survivors of the old, lost national culture. The instrumentality of such a concept –
with its potential for support of both dominant and alternative ideologies – offers much
to explain its widespread acceptance’ (Boyes 1993, 22). Folk, as a concept, erased the
urban proletariat who resided in towns and cities following the industrial revolution
and imaginatively replaced them with a romanticised and suitably deferential rural
working class. The folk – who exist more fully in records of their lore than in person –
suggested a ‘traditional culture which, it was held, had been all but obliterated by the
relentless march of capitalist industrialisation’ (Martin 1993, vii). Folk practices, and
particularly song, were potentially ‘the voice of the people, a distillation of that authen-
tic English culture which was on the verge of extinction’; their recovery promised ‘the
revitalisation of the nation’ and even a restoration of ‘organic community’ (Martin
1993, vii). However, the views of the folk espoused by the folk revival, their ‘allegedly
venerable activities and conventions’, are ‘in large measure . . . an invented tradition’
(Martin 1993, viii). Folk horror draws extensively from the ideas of the folk revival,
which figured the folk as resisting the progress of urbanisation and industrialisation.
In fact, the genre asks the folk to stretch further, so they resist the march of globalisa-
tion by standing for the local, the regional and even the national. Weird, violent, pre-
capitalist, pre-industrial, defined by ‘traditional’ gender roles, the folk are able to truly
belong in a place in ways that cosmopolitan outsiders cannot. Folk are, in folk horror’s
key texts, exclusively white.
The folk are also instances of pagan survival, the idea that pre-Christian gods,
beliefs and practices had a clandestine presence in Britain and Europe despite the
official authority of Christianity through the Middle Ages, and possibly even later.
Folklore, song and dance are thought to yield hidden histories and forms of devotion,
and the landscape might be read for evidence of ancient paths and rituals (Hutton
2013, 340–1). Pagan survival had an extended career in twentieth-century popular
culture, promoted by writers as various as Margaret Murray, Alfred Watkins, Robert
Graves and Gerald Gardner; it was generally accepted by scholars in the period from
1880 to 1970 or so, and while it still holds a degree of popular currency, the idea is
now basically discredited (Hutton 2013, 345). Ronald Hutton reads pagan survival
in similar terms to Boyes’s reading of the folk – as a response to ‘new and frightening
forms of mass population: the industrial and urban working classes and the subject
peoples of colonial territories’. This produced the anxiety that ‘civilization [was] . . .
spread precariously over a populace which is essentially alien to it, disaffected from
it, and secretly loyal to more primitive, destructive (and in some ways more exciting)
instincts’ (Hutton 2013, 341).
This makes the folk and their older gods seem as if they belong to an earlier, more
authentic and more emplaced culture, untainted by modernity, and untouched by the
sequelae of empire, colony and globalisation. Civilisation, on the other hand, is a
fragile thing that might be shrugged off; the laws and norms that govern the cities fail
to extend into folk horror’s more remote regions. The folk represent a challenge to
national government, but at the same time stake a claim to being an older and more
legitimate order. Time and again, folk horror returns to the idea of groups who –
perhaps not openly – are disaffiliated from national and international laws, cultures
and norms which ought to regulate them. Scovell describes them as ‘cut off from . . .
established social progress’ and possessed by ‘skewed belief systems and morality’
(Scovell 2017, 18). Scovell’s turn of phrase makes backwardsness seem as if it is a bad

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thing, but as I will discuss below, readings of folk horror, including Scovell’s own, seem
to celebrate the pagan and the barbarous more than they condemn them.
The folk are integral to folk horror’s project of evoking past ways. This is pastiche
more than history, where prior times are presented for audiences as darkly appealing
alternatives to the global present. There is a sense that, just as folk horror often evokes
the local without exactly locating it, the genre thinks of the past without exactly address-
ing history. Instead, the past becomes a jumble of standing stones, grey autumn days,
buried artefacts and burning witches. Witchfinder General presents a fantasia based
on the career of Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s. More often, though, it points to a
past which exists outside of the historical. In The Wicker Man, the burning of Sergeant
Howie is presented as a pagan survival. Older things still are excavated; the fields them-
selves seem to spit out the skull which heralds the emergence of Angel Blake’s cult and
the demon Behemoth in The Blood on Satan’s Claw. The stone of Gronw in The Owl
Service suggests a mythic prehistory. However, because many of the genre’s key texts are
drawn from the pop cultural archive, they also suggest the moment of their production.
The look of folk horror is conjured in the grainy shades of 1970s filmstock and the kind
of production design associated with the BBC’s Play for Today. To watch Witchfinder
General is to view the fifteenth century through the lens of the 1960s. Past views of
the past are offered. Do the old ways on Summerisle emerge from the supposed sexual
freedoms of the 1970s or from a distant pagan past? Are they in fact informed by a late-
nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century sensibility, part of the long reception of Frazer’s
The Golden Bough and Murray’s notion of an old religion put forward in The Witch-
Cult in Western Europe? It is impossible to tell. Mark Fisher grumbled about the cultural
‘anachronism and inertia’ of twenty-first-century culture which simultaneously affects
‘newness’ while ‘jumbling up . . . time’ and ‘montaging . . . earlier eras’, an arrangement
‘so prevalent that it is no longer noticed’ (Fisher 2014, 6).
This jumbling effect is not confined to the experience of watching the films of the
trilogy. More widely, the phenomenon of folk horror as a new genre which is almost
entirely interested in past times and retrospective aesthetics is suggestive of Fisher’s
concern that British culture has, since the 1980s, become eerily stuck, and the

present moment is marked by its extraordinary accommodation towards the past.

More than that, the very distinction between past and present is breaking down. In
1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today. Since then, cultural
time has folded back on itself, and the impression of linear development has given
way to a strange simultaneity. (Fisher 2014, 9)

This, certainly, is the effect created by many of folk horror’s texts. Indeed, it is one
of Garner’s great themes, played out in The Owl Service and Red Shift, amongst oth-
ers, where the present is always a repetition of the past. In some of the more recently
produced folk horrors, this simultaneity is so extreme that time becomes entirely out
of joint. Midsommar revolves around a crowning of a ‘May Queen’ at the summer
solstice, which of course takes place in June; not even the seasons can be kept track of.
Folk horror tends not to pause over this muddle, and instead its audience exhibits
‘a keen sense of nostalgia’ in online discussions of the genre (Paciorek 2015, 13). This
nostalgia speaks both to generational memories particular to some of folk horror’s
audience, and to a more generalised emotional state. Bob Fischer writes of a ‘haunted

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generation’ in Britain, who grew up consuming a decidedly peculiar strain of mass

culture – where the strident experimentalism of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was
played to encourage dancing in schools, public information films featured grim spirits
gloating over drowning children, and one of the presenters of Play School could also
release a folk album entitled Hearken to the Witches Rune (Fischer 2017). For some
of folk horror’s audience, the genre recalls some of the odder qualities of the cultural
moment of their childhood.
However, as Douglas Coupland suggests, it is entirely possible to feel nostalgia for
periods and experiences that have not been lived through (qtd in Hatherley 2017, 19).
Folk horror is a symptom of a wider cultural turn, especially in Britain, which Owen
Hatherley characterises as ‘austerity nostalgia’. This is a phenomenon in contemporary
culture where the long period of ‘public modernism’ that ran from the 1930s until the
1970s is insistently recalled, becoming a ‘straightforwardly conservative longing for
security and stability in the face of hard times’ (Hatherley 2017, 18). Folk horror’s canon
is largely the product of this era, and the genre tends to fetishise the products of public
modernism – most visibly in its interest in cult BBC productions such as Robin Red-
breast (1970) and Penda’s Fen (1974), or in the Scarfolk blog’s play with the aesthetics of
public information posters and Pelican paperbacks. This return to past cultural moments
can be uncanny, but Hatherley holds that it rapidly becomes reassuring (Hatherley 2017,
31–2). Susan Sontag noted how photographs ‘turn the past into an object of tender
regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the gener-
alized pathos of looking at time past’ (Sontag 1977, 71). The same might be said of folk
horror, and particularly its aged stock, lack of digital effects, location filming and limited
budgets; even as it presents various repulsive scenarios – women are raped and burned as
a spectacle – there is something in the films’ sense of the 1960s which gives these scenes
substance and appeal beyond straightforward sleaze and schlock.
If these scenarios were presented with the sharp edges or the digital effects and grading
of contemporary filmmaking, it is difficult to imagine they would enjoy the audience or
enthusiasm that they presently do. (It is worth noting that The Witch and Midsommar
do just this, although both films are more reticent about depicting violence in explicitly
gendered and sexualised terms than the films of the trilogy.) Indeed, with some regu-
larity, folk horror enacts demands about female sexual availability which seem to be
drawn from the mid-twentieth-century male id. These range from the cheerfully saucy
to framings of sexual assault that presume it is naughtily entertaining. Even in its less
transgressive forms, the canon has anti-feminist tendencies. Women are of limited inter-
est to James. In The Owl Service, it’s never really questioned that Alison ought to put up
with Roger and Gwyn squabbling over her affections throughout the narrative, or assent
to Clive’s dominant position in the house that she legally owns. There is a significant gap
between the interests of the texts and the values that seem present in a basically progres-
sive, basically left-leaning folk horror scene that is organised by women as well as men.
Responses to key texts seem both scrambled and disarmed, missing the critical edge that
an otherwise literate audience might be expected to bring to their reading.
For Stuart Tannock, nostalgia is a structure of feeling that

invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present world.

The nostalgic subject turns to the past to construct sources of identity, agency, or
community that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the

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 316 timothy jones

present. The ‘positively evaluated’ past is approached as a source for something

now perceived to be missing; but it need not be thought of as a time of general hap-
piness, peacefulness, stability, or freedom. Invoking the past, the nostalgic subject
may be involved in escaping or evading, in critiquing, or in mobilizing to overcome
the present experience of loss of identity, lack of agency, or absence of community.
(Tannock 1995, 454)

If globalisation disrupts national and regional identity and is feared to compromise

agency and community, then, in Tannock’s account, the past becomes a resource
to evade or even resist this, a source of stabilising tradition – itself another of folk
horror’s key concerns. After all, The Wicker Man is a film about a community cleaving
to tradition and trying to maintain its way of life in a wider environment which no
longer supports it.
Reading texts through a nostalgic lens means taking a fresh approach to them,
even if that approach sets out to rediscover something thought to be lost. Folk horror’s
approach to the key texts of its canon departs significantly from earlier readings.
Earlier takes on The Wicker Man, prior to the advent of folk horror as a category, see
the appeal in Summerisle’s cheeky paganism but agree that Howie’s death unsettles
or complicates this (Hughes 2013, 59). David Pirie, one of British horror’s earliest
advocates and critics, wrote that ‘Woodward’s final bravery in the face of his own
physical suffering, and of Lee’s smug cruelty, is surely what gives the film its lasting
pathos and power. There seems to me no doubt that ultimately, the audience is on
Woodward’s side’ (Pirie 2008, 196).
Scovell reads the same scene as crucial to folk horror. He speaks of his own excite-
ment – which he takes to be shared by the rest of the cinema – and says that the

exhilaration reached its peak at the final sound of Paul Giovanni’s score, its last
horn being . . . mournful, fateful and celebratory . . . The head of the wicker man
fell into burning flame, giving way to a vibrant sun at dusk . . . The logo of the
Summerisle sun came up as did the house lights, as if it had lit up the auditorium
with its rays of the past. Perhaps we would all leave as pagans in its warm glow.
Like the jubilant villagers of Summerisle, the audience was in equal rapture, clap-
ping as if [the film’s director Robin] Hardy himself had sacrificed Woodward in a
frenzied ritual of fire for the benefit of horror cinema as [a] whole. (Scovell 2017, 3)

These two readings suggest that the film is being used in very different ways. Pirie’s
approach takes the figure of Howie seriously and assumes that the film’s audience
will agree that while Howie might not be a charismatic figure, his death by fire is
an excessive punishment for his uptightness. Pirie retains an acute sense that horror
film, naturally enough, transgresses and horrifies. Scovell is instead thrilled and very
nearly transformed by the ending. Where Pirie – obviously – sees Howie’s death as
wrong, Scovell seems to situate himself alongside the folk watching the flames – and
Woodward’s desperate performance – and understands them as a celebration. The
very tropes that Scovell uses to describe folk horror – isolation, skewed morality, an
emphasis on the landscape, and a happening or summoning – significantly shape his
response to the text, so that recognising the text’s connection to the genre becomes
the keystone in the interpretive work. The light of Summerisle seems to bleed into the

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cinema; a remote landscape is made present. Scovell takes on – or at least pretends

to take on – the values of the folk, where Howie’s death is acceptable, even joyous.
This is not quite isolation, but Scovell imagines himself as sharing the values of a mar-
ginal and unconventional community while rejecting the prudish and normative values
represented by Howie as a cop and a Christian. By watching the ritual, Scovell is
apparently swept up in it, a participant.
Seligman et al. describe the power of ritual to create ‘a subjunctive – the creation
of an order as if it were truly the case’, although this subjunctive order usually disap-
pointingly fails to align itself in a sustained way with the real (Seligman et al. 2008,
20). (As they know on Summerisle, you can perform all the fertility rituals you like;
sometimes the harvest fails despite your best endeavours.) The subjunctive created by
this approach to reading The Wicker Man suggests the near presence of a pagan past,
an appealing alternative to the contemporary world, which almost seems as if it might
really be Britain, perhaps not even that long ago. It also encourages viewers to bracket
their empathy for figures like Howie who resist the subjunctive order. This is a position
which is obviously difficult to maintain in the light of the everyday. Just as the commu-
nities that folk horror depicts are isolated – inhabiting an ‘inhospitable place because it
is in some way different from general society as a whole’ (Scovell 2017, 17) – so too is
the subjunctive that folk horror’s audience participates in. We can be pagans, but only
for a few imaginative moments.
Scovell is not alone in noting the odd pull and powers of The Wicker Man. Sharron
Kraus is less sure about the sacrifice of Howie, but nevertheless feels the film offers
such a ‘convincing portrayal of a magical world we come to imagine that magic is
real’ and that, in turn, this portrayal allows us to ‘experience the world around us
as magical’ (Kraus 2015, 18–19). Not everyone, she says, ‘will be receptive to [this]
certain kind of magic’ (Kraus 2015, 15). For Edward Parnell, the film seems to offer
consolation:

Today, we seem to have reached a moment where society is increasingly attempting

to find comfort in the simplicity and certainties of the past – Christopher Lee’s Lord
Summerisle might even say that the people have been roused from their apathy and
are returning to old gods . . . It’s tempting to wonder whether folk horror films
awaken within us cultural memories of these imagined times. (Parnell 2019, 166)

Magic, pagan worldviews, old gods are positively evaluated and return in response to
the deficiencies of the present. Yet the identity of the old gods remains unclear, and
what it means to be pagan is up for grabs. There is, of course, a neopagan community,
but this is not what folk horror depicts; it is difficult to see The Wicker Man as a seri-
ous expression of neopagan ideas (Hughes 2013, 61). Instead, the folk and their beliefs
become a site where readers and viewers can register their discontents with globalised
modernity, seeking consolation. To engage with folk horror in the terms described by
Scovell, Kraus and Parnell means placing oneself outside the present – which becomes
equated with a kind of dull or fraught normativity – and celebrating a past which is
full of magical, if sometimes violent, possibility. Folk horror loves a burning. Witches,
policemen, May Queens all need to be shovelled into the flames. There’s no real rule
over who needs to be torched; it could be some poor, marginal woman, an uptight
patriarch attempting to find a missing child, a visitor. They might come from within or

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 318 timothy jones

without the crowd of people who have gathered to watch them die. These bonfires are
suggestive of the anger and confusion that sits at the heart of folk horror’s pagan idylls.
Thousands of cars were torched across France in the riots of October and November
2005. The cases of arson were most often associated with marginalised, recent migrant
communities. In ‘The Pyres of Autumn’, Baudrillard considered the episode, which he
saw as indicative of an increasing disconnection with the imagined community of nation
amongst not just the rioters but also those with long-established French roots. The fires
illuminated a whole nation failing under the ‘sign of globalisation’, and ‘faced with a
crisis of identity and disinheritance; the fissures of the banlieues are merely symptoms
of the dissociation of a society at odds with itself’ (Baudrillard 2006, 5, 6). France was
‘a country which can no longer offer . . . a definition of national belonging’, and more
widely, ‘the West’ was losing ‘its seductive appeal in its own eyes’ (Baudrillard 2006,
7). Perhaps the same fires burn, albeit only as symbols, in folk horror – in The Wicker
Man, but also in The Witch, and Midsommar, registering a sense of disinheritance and
disaffiliation, while also providing imaginative refuge. The notion of weird, pagan com-
munities tucked away in far-flung places provides an alternative to life in the globalised
West and allows audiences to ally themselves with the folk. In the case of a film like The
Wicker Man, by allying oneself with Summerisle’s folk, it is possible to imagine oneself
as authentically, even authoritatively located and British, while dismissing what being
British actually looks and feels like in the globalised twenty-first century. It seems telling
that the vogue for folk horror should emerge in Britain at around the time of Brexit;
both phenomena register anxiety about where the nation stands in a globalised world,
and display an inward turn to a preferable – seductive, even – sense of folk, history
and tradition.
Indeed, folk horror tends to construe itself as a tradition or a revival, and as a self-
evident category; if it had not been spoken of much before Gatiss, the assumption is
that this was simply an oversight. The genre fetishises the traditional, the ‘old ways’, but
generally avoids considering what tradition might mean. Raymond Williams knew that
‘tradition is not the past, but an interpretation of the past: a selection and valuation of
ancestors, rather than a neutral record’ (Williams 2001, 96). This is exactly what folk
horror does, suggesting a group of texts which dream of a pagan past, and finding ways
to read them that allow audiences to do the same. However, selection is about what is
left out as well as what is included. Folk horror focuses on a small set of texts drawn
from a much wider, international cultural current that includes gothic, horror, ghost and
fantasy writing. Folk horror rereads this wider category so that British – English, really –
texts become central. Material associated with the horror boom of the 1970s and 1980s,
which emerged out of American publishing houses and films (Hantke 2008), is largely
passed over. This recentres the gothic as a particularly British phenomenon – perhaps
in itself a gesture towards a stable national identity. Moreover, the tropes and texts that
folk horror returns to largely exclude the gothic’s broader interests in gender, sexuality
and race – even when there are obvious connections to be made. Angela Carter’s femi-
nist folk and fairy tales in The Bloody Chamber do not much interest folk horror. Toni
Morrison’s Beloved is about haunted folk in the wake of slavery; Charles Chesnutt’s
The Conjure Woman is a collection of folktales – but texts about blackness, slavery and
Jim Crow do not feature in the conversation. These issues do not stir the hauntological
imagination, and provide little comfort. Folk horror does seem to have a passing inter-
est in male homosexuality and queerness; after all, Christopher Lee leads the parade in

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 folk horror and the globalgothic 319

drag in The Wicker Man, and Spencer worries about his attraction to men in Penda’s
Fen. Clive Barker’s tale of a gay couple encountering a weird and bloody cult in the hills,
‘In the Hills, the Cities’, is occasionally mentioned. But these are circumscribed engage-
ments. Texts and films that emphasise straight (if sadistic) desire, authored and helmed
by white Englishmen, take pride of place.
This is a point that many of folk horror’s fans might find uncomfortable. Paul
Watson of Rituals and Declarations zine wants folk horror and its associated dis-
courses to ‘explore new potential futures and progressive ideas’ (Watson 2019–20, 5).
David Southwell believes that folk horror fights against ‘agendas of cultural or ethnic
superiority’ and ‘hatred and radical authoritarian nationalism’ (Southwell 2019, 62).
Yet folk horror’s materials seem uniquely uncongenial to such a project. Its canon
evokes the past by celebrating texts that sideline identities other than straight, white
and British. Britain is almost never described in terms that recognise its long-standing
involvements in empire and globalisation. It holds this in common with much of the
material associated with both hauntology and austerity nostalgia.
For Hatherley,

the austerity-nostalgia imaginary . . . [is] ruthlessly scrubbed of any connection to

the Empire, not only of its existence and aesthetics during the period being remem-
bered and referenced, but also in terms of any cultural or political input whatsoever
into British culture from the descendants of those migrants who came from the
Empire’s peripheries. The world of Hauntology . . . is one where Britain never faced
mass migration, and our music and culture never absorbed the internationalisation,
Americanisation and de-Europeanisation that came with it. As much as austerity
nostalgia is the imaginary vision of a Britain without 1979 and Thatcher, it’s also a
Britain without 1948 and the Empire Windrush. (Hatherley 2017, 113)

Folk horror carefully curates its textual canon to enable the hauntological imagination,
to recall a past – but a past where much is strategically omitted. Folk horror not only
shrinks from a globalised present, but seeks to scrub traces of globalisation from the
subjunctive history of Britain it seems to narrate and the folk it imagines. Later texts
and films might – very occasionally – feature characters of colour, as in Midsommar,
but even then, their identity is of negligible interest when compared with the weird
European cultures they encounter. In folk horror’s canon, there are only white faces
looking on with joy and malice from the various fields and furrows. If James mentions
India in ‘“Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”’, it is a glancing nod rather than
a sustained tracing of connections. Instead, the overwhelming emphasis is on white
Britain, and the insistent representation of white Britain allows folk horror to evoke a
past which avoids those elements of history suggestive of a globalised world – including
the representation of black and Asian figures, and the legacies of empire, which folk
horror prefers to gloss over.
Folk horror’s fixation with the past is a product of the present moment. For Botting,
the contemporary gothic presents ‘signs of negativity or transgression’ that ‘become
reassessed as attractive, acceptable commodities’ (Botting 2014, 15). Folk horror’s
wicked folk and foreboding landscapes are reread as less than horrifying, and begin
to take on the role of an appealing other people and nation, offering a subjunctive,
even numinous, sense of past and place. This is an exercise in nostalgia for a past that

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 320 timothy jones

never exactly was. If globalisation engenders disaffiliation and unbelonging, then folk
horror promises another Britain and a concomitant sense of Britishness that might
be embraced. As Tannock argues, nostalgia can be a form of ‘continuity’ that might
‘replenish a sense of self, of participation, of empowerment, belonging, righteousness
or justification, direction’ (Tannock 1995, 456). It might even offer ‘a deferral of, and
an alternative to, the . . . everyday world of the present’ (Tannock 1995, 459). This
tends to reassert mid-twentieth-century habits of representation so that women are
subject to violence or at least the demands of the male gaze, and people of colour are
removed from the British landscape entirely in order to present it as stable, settled and
meaningfully connected to tradition. The folk revival itself was ‘presented as a direct
and urgent response to a cultural crisis’ precipitated by modernity and industrialisa-
tion (Boyes 1993, 1). Folk horror, a newly minted tradition but doubly retrospective,
is a hauntological recovery of the twentieth-century folk revival as much as it is a
recovery of the materials the revival returned to. The earlier response to the crisis of
industrialisation is re-employed to navigate the crisis of globalisation. If, for some
of folk horror’s readers, this produces a sense of the past which is uncritical, fabri-
cated and overly comfortable, an irony remains. Brexit, like the genre, responds to
globalisation with anxious insularity, and is especially concerned by the presence and
influence of outsiders in the United Kingdom – whether they are refugees, migrants or
the European Union’s bureaucrats. Folk horror’s key texts at least remind us that it is
dangerous to be an outsider, stuck on the margins of an inward-looking culture that
gazes on you with suspicion. A warning to the curious, indeed.

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 21

Brexit Gothic
Roger Luckhurst

T he narrow vote in favour of the UK leaving the European Union in June 2016
marked a seismic shift in British political life. The challenge is to understand the
vote as part of a wider cultural ecology, and this is a chapter about how gothic texts
helped form and reflect on that cultural shift. Jackson Batchelor’s film Monstrous
Disunion (2021) makes Brexit and horror converge explicitly. In this low-budget
shocker, a family reunion fractures around arguments over whether Britain should
leave or remain in the European Union. This devolves into animalistic violence and
then into an outbreak of something much worse. The film is a blunt-force satire,
though, and this chapter is focused on less explicit conjunctures. Instead I want to
explore how we might read the insistent coupling together of the political, economic
and cultural rupture in the years running up to the 2016 Brexit vote with the gothic
mode in British (or rather primarily English) culture.
Scholars of the gothic often appeal to the ‘anxiety model’ to legitimate the social rel-
evance of the genre, although there has been some interrogation of this default (Baldick
and Mighall 2012). My aim is not to read gothic narratives or tropes as neat allegories
of a riven social context. Instead, somewhat after Fredric Jameson’s historicism, it is
to observe certain homologies within a ‘common objective situation’ that will produce
‘many varied responses’ rather than a singular line (Jameson 1984, 178). The gothic,
brooding on historical legacies and ambivalent inheritances, and always with a height-
ened emotional tenor, is a cultural form that articulates well a ‘structure of feeling’,
that experiential and affective conjuncture that Raymond Williams suggested might
carry all ‘the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties’
of a particular moment (Williams 1977, 129). Meanwhile, Kristian Shaw (2018) and
Dulcie Everitt (2021) have argued for a literature of Brexit, a ‘BrexLit’, to be a useful
seismograph for Britain’s reimagined community after 2016. Brexit Gothic, if such a
thing exists, would never be reducible to a single stance (reactionary or subversive), but
is likely to be encountered as a diffuse and conflicted mode, perhaps most articulate
about the conditions that produced Brexit when it seems least likely to be addressing it.
I initially want to establish the insistent discursive coupling of Brexit and the gothic.
Then I will use as starting points three phrases that have been reduced to the status
of (un)dead metaphors in Brexit debates to examine different aspects of this putative
gothic form. First, ‘Sunlit Uplands’ will focus on the use of landscape to invoke a cer-
tain Englishness in Brexit discourse, and the complex relation of the folk horror revival
of the 2010s to this discourse. Second, ‘An Act of Self-Harm’ will explore the psychic
formation of masochism in visions of both Brexit and horror. And finally, ‘Vassal State’
will examine the faux-medieval fantasies of regained English liberty in pro-Brexit
discourse alongside the abject visions of early modern ‘bare life’ in the gothic.

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Brexit, Gothicised
There are by now many accounts of the political trajectory that led to the referendum
in Britain on 23 June 2016 in which, by a narrow margin of 600,000 votes, a 51.8 per
cent majority of those who voted, signalled their wish to leave the European Union
(data cited from O’Rourke 2018). It was a surprise result in a surprise referendum,
which had been only casually promised by David Cameron before the 2015 parlia-
mentary elections because he had not expected his Conservatives to win an outright
majority. Cameron promptly resigned the day after the vote to spend more time in
his shed in the Cotswolds and to conduct some dubious financial lobbying. He left
behind a political vacuum. A state of paralysis between Leave and Remain, and also
between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ Brexit factions, was worsened in 2017 with a snap elec-
tion called by Cameron’s hapless successor Theresa May, which left the House of
Commons hung between increasingly extreme positions and unstable alliances. This
was only resolved in the decisive majority won by Boris Johnson in December 2019, a
victory of a coalition of ardent Leavers, English nationalists and right-wing libertarians
led by a populist opportunist. Political scientists have suggested a crucial reorientation
of the electorate around new conservative ethnocentric identities that was signalled by
the Brexit vote also prompted this landslide (Sobolewska and Ford 2020).
After the election, fought on the mantra ‘Get Brexit Done’, British negotiators
stumbled through rounds of talks with the EU, unable to resolve competing ten-
sions on their own right flank, and eventually signed a rudimentary exit deal late in
2020, narrowly focused on trading goods only, and outside the single market and
customs union. On 1 January 2021, Britain left the EU. A spirited, entrepreneurial
‘Global Britain’ was promised in its wake, the ardent Leaver Iain Duncan Smith
promising a Britain ‘out there buccaneering, trading, dominating the world again’
(Goodwin 2021).
It is worth remembering how recent and shallow Britain’s integration with the
European Union has been. The first pan-European bodies emerged in 1951 around coal
and steel production, which the British government contemptuously refused to join.
Yet the true costs of the Second World War left Britain in serious decline relative to the
post-war booms in France and Germany (a post-1945 declinist narrative about ‘losing
the peace’ is central to some strands of British Conservatism, most strongly associated
with the influential historian, much favoured by Margaret Thatcher, Correlli Barnett).
The dismantling of empire was an integral part of this narrative of post-war decline.
The Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan agonised over a belated request to
join in 1961. But entry was refused then, and again in 1967 (it was feared, quite accu-
rately, that Britain would be a disruptive and destabilising presence within Europe).
However, the British parliament voted to join in 1971, despite substantial rebellions,
in a brief moment of Europhiliac rule under Ted Heath. Britain joined the European
Communities in 1973; the first referendum on whether to leave, though, was held in
1975. In the 1980s, although Thatcher is remembered as the archetypal Eurosceptic,
it was she and her allies who helped to forge the unified single market on neoliberal
economic principles. Thatcher’s ideological hardening was against a perceived creep
of supranational control by European institutions and alarm at the reunification of
Germany (a residual Second World War sentiment still commonly mobilised in British
political culture). She declared her outright hostility to EU political convergence in her
1988 speech in Bruges. Nevertheless, even with a growing Eurosceptic wing, it was the

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Conservatives again who took Britain into the new European Union in 1993, albeit
with substantial opt-outs.
The right hardened opposition to the EU ‘superstate’ initially around the loss of
national sovereignty and the threat of interference in elements of legal and social policy.
But they began to focus relentlessly on immigration after the major expansion of EU
member states (which grew to twenty-eight nations by 2008). The ‘freedom of move-
ment’ from new accession states in the former Eastern Europe was phased in by leading
Western European nations, but not by the British government under Tony Blair, which
was willing to let the labour market find its own equilibrium just as the 2008 global
economic crash hit. In a major depression, narratives of influx and invasion from the
East motored the British tabloid press and pushed the marginal right-wing nativist party,
the UK Independence Party, into the political mainstream. The refugee crisis engulfing
the collapse of Libya and the Syrian war reached its apotheosis in the summer of 2015,
with hundreds of thousands of people seeking asylum in ‘Fortress Europe’ through Italy
and Greece. The appeal of nationalists, free market libertarians and racist populists grew
when combined with the structural inequalities across the EU that had been worsened
by globalisation and the neoliberal logic imposed on debtor states such as Greece. These
conditions allowed the shallow and forever ambivalent English relationship to the EU to
be pushed towards popular revolt by a skilful manipulation of conventional and social
media in the 2016 Leave campaign. The Remain camp produced pallid and lukewarm
arguments about economic security and aversion to change, backed with only gestural
concessions gained by Cameron from the EU. The Labour opposition was split, with
ardent Europeans temporarily eclipsed under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn (leader
of the party 2015–19), who shared the long history of leftist Euroscepticism stretching
back to Michael Foot and Tony Benn in the 1970s. It was easy to portray Remain as the
Establishment position acting in defence of an ugly and austere status quo that rewarded
an educated elite and immiserated the masses.
Britain had voted to remain in the 1975 referendum only by overturning an initial
majority in favour of leaving. The debates of 2016 were conducted in a space a very
long way from Habermas’s idealised vision of Britain’s rational discourse in its ‘bour-
geois public sphere’. Instead, it was a horrorshow in which gothic monstrosity was
evoked, particularly by the mendacious populists of the Leave campaign, in a bitter
and irreconcilable dispute.
Fintan O’Toole, the Irish journalist, wrote an excellent account of the English men-
tality that resulted in Brexit in his 2018 study Heroic Failure. It is an English national-
ism because – importantly – the populations of Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to
Remain, yet were soon reminded that they still bore the imperial yoke of Westminster.
The ‘Irish problem’ – the new land border between Great Britain and the EU – has been
a continual exasperating thorn in idealised post-Brexit visions, regularly scuttling what
was notoriously described by the Conservative MP Liam Fox in 2017 as ‘the easiest deal
in history’ (Weaver 2017). A bemused European, O’Toole remarks that ‘in the English
reactionary imagination dystopian fantasy is indistinguishable from reality’ (O’Toole
2018, 34). Pro-Brexit discourse erases much of the thirty years of post-1945 welfarist,
social democratic consensus to invoke instead the Battle of Britain and Churchillian
rhetoric of lonely defiance against European fascism. Boris Johnson published his biog-
raphy of Churchill in 2014, which turned obsessively on his hero’s lone stance against
appeasers and advocates of surrender in May 1940 – exactly the same historical moment

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chosen by Joe Wright’s biopic Darkest Hour, which became one of the most successful
box office hits in Britain of 2018. There was a welcome embrace – if it came to it – of the
necessary hardship and austerity of leaving fascist Europe behind. This is very similar to
the nostalgic ethos examined by Owen Hatherley in his Ministry of Nostalgia, a study
of the ‘austerity chic’ that first emerged after the 2008 banking crisis, recycling cultural
markers of the 1940s and the ubiquitous ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ slogan borrowed
from a (never used) Second World War propaganda poster (Hatherley 2016). Against
the dark portents from across the English Channel, there was derring-do defiance, and
a deployment of what Robert Eaglestone calls ‘cruel nostalgia’ about the Second World
War (Eaglestone 2018). Jon Stratton suggested Brexit was a kind of compulsive repeti-
tion of the cultural trauma around threat of invasion that peaked in 1940.
O’Toole has constant recourse to gothic or horror tropes throughout Heroic Failure.
‘Perhaps Empires don’t end when you think they do,’ he muses. ‘Perhaps they have a
final moment of zombie existence. [Brexit] may be the last stage of imperialism – having
appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of
those it has oppressed’ (O’Toole 2018, 21; see also 44). Elsewhere, O’Toole compares
Britain to ‘the body of Frankenstein’s monster: it can be animated only by the galvanic
shock of invasion’ and also suggests Brexiters are necromancers who ‘end up recoiling
in horror from the spectre they themselves summoned’ (O’Toole 2018, 39, 94). Figuring
the European Union as a monster was a familiar rhetorical device in pro-Brexit discourse
too. The alt-right Steve Bannon spoke of driving a stake through the ‘vampire’ of the EU
in the 2018 elections, leaning on centuries of monstering those from across the border in
European folklore (Frakes 2018).
In a more precise and sustained evocation of the gothic, Alex Niven’s reflection on
the condition of England and English nationalism in New Model Island (2019) begins
with the Alton Towers theme park as the symbolic centre of England. This is not for
‘Disneyfication’ or its Baudrillardian destiny as a simulacrum. Rather, it is because at
the core of the park lies the overlooked and largely ruined Gothic Revival building,
the actual ‘Alton Towers’ that was thrown up in the early nineteenth century as the
family seat of the Earls of Shrewsbury. Now largely stripped of its Puginesque Gothic
Revival elements, it houses instead ‘Hex – The Legend of the Towers’, which evokes a
historical curse, the tale of an aristocratic family entrapped by an inescapable doom.
To Niven, the construct of English nationalism is intrinsically gothic, and in this sense
Brexit fits neatly inside this account. He evokes the folk horror revival of the 2010s
and the fascination of some cultural critics with psychogeography and hauntology as
possibly oppositional levers (of which more later), but ultimately remains suspicious
of the political efficacy of this ‘hinterland of lonely walks, congealed scholarship and
laundered supernatural kicks’ (Niven 2019, 53).
Although Niven does not explore the underpinnings of the nineteenth-century
Gothic Revival, he is right to intuit its links to English nationalism. John Carter, one
of England’s first architectural journalists, continually pushed the Gothic as ‘our
National Architecture’ from his first writings in the 1770s (cited in Crook 1995, 42).
Carter despised Greek and Roman neoclassicism, denounced Christopher Wren’s
St Paul’s in London as ‘heathenised’ (Crook 1995, 4), and spouted particular vitriol at
bastard continental (and suspiciously Catholic) styles. This became shriller during the
French Revolution and the subsequent war with France, when ‘blessed England’ stood
as a lonely bulwark against the ‘terror and destruction’ across the Channel (Crook

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1995, 8). Since Carter thought that ‘Gothic’ as a term was ‘a vulgar epithet . . . given
to hold up to shame our ancient English architecture’, he simply advocated fusing the
Gothic with ‘English’ (Crook 1995, 97).
The revival that followed carried more complex and contradictory meanings than
this, obviously, but the notion that the pointed arch evoked an idealised medieval
fantasy England (for Carter, for Pugin, for Ruskin and for William Morris), as against
fallen European models, was integral to the movement. It reached its political apotheo-
sis in the perpendicular Gothic Revival of the Palace of Westminster, the new Houses
of Parliament, designed by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin and built between 1840
and 1876. It embodies Britain’s anti-Revolutionary settlement and the continuities of
solemn national tradition.
It is a neat irony that Carter’s nativist claims of English roots were completely wrong.
The first Gothic church is now agreed to be the French cathedral St Denis (completed in
1144), and pointed arches to have derived from the Islamic architecture of the Middle
East (Diana Darke’s revisionist history of this transnational origin of the Gothic style is
called Stealing from the Saracens). The national purity of the Gothic is actually a display
of hybridity and cosmopolitanism – just as the first rash of terror novels in the eighteenth
century that came to be called ‘gothic romances’ are marked by intensive exchanges,
translations and transformations between English, French and German texts. It is these
deep roots, marked by misrecognition and contradiction, that make the gothic an excel-
lent vehicle for contemplations of cultural configurations of Brexit.

‘Sunlit Uplands’
In May 2016, a month before the referendum, Boris Johnson tried to offer the ratio-
nale for his opportunistic decision to join the Vote Leave campaign. A ‘magic door’
had opened with the referendum, he said. ‘We can see the sunlit meadows beyond. I
believe we would be mad not to take this once in a lifetime chance to walk through
that door because the truth is it is not we who have changed. It is the EU that has
changed out of all recognition’ (Johnson 2016).
Typically slipshod, Johnson was slightly misquoting his hero Winston Churchill. In
the famous ‘Finest Hour’ speech in 1940, Churchill spoke of a choice between ‘a new
Dark Ages’ and the world moving ‘forward into broad, sunlit uplands’. Perhaps Johnson
had also forgotten that the full sentence ran: ‘If we can stand up to [Hitler], all Europe
may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.’ In
a bid for the vacant leadership after Cameron’s resignation, the hopeless Tory contender
Andrea Leadsom silently corrected Johnson’s lazy evocation. In a speech announcing
her ill-fated run for office, she again promised post-Brexit ‘sunlit uplands’ (Leadsom
2016). The phrase, resonating with accumulated wartime emergency hopes and prom-
ises, became embedded in Leave discourse, and evoked by sardonic Remainers at every
downward recalibration of the glories that had been promised by the Leave campaign.
What ‘sunlit uplands’ conjured was a certain pastoral vision of England, thought
irreparably lost but now glimpsed again through a break in the storm clouds, offering the
shimmering vision of a national revival. It was the South Downs, picturesque sleepy vil-
lages and the white cliffs of Dover. It was Dame Vera Lynn, fearless plucky Spitfire pilots
(although not the Polish ones), and the Dunkirk retreat recast as a triumph (Christopher
Nolan’s film Dunkirk, although in production before the referendum, appeared right on

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time in 2017 and was praised by Nigel Farage). The white cliffs were the emblematic
wall used in Conservative and UKIP discourse that holds back the pollutants of Europe
or relentless invasion by global migrants.
The pastoral is intrinsically melancholic, Raymond Williams argued in The Country
and the City (1973), because it is always premised on living after a Golden Age.
Williams suggests that England is particularly susceptible to this melancholia, due to
the specific form of its agrarian capitalism and its violent enclosures, as well as an
industrial revolution that overthrew a feudal structuring of rural life in a matter of
decades. Melancholic pastoralism is a key mode of late imperial English nationalism.
Aristocratic and Tory organicism, a belief that a natural order underpins political
power, was the ideology of the imperial landowner class of the nineteenth century,
evidenced in the rural writings of Rider Haggard all the way to fascist-leaning ‘blood
and soil’ evocations in the 1930s. The pro-Nazi landowner Gerard Wallop (Viscount
Lymington, later the Earl of Portsmouth) delivered a radio talk in 1947 called ‘The
Anatomy of Rural Melancholy’, arguing that the ‘false values’ of ‘modern Progress’
could be countered with a return to feudal agrarianism and ‘the rhythmic discipline
of soil and season’ (Wallop 1947, 7, 8). This kind of language resurfaced in Roger
Scruton’s England: An Elegy, in which a cynical, cosmopolitan and urban culture has
become detached from English rural life and landscape so that, ‘sensing that they no
longer truly belong in the land which made them, they have lost their self-confidence as
a people’ (Scruton 2001, 243). The concept of English heritage often erases the labour
of the land for a static picturesque vision of rural stability and unchangingness, which
becomes a repository of national identity. Landscape speaks as a ‘storied ground’,
where cultural forms mediate the apprehension of territory (Readman 2018).
From a leftist stance, this investment in landscape is what the critic Paul Gilroy
has called the ‘cultural pathology’ of ‘post-imperial melancholy’, which he considers
‘the morbid core of England and Englishness in remorseless decline, the same strain
that feeds interminable and increasingly desperate speculations about the content and
character of the shrinking culture that makes England distinctive’ (Gilroy 1999, 16;
see also Gilroy 2004). This is a more technical evocation of melancholia as a psycho-
logical condition premised on, as Freud frames it, a denial of any loss and a refusal of
reality-testing, in which the lost beloved is fully incorporated into the psyche only to
behave ‘like an open wound . . . draining to itself cathectic energies . . . from all direc-
tions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished’ (Freud 1984, 262). All
that dominates the melancholic is the hallucinated lost object, protected at any cost,
even to the point of self-destruction. This perhaps explains the virulent reaction on the
right to the National Trust’s ‘Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism
and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic
Slavery’, released in 2020. The researchers who wrote the report were threatened with
defunding because they had abused the pristinely preserved idealised object, bathed in
early autumn mists and mellow fruitfulness.
In an elaboration of the concept of post-imperial melancholy, Ian Baucom reflects
that the ‘very constancy’ of this structure of feeling in English culture ‘suggests that in
some strange way to be English is, often, to be a member of the cult of the dead, or, at
the very least, a member of a cult of ruin’ (Baucom 1999, 175). Although for Baucom
this presages a discussion of V. S. Naipaul’s canonical novel The Enigma of Arrival,
this leads us back very directly into the gothic labyrinth.

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Perhaps the most striking trend in British gothic of this era was ‘folk horror’, in
which elements of urban modernity are overcome by a resurgence of the rural ‘old
ways’, as pre-modern pagan or occult beliefs are discovered surviving in the eerie
landscapes and backwaters of Britain. Folk horror is typically used to group the British
horror films Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The
Wicker Man (1973), as well as a host of 1970s ‘weird’ novels, TV plays and children’s
shows, but it is important to remember that it was only grouped and named under this
name from about 2010 onwards, through the excavations of Andy Paciorek and Adam
Scovell and others. This was accompanied by a swathe of texts across media that were
grouped in the 2010s under the loose banner of a folk horror revival: Ben Wheatley’s
films Kill List (2011), A Field in England (2013) and In the Earth (2021), or a trail
of weird rural horrors such as Woke Wood (2009) or The Borderlands (2014), or
urban naifs dealt nasty deaths in ancient forests, as in Dog Soldiers (2002), The Ritual
(2017) or Calibre (2018). This folk horror sensibility crept into avant-garde cinema, in
Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves (2015), Ben Rivers’ A Spell to Ward off the Darkness
(2013) and Paul Wright’s Arcadia (2017), the last of these an ethnographic collection
of peculiar and unnerving folk rituals and festivals spliced together from British Film
Institute archives. There were distinctly localised evocations of places tinged with the
uncanny from hidden traumas in the Somerset of The Levelling (2016) or the Cornish
fishing village angry about tourist incomers in Bait (2019). A distinctly and self-consciously
northern gothic began to emerge about the same time in fiction, with Andrew Michael
Hurley’s The Loney (2014) and his subsequent works Devil’s Day (2017) and Starve
Acre (2019) all situated in the north-west, as is Jenn Ashworth’s Fell (2016). The author
Benjamin Myers, who used the Yorkshire moors in a series of brutal historical fictions
including Beastings (2014) and The Gallows Pole (2017) and non-fiction evocations of
Cragg Vale in Under the Rock: The Poetry of a Place (2018), has argued for a distinctly
northern and gothic sensibility, which might stretch to include Fiona Mozley’s Yorkshire in
her novel Elmet (2017) or Francine Toon’s rural Scottish gothic from 2019 Pine (see Sethi
2020). Regional gothics have also emerged in fiction around the fenlands in East Anglia
or the local legends of Devon and Cornwall (Packham 2019; Krzywinska and Heholt
2022). In the south-east, Gary Budden’s Hollow Shores (2017) explores the crumbling
transitional territories of the Kent coast. Budden has written forcefully against the appro-
priations of these landscapes by right-wing nationalists deploying a very different concep-
tion of das Volk, trying to appeal to a notion of ‘landscape punk’ to disrupt entrapment in
nationalist melancholia (Budden 2017). A similar mode is pursued in Tom Bolton’s long
walk around the Essex coastline, recounted in Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast
(2018). The psychogeographers who indulge in ‘weird walks’ through eerie landscapes,
saturated in the language of haunting, are integral to this cultural formation, as Merlin
Coverley has noted (2020).
This grouping includes the eerie music of the Ghost Box collective, or the frac-
tured after-dark beats of Burial, or English Heretic, or The Caretaker. It stretches to
the quasi-fictive evocations of vanished public and corporate culture of the 1970s
by Scarfolk Council or the Hookland groupings. Many owe the political energies of
this gothic mode to the work of Mark Fisher, the co-founder of first Zero and then
Repeater Books which re-energised political cultural studies. In 2009 Fisher published
Capitalist Realism, and then produced a series of ‘hauntological’ studies, seeking out
fugitive echoes of utopian futures cancelled by the neoliberal turn after 1979. His

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collection of essays and blog posts, Ghosts of My Life (2013), and his long essay The
Weird and the Eerie (2016) gave intellectual underpinning to these recalcitrant dérives
though English landscapes.
Much of the cultural production I’ve listed here was not necessarily about Brexit
as such, but it clearly shared that ‘common objective situation’. A key question for the
critic must turn on how to read these often elliptical evocations of uneasy affects, eerie
hauntings and spectral survivals. Does the revival of 1970s folk horror act as a lever
against the shiny dream-world of the new global capitalist formations in place since
1979? This was a position adopted by Walter Benjamin on the virtues of Surrealism
in the 1920s. For him, the group are ‘the first to perceive the revolutionary energies
that appear in the “outmoded”’. ‘They bring’, he concluded, ‘the immense forces of
“atmosphere” concealed in things to the point of explosion’ (Benjamin 1985, 229). So
might the folk horror revival be a counter-nostalgia, the English landscape rendered
‘unquiet’ (to use Christopher Neve’s term)? Might there be a subversive dark ecology
birthed from the same landscapes that sustain the sentiments of English nationalism
(Morton 2016)? Could a recalcitrant paganism lever against the claims of Anglican-
ism to control the meanings of the English landscape? The risk must always be that in
the routinisation of ‘folk horror’ into familiar narratives and tropes, it might fall back
into an uncritical mobilisation of the same potent imagery that enamours the right.
This ambivalence, as I’ve tried to show, is at the core of the English gothic from its
very origins.

‘An Act of Self-Harm’

There are hundreds of newspaper headlines and opinion pieces that describe Brexit
as an ‘act of self-harm’ so its first use in this context is hard to track, but one of its
earliest appearances was in a speech by David Cameron in April 2016, suggesting a
vote in favour of leaving the EU would be ‘an act of political and economic self-harm’
(‘David Cameron’ 2016). It was repeated by significant European figures over the
years, including the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and
the Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadker. ‘The “self-harm” metaphor has been particularly
prevalent,’ The Psychologist journal noted in an interview with Dr Brian Hughes,
author of The Psychology of Brexit (Smith 2019). If Hughes worried about the dead
metaphor self-harm had become, I want to revive this corpse for one last examination,
because it takes us from melancholia to another critical element of the Brexit structure
of feeling: masochism.
Peter Steggals’ investigation of the psychiatric and cultural ecologies in which ‘self-
harm’ emerged suggests that the 1990s offered several spectacles that pushed it into
public consciousness: the singer Richey Edwards carving 4REAL into his arm with a
razor blade for an interview with New Musical Express in 1991; Kurt Cobain’s suicide
in 1994; Princess Diana confessing to cutting herself as a way of mastering her misery in
a television interview in 1995. The term was a move away from the melodramatic ‘self-
mutilation’, and is now housed under the diagnostic category ‘nonsuicidal self-injury’.
For Steggals, the act of self-harm has become ‘a powerful and evocative crystallisation of
a whole way of thinking about, experiencing and expressing feelings of personal distress,
social estrangement and emotional pain that bears a peculiar resonance with late-modern
“Western” society’ (Steggals 2015, 2). It is usually understood as a conflicted psychic

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compulsion and defence on an economic model of pressure that builds and is released
by harm to the skin, which addresses a feeling of being flooded and overwhelmed by
retaking control for oneself and ritualising the administration of pain. It is therefore ‘a
technique for asserting the boundaries of the self against the disturbing world beyond’
(Steggals 2015, 140). But this act of taking control is also, Fiona Gardner suggests, a self-
defeating monument to ‘enslavement’ to the forces that prompt this desperate act ‘to cut
the ties that so tightly bound’ the self-harmer (Gardner 2001, 12). Self-harm is driven by
the compulsion to repeat, rehearsing the breach and the management of the breach over
and over again.
The puzzle of self-harm was formulated by Freud as ‘the economic problem of
masochism’: why do some actively seek pain, when the psyche ought to follow the
pleasure principle? In his later work, after theorising the ‘death drive’, Freud identified
something beyond ‘erotogenic’ masochism, or a problematic account of an always-
passive ‘feminine’ masochism, and instead explored a third type: moral masochism.
In this version, ‘the suffering itself is what most matters’ (Freud 1995, 279). It is
a dysfunction of the superego in Freud’s theorisation, where ‘in order to provoke
punishment . . . the masochist must do what is inexpedient, must act against his [sic]
own interests, must ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world and must,
perhaps, destroy his own existence’. In her introduction to Freud’s paper, Margaret Hanly
defines moral masochism as ‘an organized and fixed set of attitudes to self and to others
involving a relationship which allows for a permanent sense of injustice, or constant com-
plaints concerning the object’s failure to give enough, or endless sufferings experienced at
the hands of the object in some other way’ (Freud 1995, 269).
It risks triteness to see the shape of pro-Brexit politics in these formulations (although
it’s worth recalling that Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), from which we derive
the term ‘masochism’, made European political border elements central to its erotic
economy). As the vision of sunlit uplands receded quickly after the referendum, there
were some remarkable statements about the willingness to accept economic pain in
order to secure the boundaries of a liberated Britain again, ‘taking back control’ as the
slogan ran. In the notorious Conservative policy document Britannia Unchained, writ-
ten in 2012 by five minor back-benchers who have since become post-Brexit ministers,
the book opens with a chapter called ‘The Chains’ and is a vision of Britain steeped in
sadomasochistic imagery, pinned to the rack of EU regulation (Kwarteng et al. 2012). A
YouGov poll in August 2017 suggested 61 per cent of Leave voters were still committed
to the project in spite of the economic harm and unemployment it would probably pro-
duce (Brinded 2017). Pain was the price of liberty, it was repeatedly said. Meanwhile,
the Tory education minister, Gavin Williamson, was pictured during a major examina-
tions crisis in his office with a whip on his table, and Charles Moore, the former Daily
Telegraph editor and Thatcher biographer, wrote several columns in which he looked
forward to food shortages, rationing, growing his own vegetables, and even a spot of
smuggling by Dunkirk-inspired little boats to flout EU tariff rules, fondly recalling an
era of poverty and austerity during and after the Second World War that he had never
actually lived through (Goodwin 2020).
Fintan O’Toole uses a loose sense of masochism as his overarching model for
understanding the British ruling class that advocated Brexit in Heroic Failure. A
key reference point for O’Toole is the violently sadistic, colonial-era father and his
damaged, masochistic son in Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, published

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between 1992 and 2014, and serialised on television in 2018. The self-harm of Brexit
is slotted alongside post-imperial melancholy as an embrace of glorious failure in a
long tradition which includes the suicidal charge of the Light Brigade, the defeat at
Isandlwana in 1879 and the glorious sacrificial death of General Gordon in Khartoum
in 1885, all three events endlessly mythologised yet entirely self-inflicted British Army
disasters. EU migrant invasion fantasies work precisely to encourage the repeated cut-
ting that helps recover an English identity on its scarred and hardened borders which
it would otherwise lose in being ‘swamped’ (in the racist language of UKIP) by alien
forces. There are also Remain ‘saboteurs’ and ‘enemies of the people’ who work as a
fifth column to undermine this fragile, wounded border from within. Masochism can
quickly flip to ‘sadopopulism’ (coined by Timothy Snyder for the American political
sphere during Trump’s presidency). This mode denounces all but the true believers,
and enforces a ‘hostile environment’ to maintain the security of the nation’s border.
Under Priti Patel as Home Secretary after 2019, there was a plan to use warships to
push back migrant boats crossing the Channel, a policy declared illegal by those Patel
sneeringly dismissed as ‘activist’ lawyers and saboteurs. Much of this logic could be
productively read inside Didier Anzieu’s notion of the ‘skin-ego’, the primary border
that consolidates the self, but which is forever at the risk of intrusion or breach and
thus dissolution (Anzieu 2016).
Masochism also features, of course, in many accounts of the economy of the horror
film. From Laura Mulvey’s early insistence on the sadism of the male gaze, exemplified
by the punitive sexual horror of the slasher film, subsequent generations of critics have
explored the more ambivalent identification of the viewer, perversely seeking unpleasure,
inside the masochistic pole (Creed 1993; Briefel 2005). The assault of the cinematic image
was never about sadistic mastery, Steven Shaviro argued, but ‘a forced ecstatic abjection
before the image’ where the masochist revels ‘in my bondage to the image’ (Shaviro 1993,
24). Shaviro saw horror film as central to theorising this position. This masochism turned
even nastier with the rise of ‘torture porn’ at the turn of the millennium, the kind of body
horror that is ‘a visceral fantasy of vulnerability’, but therefore also ‘the fictional possibil-
ity of empathizing with fictional pain at a safe remove’ (Reyes 2014, 126). Watching this
genre in the context of Brexit masochism opens a whole range of meanings in films that
might never have intended to carry these subtextual resonances.
Retrospectively, the quaint Englishness of the first two Hellraiser films (1987–88),
shot, very cheaply, in North London suburbs, gives an extra dimension to the ecstatic
promise of the scarification and the relentless wounding of the surface of the skin
depicted in those who seek their most forbidden desires in the franchise. The pains
and pleasures of hell are unleashed on the skin through an oriental puzzle box, later
in the series named the ‘Lament Configuration’ – a melancholy, postcolonial thing.
But they erupt in these first films into a world of drab semi-detached English Edward-
ian houses and abandoned docklands, bouffant hair and shoulder pads. At that time,
the Metropolitan Police (with the approval of Thatcher’s government) was pursuing
a prosecution intended to outlaw consensual BDSM practices between gay men (the
so-called ‘Operation Spanner’ case). And since Thatcher’s appeal to right-wing men
was openly figured in terms of a sexualised dynamic of domination and submission,
Hellraiser reads like a return of the Thatcherite repressed.
By the time of Brexit, when the BDSM fantasies of Fifty Shades of Grey dominated
the bestseller charts, English horror cinema had imbibed the splatter visuals of the

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‘torture porn’ aesthetic. This nasty and nihilistic genre focuses without pity on the
rending of the skin and the ruination of the skin-ego. Fifteen years on, the Europhobic
premise of Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005) fundamentally shifts meaning in our new dispen-
sation. American backpackers are tempted from the safe and sanctioned naughtiness
of Amsterdam further east, to the new frontier in Slovakia, where Russian gangster-
capitalists arrange for the wealthy global elite to torture and kill anyone they please
for the right price. It takes place in the shattered ruins of socialist factories, a defeated
economic model. Here, an American body is – of course – worth more than twice that
of a European. This is a vision of Anglo-Saxon masochism – since we are expected to
identify with the white, privileged American bros lured into this victim position. Euro-
pean sadism, saturated in Nazi and neo-Nazi or post-Communist violence, lies barely
hidden beneath the touristic surface of the continent. The film now reads like a fevered
fantasy of alt-right Euro-conspiracy, or the vision of federalist Europe as roiling with
the ‘tribulations’ that mark the arrival of the Antichrist (the way some American pre-
millennialist evangelical discourse commonly figures the institutions of the EU (see
Knowles 2018)). Mark Steven has fruitfully examined torture porn’s elision with the
international finance capital that collapsed in 2008, arguing that ‘spectacular scenes
of gore and their narrative articulation correspond to the structures of seemingly post-
industrial finance’ (Steven 2017, 132). They can be updated to the decade of Brexit
too. The injury details and mutilations typical of Ben Wheatley’s horror fiction might
figure here. Although Neil Asher in Cinema and Brexit (2021) considers Wheatley’s
Sightseers (2012) as the text most redolent of Brexit ressentiment, I think the disturb-
ing sadomasochism of Kill List, in which one victim whispers a fervent ‘thank you’ as
his body is mutilated with a hammer, is closer to this framework.
The full resonances of torture porn in relation to Brexit Gothic are even clearer
when brought quickly into dialogue with our last dead metaphor, vassalage.

‘A Vassal State’
From the middle of 2017, Tory supporters of a hard Brexit began to use another short-
hand term: vassal state. In the midst of a vicious factional Conservative Party struggle
over the direction of Brexit negotiations, both Boris Johnson and the parodic Tory
toff Jacob Rees-Mogg declared Theresa May’s proposals for agreement with the EU as
untenable, leaving Britain in a state of vassalage. It is a term that evokes a pre-modern
legal form, more typical of feudal societies, in which a ‘vassal’ (or ‘servant’) state is left
in a subordinate position to a suzerain state or imperial centre, their political condi-
tion and trading status (and the tribute they pay) usually determined by the suzerain.
It survived into the modern world typically as the status of a dependent colony of an
empire. For hard-liners, a soft Brexit ‘alignment’ with the EU, to allow for a single
market and a customs union, surrendered sovereignty to hated supranational arbiters,
such as the European Court of Justice. In the language of Martin Home, legal advisor
to the hard-line Brexit-supporting European Research Group, May’s proposals led to
‘a Black Hole Brexit where the UK is stuck permanently as a Vassal State in the EU’s
legal and regulatory tarpit’ (cited in Morgan 2020).
Both Johnson and Rees-Mogg fancy themselves historians, but hyperbole always
outruns their invocations of precedent. Rees-Mogg declared May’s proposals in July
2018 as ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in
1200’ (cited in Perring 2018). Many hard-liners also started wildly evoking the Magna

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 brexit gothic 333

Carta of 1215 as an emblematic British defiance of arbitrary, tyrannical power. Brexit

‘is not’, the historian Christopher Kissane sighed after four years of this discourse,
‘1939, 1914, 1776, 1689, 1534 or 1066 again’ (Kissane 2020). Yet faux medievalism
was everywhere, pre- and post-Brexit, from the TV series Merlin (2008–12) to Guy
Ritchie’s longing for proper English leadership, King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword
(2017). Johnson, less bothered about historical accuracy, just used the vague and airy
shorthand ‘vassal state stuff’ to dismiss May’s proposals. For both men, Brexit was
driven by fantasies of global Britain, Indo-Pacific Tilts and the glories of empire. To be
a vassal state appeared to be the catastrophic inversion of this precious dream.
The gothic romance, from its eighteenth-century origins, imagined horrors as uncanny
returns of pre-modern tyranny, figured as exercises of arbitrary power in Catholic Europe,
dominated by priestcraft, feudal tyranny and the exercise of unchecked sovereign power
over life and death. It could be conservative and nationalist in these imaginings; it could
also slyly side with the demonic energy of these transgressors. This tenor of the gothic
continues to serve ambivalences about Europe into contemporary British horror. The
setting just prior to modernity is integral to the sadistic brutality of Michael Reeve’s
Witchfinder General (1968) or Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). The
continuing obsession with witches and their torturers, or masters and serfs, around the
time of the English Civil War – from A Field in England (2013) to Neil Marshall’s
The Reckoning (2021) – suggests that the horror film still broods on the foundations of
the modern democratic subject, the fragility of its institutions, and the return of unchecked
autocratic power in contemporary geopolitics. The imagination of slavery that underpins
the zombie apocalypse, and all the tyrannical statelets of survivors that pop up in this
terrain (as in, say, 28 Weeks Later (2007)), feeds off the same imaginary of the return
of post-democratic, arbitrary power in an aftermath that often looks suspiciously like a
pre-modern feudal antecedent. Either British pluck will stop this nonsense (Cockneys vs.
Zombies (2012)), or the state will slide uneasily into authoritarian models of the biopo-
litical management of the undead (the TV series In the Flesh (2013–14)).
Although British censors objected to the sadism of Witchfinder General, I suspect
it is more the masochistic pole that continues to do its cultural work in the time of
Brexit. In the folk horror revival, or even in the exploration of the cruelty of absolute
power in the faux-medieval world of Game of Thrones (2010–19), we are asked to
identify with the victims (even if the prospect of democracy is laughed out of court in
the final episode as simply unimaginable in this world of absolute sovereign power).
Brexit Gothic – if you accept that it might exist as one way of capturing aspects of
contemporary British horror – imagines brutal scenarios in which unconstrained sov-
ereigns have the power over what Agamben calls ‘bare life’, a biopolitics that exerts
power over life and death, can stretch the hinterland between them, and even imagine
power over ‘a new living dead man’ (Agamben 1998, 131). In recent horror, the skin
is the punctured surface on to which these fantasies are violently scored. Vassalage
might be abjected in pro-Brexit discourse, but the reversibility of the economy of sado-
masochism, and the secret logic of identification with the wronged or victimised pole
identified by Fintan O’Toole as Brexit’s ‘politics of pain’, suggests that things are more
complicated than this. Brexit embraces self-harm and glories in it. Even on the losing
Remain side, there is a sort of grim pleasure in the pain of their loss to sadopopulists,
something similar to what Wendy Brown has called ‘left melancholia’ (Brown 2017).
This perverse dynamic is surely one of the key elements of its structure of feeling that
contemporary British horror has found itself articulating over the last few years.

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 22

Online Gothic
Xavier Aldana Reyes

T he very notion of an ‘Online Gothic’ may come across as a contradiction in terms.

After all, the literary tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
generally seen to have birthed the mode and best represented by Horace Walpole, Ann
Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin, was primarily concerned with looking
back at a fantasised version of foregone times. The gothic is associated with the return
of the past, with the pervasiveness of hauntings, with archaic and ruinous buildings and
barbaric codes of conduct that contrast starkly with the modern times of the reader.
Online Gothic is thus a development, rather than a direct aesthetic descendant, of an
artistic lineage that has operated as a cultural response to specific social anxieties – a
movement mirrored by the simultaneous broadening of the academic understanding of
the basic parameters of the gothic (Chaplin 2011, 4).1 In this light, Online Gothic does
not look to the medieval, Victorian or Edwardian eras to stage tensions between new
and ossified moral attitudes, but rather channels contemporary fears propounded by
tremendous and exponential technological advances whose truly transformative nature
has been hard to assimilate due to the speed with which they have become enmeshed in
the fabric of human life and the circulation of capital. As I use the term in this chapter,
Online Gothic can be considered part of a wider category Linnie Blake and I have called
‘digital horror’: the ‘type of horror that actively purports to explore the dark side of
contemporary life in a digital age governed by informational flows, rhizomatic public
networks, virtual simulation and visual hyper-stimulation’ (2016, 3).
Online Gothic, as its name suggests, is concerned with the nightmares arising from
the use of the internet, a global infrastructure of computers that provides informa-
tion and allows companies, businesses and governments to communicate with one
another. These connections are themselves facilitated by the World Wide Web, the
services or information accessed via the internet which became publicly available in
1991 (Gillies and Cailliau 2000, 221). Even though access to broadband is largely a
basic necessity in the twenty-first century, it is wrong to assume that online experiences
are democratic or homogenic. There is a sizable list of countries, including China and
Saudi Arabia, where certain types of content are censored or restricted, and a case
can be made that the internet is premised on the exploitation of the Global South for
the material resources that underpin its physical existence.2 My focus in this chapter,
however, is on Western artistic expressions that have mediated preoccupations arising
from the turn to telecommunications and the development of web-based video sharing
and social media platforms like YouTube and Facebook, or what is usually referred to
as Web 2.0 (Han 2011). In the texts analysed below, the emphasis is placed on how
the internet, initially constructed as a great transnational enabler bringing together

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people and countries far apart, possesses a dark underbelly routinely exposed by the
gothic. Isolation and vulnerability, especially the dangers of surveillance and extor-
tion, as well as the irrevocability of immediacy made possible by wide bandwidth
data transmission, emerge as key tropes. In Online Gothic, the internet opens the door
to interconnectivity, but also to the ghosts of failure, disenchantment, mistreatment,
overexposure and manipulation.
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to David Cronenberg’s transgressive ‘new
flesh’, the gothic, especially when it has cross-pollinated with science fiction, gravi-
tates towards the presentation of technology as a machinery that creates monsters,
or rather, that gives shape to human evil and delusions of grandeur. As with the mad
scientist subgenre, technology in the gothic comes to represent hubris; failed and deadly
experiments act as a natural corrective to inflated ambitions and abuses of power.3 If
the internet can be conceived, following Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of media,
as a ‘technological extension of consciousness’ (2001, 3), then Online Gothic operates
as a digital Mr Hyde – as an enhancer of the worst depravities of our minds. As Justin
D. Edwards argued, at the interplay of the gothic and technology also lie the terrors
of self-alienation, ‘[f]or advanced technology and advanced capitalism are human cre-
ations that are seen to require urgent socio-political collective regulation because they
have escaped the grasp of their creators’ (2015, 6). In this chapter, the internet is con-
ceptualised as a supplement of digital economies that have long privileged corporations
at the expense of the individual and which, for all its potential for good, continues to
act as both catalyst for and sublimation of the immoral and corrupt. Although the
examples in this chapter do not themselves engage with the ills of globalisation and
neoliberalism explicitly, their underlying rhetoric of hypervigilance, mistrust and help-
lessness speaks to the primary concerns of the globalgothic.4 On one level, all Online
Gothic is tacitly its expression, since the internet, at least theoretically, enables the
transnational circulation of material. Similarly, fiction that registers anxieties attendant
on the internet’s global scope and transnational reach surfaces across different geo-
graphical expanses, from the US to Russia and Japan.

Lonely Techno-Ghosts, Soul-Sucking Spiders and Slender Men

‘Welcome to the Internet,’ reads the Internet Service Provider manual in the hands of
student Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), close to the beginning of Kairo (Pulse, 2001). The
scene portrays the confusing installation and first use of a dial-up modem, which has
unintended negative consequences. Ryosuke’s computer returns live webcam feeds of
strangers in dark rooms, apparently alone and acting in ways that are not immediately
discernible. Then a black screen flashes a single question: ‘Would you like to see a
ghost?’ Ryosuke is visibly shaken but shutting down the computer does little good.
The following day the machine streams an even more disturbing feed of a man sitting
on a chair with a black bag over his head in front of a wall that reads ‘help me’. As will
become clear, Japan is suffering from a strange epidemic of ghosts that are invading
our world through the internet. Those who meet the apparitions lose the will to live
and commit suicide, eventually becoming haunting presences themselves. Importantly,
these figures are indistinguishable from humans, a point the film underscores by hav-
ing one of its characters explain that ‘ghosts and people are the same’. Kairo thus
complicates a simplistic reading of its horrors and presents a much more interesting

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 online gothic 339

dilemma. Could it be that, in a crowded networked world, we are lonelier than ever?
One of the film’s many memorable images is a series of simulated white dots on a dark
screen that resemble stars and symbolise how ‘no-one really connects’. The dots are
very close to each other, yet hardly ever touch.
Kairo was one of the first horror films to thoroughly gothicise the internet in order
to question the effectivity of its promise of intimacy and communication.5 ‘Death was
eternal loneliness,’ suggests one of the souls who have returned from the beyond, but
crucially, so is the medium that enables the undead to take over the world. Those
humans who do not kill themselves end up vanishing, and Japan is eventually reduced
to a post-apocalyptic ruin populated by a few errant and traumatised survivors trying
to escape the grid. It is not hard to read into the film a major concern arising from
the encroachment of the internet as recreational tool and essential mediator of busi-
ness and social life: that it can lead to ostracism and depression. As Monica Whitty
and Adam Joinson have shown, early psychological and behavioural research, like the
HomeNet survey of 1998, was particularly prone to associate the internet with nega-
tive consequences for its users (2009, 33). The picture has remained inconclusive, with
the results of some studies suggesting that the internet reduces interpersonal communi-
cation and replaces social interactions with family and friends, while others claim that
it has no real impact and may even lead to offline meetings that would not otherwise
take place (Whitty and Joinson 2009, 34–6). Still, fears have not gone away, and later
research has persisted in asking whether increased time spent online has a correlative
relationship with depression and disengagement (Bozoglan 2017). Although Kairo is
too cryptic a film to be truly moralistic or didactic, it seems to suggest that its ghosts
are themselves looking for company or, given their calls for aid, to be rescued.
A similar idea lies at the heart of Russian writer Victor Pelevin’s novel The Helmet
of Horror (2006), which rethinks the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Its story is
told entirely through a chatroom thread in a space that ‘isn’t the Internet’, because
participants have no access to external links, yet ‘looks like it’ (Pelevin 2006, 2). Eight
characters interact with each other and in the process attempt to find out who they
are – their true identity is never revealed – and where they are – individual rooms
furnished with nothing but a screen and a keypad. They soon realise that a dark pres-
ence, a censor, is monitoring their contributions to ensure no personal information
is given away during their exchanges. The only way out is by a door in each room,
but this only leads to a strange maze that could be either a computer simulation or a
dreamscape. The metaphor is spelled out for the reader in the last third of the book:
‘Some American or other said that the labyrinth is the Internet. That it’s inhabited by
some being that hacks into the mind, and that’s the Minotaur’ (Pelevin 2006, 210).
This creature is ‘not really a bull-man, it’s a spider-man’ (because ‘if there’s a world
wide web, then there must be a soul-sucking spider’) who wears the titular helmet, a
species of virtual-reality contraption. It is not clear whether the Minotaur – or the rest
of the characters, for that matter – actually exists or is merely a figment of someone’s
imagination. At stake here is not just the preoccupation with loneliness and entrap-
ment foregrounded by Kairo, but the very unstable nature of an interdependence that
can only be described as hyperreal. Communication between the chatroom users is
circuitous and, although often philosophical, ultimately speculative.
The helmet of horror is eventually described by one of the chatroom users,
Monstradamus, as ‘the contents of the mind, which attempt to supplant the mind by

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proving that they – the contents – exist, and the mind in which they arise doesn’t’
(Pelevin 2006, 224). Pelevin is interested in asking questions about our perception of
the world and the assumed certainty of empiricism. The decision to locate the nar-
rative in cyberspace necessarily extends his quandary into the online world and its
phenomenology. In the short introduction to the novel, he contemplates the duality
of the ‘myth’ as both a traditional story that seeks to explain a natural phenomenon
and a falsehood. Part of what we understand as progress involves dispensing with
outdated notions that may fall under this category in our constant search for truth.
This may feel like a ‘propulsive’ act (Pelevin 2006, x), but its momentum is under-
cut by repetition: new myths are constantly created by technology. ‘If a mind is like
a computer,’ Pelevin ponders, ‘perhaps myths are its shell programs: sets of rules
that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex
events to endow them with meaning’ (Pelevin 2006, x). The Helmet of Horror also
makes the converse case. If the web is a coded (programmed) expression of human
consciousness, its value, coherence and validity are all equally suspect and fallible.
Digital technology may feel progressive and posthuman, something that exceeds the
imperfections of corruptible, organic matter, but its core remains human.
Pelevin’s novel powerfully repurposes a creature of ancient myth and transforms it
into a monster for the age of simulacra, but it can hardly compete with the Slender Man
in popularity and legacy. Created on 10 June 2009 in the ‘Something Awful’ forums
(part of somethingawful.com) as a result of a Photoshop competition to manipulate
images to include supernatural entities, the Slender Man can be said to be a truly col-
laborative creepypasta effort, ‘an “open sourcing” of generic horror conventions’ that
involved the voluntary, distributed participation of many (Chess 2012, 375).6 After
one user (Eric Knudsen, alias ‘Victor Surge’) supplied two black-and-white pictures of
children playing with a vaguely anthropomorphic suited figure and a brief accompany-
ing story, others began submitting additional material. The original photographs were
dated to 1983 and 1986, and one of them bore a stamp from City of Stirling Libraries.
It was purportedly recovered in a fire and notable for being the last to portray four-
teen children who disappeared without a trace. Victor Surge provided further content,
but crucially, other forum posters also began to expand the mythology, retrofitting
sightings of the monster to, for example, sixteenth-century Germany. Marble Hornets,
a YouTube web series based on these exchanges, was quick to surface. As early as
20 June, the Slender Man could be glimpsed in ‘Entry #1’ of what would become an
online series boasting millions of visits and spanning ninety-two videos on its main
channel and thirty-nine accompanying ones on side-channel ‘To the Ark’. The videos
were presented, following the dynamics of found-footage horror, as tapes from a film
student named Alex (Joseph DeLage) passed on to friend Jay (Troy Wagner). Actor
and director Troy (as ‘ce gars’) had posted about these tapes the day before on the
same forum and explained the basic (fictional) premise of Marble Hornets (2009–14).
The series followed a number of encounters with ‘The Operator’, their name for the
Slender Man, and added new attributes such as the ability to affect nearby recording
technology and to cause amnesia and hallucination upon repeat contact.
Despite an infamous incident in 2014 where two teenage girls stabbed a friend to
‘appease the online fictional character’ (Van Dyke 2018), the Slender Man has cropped
up in a multitude of texts, not all of them internet-based. There have been more YouTube
serials and alternate reality games (ARGs), like EverymanHYBRID (2010–19),

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TribeTwelve (2010–19), DarkHarvest00 (2010–) and ECKVA Network (2016–); video

games, such as Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Slender: The Arrival (2013); a slew
of independent, mainstream films and documentaries, including Always Watching: A
Marble Hornets Story (2015), Beware the Slender Man (2016) and Slender Man (2018);
and at least one novel from a major publisher (HarperVoyager), the anonymously written
Slender Man (2018). These varied texts evince the collaborative and rhizomatic growth
of the legend. I am less interested here in specific deviations in the history of the charac-
ter than in how they can come to signify a specific type of Online Gothic. The Slender
Man is the most important original gothic monster of the twenty-first century because
it embodies the very medium from which it emanated. On a surface level, its physique
(a featureless head) is reminiscent of generic online avatars, like Facebook’s before users
upload a profile picture, and is thus suggestive of online anonymity. The Slender Man
also stalks his victims, with terrible consequences. It is not a stretch of the imagination to
envisage the creature as an embodiment of contemporary concerns around surveillance
and data mining (Zuboff 2019), especially after the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica
scandal of 2018 in which it came to light that the British political consulting firm had
hijacked personal data from millions of Facebook users for the purpose of aiding Donald
Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign (see Ingram 2018). The same firm was later con-
nected to Brexit and the Vote Leave campaign in 2019 thanks to whistleblower Shahmir
Sanni, a former volunteer, and was the subject of a major Netflix documentary on the
dark side of social media, The Great Hack (2019).
The Slender Man’s direct effect on recording appliances in Marble Hornets may
be interpreted as simple opportunism. Clearly, the reverberations, skipping images,
loss of sound and similar visual and auditory effects are discombobulating and build
eerie atmospheres. Like the larger found-footage horror subgenre to which the series
belongs, attacks on the camera, and, by proxy, the viewer who is aligned with it, are
key to the affective landscape of immersive horror (Aldana Reyes 2016a, 108–11). Yet
the Slender Man’s techno-hounding can also be read as a more profound reflection on
the process of digital recording and the medium’s inherent uncanniness, straddling, as
it does, both the material and the immaterial. As Marc Olivier argues, contemporary
media engages with the ‘correspondence between machines and ghosts’ while simul-
taneously acknowledging the contemporary demystification of ‘the great electronic
beyond’ by ‘re-ground[ing] information technology in the materiality of circuits, the
ecological impact of machines, and the pre- or nonhuman temporalities of geological
time and computational processes’ (2015, 256).7 This change in our thinking about
digital media has turned the glitch into a significant visual and noise motif. Olivier
writes of a ‘Glitch Gothic’, an aesthetic that privileges disruptions, shifts and errors.
For him, there is a comparison to be drawn between the crumbling mansions of
nineteenth-century gothic and ‘the jarring spectacle of data ruins’ (253) the Glitch
Gothic symbolises. Glitch Gothic becomes ‘the privileged space for confrontations
with incompatible systems, nostalgic remnants, and restless revenants’ (253). The
Slender Man, unlike the lonely techno-ghost, does not manifest through digital record-
ings, but rather disrupts them. This is particularly disconcerting for texts in which
seeing is often believing. When the camera stops running in the found tape or online
video, so does our experience of the character; messing with the image means destroy-
ing physical evidence. The Slender Man points to the ephemerality of digital archives
and memories over the printed word.8

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Social Media Gothic

Much Online Gothic wrestles with what has happened to truth in a digital age gov-
erned by lack of trust in objective and impartial reporting, the growing influence of
social media and the ambiguous status of images, which have overtaken the real (in a
Baudrillardian sense) yet also become unreliable. Deliberate ignorance on the part of
specific bodies or research organisations that could be pernicious to businesses is noth-
ing new, and there have been important instances of science denialism in the twentieth
century.9 What defines our post-truth times is that personal opinion has become more
important than facts, which can be bent to accommodate one’s opinion for either
political or financial gain. The epitome of this was the coining by the Donald Trump
administration of ‘alternative facts’ in 2017 and the popularisation of the term ‘fake
news’ in regard to negative coverage of the President or his acolytes. With the denial
of photographic evidence and data that does not suit specific purposes, Lee McIntyre
warns, comes the denial of reality itself (2018, 10) and the possible development of
authoritarian governments and coercive forms of domination. Online Gothic’s pursuit
of the truth could be read as a fictional salve, but the tragic end of most of its charac-
ters also highlights the limited efficacy of individual resistance.
Online Gothic’s interest in the dynamic between reality and deceit is connected to
changes in our capacity to trust what we see, in a crisis of belief in the inherent indexi-
cal value of images. In a 2016 Gallup survey, 32 per cent of American respondents
thought the media could inspire confidence. This needs to be contrasted with 72 per
cent in 1976, despite the Watergate and Vietnam scandals (McIntyre 2018, 86). The
rise of the partisan coverage of news after the foundation of MSNBC and Fox News in
1996 is necessarily part of the picture. As revenue from viewers became more impor-
tant than any type of objectivity, so rose skewed representation. CNN reported a gross
profit of $1 billion in 2016 as a consequence of Trump’s presidential rallies, whose
shock value accrued views and, in turn, granted them more airtime. The twenty-first
century has also seen a concomitant decline of traditional media, especially news-
papers, and a marked preference in the public for the confirmation of their existing
views. In another recent poll, 62 per cent of US adults suggested they currently source
their news from social media, with 44 per cent overall admitting they get theirs from
Facebook (McIntyre 2018, 94). These channels do not veto content or filter out dis-
reputable sites, which makes it virtually impossible to monitor what is often passed
as ‘real’ information or journalism. With the rise in image and video manipulation,
especially concerns over deepfake technology, it is feared that reality is in jeopardy.
Online Gothic negotiates this scepticism towards the recorded image, its ontological
crisis, and encourages a playful and self-aware engagement with digital fakery.
Social media has been crucial in shaping the concerns and looks of later Online
Gothic texts and has been framed as a prospective repository and spreader of misinfor-
mation. The development of fast and reliable broadband internet, of applications like
Skype in 2003, alongside the founding of video sharing platform YouTube in 2005, of
microblogging platform Twitter in 2006, and in the 2010s of photograph and video
sharing platforms Instagram and TikTok, has radically transformed the speed and fun-
damental nature of human communication. An image or video can go viral in seconds,
and it is possible to upload and send content of any kind instantly. A lot has been writ-
ten about the possible isolation, duplicity and anxiety caused by an over-reliance on

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social media, but even more interesting to Online Gothic are the ways in which social
media mediate and commodify our lives, making people anxious over participatory
gestures of interest and performative ‘love’, such as rises or decreases in likes, hits or
views. Similarly, the risks of using the internet, full of unregulated content and seen as
a possible bedrock of sociopathic behaviour, have become an area of interest following
extreme cases like that of Luka Magnotta’s recording and uploading of his to-camera
killing of a man in 2012, the history of which was captured in the documentary Don’t
F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer (2019). Finally, the rise of ‘platform capital-
ism’ (Srnicek 2017), or the development of businesses that provide the hardware and
software necessary for firms to monopolise certain sectors, has made user data (its
extraction and analysis) a much-coveted asset. The twenty-first century is understand-
ably digitally suspicious: who can hear and see us, and for what purposes? And how
can we protect ourselves from data poaching, identity theft and cybercrime?
Disquiet over safety and the predatory behaviour of criminals has manifested in a
new thematic submode. ‘Social media gothic’, which can include found-footage hor-
ror framing either partly or completely, has embraced webcam feeds and phone videos
as mediators, and turned its suspicious eye to the participatory web.10 Social media
gothic stories tend to focus on the horrors that belie apparently innocuous personal
text, image or video sharing content and telecommunications platforms where the
anonymity of made-up avatars and profiles can easily mask the identity of characters
(human or supernatural) who wish us ill. In them, the modern, hyperconnected world
of the user or content generator is normally contrasted with a dark, hidden and bar-
baric underworld. A great example of this thematic trend is Megan Is Missing (2011),
which begins by introducing two reportedly missing fourteen-year-old girls, Megan
Stewart (Rachel Quinn) and Amy Herman (Amber Perkins), through their webcam
interactions. After becoming interested in a boy she meets in a chatroom, Megan dis-
appears. The police initially investigate the incident, but eventually give up due to the
lack of a clear lead. Amy, who refuses to believe her friend has simply run away despite
her difficult home life, decides to dig deeper and challenge the stranger. This results in
images of Megan in a torture contraption being uploaded to a fetish site and in Amy’s
own eventual abduction. Unedited footage from Amy’s camera, which she carries with
her for the purposes of recording a video diary, depicts her being taken to a basement
where she is humiliated, raped and finally buried alive inside a barrel containing her
friend’s corpse. Megan Is Missing is an indictment of child sexual predators, and was
in fact initially marketed as an educational film. Although the exploitative quality of
the ending was questioned by some critics and even led to a ban in New Zealand,
Michael Goi’s intentions look to be sincere. As Alexandra Heller-Nicholas points out,
not only did he base the film on real events from seven different cases, Goi also went
to great trouble to ensure the actresses and their parents were at ease with and during
the shooting (2014, 56).
Social media in Online Gothic texts typically enable violent behaviour and retali-
ation. Facebook and Twitter, as well as YouTube for influencers, give the illusion of
control through privacy settings that may be adjusted. In reality, as the aforementioned
Facebook debacle proves, our personal data, from personal characteristics to pictures,
is vulnerable. The immediacy of digital uploads, which can spread instantly across the
globe, has led to worries regarding other people’s reactions and misuse of private data.
In its most misogynistic strain, so-called ‘revenge porn’, or the distribution of sexually

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explicit images or videos without the permission of the depicted individual, is affect-
ing increasing numbers of women across the world – as many as 13 per cent in the US
(Moore 2019). Some films that take place almost entirely on computer desktop screens
explore the detrimental effects of such online abuse. In Unfriended (2014), the sharing
of a YouTube video showing a female high school student soiling herself after passing
out from too much drinking drives the victim to suicide. The story of Laura (Heather
Sossaman), who returns as a techno-ghost capable of manipulating files and people’s
computers, plays out gradually throughout the film, so that viewers are initially unaware
that all the main characters were implicated in her death. Unfriended effectively switches
gears, and transforms from a ghost film told through a digital interface into a species
of ‘rape revenge’ narrative from beyond the grave. Laura’s attacks are poignant, as they
essentially involve the uncovering of her friends’ hypocrisy and debauched behaviours.
No one can win this game of cyberbullying; instead, cycles of cruel and degrading
retribution perpetuate themselves. The narrative is interesting too, for it is framed and
told through the apparent ‘real time’ use of a plethora of recreational apps and services:
Facebook, Google, Gmail, iMessage, Instagram, Skype, Spotify, Snapchat, YouTube
and video broadcasting site LiveLeak. Since Laura’s ghost has no trouble finding com-
promising material, Unfriended suggests that our digital footprint is a lot more physical
and incriminatory than we might like to believe.
Social media gothic is also interested in the schizoid nature of our reliance on
digital interfaces that force us to refract and mediate our sense of self. In the age of
influencers and webcam entertainment, livelihoods and bodies are subject to commer-
cial demands that require constant innovation and refashioning. Social media gothic
has captured this aspect in stories about users who have their online identities stolen,
corrupted or duplicated. Cam (2018), for example, mounts a timely critique of the
objectification of women online, especially through pay-per-view camera chat shows
that aim to control performers’ actions into the fulfilment of all manner of sexual
fantasies. At the beginning of the film, camgirl Alice (Madeline Brewer) appears to kill
herself in front of her audience. This ‘live’ death is revealed to be a ruse manufactured
to help her place higher in the site’s webcamming ranks, a powerful metaphor for how
adult entertainers become so much disposable flesh. Cam reinforces this idea when, a
little later, Alice finds herself locked out of her account by a copy of herself. Her crazed
search to locate and destroy the digital doppelgänger, arguably a ‘live’ and responsive
algorithm made up of information and images of Alice stored in the server, sees her
victorious. Alice’s humanity saves her during a face-off where fans must determine the
winner, but she returns to webcamming under a new identity in the ambiguous ending.
Clearly, Cam underscores the exploitation and expendability of sex workers, as well
as the internet’s capacity to reduce women to images. At the same time, the film cel-
ebrates Alice’s gumption and dogged passion for her profession, potentially presenting
camgirls as owners of their online personas.
Webcammers are more than just victims of an exploitative system. They can grow
to be so interpellated by its ideology as to channel its behaviours. This is the case in
Vlog (2008), where a popular ‘vlogger’ (Brooke Marks) is brutally murdered ‘live’
during one of her webcasts. The film is largely composed of videos chronicling the
days leading up to this terrible event, during which Brooke is cyberstalked by someone
who proceeds to film the deaths of those in her entourage. Brooke’s vlogs focus on her
dating life, which is presented as shallow and capricious. The superficial vignettes are

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contrasted with gory videos made by the killer, which portray the murders and dis-
posal of the victims in minute detail. The final twist connects all these strands, as the
killer is revealed to be Brooke herself and her own killing a ploy to cover up her crimes.
The viewer realises simultaneously that Brooke has been lying, that the vlogs they have
watched did not tell the whole story, and that Brooke’s superficial life translates into
the glacial, unremorseful manner in which she dispatches her lovers. Vlog’s linking
of extreme violence with apparently innocuous moments in the life of a woman who
decides to bear all synthesises social media gothic. Nothing and nobody are what they
seem, and the culture of personal commodification emerging from social media metas-
tasises into new forms of epistemological aggression, from the co-option of market
forces through product placement and the sensationalisation of personal experiences
to the consumption of other people’s lives for aspirational leisure.

The Darkest Corners of the Web

The plot of the earlier FeardotCom (2002) already contained all the tropes of later
social media gothics. In it, the strange frozen look in the eyes of a train fatality leads
New York detective Mike Reilly (Stephen Dorff) to a mysterious streaming website
that can apparently kill its audience. The ending reveals that it was set up by the
victim of a serial killer whose death was filmed and broadcast publicly. By cursing
visitors and giving them forty-eight hours to live, the ghost punishes their morbid
voyeuristic tendencies. FeardotCom was naturally influenced by Ringu (Ring, 1998),
the film that introduced the onryō, or vengeful spirit, to modern Western viewers
and kickstarted the Japanese horror craze of the early twenty-first century. Ringu
featured an iconic scene where the ghost of Sadako (Rie Inō) manifests through a
video tape and eventually breaks out of a television set. The moment echoes count-
less other instances in gothic literature and film where supernatural phenomena have
either been summoned or channelled by new electronic media (see Sconce 2000).
FeardotCom did more than propose an internet version of Ringu’s techno-ghost,
however, for a key aspect of the premise is that the medium facilitates scopophilia.
When Mike explains to researcher Terry (Natascha McElhone) that ‘feardotcom.
com’ is a ‘live-cam death site’, she asks why anyone would engage with such mate-
rial. His answer is both brutal and accurate: ‘People love to see death. Why do you
think the ratings are so high on reality disaster shows?’ This line resonates with the
question the ghost, Jeannine (Gesine Cukrowski), poses to the webpage users: ‘do
you like to watch?’ Her seductive invitation does not replicate social media gothic’s
anxieties regarding surveillance culture. Instead, it hints at the web’s susceptibility to
becoming a repository for all types of deregulated material.
Many proxies can be found for FeardotCom’s gothic live-death cam and for the
anxieties it negotiates. Rotten.com, a shock website created in 1996 and which ceased
to post updates in 2012, stored, among other things, violent and disturbing images of
autopsies and violent acts. A self-avowed ‘archive of disturbing illustration’, the front
page described its contents as ‘[t]he soft white underbelly of the net, eviscerated for all to
see: Rotten dot com collects images and information from many sources to present the
viewer with a truly unpleasant experience’.11 Some will argue that the website stood up
for free speech online, but others will see its portrayal of real death as indecent exploita-
tion and as potentially damaging to the memories of those depicted and their families.

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In the 2010s, ease of access to disturbing and harmful material also travelled over to
social media. The suicide of British teenager Molly Russell in 2017 and its association
with distressing content found on her phone led to the banning of graphic images, and
eventually drawings and memes, of self-harm on Instagram.12 It also paved the way for
larger discussions on the difficulty of policing vast numbers of personal uploads and
of protecting the young and vulnerable. The fast spread of social media viral trends,
like the Tide Pod and skullbreaker challenges of 2017 and 2020, with their potential
to influence the behaviours of impressionable youths, has only fuelled debates around
online safety.13 Of course, these examples only deal with data that is openly traceable
or discoverable. There is an even darker side to the internet, the so-called ‘dark web’,
or the information that exists on overlay networks that can only be accessed through
specialist routing software or authorisation and is therefore not indexed by traditional
search engines like Google. Although, as Robert W. Gehl has argued (2018), the dark
web may have legitimate uses, such as whistleblowing or encryption by political dis-
sidents, journalists and law enforcers, it is associated with criminal activity of all kinds,
from illegal pornography to fraud.
Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) takes the basic premise of its predecessor, a horror
film experienced in real time through a digital interface, to explore online undercover
activities. This time the various friends who join a video call are eventually attacked
and murdered by a group of depraved hackers called ‘The Circle’ after the protagonist,
Matias (Colin Woodell), discovers a set of hidden videos in a laptop purloined from
a local café. The anonymous members of the group operate through a bulletin board
system called ‘The River’ and name themselves ‘Charon’, in reference to the character
of Greek and Roman mythology who carries souls over the Styx and the Acheron.
The allusion refers to the service on offer, bespoke videos depicting the graphic torture
and death of women, something Matias accidentally uncovers by passing himself off
as a member. The end of the film, which involves Matias’s fate being decided by an
online poll, packs one last punch: nothing was accidental. Matias and his friends were
targeted by ‘The Circle’ for what they term ‘game night’, and all actions have been
meticulously plotted to pin all crimes on the group of friends. The film’s ending is
particularly disturbing in its implications. As Matias is run over by a car after the poll
decides he should die, the camera pulls out to reveal other monitors that have been
tracking the events in different locations and houses. This is evidently an operation
on a massive scale that has required the co-operation of many members. Most worry-
ingly, this subtle gesture makes it clear that the film has been shot, or is being screened,
from the point of view of one of the hackers, who has remotely accessed Matias’s
laptop.14 The viewer is thus brought in and morally implicated in the action. The film
seems to suggest that, by watching a film about teenagers being killed for sport, we
too are involved in a vicious voyeuristic cycle. In this respect, Unfriended: Dark Web
updates the long history of interpellation that lies at the core of the snuff fiction film
(Aldana Reyes 2016b) by reflecting on the ways in which the internet’s anonymity and
remoteness can be reconfigured as conduits for extortion and harm. Halfway through
the film, one of the Charons breaks into Matias’s girlfriend’s house while she is in the
bathroom, her computer left running. The figure lifts a recording phone to Matias –
and thus to the screen. The result is an evocative image, a mise en abyme of the hooded
maniac holding a camera that doubles as a mirror locking viewer, character, film and
crime into an infinite repetitive sequence.

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 online gothic 347

The rug-pulling ending of Unfriended: Dark Web also reminds us of a crucial

aspect of Online Gothic: its metatextual and self-referential nature. The gothic is a
mode uniquely placed to adapt and evolve because its rhetoric of fear and suspense
can easily jump across media and adjust to new affective specificities. In fact, as Joseph
Crawford has suggested (2015, 36), it is perhaps more correct to expect every new
medium to express itself gothically precisely because the full extent of its potential
is initially unknown. From mass-market novels in the eighteenth century to film and
video games, ‘[e]very new form of popular media technology is a kind of monstrous
birth, an illegitimate, a usurper, possessed of portentous and previously unheard of
capabilities, threatening to disrupt or dissolve the cultural landscape into which it
arrives’ (36). Online Gothic has routinely told stories about the darkest corners of the
web and framed itself through the very medium it critiques. Self-referentiality is more
than an appeal to verisimilitude connected to the bid for immersion started by found
footage; it is a reflection of how the gothic is always aware of its dual role as a mode
that highlights social, political and economic issues by simultaneously exploiting them.
One need look no further than Host, the horror film sensation of 2020 told entirely
through Zoom, the videotelephony software programme that came to define world
communication during the pandemic crisis of that year. Ultimately, the predominant
message in Online Gothic is that the internet is no different from the real world. It
would make sense that ghosts, ghouls, serial killers and doppelgängers have all found
a home in the fibre optic nooks and crannies of the network. The digital world rep-
licates the physical one; the speed, vastness and dislocation of the internet amplifies,
rather than dispels or distances, flesh-and-blood horrors. As metaverses take hold in
the early 2020s, pledging increased social connections and interactions, a fresh set of
nightmares is certain to continue the job of pulling the virtual wool over our eyes.

Notes
1. I am very specifically referring to the shift in perception of the gothic from a discrete aes-
thetic genre to a writing mode characterised by its cultural work, generally the exploration
of the historically and socially repressed, condemned or marginalised.
2. A related case can be made for the detrimental effects of digital colonialism or platform
imperialism (see Jin 2015).
3. The subgenre is, of course, not static in its depiction. For an overview of its evolution from
the 1930s to the 1980s, see Tudor 1989, 133–57.
4. See Byron 2013, 1–3, and Blake and Soltysik Monnet 2017.
5. William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) was a crucial predecessor in literature.
6. ‘Creepypasta’ are internet horror legends or images that have been user-generated, then
copy-pasted and circulated.
7. Olivier is talking very specifically about media archaeology, but I find his ideas applicable
to the more material understanding of digital technology in the 2010s.
8. I have no space here to cover other important online horror fictions, but see Joseph Crawford
2019 and Balanzategui 2020.
9. Lee McIntyre (2018) singles out the years 1953, when American tobacco companies
silenced evidence of the detrimental effects of smoking, and 1998, when climate change
was denied by the American Petroleum Institute.
10. ‘Desktop horror’ is another term for what I am labelling ‘social media gothic’. I favour
the latter because, as Lindsay Hallam shows, desktop horror is a complex ‘post-cinematic’

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 348 xavier aldana reyes

phenomenon that often mixes different types of image feeds and platforms (2020, 185–6).
My concern here is with gothic texts that rely heavily on social media either narratively
(social media are one of the main themes) or at the interface level (stories are told through
social media).
11. As of May 2020, a 2010 screenshot from the website’s front page could still be accessed
through the Wikipedia entry for Rotten.com.
12. For more information, see Marsh and Waterson 2019 and Angus Crawford 2019.
13. For the Tide Pod challenge, teenagers uploaded YouTube videos of themselves eating deter-
gent capsules. In the skullbreaker challenge, popular on TikTok, victims were tricked into
falling backwards headfirst.
14. The cursor that hovers over the page is named ‘Charon 1’.

References
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016a. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership.
London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2016b. ‘The Mediation of Death in Fictional Snuff: Reflexivity, Viewer Interpellation,
and Ethical Implication.’ In Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media, edited by Neil Jackson,
Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker and Thomas Joseph Watson, 211–23. London and New
York: Bloomsbury.
Balanzategui, Jessica. 2020. ‘Slender Men and Candle Coves: Digital Gothic and the Main-
stream Horror Genre.’ In New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, edited
by Eddie Falvey, Joe Hickinbottom and Jonathan Wroot, 147–64. Cardiff: University of
Wales Press.
Blake, Linnie and Xavier Aldana Reyes. 2016. ‘Introduction: Horror in the Digital Age.’ In Digital
Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon, edited
by Linnie Blake and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 1–13. London and New York: I.B. Tauris.
——— and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, eds. 2017. Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in
the Neoliberal Age. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bozoglan, Bahadir, ed. 2017. Psychological, Social, and Cultural Aspects of Internet Addiction.
Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Byron, Glennis. 2013. ‘Introduction.’ In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 1–10. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Chaplin, Sue. 2011. Gothic Literature: Texts, Contexts, Connections. London: Pearson.
Chess, Shira. 2012. ‘Open-Sourcing Horror: The Slender Man, Marble Hornets, and Genre
Negotiations.’ Information, Communication, and Society 15, no. 3 (December): 374–93.
Crawford, Angus. 2019. ‘Molly Russell: Instagram Extends Self-Harm Ban to Drawings.’ BBC
News website, 28 October. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50129402.
Crawford, Joseph. 2015. ‘Gothic Fiction and the Evolution of Media Technology.’ In Technologies
of the Gothic in Literature and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin D. Edwards, 35–47.
London and New York: Routledge.
———. 2019. ‘Gothic Digital Technologies.’ In Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh
Companion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, 72–86. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Edwards, Justin D. 2015. ‘Introduction: Technogothics.’ In Technologies of the Gothic in Litera-
ture and Culture: Technogothics, edited by Justin D. Edwards, 1–16. London and New York:
Routledge.
Gehl, Robert W. 2018. Weaving the Dark Web: Legitimacy on Freenet, Tor, and IP2. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gillies, James and Robert Cailliau. 2000. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide
Web. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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 online gothic 349

Hallam, Lindsay. 2020. ‘Digital Witness: Found Footage and Desktop Horror as Post-Cinematic
Experience.’ In New Blood: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Horror, edited by Eddie
Falvey, Joe Hickinbottom and Jonathan Wroot, 183–99. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Han, Sam. 2011. Web 2.0. London and New York: Routledge.
Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. 2014. Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of
Reality. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Ingram, David. 2018. ‘Factbox: Who Is Cambridge Analytica and What Did It Do?’ Reuters, 20
March. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-cambridge-analytica-factbox/factbox-
who-is-cambridge-analytica-and-what-did-it-do-idUSKBN1GW07F.
Jin, Dal Yong. 2015. Digital Platforms, Imperialism and Political Culture. London and New
York: Routledge.
McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-Truth. London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLuhan, Marshall. 2001 [1964]. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London and
New York: Routledge.
Marsh, Sarah and Jim Waterson. 2019. ‘Instagram Bans “Graphic” Self-Harm Images after Molly
Russell’s Death.’ The Guardian, 7 February. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/
feb/07/instagram-bans-graphic-self-harm-images-after-molly-russells-death.
Moore, Anna. 2019. ‘“There’s No End and No Escape. You Feel So, So Exposed”: Life as a Victim of
Revenge Porn.’ The Guardian, 22 September. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/
sep/22/theres-no-end-and-no-escape-you-feel-so-so-exposed-life-as-a-victim-of-revenge-porn.
Olivier, Marc. 2015. ‘Glitch Gothic.’ In Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent
Cinema to the Digital Era, edited by Murray Leeder, 253–70. London: Bloomsbury.
Pelevin, Victor. 2006. The Helmet of Horror: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. Translated
by Andrew Bromfield. Edinburgh and New York: Canongate.
Sconce, Jeffrey. 2000. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity.
Tudor, Andrew. 1989. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie.
Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Van Dyke, Abe. 2018. ‘Mothers of Teens Who Pleaded Guilty in “Slender Man” Stabbing Case
Say There Were No Warning Signs of Violence.’ ABC News, 31 January. https://abcnews.
go.com/US/mothers-teens-pleaded-guilty-slender-man-stabbing-case/story?id=52739807.
Whitty, Monica and Adam Joinson. 2009. Truth, Lies and Trust on the Internet. London and
New York: Routledge.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at
the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.

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 Part IV:
Regions and Geographies

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 23

Gothic and the Global South

Rebekah Cumpsty

G othic narratives and tropes have surpassed the bounds of Euro-American

cultural production, coming to the representative aid of monstrous colonial his-
tories, uneven world-economic systems and the asymmetrical impacts of globalisation
and climate change (Duncan 2018; Ilott 2019). The gothic cuts across time and space,
providing an aesthetic vocabulary that registers the transgressive, the unreal and the
unknown. If, as Fred Botting writes, ‘Gothic signifies a writing of excess’, then there are
few tropes of the genre better suited to its exploration than the sublime (Botting 1996,
1). The sublime is an emotive aesthetic that conveys the experience of imaginative and
rational failure in the presence of infinity or vastness, and, I argue, the incalculable
alterations and mitigations of climate change. The argument of the chapter is not only
that the gothic sublime assists in the representation of planetary shifts that are otherwise
difficult to figure, but that it assists in representing the uneven distribution of these shifts.1
In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005) and Gun Island (2019), both of which
chronicle the effects of extreme weather and habitat loss, the environment is often
described in menacing and excessive terms. Similarly, in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria
(2006), a town is erased by a cyclone and Will Phantom is left floating on an island of
garbage. The difficulty of representing climate change is also the difficulty of account-
ing for it. This chapter demonstrates, therefore, that gothic tropes, particularly the
sublime, are deployed to manage and register the unrepresentable extremes of climate
change and its differential impact on peripheral countries and communities. Further,
Ghosh’s contrapuntal description of two tidal settlements, Venice and the Sundarbans,
challenges the Global North/South binary. Wright’s and Ghosh’s novels imagine global
relationships beyond national boundaries, presenting ‘global’ as a set of uneven and
partial networks of human, cultural and economic exchange.

The Global South, Periphery States and Irrealist Aesthetics

This chapter begins by taking issue with the terms of its title. The ‘Global South’
refers generally to ‘the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania’ (Dados
and Connell 2012, 12). Like ‘Third World’ and ‘Periphery’, it signifies ‘regions outside
Europe and North America, mostly (though not all) low-income and often politically
or culturally marginalised. The use of the phrase Global South marks a shift from
a central focus on development or cultural difference toward an emphasis on geo-
political relations of power’ (Dados and Connell 2012, 12). Despite its potentially
geospatial neutrality, the phrase has been widely critiqued for reinscribing colonial and
developmental logics, occluding exploitative economic relationships, and inaccurately

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 354 rebekah cumpsty

presenting geopolitical realities (Lopez 2007; Dirlik 2007; Deckard et al. 2015). The
most obvious failure of the term is that the ‘southern’ geopolitical relations it seeks to
describe exist within northern nations/regions, as a product of combined and uneven
development that operates across inter- and intranational scales. The discourse of the
Global South creates and reinforces the power relations it purports to describe: it is
a ‘Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient’,
the Other, the South (Said 2003, 3). The networks of people, capital, waste, com-
modities and culture cannot be adequately conceptualised within these tired and
divisive dichotomies that continue to ‘celebrate American or Western exceptionalism,
denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt’
(Said 2003, xix).
Alfred J. Lopez and Vijay Prashad attempt to rescue the phrase by understand-
ing it as a banner of unity for the globally dispossessed and disenfranchised. Lopez
explains that markers of ‘globalisation’s discontents’ ‘transcend the limitations of
a geographical South, and the colonial fictions of North-South, and transform the
Northern global city itself’ (Lopez 2007, 4, 5). Lopez defines the Global South as
a ‘postglobal discourse’, a ‘recognition by peoples across the planet that globaliza-
tion’s promised bounties have not materialised’, leaving those on the margins to share
subaltern conditions (Lopez 2007, 1). Similarly, Prashad uses the term to describe an
affinity between global protest movements revolting against neoliberal policies: ‘The
“Global South” comes to refer to this concatenation of protests against the theft of
the commons, against the theft of human dignity and rights, against the undermin-
ing of the democratic institutions, and the promises of modernity’ (Prashad 2012,
52). Despite these efforts, the phrase still falls into a tradition of ‘scholarly writing
that treats geographical areas of the world as natural, preformed backgrounds against
which historical events unfold’ (Appadurai 2021). Instead, Arjun Appadurai enjoins a
revised critical perspective that views ‘geographical areas . . . as the contingent results
of human actors, movements, and projects’, to view geography as a production of
material history (Appadurai 2021). This shift of critical and imaginative perspective –
to think through systemic, global perspectives – is needed to address the limitations of
the Global South.
In place of the Global South, the chapter follows the Warwick Research Collective’s
(WReC) intervention into world-literary studies, arguing that ‘global’ is more produc-
tively understood as a system of combined and uneven development defined by asym-
metrical relations between core and peripheral spheres, on micro and macro scales.
The WReC define world-literature as a ‘single but radically uneven world-system; a
singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers
this combined unevenness in both its form and its content’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 49).
Building on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory that distinguishes between
core, semi-periphery and periphery countries, they construe the world to be a singular
system, rather than divided into first/third, north/south. World-systems theory explains
that core states have complex production; periphery states are regions annexed by core
states and transformed into the producers of primary commodities (‘raw’ materials)
and the purchasers of manufactured goods imported from the core. There is evident
overlap between the periphery and the South, although peripheries exceed the South
because they also exist within core regions. In this light, where ‘Global South’ denotes
regions of the world peripheralised by core states specifically through processes of

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 gothic and the global south 355

colonisation, it may be retained to help to capture the co-development of colonialism

and uneven capitalist development.
Moments of capitalist crisis, in which one set of resources is exhausted and the rela-
tions of capitalisation are expanded, recur across the history of the world-system, and
are registered stylistically in ‘massive ruptures . . . at the levels of space-time continuum,
lifeworld, experience and human sensorium’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 50). These ruptures
are most often mediated through irrealist modes of writing, such as the gothic. The for-
mal features of irrealist writing include ‘anti-linear plot lines, meta-narratorial devices,
un-rounded characters, unreliable narrators, contradictory points of view, and so on’
(Deckard et al. 2015, 51). The WReC assert that these formal techniques are ‘discernible
wherever literary works are composed that mediate the lived experience of capitalism’s
bewildering creative destruction (or destructive creation)’ (Deckard et al. 2015, 51). The
crises mediated by irrealism are not merely economic, but socio-ecological: the world-
system is a world-ecology. As Michael Niblett explains, world-ecology describes ‘the
way in which the production of nature under capital becomes fundamentally world-
historical, with the connections between local socio-ecologies increasingly determined
by the vectors of the market’ (Niblett 2012, 16). Extending this argument, I focus on
disruptions of the space-time continuum and the human sensorium, registered through
the sublime, per se, and sublime depictions of climate change as a socio-ecological crisis.
I argue that Wright’s and Ghosh’s novels deploy the language of the sublime to manage
the disjuncture between human and extra-human temporal scales and the irreality of
globalised climate change.
A mode of irrealist writing, the gothic often relies on returning revenants and repressed
fears/desires. The ecogothic, Sharae Deckard asserts, ‘turns around the uncanny mani-
festation of the “environmental unconscious”, particularly those forms of environmental
violence that have been occulted’ (Deckard 2019, 174). Ecogothic environments are exces-
sive, monstrous, fecund and ripe with the ‘immanence of death and decay’ (Deckard 2019,
174). ‘Ecogothic revenants’, Deckard continues, ‘offer a powerful method of conjoining
short and long durées, in which environmental histories and geophysical forces outside
the capacity for memory of individual human protagonists manifest as apparitions that
disturb the present’ (Deckard 2019, 175).

The Sublime and Gothic Irrealism

The sublime describes a phenomenological overload, when the human sensorium fails
to make sense of and represent excess.2 When the rational mind is confronted with a
vastness, an expanse of space or time, the sublime signifies an experience of absent
finitude, of lack or limitation that resolves into an awareness of the numinous, the
wholly Other, a moment of transcendence, or reason (depending on the version of
the sublime – Kantian or otherwise). Referring to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Botting
explains the distinction between ‘beautiful objects . . . characterised by their small-
ness, smoothness, delicacy and gradual variation’ and ‘vast, magnificent and obscure’
sublime objects ‘which produced awe and terror’ (Botting 1996, 26). Burke proposes
that the sublime ‘is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling’ (Burke 2001, pt. I, sect. 7). Burke’s theories of the sublime are an important
precursor to the ‘literary gothic’ because of his ‘insistence on the sublime as a quality

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 356 rebekah cumpsty

of the object’ which excites the senses of the observer (Punter 2012, 291). The sub-
lime is located in the object, and elicits subjective feelings of desire, fear, awe, terror
or astonishment. In Immanuel Kant’s explanation, a feeling of ‘displeasure, arising
from the inadequacy of imagination’, is met by ‘a simultaneously awakened pleasure’,
which lies in the capacity of reason to judge the ‘inadequacy’ of the imagination (Kant
2000, 141). While the Kantian sublime celebrates the primacy of reason, Burke’s ver-
sion is invested less, Vanessa Ryan clarifies, in ‘the subject’s increasing self-awareness’
than in ‘the subject’s sense of limitation and of the ultimate value of that experience
within a social and ethical context’ (Ryan 2001, 266).
Euro-American iterations of the gothic sublime depend broadly on a ‘source of . . .
immense power, understood with reference to the majestic in nature’, or the omnipo-
tence of God ‘and [are] linked both to the object and to the “perceiver’s state of mind”’
(Mishra 2012, 289–90). ‘The Enlightenment . . . invented the Gothic,’ Botting notes
(Botting 2012, 13). A fundamentally religious sublime, described by Rudolf Otto as
‘mysterium tremendum’, or religious dread is generated by spiritual transcendence,
oneness with God, or the wholly Other (Otto 1958, 12). While the religious sublime
requires a connection between the self and a transcendent Other, the gothic sublime,
Vijay Mishra asserts, ‘regresses into a trace, a memory, a recollection . . . firmly located
in the unconscious’ (Mishra 2012, 294). The terror of the gothic sublime is located
in the subject’s psyche, where ‘death is always the recurring/repeating presence’, and
the subject cannot return to the security of reason (Mishra 2012, 294). The Freudian
redefinition of terror as unheimlich, or uncanny, describes the return of the repressed
and immanence of death and decay. The gothic sublime does not resolve into religious
transcendence or moral allegory; instead, it persists in the unheimlich, in discomfort
and uncertainty. Following the Romantics, the sublimity of nature was re-evaluated
‘so that mountains became “temples of Nature,” “natural cathedrals,” places of won-
der and sacred inspiration’ (Botting 2012, 21). In the imperial imagination, however,
the sublime is ‘something vast, non-rational, non-human, something always exceeding
the “now” and the “here”’, ‘the Sublime-as-always-beyond-colonisation/civilisation’
(Khair 2009, 67, 64).
The social and ethical context of the gothic and its reception are important con-
siderations. Tabish Khair notes that ‘Gothic fiction is a “writing of Otherness” . . . it
revolves around various versions of the Other, as the Devil or as ghosts, as women,
vampires, Jews, lunatics, murderers, non-European presences’, and, of course, as
nature (Khair 2009, 6). As such, the gothic mode is ‘well suited to registering colonial
violence and critiquing colonial discourse’, and thus it offers postcolonial writers ‘a
language suited to horror and trauma; it writes back to a body of imperial Gothic
literature that supported the colonial project through the othering of colonised
peoples; and it recognises the “boomerang effect” that renders the Frankensteinian
monster-makers themselves monstrous’ (Ilott 2019, 19). Following the materialist
turn in postcolonial studies (Lazarus 2011a, 2011b; Graham, Niblett and Deckard
2012; Deckard et al. 2015), twentieth-century postcolonial authors have found these
gothic modes generative in depicting ongoing (neo-)colonial violence and structural
inequality – what Ann Laura Stoler has called ‘colonialism’s durable presence’ (Stoler
2016, 9). Ilott reaffirms the WReC’s seminal intervention – that for irrealist writing,
the ‘in-mixing of the imaginary and the factual’ is ‘more sensitive’ to the ‘incongru-
ous conjunctions’ of core and periphery dialectics – to suggest that contemporary

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 gothic and the global south 357

postcolonial gothic re-engages the ‘systemic violence and the structural exclusion of
minority voices’ in the North (Deckard et al. 2015, 70; Ilott 2019, 22). The metabolic
rift is one signifier of the unevenness of world-ecology. As Deckard explains: periph-
eries are drained of raw materials, minerals and nutrients, while cores are in excess,
unable to process the waste, forced to relocate not only industrial production but
also waste to peripheries (Deckard 2016, 180). The origins of the sublime are undeni-
ably Eurocentric (Ashcroft 2005; Giles 2014). However, as a feature of world-literary
gothicism, the sublime surpasses its origins to become a trope that mediates epistemo-
logical disjuncture, imaginative ruptures and socio-ecological violence. The sublime
of the ecogothic is experienced when aspects of the natural world exceed human
rationality or imagination; when the occluded ontological and ecological violence of
colonisation and global capitalism resurfaces as threatening storms or animist spirits;
when climate change is presented as terrific catastrophe; when finite human histories
are compared to geological pasts. Two versions of the sublime are operative across
Ghosh’s and Wright’s novels: the temporal sublime and the ecological sublime.

The Sublime as Global Climate Crisis in Carpentaria,

Gun Island and The Hungry Tide
Incommensurable ontologies are depicted diegetically and registered formally in
Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. The novel shifts between multiple characters’ perspec-
tives, between Waanyi (Wangabiya is the fictional name of the community) and Chris-
tian cosmologies, and presents European, Indigenous and geologic timescales. Set in
the eponymous gulf in northern Australia, Carpentaria undermines the ‘visual clarity
of the Brandt line’ (Rose 2020, 642) by foregrounding the economic inconsistencies
of the Global South. The Brandt line, best described as a squiggle, attempts to more
accurately demarcate the industrialised North and developing South (Lees 2020).
The novel, however, establishes the ongoing colonisation and marginalisation of
Indigenous communities in the Global North. Gurfurritt International, a US-based
mining company, is encroaching on sacred land and coercing Wangabiya commu-
nity members to police their own people and to work on the iron-ore mine. Mozzie
Fishman, the leader of a syncretic religious group and supporter of Will Phantom’s
activism, says, ‘International mining company. Look how we got to suit international
mining people. Now, even we, any old uneducated buggers, are talking globally. We
got to help United Kingdom money. Netherlands lead air problems. Asia shipping’
(Wright 2006, 405). Wright’s fiction is framed by world-systemic logic, where the
influence of a multinational corporation is inextricable from local lives. The primary
protagonist, Normal (Norm) Phantom, is ‘an old tribal man’ who ‘could grab hold
of the river in his mind and live with it as his father’s fathers did before him’ (Wright
2006, 4, 6). The ghostly sign of Norm, and his son Will’s family name, foregrounds
the magic in their lineage. Ben Holgate notes these vampiric themes in Norm’s descrip-
tion as ‘one of those Indigenous people who have “swapped their blood for magic”
and have “got magic running through their veins”’ (Holgate 2015, 639). Ecogothic
tropes and depictions of the sublime contribute to the novel’s irrealist mode, which
foregrounds marginalised Waanyi voices, and addresses the epistemic and material
violence experienced by Wright’s community.

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The multivocal, fragmented narrative begins by juxtaposing punitive Christian

theology and lyrical Waanyi creation myths: ‘CHURCH BELLS CALLING THE
FAITHFUL TO THE TABERNACLE BUT NOT FOR THE WICKED’ is contrasted
with ‘The ancestral serpent, a creature larger than the storm clouds, came down
from the stars laden with its own creative enormity . . . It came down those billions
of years ago’ (Wright 2006, 1). Philip Mead notes that the ‘contrapuntal evocation
of two incommensurable myth systems’ persists throughout the novel (Mead 2014,
190). While it is possible to read the depiction of these oppositional ontologies as
magical realism, Frances Devlin-Glass cautions that Carpentaria ‘melds satire with a
new form of magic realism based in Indigenous knowledge’ (Devlin-Glass 2008, 392).
She asserts that ‘whereas much magic realism loosens the narrative’s connection to
the ordinary world of sense perceptions’, Wright’s text ‘draws on Waanyi cosmology
to insist that mythological meanings are embedded in the mundane and everyday real’
(Devlin-Glass 2008, 393). This world is presented in ‘the manner of hyper-realism
(a western literary modality) and re-visions the Dreamtime3 mythology as an alter-
native form of scientific discourse, ethno-biology/geography/climatology, based in
observation of the forces of nature over many thousands of years’ (Devlin-Glass 2008,
392–3). Moreover, Holgate argues that ‘magical realist fiction which portrays ongo-
ing colonisation in a supposedly postcolonial nation incorporates three oppositional
systems: the Indigenous colonised; the white settler coloniser; and global economic
forces that help perpetuate the ongoing colonisation’ (Holgate 2015, 635). The aes-
thetics of irrealist writing refine realism, as Carpentaria presents Waanyi cosmology
as real. The irrealism of Wright’s fiction is best understood, therefore, as a registration
of a tripartite oppositional system where Waanyi cosmology is unevenly entangled
with European Christianity and temporality, as well as extractive neo-imperialism.
The irreality of the sublime helps to signify these oppositional ontological regimes
by contrasting their relative temporalities: European and Indigenous. In the settler
town of Desperance ‘Time stopped tick-tocking, because there was too much moisture
in the air and it had interfered with the mechanical workings of dozens of watches
and clocks that ended up jiggered’ (Wright 2006, 44), while ‘Norm’s time was a spec-
tacular clock’ (Wright 2006, 258). The text suggests the ineptitude of European time
by presenting mechanical clocks ineffectively keeping secular time. The related but
distinct scales of Indigenous and geologic time are presented contrapuntally, as in the
following description of Will:

Time was a fleeting whisper for Will, sitting on the edge of the lagoon that had been
carved by an eternity of rushing flood waters inside the remains of a forest that lived
a million years ago, and had, after a moment of shock when drowned by high seas,
petrified into rock. Time accumulates thought or vice versa and Will Phantom . . .
took his time. (Wright 2006, 163)

The finitude of Will’s time is lyrically contrasted with ‘an eternity’ of geologic time, a
vision of expansive time marked by incremental changes to the natural world. Simi-
larly, running from his mystical fish room, where ‘he saw death’, Norm seeks to ‘drown
his conscience in the hub and tub of a psychotic Pacific Ocean collapsing through eons
of compressed time’ (Wright 2006, 207–8). Descriptions of Waanyi mythopoeia, such
as the Rainbow Serpent, are presented contrapuntally with omniscient accounts of

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 gothic and the global south 359

geologic time, and Norm’s and Will’s finite human time. ‘One of the first narrative
moves Wright makes’, Mead asserts, ‘is to subsume geological time under Aboriginal
creation’ (Mead 2014, 194). ‘Eons’, ‘eternity’ are but two of myriad examples of the
language of temporal sublime.
Human finitude and vulnerability before the power of nature are also evident
in Ghosh’s novels The Hungry Tide and Gun Island, where temporal disjuncture is
indexed by the distinction between geologic time of the Sundarbans, mythic, and
human time. Both novels are set primarily in the Sundarbans, with Gun Island juxta-
posing Venice, Italy’s sinking city, with the Indo-Gangetic Delta (both are UNESCO
World Heritage sites). The Hungry Tide draws together Hindu and Muslim practices,
and Greek mythology, a strategy echoed in Gun Island’s transnational and transh-
istorical legend of Bonduki, a Bengali gun merchant. Rajender Kaur argues that the
‘narrative’s complex interweaving of these myths and legends from different cultures
into one common heritage of humanity to mirror the distant geological era before the
different continents were configured gestures, in effect, to the “deep time” of geology’
(Kaur 2007, 135). The contrast between human and geological timescales is man-
aged by the islands’ Indigenous inhabitants, who ‘bridge the transcendent and poetic
aspects of this ecosystem’ through mythology and local knowledge (Kaur 2007, 126).
With evident similarities to Carpentaria’s Rainbow Serpent, the eco-mythological reg-
ister of The Hungry Tide is set against an earlier description of the delta’s origins:

In our legends it is said that the goddess Ganga’s descent from the heavens would
have split the earth had Lord Shiva not tamed her torrent by tying it in to his ash-
smeared locks. To hear this story is to see the river in a certain way: as a heavenly
braid, for instance, an immense rope of water unfurling through a wide and thirsty
plain. That there is a further twist to the tale becomes apparent only in the final
stages of the river’s journey – and this part of the story always comes as a surprise,
because it is never told and thus never imagined. It is this: there is a point at which
the braid comes undone; where Lord Shiva’s matted hair is washed apart into a
vast, knotted tangle. Once past that point the river throws off its bindings and
separates into hundreds, maybe thousands, of tangled strands. (Ghosh 2005, 6;
italics in original)

This mythopoeia embeds the geological explanation of the Sundarbans, a delta created by
the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna Rivers, within Hindu mythology:
geological time is subsumed under the local mythos. Indicating similar scalar tensions,
Gun Island’s Horen marks the passage of time according to cyclones: ‘In the same way
that the Chinese speak of the era of the Qianlong or Jiajing emperors, or Americans
of the Kennedy or Reagan administrations, Horen spoke of the Bhona cyclone . . . as
events that bookended extended spans of time’ (Ghosh 2019, 59). Extended spans of
time are signified by storms and their impacts, natural time contrasted with the geopo-
litical influence of core dynasties. Uncanny and sublime experiences of time can be read
as a move away from Euro-colonial ontologies and temporalities, towards more locally
embedded modes where secular time is displaced by Indigenous or mythological time. The
intersection of mythology, local knowledge and extra-human timescales is demonstrated
by Fokir, a local fisherman who is devoted to Bon Bibi, a deity who protects the forest
and its worthy inhabitants from the ‘tiger-demon, Dokkhin Rai’ (Ghosh 2005, 292).

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 360 rebekah cumpsty

For Fokir, the myth is the real. The geo-mythology of the region contextualises the
present within a long socio-ecological history, juxtaposing human and extra-human
temporalities.
Temporal experiences of the sublime merge with spatial anxieties in Wright’s and
Ghosh’s depiction of climate change. In The Great Derangement (2016), Ghosh sug-
gests that a major challenge of addressing climate change is the difficulty of represent-
ing its enormity and uncertainty. The sublime is vital to Ghosh’s formal and diegetic
response to this challenge: through metaphors of comparative excess, the natural
world and its alteration are depicted as sublime. Allan Stoekl argues that the experi-
ence of the sublime is the impossibility of accurately calculating the ‘external or hid-
den costs of any product we consume’: ‘the impossibility of calculating externalities is
akin to the withdrawal of God: if we really could calculate externalities all would be
possible, foreseeable; without it, we walk through the desert, yearning for the moment
of deliverance and closure’ (Stoekl 2013, 44). The impossibility of accounting for and
representing the costs and consequences of climate change is a problem of scale and
imagination – an experience of the sublime. While there may be danger in obscuring
the responsibility for climate crisis behind a numinous category of human activity, the
sublime is a response to or consequence of the crisis, which leaves open the possibil-
ity of the culpable being named. In Gun Island and The Hungry Tide, the disjunctive
scales of human and deep time, as well as the incalculability of climate change, are
partially managed and represented by the ecogothic sublime.
The Hungry Tide’s Piya, a US-based cetologist, has come to the delta to study the
endemic Irrawaddy dolphin. On a train from Kolkata to Canning, she meets Kanai,
an Indian translator on his way to visit his aunt in Lusibari. Piya and Kanai, liter-
ate urbanites from core and semi-periphery countries, find the superabundance of the
Sundarbans’ flora visually overwhelming. They experience the landscape as uncanny
and sublime. Piya is ‘struck by the way the greenery worked to confound the eye . . .
it seemed to trick the human gaze in the manner of a cleverly drawn optical illusion’
(Ghosh 2005, 125). Similarly, Kanai is confounded by ‘the landscape, in its epic muta-
bility’, where ‘[d]epending on the level of the tide . . . the view was either exhilarating
or terrifying’ (Ghosh 2005, 128, 31). For both, ‘the realities of the tide country were
of a strangeness beyond reckoning’. To the ‘unaccustomed eyes’ of Dr Deen Dutta,
Gun Island’s narrator, the Sundarbans are ‘unreadable’; for Horen, his guide, they
are legible, an ‘antediluvian script’ (Ghosh 2019, 71). Horen recalls the ‘devastating’
consequences of Cyclone Aila, where

the sea had invaded . . . vast tracts of once fertile land . . . rendering them uncultivat-
able for a generation, if not forever . . . Sometimes . . . it seemed as though both land
and water were turning against those who lived in the Sundarbans. (Ghosh 2019, 52–3)

The thrill and terror of the sublime mediates socio-ecological anxieties about the
interdependence of human and non-human nature. Piya, Kanai, Deen and Horen are
dependent on and vulnerable to their respective environments. The mutability and
illegibility of the landscape signifies the fear of reliance on a seemingly vengeful non-
human world.
The folklore of the Gun Merchant is transhistorical and transnational: it connects
the present with the past, as well as the periphery of the delta with Venice, the core

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 gothic and the global south 361

of ecological tourist anxiety. Gun Island is a didactic novel that demonstrates the
global repercussions of climate change linked to the longue durée of capitalist exploi-
tation. The subtleties of the spatio-temporal sublime in The Hungry Tide give way to
an environmental unconscious that threatens Gun Island’s narrator. Deen feels a loss of
control when an ‘unsettling’ spider takes up residence in his Venice apartment: ‘the way it
appeared in front of me and was just standing there, as though it were looking at me,
as if there were some sort of connection between us . . . and then finding out that it
was extremely venomous’ (Ghosh 2019, 234). Deen is forced to confront the ecologi-
cal reality that he is present in nature, rather than separate from it. He knows there is a
‘natural, scientific explanation’ for this proximity: ‘temperatures are rising around the
world because of global warming . . . the habitats of various kinds of animals are also
changing. The brown recluse spider is extending its range’ (Ghosh 2019, 234). Simi-
larly uncanny events recur throughout the novel. Deen and his Italian host, Cinta, go
in search of Il mostro, a Venetian legend thought to be a giant squid, but what Cinta
shows Deen in an eerily abandoned area of Venice are monsters ‘invading Venice’
because of the lagoon’s rising temperatures. These shipworms ‘are literally eating the
foundations of the city’ (Ghosh 2019, 251). Cinta and Deen ‘watched in horror as a
mass of squirming shipworms came pouring out of the broken logs . . . swarming . . .
It was as though the earth itself had sent out tentacles to touch [them], to feel the tex-
ture of [their] skin and see whether [they] were real’ (Ghosh 2019, 251–2). The local
effects of a warming climate are made legible through a sublime ecogothic register
that presents the monstrously insatiable worm as a direct consequence of rising lagoon
temperatures. The worm devouring Venice is a microcosm of global climate change.
Gun Island reaches its climax as a storm crosses Italy with ‘rain and hail’, ‘gale-
force winds’ and ‘entire forests flattened’ (Ghosh 2019, 276). In Venice, ‘whirling
squalls’ of a tornado create a ‘strange menace in the sky’ that ‘faded away to be
replaced by an eerie, seething silence’ (Ghosh 2019, 272–3). While The Hungry Tide
concludes with a cyclone in the Sundarbans that kills Fokir, the later novel considers
the increasing ferocity of storms on a global scale. The narrator travels through the
Italian storm to intercept Tupi, Fokir’s son, on a migrant boat in the Mediterranean,
where the sublime is experienced again, as ‘hundreds of thousands’ of migrating birds
leave Deen to ‘gape uncomprehendingly’ (Ghosh 2019, 306). He and his companions
‘were transfixed by this miraculous spectacle: the storm of birds circling above . . .
and the graceful shadows of the leviathans in the glowing green water below’ (Ghosh
2019, 307). Conjoining the novel’s present to its long mythic history, ‘the creatures of
the sky and sea’ rise up, as they had in the legend (Ghosh 2019, 306).
The Gun Merchant travels between India and Italy under the protection of Manasa
Devi, who

was in effect a negotiator, a translator – or better still a portovoce – as the Italians

say, ‘a voice carrier’ between two species [human and reptile] that had no language
in common and no shared means of communication. Without her mediation there
could be no relationship between animal and human except hatred and aggression.
(Ghosh 2019, 167)

The deity signifies an ecological awareness that connects past and present, a historical
‘socio-ecological’ mediation between species. Gun Island self-consciously reproduces

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 362 rebekah cumpsty

a world-literary frame that links the Sundarbans (the periphery) and Venice (the core),
thus undermining a global North/South binary. Additionally, the focus on differential
habitat loss and species migration across both settings heavy-handedly illustrates the
worldwide implications of climate change, unevenly manifest in the erosion of futurity
in the Indo-Gangetic Delta and Italy’s sinking city. These sublime depictions of climate
change rely on a representation of fear and the disjuncture between human and
non-human scales.
If the gothic registers socio-cultural anxieties as David Punter (2000, 2012),
Dale Townshend (2013), Vijay Mishra (1994) and Rebeca Duncan (2018) have
noted, then the sublime, an experience of a ‘rupture in the economy of reason’
(Punter 2012, 287), indexes apprehensions related to alterity and scale. Climate
change is ‘a version of the contemporary sublime’ (Stoekl 2013, 44). The Hungry
Tide is not explicitly about climate change, yet it does depict the sublime mutability
of the Sundarbans as well as the terror of the cyclone that kills Fokir. Gun Island
engages specifically with the challenge of representing the local and global implica-
tions of warming ecosystems and climate migration. In Wright’s Carpentaria, eons
of geologic time and the sweep of mythic time are presented in concert with 400
years of (un)sustainable development beginning with early settler occupation in
Desperance. Following an orchestrated bombing of the mine, Will is pursued by a
guard when the ancestors intervene. The guard trips and splits his head open on a
‘rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was
thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in
this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing’ (Wright 2006, 402). The rock
is contextualised by ancestral and ecological vengeance, in a war ‘for money’, a war
with the mine inextricable from the socio-ecological violence of British colonialism
(Wright 2006, 375). This telaesthesia – telescoping between ‘multiple temporalities,
capturing the way in which different moments of socio-ecological crisis over long
historical periods are over-layered on fractured environments’ – is where disjunctive
temporal scales and the incalculable externalities of climate change are most evident
(Deckard 2019, 175).
All three novels conclude with the awe and terror of sublime storms. Desperance
is wiped away by a cyclone that leaves only a ‘flattened landscape’, an ‘empty land’
(Wright 2006, 512, 513): an ironic erasure of a colonial settlement that returns to terra
nullius, to a landscape prior to the imperial imagination. Will sees

the tremendous fury of the winds gathering up the seas, and clouds carrying the enor-
mous bodies of spiritual beings belonging to other worlds . . . Everyone clearly saw
what the spirits saw. The country looked dirty from mining, shipping, barges spilling
ore and waste. Something has to run a rake across the lot. (Wright 2006, 398)

The gathering storm and its aftermath are described as ‘tremendous’, ‘enormous’. The
environment itself is excessive, as it threatens colonial settlement and protects the
Waanyi inhabitants. Additionally, an environmental unconscious is incarnated in
spirits and ancestors who provide a deterministic logic to the cyclone’s path. Like
the destruction of the British-built port of Canning by a ‘moderate cyclone’ in 1867,
detailed in The Hungry Tide (Ghosh 2005, 77; Seema 2020, 2,027), the vengeance of
nature is wrought on imperial and extractive capitalist projects.

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 gothic and the global south 363

Wright’s novel details the visible local effects of transnational mining and global
climate change through Will’s and Norm’s extrasensory perception: the Gulf waters
that used to be coloured by clay, ‘Before mining’; the ‘chemical-ridden tailings dams’;
the birds ‘bred a mutation’; ‘dozens of white plastic cordial containers bobbing along
the coastline’, released from a ‘loose container from Asia perhaps’ (Wright 2006, 379,
391, 392, 380–1). ‘The whole oceanic world seemed to be occupied in the Gulf,’ Will
thinks. ‘It was a grey painter’s palette of tankers exchanging mining equipment for
mined ore that came to the coast, after the flesh of the earth has been shunted here by
pipelines, tying up the country with new Dreaming tracks cutting through old’ (Wright
2006, 385). Like his father, he carries ‘a sense of knowing’; ‘Will was knowledge
galore, navigating his own nirvana’ (Wright 2006, 458, 385). Will’s sense of knowing,
his perception of the spirits, his telaesthetic view of climate change informed by global
capitalism is sublime in its scale and scope. Counter to Enlightenment versions of the
sublime that rely on the alterity between human and nature, Wright’s version draws on
Waanyi cosmology to embed Will’s experience of the sublime in his apprehension of
the land and its spirits. In an illustrative contrast between these iterations of the sub-
lime, the underground sea of the ancestors is compared to European places of worship:

So it was with astonishment and awe that these men gaped at what they had been
shown, and allowed themselves to be taken into the powerful spirituality, which was
somehow the same as but much older than the ornate cathedrals made with stone, or
the monasteries and places of worship to relics of bones and other bits and pieces of
sanctified saints of old Europe and the Holy Land. (Wright 2006, 434)

Wright formally and diegetically foregrounds the conflict between European and
Waanyi epistemologies. From the novel’s mythopoetic opening to its concluding
pages, the Indigenous sacred is prioritised and vital to the disjunctive representation of
Indigenous, geologic and European chronology.
Will is washed out to sea by the cyclone and finds refuge on ‘an extraordinary float-
ing island of rubbish’, a ‘Serpentine flotation’ that recalls the Rainbow Serpent (Wright
2006, 490). Described as an ‘embryonic structure’, the decay of the island’s parts that
‘rubbed, grated, and clanked together . . . squash[ing] every inch of oil and stench out
of the dead marine life it had trapped in its guts’ is monstrous and disgusting (Wright
2006, 490). The island’s guts manifest the metabolic rift – waste from core states
exported to the periphery. Uncanny and irreal, the surface is dreadfully fecund: the
nests and droppings of migrating birds ‘eventually covered the entire surface in a thick
fertilising habitat, where over time, astonishing plants grew in profusion’ (Wright
2006, 492). Food waste, bees, worms and ants all proliferate. Anthropogenic refuse
multiplies in unrelenting and threatening fertility, creating an environment where
‘[e]verything was bountiful’ (Wright 2006, 494). The creation of this microclimate
happens quickly; the duration of decay and generation is compressed to register the
contemporary sublime. The island of waste signifies ecogothic anxieties: the prolif-
eration of supply chains, ocean currents, life cycles and decomposition that make the
island possible are a microcosm of the sublime experience of socio-ecological relations
and climate change.
The authors discussed in this chapter address the difficulties of representing climate
change and the enforced flexibility of globalised capitalism. Their representative strategies

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 364 rebekah cumpsty

include compression and fragmentation of time and space, irrealist and gothic tropes. It
would be reductive to conceive of the gothic forms deployed across these texts as particu-
lar to the Global South; instead, as this chapter has argued, world-literary and ecogothic
analyses are best suited to explore the novels’ transnational and world-systemic framing.
Wright’s depiction of the marginalisation and exploitation by an international mining
company of Indigenous communities; Ghosh’s pairing of Venice and the Sundarbans in
the folklore of the Gun Merchant; and Piya’s diasporic identity all index uneven networks
of global exchange. Gothic forms and tropes are used by these postcolonial writers to
signify brutal colonial histories, the frightening return of repressed Others, and ongoing
developmental asymmetry, because they provide a vocabulary to articulate transgression,
fear of the unknown, and the unreal. The sublime, an experience of imaginative and
rational failure, registers anxieties about alterity, scale and the unknowable. As such,
the sublime is an ecogothic trope that indexes the disjuncture between human and geo-
logic time, a feature of socio-ecological relations, as well as the incalculable externalities
of sustainable development in rapidly changing, and sometimes threatening, core and
peripheral environments. The gothic sublime encodes these sometimes-unrepresentable
planetary shifts, as well as their uneven global distribution.

Notes
1. I am grateful to the editor, Rebecca Duncan, for comments on this chapter.
2. For an extended introduction to the gothic sublime, see Botting 1996 and Mishra 1994.
3. Dreamtime, Devlin-Glass explains, is a productive ‘shorthand for the Indigenous sacred’
(Devlin-Glass 2008, 393).

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https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2020.1715819.

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Ryan, Vanessa L. 2001. ‘The Physiological Sublime: Burke’s “Critique of Reason”.’ Journal of the
History of Ideas 62, no. 2: 265–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/3654358.
Said, Edward W. 2003. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin.
Seema, S. R. 2020. ‘Climate Change, Ecological Risk in Mumbai and Kolkata with Reference
to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable – An
Ecocritical Review.’ International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences 5, no. 6:
2,024–9. https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.56.30.
Stoekl, Allan. 2013. ‘“After the Sublime,” after the Apocalypse: Two Versions of Sustainability in
Light of Climate Change.’ Diacritics 41, no. 3: 40–57. https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2013.0013.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Townshend, Dale. 2013. ‘Introduction.’ In The Gothic World, edited by Glennis Byron and Dale
Townshend, xxiv–xlvi. London and New York: Routledge.
Wright, Alexis. 2006. Carpentaria. New York: Atria Books.

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 24

Migration and the Gothic:

Border Gothic
Enrique Ajuria Ibarra

G eographical borders still play a pivotal role in the demarcation of national

boundaries, despite the promise of globalisation. Mobilities and migrations are
determined by perceptions of national identity influenced by trade agreements, neo-
liberalism and new technologies of surveillance. This results in new imagined terrors
and horrors that can plague life at a national border, eliciting strategies to cope with
the incoming flux of migrants and forms of violence that afflict communities. In turn,
alternative forms and systems of faith and belief arise to guarantee survival in these
conflicted liminal spaces. Instead of opening up to potential global social interactions,
mobility and exchange, and a pervading perception of the nation, have created urban
spaces monstrified by border politics and global trade agreements that benefit from
inequality. There is no better example than the border that separates Mexico from the
United States of America, a geopolitical space that has historically been a site of strug-
gle in the definition of national identity and which has also been subject to constant
migration, whether legal or illegal. Recent gothic and horror fictions, such as Marcus
Sedgwick’s novel Saint Death (2016) or the Mexican film Belzebuth (2017), reveal
the complexities of such borders and the social and economic effects these have had
on the cities on the Mexican side, where globalisation has provided harsh conditions
for survival, always framed by death and the desire to move to better-imagined places
in order to live. Instead of celebrating beneficial outcomes of globalised cultures and
economies, gothic at the border reveals and unearths sociopolitical frameworks that
constrain desired fluid mobilities. Individuals are threatened by a systemic violence
that is enhanced by the environmental and political nature of the national border,
complicating these mobilities. Movement is motivated by the desire for a better quality
of life, but is constantly hindered by death. To take a look at the Mexico-US border
involves understanding a complex network of policies that have turned it into a site of
horror. Both Saint Death and Belzebuth explore this horror by telling fictional stories
that ultimately make evident that mobility is disrupted by a border that is still in place,
despite what globalisation has promised.

Monstrous Global Borders

The Mexico-US border stretches across 3,145 kilometres, mostly through vast deserts.
The idea of crossing this border legally requires passing through densely populated
areas, closely monitored by agents of each nation.1 The ties between the two countries

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have resulted in complex economic and surveillance relations on the border cities,
where most of the time their urban extensions easily reach the political border, gen-
erating ideal multicultural exchanges. Economic trade agreements have also allowed
international companies to benefit from cheap workforces in Mexico. Thus, while
north of the border there is a sense of well-being and stability, on the Mexican side
things are different. Plagued by low incomes, working-class neighbourhoods face con-
stant political and police corruption as well as violence from drug cartels. Life south
of the border has been neglected by the economic ties that bind these cities, keeping
them in a perennial state of contradiction: geographically merging into each other, but
drastically different in terms of social and economic well-being.
One of the constant paradoxes that the border reveals is its perception of openness
and closeness. For David Punter (2016) it leads to fantasies of technological policing,
where ‘weaponry and the military . . . are in the driving seat’ and allow for a certain
facilitation of well-being and control. Yet, Punter warns that ‘the fulfilment of fantasy,
and especially of fantasy which offers to allow us to transcend the human, may never
come without a certain price’. In this case, the ‘long, wide open border’ between the
two aforementioned countries ‘occasions horror in those whose role it is to police
the boundaries of the nation state’ (2016, 168–9). Regulated movement across this
border is thus constantly plagued by the threat of violence and social and economic
inequalities.
There is a problem with the concept of ‘open border’ here. The vast expanse of the
desert seems as if it were completely unprotected or even ignored, causing illegal cross-
ings that justify the need for an enhanced border patrol. Instead, we must consider the
natural environment, which acts as a leverage that solidifies a closed and dangerous bor-
der that can hinder these illegal crossings. Jason De León (2015) claims that the deaths
of illegal migrants on the Mexico-US border are not coincidental. Instead, he argues that
they are the result of a slick environmental-political machine where federal American
institutions and the Sonoran Desert work simultaneously to prevent the crossing of
the border (2015, 4–5). In this sense, the concept of openness becomes ambiguous
and more dreadful. On the one hand, natural barriers, such as the Rio Grande and the
desert, provide demarcations that lack human or technological surveillance and there-
fore could apparently be easily crossed. On the other, nature itself can hinder survival,
paired with periodic border security scoutings and the negligence of people who orga-
nise illegal crossings. Beyond the border cities, the border becomes something distant
and hardly understood by the population. De León suggests that ‘the Sonoran Desert
is remote, sparsely populated, and largely out of the American public’s view’; thus, the
inhospitable environment can help control migration. Likewise, because it feels distant,
‘this space can be policed in ways that would be deemed violent, cruel, or irrational in
most other contexts’ (2015, 28). The horror of the border does not arise from exclusive
human intervention; rather, it discloses an effective combination of harsh natural terrains
that have come to aid the policing of the crossings. For De León, this environmental-
technological machine functions in horrifying and monstrous ways, and the author
considers that ‘maps of this region should be labeled “Here be monsters”’ (2015, 28).
The border functions not only in its geographical and political sense, but also in its
definition of identities and bodies. The monstrification of this geographical space is
determined by the politicisation of the setting: that is, by the national demarcation of
this side (ours) and the other side (theirs). The exceptionality of the geographical area

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desubjectifies and further monstrifies individuals who enter a space that is void of any
possibility for vitality. It is a location filled with violence and death.
The idea of globalisation encouraged a thinking beyond borders as social and eco-
nomic activities attempt to liberate themselves from local or regional restraints for the
benefit of larger-scale flows of movement, production and consumption. The global in
itself appeals to an openness that encourages exchanges – whether cultural or economic –
which seek to reduce ideas of self and other. The individual becomes involved in net-
works of communication and commerce that extend the sense and notion of mobility
beyond fixed locations. Nevertheless, the global is not entirely positive; it also develops
a sense of anxiety and dread that derives from the very processes that characterise it.
For Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards (2013), the expansion of the global has led
to a heightened awareness of motifs, creatures and other characters worldwide. Still,
the commercial and popular extent of supernatural creatures has also helped mediate
the very frightening processes of globalisation itself. What they term ‘the globalgothic
mode’ discloses ‘an ill-formed grasp of the consequences attendant on the dissolution
of old securities, clear-cut jurisdictions, stable structures and comforting boundaries, be
they national, social, cultural, scientific or subjective’ (2013, 14). It is necessary to pay
attention to the figurative blurring of any demarcation, which becomes highly conflic-
tive in the definition of geographical borders that help distinguish nations and states. At
the same time, the global pushes these boundaries beyond their physical perception and
provides different forms of thinking through other divisions. For Botting and Edwards,
‘travelling with migrations and through the flows of global media, boundaries between
life and death, real and unreal, self and other, normality and deviance become defamil-
iarised as they are shifted across geographical, virtual and cultural planes, global and
local at the same time’ (2013, 13). In this sense, globalisation invites to an opening
up that is both exhilarating and horrifying, decentring the familiar as it unwinds and
expands beyond the very limits that contain it.
At the heart of the border issue is the extraordinary policing that is a response to
the presence of the cartel forces shaping the urban environments North and South. This
incites a lack of real stability, something that border policies seek to represent but con-
stantly fail to achieve. Consequently, the border becomes a site of interest to understand
the articulation of gothic and globalisation. The border is an area of death, of violence,
but also of systems of power that terrorise the individuals who live there. The exercise of
this power may be legal or illegal, disclosed or underground. In the end, ‘terror refuses
to be contained within the borders of a particular jurisdiction’ (Botting and Edwards
2013, 21). Even though Botting and Edwards refer to the visible acts of terrorism that
have been heightened by globalisation itself, there are other forms of terrorism that
need to be accounted for in everyday life demarcated by national and political divisions.
Likewise, these other forms of terror demonstrate (as terrorism itself demonstrates) that
‘borders are permeable, exploding binary models of terror and proximity’ (2013, 21).
The Mexico-US border, where many individuals wait (im)patiently to cross over to the
other land – the better land – feels simultaneously close and distant. At the same time,
the state of everyday violence experienced south of the border elicits different forms of
coping that transcend the limits of perceived reality. Appeals to faith, hauntings and
monstrous fantasies disclose the horrors of an everyday that is subject to the contradic-
tion of openness and closeness and opportunity and restriction that characterises the
geographical delimitations between two nations.

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By the Border
Saint Death explores the horrors of living in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The urban conglomeration is represented in this text as a place of perennial waiting,
for migrants who are eagerly anxious to cross over to the United States, with the hope
of substantially improving their lives. Simultaneously, Juárez is also the site of con-
stantly belligerent cartels and gangs, who instil fear and death throughout the urban
sprawl. Caught up between the rival factions, the less well-to-do inhabitants of the city
live in a state of apprehension. The grip that the gangs and the cartels have on all strata
of public security makes trust practically non-existent, forcing people to recur to other
sorts of (un)holy presences that play with the fate of those who ask for help by means
of prayers and material offerings. What stands on the gambling table is the body itself
as the last sacrifice to find a way to move on and escape to the promised American
land. South of the border – south of the river – what governs Juárez is death and the
everlasting desire to move and cross the border one day.
The plot focuses on teenager Arturo, who lives in a shanty town in the outskirts
of Juárez, and who is visited by his childhood friend Faustino. Faustino now works
for a drug gang and owes the leader 1,000 dollars. Knowing that he has no chance of
ever finding that amount of money in one single night, Faustino requests Arturo help
him win the money by betting it all at a bar in Juárez owned by his boss. In order
to earn good fortune, Faustino takes Arturo to see Santa Muerte, or Saint Death, an
obscure deity that is fashioned after the idols of Roman Catholicism, but represents
death itself. Although Arturo is hesitant about this macabre prayer for luck, he goes
into the bar El alacrán (The Scorpion) to play calavera (skull), a card game he is par-
ticularly adept at because of his memory skills. Arturo is able to win the 1,000 dollars
that Faustino needs and even wins more money, but his greed tempts him to play once
again and he ends up losing everything, even owing gang leader El Carnero (The Ram)
4,000 dollars. Even though Arturo’s fate is sealed because he has no means to get the
money in one single day, he asks for help from friends and even looks for his estranged
father. All his attempts are unsuccessful. Arturo accepts the blame and dies tortured by
El Carnero’s men; his body is left on the shores of the Rio Grande, just a few metres
away from the land he never got to cross over to.
Despite its crude realism, Arturo’s story is also governed by foreboding and appar-
ent supernatural interventions in his actions and the choices that he makes throughout
the last two days of his life. This fiction carefully exposes the inevitable presence of
violence at the hands of the drug gangs, a violence that mars the living conditions of
Juárez to the point where nearly all the people that Arturo meets during his trial are
marked by death, whether by closely escaping it or by having witnessed someone die
or disappear. This is further cemented by symbols in the narrative that frame Arturo’s
story around death and deception, with Santa Muerte being the primordial one driving
the plot, an ambiguous deity, a keeper of the portal between life and death, a figure
that can grant wishes, but always at the cost of life itself. In this deadly world, Arturo’s
options are limited. It is clear that he is not just bound by chance or luck, but also by
a more dreadful spiritual force that reinforces the state of violence in Juárez.
With a wide array of mixed rituals, prayers and sacrifices, Santa Muerte attests to a
global conglomeration of belief systems inherited from the encounter of different migrant
cultures that stop at Juárez. When Faustino takes Arturo to visit the altar of this deity,

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they both notice some ‘strange chalk marks’ on the floor. Arturo enquires about them,
but all Faustino can say is that Doña Maria, the owner of the house where Saint Death
resides, says ‘they let good spirits in and keep bad ones out. They’re called patipemba,
something like that. Old African magic, but that’s okay. The White Girl welcomes every-
one to her church. Everyone. You’ll see’ (Sedgwick 2016, 55). The shrine of this uncanny
figure is all-encompassing. She is embodied by a mixture of specific belief systems, some
of African origin, which have been paired with the Roman Catholic tradition of saintly
figures. The novel clarifies that this deity was not born in Juárez, but had come a long
way from Central or Southern Mexico, travelling, migrating, stopping short at the bor-
der city as a sign of protection or omen of death to come. The violent border is the ideal
site for it to flourish. Saint Death serves an embodiment of globalisation and flow, yet it
can only thrive in conflict and the end of life. Thus, it is a liminal, almost supernatural,
figure that convincingly represents the contradictions of the global border.
The narrative in Sedgwick’s novel is all about thresholds, about spaces – physical,
geographical, spiritual and symbolic – that stand one against the other. In these spaces,
the main protagonist is forced to navigate under constant threat, always looking beyond
the imposed limits of political borders and his severe economic situation. He resides in
Anapra, a suburb of Juárez overlooking the United States. Every day, Arturo faces
the other side of the border and notices that the frontier is not always clearly marked
physically or artificially. There are several parts where the riverbed is shallow or a bit
dry and the border fence is not entirely set up or constructed. Arturo knows he ‘could
simply walk into America’ at any point outside the urban sprawl of Juárez and El Paso
(Sedgwick 2016, 13). He just does not because he knows of the risks of walking into
empty desert land without substantial resources to move as far away from the border as
possible and avoid being noticed by the American border patrol. Even though the land
he wishes to migrate to is not that far away, he knows very well that crossing illegally
is to risk one’s own existence in the harsh desert.
Sedgwick’s novel reproduces, by means of fiction, what is yet to come for the
would-be migrant, whose attempt to move across the border is prevented by what De
León calls a ‘hybrid system’, a complex ecology comprising various factors – ‘human,
animal, mineral, weather pattern, and so forth’ – that complicate migratory crossings
(2015, 40). Here, the desert becomes ‘a tool of boundary enforcement and a strategic
slayer of border crossers’ (De León 2015, 67) that saves the government the human
force to keep unwanted crossers away from the American land.
In a way ‘nature “civilizes”’ how ‘the government deals with migrants; it does
the dirty work’, further relying on a techno-environmental surveillance that detaches
bodily harm from human intervention (De León 2015, 68). Nevertheless, for Jeremy
Slack (2019), migration is always about humanity exposed throughout the journey:
‘Human movement is etched with violence, and the people marked by these etch-
ings are at the mercy of those around them’ (2019, 9). He insists that this violence is
not determined by geographical environments alone, but that the human factor must
always be taken into account: ‘Violence is both a social and a spatial process, with the
radical “foreignness” of the individual inscribed on their being’ (2019, 9). This eco-
logical perception of the horrors of migration at the border is strategically represented
by the city of Juárez in Saint Death. Even though Arturo is still unable to cross the
border, life in this urban space extends the dangers and risks of walking into the desert
with no means of defence.

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The urban landscape at the border is just as dangerous as crossing the border itself.
Juárez is a place where the conglomeration of economic and migratory interests move
around issues of legality and illegality. Whilst there are legal border crossings and busi-
ness endeavours facilitated by trade agreements, there is also a darker side. The novel
monstrifies environments in the way De León argues, illuminating migratory poli-
cies that may use the natural desert environment where the Mexico-US border passes
through as a defence against unwanted migration. Juárez is ‘a hot beast in a cold world
of night’, its nightlights flashing alongside gunfire. It ‘is what occurs when greed makes
money by passing things across the border dividing poverty and wealth. Things like
cars, like electronics, like machines. Things like drugs, things like people’ (Sedgwick
2016, 77). Rather than celebrating a potential enrichment of social, economic and
cultural proportions, Saint Death reveals a state of marginalisation and poverty that
has resulted from global economic and political agreements that have failed to benefit
all people equally. At the same time, the city has become a hotbed of illicit actions, as
a result of this perennial gothic dyad of movement/stagnation that traps people who
wish to have a better life on the other side. Rather than thinking about flows and
mobilities, the novel discloses urban imprisonment as part of this contradictory and
terrifying view of migration.
At night, the monstrous urban sprawl reveals a lack of stability. As it lights up, it
demonstrates the extent to which human desire can result in living conditions where
subjects constantly fear for their lives. They also become commodities in the eco-
nomic environment of the border. The world of Juárez depicted in Sedgwick’s novel is
one in which human life can be traded for financial gain, and if no gain is obtained,
this life can be disposed of. This is the dire situation in which Arturo and Faustino
find themselves: since Faustino owes his boss, El Carnero, money, he is forced to pay
it off in cash or with his own life. When Arturo agrees to help his friend and prays
to Saint Death for good fortune, his greed and confidence make him lose even more
money at the card game. With no means to pay off the debt, the protagonist is forced
to trade one life for another. Involved in the illicit agreements that seek to benefit the
gangs of Juárez, Arturo gives up his life in order to save the ones he cares for. His
prayer to Santa Muerte is fulfilled, as death itself is what envelops this ambiguous
figure of devotion.
When Arturo and Faustino visit the shrine of Saint Death, Arturo overhears a radio
show where the host interviews a woman who is completely shattered by the disap-
pearance of her daughter. This is a common example of everyday violence in Juárez,
where hundreds of women have been killed in one of the biggest femicide cases in the
world.2 Arturo’s mother disappeared on her way back from work, never to be seen
again. In this sense, death has followed Arturo during most of his life, depriving him
of any possibility of moving forward and of being able to cross over to the desired bet-
ter living conditions in the United States. Now, in order to help his friend pay off his
debt and be able to smuggle his girlfriend and baby illegally across the border, Arturo
faces a holy yet deceiving figure, whose very representation is more ambiguous and
grotesque than comforting. The protagonist notices that the altar centres on a skeleton
dressed with a shawl and a wig. It looks ‘almost ridiculous, Arturo thinks, and yet it’s
more disturbing than it is funny, and in a way disconcerting because it is somehow
comical too, and do not laugh at death, he thinks, we do not laugh at death’ (Sedgwick
2016, 57). Arturo is aware of the ritual setting of the altar, with a careful, yet macabre,

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mixture of portraits and figurines that appeal to all forms of well-being, some illicit,
others even focused on sexual satisfaction. At the centre of the shrine lie the offerings
left for Santa Muerte’s protection. Arturo is hesitant, but decides to play along with his
friend in order to help him out.
The request backfires. Whether it was a matter of mere luck and pride or super-
natural divine forces that guided Arturo throughout the card game, this is never made
clear. What is left is a payment that cannot be fulfilled, and the only way to solve
the debt is with Arturo’s own life. In Saint Death, the narrative has always revolved
around death itself. The ominous figure of Saint Death appropriately represents the
social and economic conditions that prevail here: an ambiguous take on death as both
something to be afraid of, yet also a means to overcome the dangers that rule this
place. At the same time, Santa Muerte is enveloped in dynamics of request, payment
and retribution that are associated with the economic models that have turned Juárez
into such a deathly place. Whatever is requested must be paid off, whether in kind or
with life itself. Gothic at the border reveals the inconsistencies of legality and illegal-
ity in terms of life, society and economy. When unrestrained, migratory conditions
become ordeals in inhospitable spaces. There is no escape. The monster of the city only
leads to the monster of the border, with its political and natural hazards, which has
been implemented to betray life. It is not that ‘here be monsters’; rather, political and
economic border frameworks set the conditions for loss, unfulfilment of desires
and lack of security. Here be monstrous instead.

Under the Border

Directed by Emilio Portes, Belzebuth approaches the experience of systemic violence in
a Mexican border city in a similar way to Sedgwick’s novel. In this film, Mexican police
detective Emmanuel Ritter is trying to solve the mystery of a series of violent mass kill-
ings in his unnamed hometown. All these atrocious killings have happened in public
places, such as hospitals, schools and cinemas, mainly aimed at children who are roughly
five years old. At first, Ritter and his colleagues blame drug cartels and the persistent
gang violence that has plagued the city for quite some time. Ritter is still mourning the
death of his wife and newborn son, victims of a mass killing five years earlier, and has
not yet come to terms with his loss. Simultaneously, a team of American special unit
detectives led by Iván Franco is also investigating the scene and looking for traces of
paranormal activity. Eventually, Ritter and Franco team up to discover that the mass kill-
ings have been perpetrated by possessed people in their attempt to prevent the coming of
the messiah to a land ravaged by violence and also dominated by a world power, mostly
in economic terms. The two detectives work together to save Isa, a five-year-old boy who
is revealed to be this new messiah. When they explore an abandoned orphanage, they
are tempted by the Devil himself. Satan ends up possessing Ritter, promising to revive
his dead son and wife. Finally, the two men make an agreement with Father Canetti, a
priest who had been banned by the Roman Catholic Church and has been searching
for the new messiah all his life. In order to keep Isa safe, the three men agree they must
take him across the border to the United States to a hidden location. Since the border is
heavily guarded and there is the chance to encounter another possessed being who will
try to harm the boy, they decide to use an underground, illegal tunnel formerly used to
smuggle drugs from Mexico. During the crossing, they stumble upon a shrine dedicated

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to evil forces, where Ritter’s possession is reignited. A violent fight to save Isa and to
rescue Ritter’s soul ensues. Canetti expels the demon from Ritter’s body and transfers
it to a pre-Hispanic idol before they blow up all access points to the illegal tunnel and
shrine. The demon ends up buried deep in the desert at the border, whilst Ritter becomes
the guardian and protector of the new messiah.
In Belzebuth, the setting of the border facilitates the representation of living con-
ditions that are constantly at odds with the global premises of mobility, cultural and
economic exchange and social interactions. Instead, the cities on the Mexican side of
the border are established as nests of poverty, limited mobility, social injustice and a
profound lack of law – whether human or divine. This results in a persistent atmo-
sphere of physical violence that permeates the very core of human existence. Physical
and political borders are constant reminders of the limits of the self and the thin line
that separates life and death. Under the threat of the end of one’s existence, the char-
acters of both the film and the novel turn back to faith and prayer in an attempt to
justify their actions and their sense of living by means of divine entities that may very
well oversee their destiny. In Sedgwick’s novel, the protagonist turns to hybrid figures
of devotion to get some sense of stability in the chaotic urban warfare of Juárez. With
no material or human conditions that can guarantee peace, security and free mobil-
ity, Santa Muerte looms over everyone as a figure that represents divine justice. When
Arturo meets his friends Carlos and Siggy, a couple who own a bar close to where
he lives, he engages in a discussion about the power of religion. According to Siggy,
‘Religion is a collective delusion, a collective madness that ironically prevents mad-
ness for the individual’ (Sedgwick 2016, 71). In the midst of nonsense, the collective
discourse of religion, of placing faith in a figure of devotion, can help individuals navi-
gate through the inconsistencies and injustices of the everyday. Like gambling, trust in
Saint Death is hit or miss, but at least actions and decisions are placed elsewhere, on
this other entity that knows it all, sees it all and embraces all. Siggy points out that the
power of Santa Muerte relies on the fact that everyone prays to her: ‘Narcos . . . and
the army, and the police, and the politicians and the prostitutes, and the prison guards
and the prisoners, and the poor’ (Sedgwick 2016, 71). If there is a promise of globali-
sation in these narratives, it is one that encompasses a choice of faith in the divine for
a universal well-being that has not been accomplished in material, economic, political
and social ways. Yet, what both fictions also reveal is that this promise is deceiving and
uncanny: the all-encompassing deities are always encompassed by death itself.
In Belzebuth, everyday violence is explained by means of supernatural and divine
premises. People are possessed, which drives them to commit atrocious mass killings
for the sole purpose of preventing another messianic revelation. Forces of evil meddle
with everyday life, resulting in a violence that blends with the current state of neglect
of the law and the institutions that are meant to enforce it. In their attempt to under-
stand who is behind the violent crimes they are both investigating, Ritter and Franco
decide to consult a bruja, a woman who works as a fortune teller and who is able to
cast spells when someone asks for them. When the bruja looks at the investigation
papers about the massacres that have been happening in the city, she immediately rec-
ognises the symbols as magia negra. ‘I won’t mess with them,’ she warns. ‘It is heavy
stuff . . . Black magic, used by drug dealers, politicians or policías huevones [lazy
ass police officers] who want to raise faster, win a personal war or just for regular
protection.’ Ritter confesses that all police officers eventually deal with these forces,

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but claims they are ‘bullshit’. Still, the bruja warns him that what they are dealing
with now is very dangerous. The woman agrees to read the tarot to the detectives,
revealing a mixture of systems of belief in magic in this hostile environment too. The
scene is set up with low-key lighting to accentuate shadows and the street light com-
ing in through the windows of the house. The primary tone is a warm, golden light
that contrasts heavily with the male characters’ clothes in sober blues, blacks and
whites. After the cards are shuffed and laid out on the coffee table, close-ups reveal
that they are all the Devil, implying that a supernatural force has been messing with
the woman’s tarot deck. The bruja claims that one of the detectives is going to die, but
Ritter dismisses her warning. Right at that instant, small objects in the house start to
fly around the room as if someone had thrown them. Unexplained footsteps are heard
upstairs, and then the woman’s daughter screams desperately. The men and the bruja
run to find the girl’s room locked. Ritter forces the door open and they find a terrifying
situation reminiscent of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Objects in the room
fly around in every direction and the bed keeps on moving uncontrollably. The refer-
ence to the earlier American film is unavoidable. Belzebuth clearly suggests that the
characters are dealing with demonic possessions and that the protagonist will see his
faith tested by being tempted and possessed by the Devil later on.
More traditional gothic motifs are incorporated when Ritter and Franco go to
investigate the abandoned orphanage, led by Canetti, who they believe is behind all
the killings in the city. The abandoned building shows a clear state of disrepair: forgot-
ten files and Catholic statues and figures are scattered across the several big rooms the
detectives walk through. It is here that the Devil reveals himself by animating a rotten
wooden statue of Jesus Christ on the cross. The nod to Guillermo del Toro’s vampire
film Cronos (1993) cannot be overlooked. Del Toro’s allegory of the fantasy of eternal
life begins with a wooden angel statuette that is already showing signs of disrepair
when protagonist Jesús Gris and his granddaughter spot a cockroach coming out of
the head of the figurine. This prompts them to discover the Cronos device hidden
inside. In a similar, but more perverse, fashion, the demonic entity speaks out from the
rotting Christ figure, animating its useless wooden parts to create an uncanny, puppet-
like object. The Devil plays on Ritter’s past trauma: the loss of his newborn son and his
wife. This has haunted his existence ever since, and evil forces decide to prey upon his
own weakness by offering him an imaginary reunion with his beloved deceased ones.
The scene points to the protagonist’s unwillingness to let go of the past, something
that has potentially ruined his present existence: he has been living on his own in a
badly kept flat and has failed to develop any emotional attachment with anyone else
ever since. When Ritter approaches the figures of his wife and his son that the Devil
is offering him, he discovers that they are just monstrous deceptions. He madly tries
to attack the wooden statue, but whatever animated this object passes on to him. He
nearly kills Franco before Canetti steps in and knocks him unconscious.
The most relevant sequence in the film is the moment when Ritter, Franco and
Canetti decide to work together to take the messiah to a safe location across the bor-
der inside the United States. They agree to use an illegal underground tunnel used by
drug cartels to smuggle goods and people right under the heavily policed migration
stop and where possessed individuals may show up anywhere to try to kill the child.
Their plan resembles an illegal crossing process: the boy and his mother are secretly
put into a van that drives them to a Chinese restaurant, where the entrance to the

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tunnel is under one of the customer tables. These secret underground passageways have
featured prominently in the news,3 and are known by the protagonist in Sedgwick’s
Saint Death. When Arturo wonders if Faustino’s girlfriend and baby have crossed
the border, he hopes that the polleros managed to do it without being noticed: ‘He’s
heard some stories about tunnels to the east of Juárez, and someone told him about
the cattle market a few kilometers to the west of Anapra’ (Sedgwick 2016, 140). The
complex political-environmental machinery that monstrously engulfs the lives of ille-
gal crossers can be challenged by looking for other ways that keep on extending the
fantasy of global flows. What Ritter and his friends encounter underground is far more
monstrous and disturbing.
The tunnel that the characters enter is plagued by darkness and various passage-
ways. Rather than being designed in a straight line, the crossing is meant to confuse
anyone who enters it. It resembles a labyrinth, and Ritter and company must not stray
from the path that will take them to the exit in the American desert. The characters
discover secret rooms along the way, where drug dealers could store their merchandise,
as well as iron gates that can help protect people and goods from unwanted invaders.
These gates also work to lock up or lock out intruders, denying them progress along
the tunnel. Halfway through the crossing, the group enters a large open space filled
with objects and figures of worship. There is no consistency in the religious or cultist
origin of these statues. Crosses are hanging on the walls, Roman Catholic statues of
virgins and saints occupy the space, but there are also figures of Saint Death and busts
of Jesús Malverde. On one side, a large stone with strange carvings looms over the
rest of the objects. The conglomeration of these figures attests to an amalgamation of
beliefs and devotions, a sign that hints that drug dealers have mixed different faiths
and ritual practices in order to guarantee good fortune for their illegal trading.
The fact that this disturbingly hybrid shrine lies right under the border between
Mexico and the United States points to different ways of dealing with how groups of
interest can make the most profit from the economic treaties and policies that rule bor-
der communities. The secret passageway works as an alternative solution to continue
with any illegal trade. At the same time, it discloses twisted forms of secrecy and trans-
port that lie underneath the legal frameworks between the two bordering countries.
Not all forms of trade and border crossing are recognised, and these look for darker,
alternative forms to continue existing. The discursive and active machinations that
have monstrified the surface of the border, where migration has been targeted by an
amalgamation of legal and environmental forms to deter any unrecognised crossing,
see a double, but more macabre, counterpart underground, where supernatural evil
forces reproduce processes of exploitation, extraction and unequal exchange that exist
overground. The secret tunnel in Belzebuth highlights how these cruel and violent poli-
cies that have been machinated overground possess a counterpart deep in the recesses
of the earth: one that aims to continue all forms of exchange – of goods, of bodies, of
faiths – in ways as inhumane as possible.
It is here, in this global shrine of sorts where religious beliefs and traditional prac-
tices intermingle, that the demon that had possessed Ritter finds new strength. Canetti
deems it necessary for Ritter to be exorcised right there in order to save the boy that
the demon is hunting down. The sequence is characterised by its body violence: whilst
possessed, Ritter kills a couple of men with an axe, blood and tissue splurging on to a
few of the religious artefacts that lie there. When they manage to control him, part of
the exorcism rite involves nailing Ritter to a makeshift cross. This scene goes further

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 migration and the gothic 377

into borders and boundaries by inflicting wounds on bodies. Ritter has smashed and
cut through heads and limbs; when he is crucified, his body is subject to the same
inflictions. In a disturbing moment, a close-up reveals an alien entity moving inside his
body. This thing writhes and screams, pushing itself inside his abdomen in a horrifying
attempt at keeping the protagonist’s body during the exorcism. Once again, with the
limits of the body as border, the machination of the Roman Catholic ritual seeks to
forcefully destroy an entity that seeks asylum, a host with which to move around the
terrestrial plain. The border that is instated is provided with another intricate level of
representation: a spirit within a body underneath a geopolitical border attempts to
maintain itself (illegally – that is, understood by a law of faith) within specific bound-
aries of conscience and physicality.
In a last attempt to rescue Ritter, Canetti barges into this human-made cave with
the blood of the messiah. The former priest grasps the protagonist and forces the
demon to take possession of his body. With a final strength of will, Canetti deposits the
demonic spirit into the huge carved rock that had been lying there. Once dispossessed,
Ritter and friends manage to escape the tunnel and detonate some explosives to bury
the evil entity underground, along with the body of Canetti. Ritter’s soul is saved, and
the illegal crossing has also kept the young boy alive. No matter where or how they
could have crossed into the United States, their lives had always been at stake.
Both novel and film are thus concerned with the precarity of life and the perennial
presence of death that has resulted from the machination of border policies. Even
though globalisation suggests greater mobility and transnational development, the
ecology of border crossings and urban settlements points to something completely dif-
ferent. Border cities are populated by people who are stuck, detained, always waiting
for the moment in which a crossing may be possible. If they are not permanent resi-
dents, they risk marginalisation. They become the targets of the complex machinery
of violence and impunity that rule these places. Once again, it is a matter of placing,
of acting by moving across a setting. If this is hindered, the semi-permanent stay of
the migrant reveals the horrifying conditions that have systematically been enshrined
both legally and illegally. Slack claims that ‘individuals whose geography is defined as
transient can be taken, extorted, tortured, and murdered, in the same way they can
easily be demonized, criminalized, and blamed’ (2019, 21–2). Arturo and Faustino
are two teenagers who live in constant poverty and are subject to being abused by the
forces that encompass their urban space as they eagerly wait for the day when they
can cross the border. Ritter is a man of the law who fails to enforce it, traumatised by
the loss of his wife and newborn son by the violence that he fights every day. These
narratives demonstrate the instability and ambiguity of living at the border, unearth-
ing secrets and illicit actions that put entire cities in a state of constant urban warfare.
Characters turn to other forms of faith, to the occult and even to God himself, in an
attempt to understand the death that surrounds them. Slack states that ‘understand-
ing that death can be both the start and the end of migration shows how easy it is to
fail to understand the complex relationships between violence, conflict, and human
movement’ (2019, 135). With the ominous figure of Saint Death in Sedgwick’s novel
and the perennial presence of evil forces that massacre inhabitants in the border city in
Belzebuth, the depiction of the border as a facilitator of mobility in global times turns
into a space of suffering both on the surface and under it. The result is a monstrous
geographical complex that devours its inhabitants, as well as the people who are eager
to escape to somewhere better.

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 378 enrique ajuria ibarra

Notes
1. Transnational metropolitan areas are common along the US-Mexico border. The most
important ones are: San Diego-Tijuana, Calexico-Mexicali, El Paso-Juárez, Laredo-Nuevo
Laredo, McAllen-Reynosa and Brownsville-Matamoros. The Mexican cities tend to be
more densely populated. The Rio Grande is the most extensive natural barrier, and to
cross it, entry points by means of bridges are set up from Juárez all the way to the coast in
Matamoros. Often, housing and industries lie right next to the established border between
the two countries. Because this is a desert environment, these urban pockets stand next to
vast areas that are, by contrast, not populated at all.
2. Marietta Messmer claims that hundreds of killings, specifically of women and girls, have been
perpetrated in Juárez since 1993 and that multiple ‘theories have been advanced as to who is
responsible for those murders and why they are concentrated in Ciudad Juárez’. The potential
culprits are many, but, as Messmer suggests, so far no one has been pointed out as the sole per-
petrator (2012). Sergio González Rodríguez (2012) argues that the high rate of crimes against
women is the result of modern economic policies, industrialisation, ‘institutional corruption
and impunity for criminals’ that results in a slick machinery that becomes a ‘parasite of the
neo-Fordist economy’ (2012, 8–9). Just like the complex monstrous border political machi-
nations proposed by De León, femicides in Juárez also respond to the dark contradictions of
globalisation that frame the city’s legal and illegal structures, abusing and harming its citizens
as well as disposing of their bodies.
3. A BBC News article speaks of a ‘1,313m’ underground tunnel between Tijuana and San
Diego that notoriously ‘had a lift, rail track, drainage and air ventilation systems, and high
voltage electrical cables’, although no evidence of drug trafficking had been found (2020).
Mary Webber reported recently that another ‘650-foot tunnel built by Mexican drug king-
pin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’ had been built ‘across the street from a National Guard
base in Tijuana, Mexico’ (2021). Both news articles notice that the tunnels are not rudi-
mentary, with several services and facilities making them suitable hideout places. That one
was built next to the National Guard also suggests a lack of close surveillance of cartel
activities by Mexican law enforcement bodies. It once again shows that border cities are
subject to violence and activities beyond or overlooked by the law.

References
BBC News. 2020. ‘US-Mexico Border: “Longest Ever” Smuggling Tunnel Discovered.’ 30 January.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51304861.
Botting, Fred and Justin D. Edwards. 2013. ‘Theorising Globalgothic.’ In Globalgothic, edited
by Glennis Byron, 11–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland:
University of California Press.
del Toro, Guillermo, director. 1993. Cronos. October Films.
Friedkin, William, director. 1973. The Exorcist. Warner Bros.
González Rodríguez, Sergio. 2012. The Femicide Machine. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Messmer, Marietta. 2012. ‘Transfrontera Crimes: Representations of the Juárez Femicides in
Recent Fictional and Non-Fictional Accounts.’ American Studies Journal 57. https://doi.
org/10.18422/57-03.
Portes, Emilio, director. 2017. Belzebuth. Videocine.
Punter, David. 2016. The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche. Cardiff: University
of Wales Press.
Sedgwick, Marcus. 2016. Saint Death. New York: Roaring Brook Press.

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 migration and the gothic 379

Slack, Jeremy. 2019. Deported to Death: How Drug Violence Is Changing Migration on the
US-Mexico Border. Oakland: University of California Press.
Webber, Mary. 2021. ‘El Chapo Narco Tunnel Found in Front of a National Guard Base in
Mexico.’ Latin Post, 11 May. https://www.latinpost.com/articles/150263/20210511/el-
chapo-narco-tunnel-found-front-national-guard-base-mexico.htm.

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 25

Globalgothic Americas: Consuming and

Consumed Bodies in Twenty-First-Century
Narratives
Inés Ordiz and Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno

T he short film Her Body (2018), directed by Juan Avella (Venezuela), tells the
story of Gina, an undocumented Latina whose abusive American boyfriend,
Erick, has left her for dead after brutally hitting her. The film’s narration begins by
showing us Gina’s body wrapped in a large piece of plastic covered in her blood.
She is gasping for air and, like a caterpillar about to emerge from its cocoon, she is
wriggling to free herself. Erick and another unidentified man enter the dark storage
room where they are keeping Gina. Armed with an axe and a kitchen knife, they
come ready to cut her body into pieces to sell to organ traffickers: her body is now
merchandise. While this is happening, the gruesome violence and suspenseful tone
is constantly interrupted with flashbacks of Gina’s life with Erick. Another type of
violence, much subtler, enters the plot. He was possessive and controlling, but like
the classic abuser, he acted like a loving, devoted partner: ‘He is a sweetheart,’ Gina
even tells her sister. In the end, with the help of her sister, Sara, who was able to track
her down, Gina saves herself from the most gruesome death. In a turn of events, after
fighting and killing the men, Gina and Sara impersonate the dealers, sell the men’s
body parts to the traffickers, and leave the house.
In under eleven minutes, this short film raises a number of issues. The first one is:
whose body is it really? Gina’s body is seen as an object to be controlled by others
(men) and as a commodity to be inserted in the global market: at some point, Erick’s
accomplice assures him that ‘by midnight, half her limbs are going to be in Europe
being sold to pharmaceutical companies and shit’. To potentially save other, more
privileged bodies, through scientific research and the creation of pharmaceutical drugs,
marginalised and disenfranchised subjects need to be sacrificed. In this case, the body
is of a woman who must remain hidden given her illegal status in the United States.
Furthermore, when Gina and Sara ‘take over’ the illegal transaction and sell the two
male bodies, the film suggests that they are eventually able to insert themselves as
agents in the capitalist logic of extreme consumption.
Her Body is a horror film and it uses tropes from slasher movies. Firstly, the notion
of borders and their transgression, a characteristic of gothic and horror fiction, is
constantly present throughout the film: inside and outside; men and women; life and
death; past and present; good and evil. It is also possible to think that the plot takes
place in, or close to, the Mexico-United States border, a space marked by sociopo-
litical, economic and humanitarian conflicts and crises. Secondly, Gina is effectively a

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 globalgothic americas 381

victim of a gothic villain, imprisoned in a house, her body immobilised. She and her
sister rebel against these men, though one can presume that this moment of empow-
erment is limited, mainly because they have been forced to reproduce the very same
gory violence that has for decades been inflicted on their bodies. The final sequence of
the film shows both sisters about to leave the house of horrors. Are they really able to
escape? Even if Gina is able to emerge from the plastic cocoon, her metamorphosis will
probably not materialise so long as she is still trapped in masculinist, heteronormative
and capitalist systems of oppression.
The paradigms of extreme consumption and gender inequality reflected by
Avella’s film are key elements of neoliberalisation1, a historical and material process
interrogated by the literary sources analysed in this chapter: the short stories ‘Auction’
(2020), by Ecuadorian author María Fernanda Ampuero; ‘Things We Lost in the
Fire’ (2017) by Argentinian Mariana Enriquez; ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ (2017)
by American writer Carmen Maria Machado; and the paperback Hurricane Season
(2020; Temporada de Huracanes 2017) by Mexican novelist Fernanda Melchor.
As ‘forms of cultural mediation of neoliberal modernity’ (Deckard and Shapiro
2019, 15), these texts typify what Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro define as
counter-hegemonic examples of a ‘neoliberal world-culture’, offering a critique of
neoliberalisation and ‘registering the culture of discontent against the abstraction
of financialisation and the scarring violence of seizure capitalism’s accumulation via dis-
possession’ (15). In our selection of texts – which represents the American continent –
the female victims are trapped in systems of economic and gender oppression which
haunt individuals and communities. Basing our analysis on critical sources from
gothic and horror studies (with texts by Judith Halberstam, Anne Williams and
Barbara Creed, among others), and decolonial and anti-capitalist feminism (such
as the works of Silvia Federici, Sayak Valencia and Rita Segato), we focus on the
narratives’ depiction of capitalism’s monstrous consequences: invisibilised systemic
violence against other(ed) bodies, economic and political corruption, and the disre-
gard for human life in favour of profit. In Caliban and the Witch, Federici connects
global economic development with gender oppression when she asserts that some
of the necessary conditions of global capitalism are women’s degradation and ‘the
continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale’
(2009, 13). Expanding on Federici’s ideas, Valencia’s Gore Capitalism explores the
ways in which neoliberalisation has turned violated bodies and violence (particularly
against women) into a commodity to be purchased and traded. According to Valen-
cia, the economic polarisation at the core of this model has facilitated the creation
of endriago subjects who, marginalised within neoliberal economic systems, seek to
acquire power by marketising violence. Valencia terms this process ‘necroempower-
ment’ and the socio-economic structures that sustain it ‘gore capitalism’, a set of
processes by which ‘the destruction of the body becomes in itself the product or com-
modity’ because ‘death has become the most profitable business in existence’ (2018,
13). In our chapter, we argue that, in the literary texts chosen, the consequences of
(gore) capitalist brutality take gothic forms: violence against women’s bodies, mon-
strous corporalities and gendered spectralities. These works show that inequalities
inherent to world-economic systems and their oppression of populations and identi-
ties are processes which operate on a larger scale than national borders and require
solutions beyond individual agency.

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 382 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

‘Auction’
The opening short story in María Fernanda Ampuero’s Cockfight (2020)2 is a first-
person narrative by a young unnamed female character. At the beginning of the story,
she does not know where she is, but she is kneeling down, her head covered with a
‘filthy rag’ (Ampuero 2020). She can sense that she is in real danger or, in her own
words, ‘properly fucked’. The sound of distant roosters is the only thing that is familiar
to her and it is ultimately what dissipates the spatio-temporal boundaries, allowing her
to remember her childhood surrounded by the roosters that her father raised for cock-
fighting. As a child, the narrator was in charge of cleaning the space and picking up the
feathers and the viscera of the dead animals. At night, the animals would come back to
haunt her as ‘giant vampire roosters [that] devoured [her] insides’. However, she soon
learned that the revolting remnants of carnage could save her from the other beasts:

One night, a rooster’s belly exploded as I was carrying it in my arms like a doll and
I discovered that those macho men who shouted and jeered for one rooster to rip
open the other were disgusted by the shit and guts of the dead rooster. So I covered
my hands, my knees, and my face with that mixture and they didn’t bother me with
kisses and all that nonsense anymore. (Ampuero 2020)

She started to wear a waistband made from roosters’ heads, a chastity belt of sorts that
would keep men away. The rooster head became her amulet, but it also redefined her:
from ‘prissy’, as her father used to call her, to ‘monster’, the term these men used to
identify her bloodied, soiled body.
In the present, the narrator discovers that she is trapped in ‘an underground joint’
along with other people, men and women, and that they are all going to be auctioned
off. Like Gina in Her Body, she is going to be sold on a black market that defines bodies
as commodities and that stipulates their value based on how they look and/or what
they own. The first person up for auction is Ricardo, a rich man who lives in a gated
community and who owns luxurious items: Adidas shoes, a nice watch, credit cards
and a house that provides ‘a view poor folks like us can’t even get a glimpse of’, as the
man in charge of the auction explains to the audience. Ricardo has access to goods
that many cannot afford but that late capitalist consumerism presents as a marker of
success. To dominate a man like Ricardo by stripping him of his power and manliness
is to somehow dispose of his privileges, including his wife and children. The bidders,
in turn, will have the opportunity to accumulate even more and in more extreme ways.
Selling and acquiring the body of Ricardo exemplifies gore capitalism’s theoretical abil-
ity to unsettle ‘many of the fundamental principles that undergird humanist discourse’:
‘one of them is that male subjects, just like upper classes, are no longer untouchable in
today’s world. All these previously respectable subjects have become fungible bodies
susceptible to torture and eradication in order to produce further wealth’ (Valencia
2018, 164). This wealth, however, is limited to those who have the power to buy
Ricardo (and according to the narrator the bidders are thieves, rapists and murderers)
and have unlimited access to his habitus. As an endriago subject, the man in charge
of the auctions dominates and degrades the rich. But these actions are far from being
a social revolution that would ultimately benefit others like him who live in poverty.
Instead, ‘endriagos embody ungovernability, though . . . they cling to power, while

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 globalgothic americas 383

simultaneously internalizing a heteropatriarchal discourse as a way to legitimate their

identity and their social belonging’ (Valencia 2018, 133). This is probably more obvi-
ous in the bidding for the two women in the story: Nancy and the narrator.
In order to sell Nancy, the man focuses on her body – ‘Look at these tits, how
delicious, such perky nipples’ (Ampuero 2020), he tells the audience – and not on her
material possessions. What matters is what she is and not what she has. The ideas of
consumption and exploitation are taken to the extreme here as the man decides to per-
form a ‘quality control’ test, as he calls it, and sodomises Nancy in front of everyone.
‘The men jeer, roar, applaud. Then the slap of flesh against flesh. And the howls. The
howls.’ He positions himself as the alpha male in the wolf pack; the one who tastes
first and then leaves the ‘bones’ to the others. What is left of Nancy (her body and
her dignity) is immediately sold for ‘three thousand five [dollars]’, whereas Ricardo’s
value on the black market was five thousand. As the narrator explains: ‘Sexy is cheaper
than wealthy.’ This control and accumulation of goods and bodies, by both the auc-
tion organisers and the bidders, follows what Rita Segato calls ‘dueñidad’.3 This new
form of dominance of the land, the goods and the bodies, especially women’s bodies,
explains Segato, manifests itself in Latin America as a mafia-esque and gangsterish
administration of businesses, politics and justice (2016, 99). The underground joint
becomes a microcosm of the outside world, where social capital is the ultimate goal
and women are objects to be bought, consumed and disposed of. The public (though
clandestine) auction turns violence into a mundane spectacle which is reminiscent
of the slave trade market. As the narrator puts it: ‘The fat man4 introduces us like
he’s hosting a TV show’ (Ampuero 2020). The auction is essentially a game in which
women like Nancy see their worst (yet very plausible) nightmares come to life.
When it is the narrator’s turn to be auctioned off, the story takes the reader back
to her childhood and to the image of the dead roosters covering her body as a bloody
armour. Only this time, she opens her sphincter and empties her bowels, transforming
herself in front of the audience:

As best I can, I rub one leg against the other, I assume the position of a gutted doll.
I scream like a madwoman. I shake my head, mutter obscenities, made up words,
the things I said to the roosters about heaven full of corn and infinite worms.
(Ampuero 2020)

The crowd is disgusted, turned off by the sight of a woman who rapidly becomes an
animal before their own eyes. ‘How much for this monster?’ asks the man, but nobody
bids. She is finally taken to a patio to be hosed down, put in a car, and left ‘wet, barefoot,
and dazed’ on the highway.
The story’s open ending, similar to the one in Her Body, proposes a series of ques-
tions. What will happen to the narrator now that she has been able to ‘escape’? Will
she get back home safely? How? This is something that the plot hints at from the
beginning, when the narrator explains how she got to that place where she was being
kept prisoner: kidnapped by a taxi driver who, instead of driving her home after a
night out, took her to an ‘unfamiliar place’.
During her auction, the narrator assesses the situation and decides that she only has
two options: keep her body ‘pure and pristine’, untouched by the elements that would
turn her into ‘damaged goods’ so that others can use it for their own sexual satisfaction

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 384 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

and cover her, not with the blood and faeces of dead animals, but with their sweat and
semen. Her other choice is to make herself unrecognisable and undesired. Being ugly
and revolting gives her a fleeting freedom and the certainty that, this one time at least,
the ‘giant vampires’ will not devour her.

Hurricane Season
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020)5 is set in La Matosa, in Veracruz. The novel
starts when the body of the town’s witch is found floating in the river: ‘A horror show,
people said, because by the time those kids found her, the body was already bloated and
her eyes had popped out, her face had been half eaten by some animal and it looked like
the crazy bitch, the poor thing, was smiling’ (Melchor 2020, 35). The novel is focalised
through the perspective of different characters and it has an unusual discursive style: the
narration is formed by long run-on sentences that offer a peek into the character’s con-
sciousness, with frequent slang words and a delivery that resembles oral communication,
or even gossip. The readers soon learn that La Matosa is a very impoverished area, and
the characters’ stories, particularly the women’s, are examples of the misery that accom-
panies this poverty: Norma is a teenager who becomes pregnant after being raped by her
stepfather; Chabela is a sex worker who supports her boyfriend (Munra) and their son
(Luismi), and who takes Norma to see Bruja to terminate her pregnancy; Luismi is the
lover of Norma and Bruja; Brando is a paedophile secretly in love with Luismi who does
not accept his own homosexuality or Luismi’s relationship with the Witch, and who ends
up murdering Bruja.
Melchor’s Bruja6 reproduces local beliefs in the region of Los Tuxtlas and Catemaco,
known for its tradition of witches and healers (Godínez Rivas and Román Nieto 2019,
61). She is also confused by the people of La Matosa with La Llorona, the folkloric fig-
ure of Greater Mexico which, in traditional accounts, symbolises the threat a woman
can pose to boys and men, but which has also been explored by Mexican and Chicana
feminists as an emblem of resistance to patriarchal rule.7 Bruja’s portrayal is dark-
ened by the patriarchal and colonial understanding of witches as defined by European
history and folklore since the Middle Ages – and reflected by gothic fiction – which
could be summarised by the following traits: drug use and a dangerous knowledge of
alternative medicines, transgression of traditional structures of power, unconventional
and ambiguous gender traits and sexuality, and monstrous bodies, or monstrous use
of their bodies (including sexual encounters with the Devil). The external features of
Bruja are also in line with gothic depictions of witches: she conceals her pale face with
a veil, wears a long black tunic and lives in an old house that holds a secret: according
to rumours, a treasure.
The Witch serves as consultant and healer of many sex workers in La Matosa who
live off the tanker truck drivers who pass through the village: ‘hookers and huskies
who rolled in from god knows where, lured by the trail of banknotes that the oil trucks
left in their wake as they made their way down the highway’ (Melchor 2020, 33).
Bruja gives these women remedies to deal with loneliness and heartbreak, to scare away
suicide wishes, and to interrupt unwanted pregnancies. A sort of sisterhood is built
amongst the Witch and the sex workers: they are all pariahs of society, women used and
abused by the men of La Matosa. The ‘girls from the highway’ are the only ones that
Bruja would confide in, ‘perhaps because they understood and knew first-hand the full,

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 globalgothic americas 385

brutal force of male vice’ (34). Bruja helps the women ‘without charging a peso’ (3) in
a clear opposition to the monetary exchange that takes place between the sex workers
and their clients.
Valencia, when describing the logic that preceded neoliberal modernity, defines the
system’s limitations of individual freedom as a relationship between society and its
‘subjected subjects’:

the system’s demand that individuals take responsibility for themselves – rendering
the negotiation of their economic relations social and intersubjective, and in a
certain sense, private – does not take into account those subjects who lack the
power to negotiate from a non-disadvantaged position. (Valencia 2018, 24)

Melchor’s focus on the violent underground economy that runs La Matosa narrativises
the existence of these subjected subjects, and undoes the disposition of gore capitalism
to invisibilise the necessary relationship between legal and illegal economic exchanges:
on the one hand, the truck drivers transport petrol, a global consumer good; on the
other hand, the road girls are consumed by the drivers. In this sense, the truck driv-
ers become ‘gore consumers’ (Valencia 2018, 60) who also exemplify the connection
between specific geopolitical economics and the international market.
But women are not the only ones who turn to Bruja for remedies to deal with everyday
life under gore capitalism: she also gives drugs to the young men at the parties that she
organises in her house. In Brando’s chapter, we learn that

the poof would disappear and then come back without her veil and dressed up in
shiny colourful wigs and all sorts of costumes, and then, when they were all well
and truly fucked, when they were drunk as skunks and high as kites on the weed
that the Witch grew in her garden and those mushrooms that flourished under cow
pats . . . then the music would start blaring from the speakers. (Melchor 2020, 180)

At these parties, the drugs, the music, the singing and the gender performance of Bruja
create a carnivalesque environment in which traditional divisions of power between
genders disappear. This subversion, and Bruja’s affair with Luismi, are unacceptable
to Brando. His acceptance of prostitution and oppression, but strong rejection of
homosexuality, exemplifies the marginalised masculinity of the endriago subject and
his upholding of hegemonic systems of power, both of which lie at the core of gore
capitalism (as analysed in ‘Auction’).
These social and political interpretations of gender, which have historically defined
both the role of masculinity and the figure of the witch within patriarchal societies,
characterise the former as the centre of meaning and the latter as a monster. As Judith
Halberstam asserts, the gothic’s ‘modern preoccupation with boundaries and their
collapse’ (1995, 23) exemplifies an epistemological definition of the monster as ‘the
perfect figure of negative identity’ (22). ‘Monsters’, continues Halberstam, ‘have to
be everything the human is not and, in producing the negative of human, these novels
make way for the invention of human as white, male, middle class and heterosexual’
(22). Bruja’s gender identity is never made clear in the novel, as the character is always
talked about but never listened to. The different characters through which the story
is internally focalised mostly use female pronouns; however, Bruja is also referred

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 386 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

to using homophobic slurs for gay men, due to the fact that she has male reproduc-
tive organs.8 Therefore, her characterisation in Hurricane Season represents both a
transgressive undoing of boundaries – perceived as monstrous by the hegemonically
masculine social structure of La Matosa – and an uncertainty regarding sexual identity –
which is one of the elements of the literary uncanny (Bennett and Royle 1999, 38).
According to Anne Williams, ‘The witchy women of Gothic fiction usually threaten . . .
symbolic forms of castration: rebellion against their patriarchal roles as dutiful daugh-
ters, faithful wives and self-sacrificing mothers’ (2017, 91). Bruja not only does not
fulfil any of these roles, but also becomes a threat to accepted notions of power, gender
roles and sexualities, sexual bodies and economic exchanges within gore capitalism. In
being the emotional healer of the town’s women, as well as the provider of medicine to
terminate pregnancies, she is also aiding others in their decision of not fulfilling these
roles. As a risk to the status quo, she is eliminated by the patriarchal representatives of
the violent system: she is beaten by Munra and Luismi, and finally murdered by Brando.
Mixing the features of a pre-Hispanic healer and a gothic witch, Bruja ultimately
embodies centuries of oppression against women in the name of colonial and capi-
talist expansion. As Federici explains, due to the societal relevance that Indigenous
women had before the conquest and the misogynistic social rules brought about by
the Spaniards, these women became the main enemies of colonial control (2009, 309);
in central and southern Mexico, for instance, they guided all the main anti-colonial
revolts (De León quoted in Federici 2009, 311). Bruja’s murder at the end of the novel
reproduces and reflects a history of institutionalised gendered violence which is both
global and local, and which, according to Federici (2009, 17), is still one of the pillars
of contemporary social politics. In the Mexican context, this murder inevitably evokes
the country’s dreadful numbers of femicide and trans murder.9 The violence against
women referred to in Hurricane Season – which includes beatings, abuse, abortion
violence, rape, paedophilia and murder – is often a consequence of patriarchal and
late capitalist structures. Bruja and the rest of the women in La Matosa are victims of
the violent intersections of gender and poverty: stripped of the power Mexican women
once had, their worth is reduced to their bodies’ ability to satisfy these socio-economic
systems of oppression.

‘Real Women Have Bodies’

Carmen Maria Machado’s ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ is the fifth story in the col-
lection Her Body and Other Parties, first published in 2017. The story is set in a
dystopian – but uncannily recognisable – future in what can be assumed is the United
States, at a time when a strange phenomenon makes women become incorporeal and,
perhaps, undead: ‘Do you think faded women ever die?’ (Machado 2019, 144), the
protagonists ask themselves. The main character and narrator of the story is a young
woman who works at Glam, a shop that sells prom dresses, and who witnesses her
girlfriend, Petra, slowly lose her corporality.
The spaces of ‘Real Women’ – a dress shop, a mall, a motel – anticipate the story’s
commentary on the challenges of being a woman in a patriarchal and late capitalist
society. Some of the passages at the mall – the utmost symbol of American consumer-
ism – exemplify sexist expectations of women’s bodies embedded in the fabric of the
everyday. Examples of this are the derogatory comments of Chris and Casey (who
work in the photography shop next to Glam), and a mother’s casual fat-shaming of

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 globalgothic americas 387

her daughter: ‘“Hips,” Chris says. “That’s what you want. Hips and enough flesh for
you to grab onto, you know?”’ (Machado 2019, 128); and ‘A little girl standing in
front of the counter asks her mother for a pretzel. “Susan,” the mother admonishes.
“Pretzels are junk food. They will make you fat”’ (136). The prom dresses sold at
Glam are designed to make young girls fit into these standards: ‘bright teal slips and
dusky pink thunderpuff, the Bella series, the one the color of bees. Mermaid cuts in
salt-flat white; trumpet-style in algae red; princess gowns in liver purple. The Ophelia,
which looks perpetually wet’ (Machado 2019, 126). They are representative of a tra-
ditional concept of femininity10 only accessible to the wealthy because, as the narrator
admits, ‘[t]he most expensive dress costs more than [she] make[s] in three months’
(Machado 2019, 126).
Machado’s story refuses to be defined by one sole genre: it can be labelled as a
magical realist tale, a ghost story and a gothic text. Moreover, the world in which the
story is set is recognisable to contemporary readers, but some unusual elements invite
us to read it as a dystopia. As such, the reality imagined by Machado proposes an
exercise of awareness and reflection about the contemporary context; as a gothic and
dystopian text, it engages with fears born in the past and the present, but projected
into the future. The two main issues on which the story comments are represented
by the two lovers: the protagonist embodies the lack of prospects of a generation of
young people with a much more limited purchasing power than their parents; Petra
and the rest of the faded women represent the historic invisibility of women in capi-
talist expansion and the oppression which is particularly visible in the context of the
fashion industry.
The protagonist of the story is working jobs with ‘shit’ pay (Machado 2019, 138)
and continuously postponing the repayment of her student debt. Her experience reflects
the reality of many young people in the United States, a country which, despite being
the richest in the Americas, has seen an increase in precarious working conditions as
a consequence of neoliberal policies, and the repeated crises to which these have led
since the late twentieth century (Blustein 2019), which undermine the basic conditions
of democratic citizenship, education and knowledge (Baer 2017). Machado’s story
projects growing American anti-intellectualism into a future without higher education:
‘Months fall away. I consider going to grad school, if the government doesn’t shut
universities down like they’re threatening to’ (2019, 139). As opposed to the women
who become undead, the protagonist seems to be un-alive: existing in an economically
precarious state with no future in sight, incapable of furthering her education, working
at a store that looks ‘like the view from inside a casket’ (Machado 2019, 125).
Petra and the other faded women, conversely, haunt public spaces in what can be
interpreted as an attempt to bring to light invisibilised global inequalities. For Avery
Gordon, haunting ‘describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething
presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities’ (2008, 8). In
this logic, the ghost is ‘the sign, or the empirical evidence . . . that haunting is taking
place’. Gordon elaborates this idea by defining the social significance of the ghost:

The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investi-
gating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life.
The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible,
or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or
apparent to us. (2008, 8)

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 388 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

Haunting demonstrates that ‘beneath the surface of received history, there lurks
another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the autho-
rised version of events’ (Weinstock 2004, 5). Understanding the faded women as ghosts
allows us to analyse the meanings of their haunting and their connection to their social
and historical reality. By haunting a reality of precarity and academic recession and
by visibly attaching themselves to consumer goods, the faded women make visible
the spectrality of the financial markets, as well as the taken-for-granted labour and
invisibilised oppression of women in the accumulation of capital through the centuries
(as described by Federici 2009, 75).
The connection between spectrality and neoliberal economic practices is established
through the casual mention of a recession:

The first reports started at the height of the recession. The first victims – the first
women – had not been seen in public for weeks. Many of the concerned friends
and family who broke into their homes and apartments were expecting to find dead
bodies. I guess what they actually found was worse. (Machado 2019, 127–8)

This allusion, which further situates the narrative within a dystopian context of crisis,
unavoidably evokes the 2008 mortgage crisis. The ‘familiar cocktail’ of ‘deregulation,
privatisation, reduction of taxes and diminution of social programs’ (Wyile in Macfarlane
2017, 147) that led to this crisis was, as Karen E. Macfarlane comments, described
in American mainstream media in gothic terms – using words such as ‘uncertainty’,
‘insecurity’, ‘deterioration’, ‘fear’ and ‘horror’ (Kaklamanidou in Macfarlane 2017,
158). In similar fashion, Machado’s story gothicises the horrific consequences of these
policies by connecting them to the first appearance of the faded women.
This association is further emphasised when the main character discovers that faded
women are being sewn into the prom dresses sold at Glam by Petra’s mother: ‘The needle
– trailed by thread of guileless gold – winks as Petra’s mother plunges it through the girl’s
skin. The fabric takes the needle, too’ (Machado 2019, 134). These garments seem to
‘sell more’ (135): the hidden role of the faded women in the generation of surplus value
for Glam’s dresses works here as a metaphor for the invisibilised role of women in the
accumulation of capital that historically fuelled capitalist expansion.
Furthermore, the fact that the reason for the popularity of the dresses amongst the
consumers is spectral – ‘It’s like people want them like that, even if they don’t real-
ize it’ (Machado 2019, 135) – raises issues related to the imperceptibility of women’s
oppression in the global garment industry. According to the Global Slavery index,
forty million people are nowadays living in conditions of slavery; many of them live in
the Global South working in the supply chains of Western clothing brands (Kozlowski
2019). The apparel and footwear industry that caters to the demands of rich countries
presents an acceptable face to the buyer through the spectralisation of its workforce.
This precarious situation disproportionately affects women workers and it is often
connected to gender-based violence (Global Labor Justice 2019). But this seems to
be a local problem too, as workers based in the United States sewing clothes ‘Made
in the USA’ also operate under slavery conditions in sweatshops across the country
(Meagher 2020). As the protagonist of ‘Real Women’ becomes conscious of the real-
ity hidden behind a piece of clothing, she also starts undoing the spectrality of the
unethical practices on which the system is built. As with the dresses sold by Glam, each

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 globalgothic americas 389

one of the garments produced under unfair conditions is haunted by the oppression
of its workforce. In this sense, consumers are prompted to deliberate along with her:
‘I wander the mall on my lunch break. I wonder about the merchandise I pass. Who’s
in there?’ (Machado 2019, 136).11

‘Things We Lost in the Fire’

Mariana Enriquez’s short story was published in translation in 2017, in the collection
of stories with the same title.12 The narration opens with the story of ‘the subway girl’,
a young woman who begs for money in the Buenos Aires underground system while
she recounts a brutal attack by her husband, who burned her for being unfaithful.
The authorities believed him at first when he said that she had provoked the incident.
But as soon as she left the hospital, her face disfigured, she began to tell her truth to
everyone who would listen on their daily commute.
For those who encounter her, the subway girl is a walking contradiction, a body
that, like monsters, defies classification (Cohen 1996). On the one hand, ‘her mouth
was lipless and her nose had been sloppily reconstructed. She had only one eye left –
the other was a hollow of skin – and her whole face, head and neck were a maroon
mask crisscrossed by spiderwebs’ (Enriquez 2017, 186). On the other, some would say
that she dresses provocatively: tight jeans, see-through blouses, high heels and jewel-
lery. As the narrator comments, ‘For her to flaunt a sensuous body seemed inexplicably
offensive’ (187). People are repulsed by her mere presence and by the fact that she likes
to greet strangers, shake their hands and offer them kisses. A sexy woman in public is
already an affront to a patriarchal society, an invitation to violence; a sexy monstrous
woman is an impossibility. Through the perspective of Silvina and her mother, the two
main characters of the story, we learn of other women who, like the subway girl, have
been burned – and often killed – by their partners. The ‘Burning Women’, as they call
themselves, start a social revolution to protest against the recent wave of femicides and
fight to regain autonomy of their own bodies. Their plan is to organise and film secret
bonfires through which women would voluntarily walk to burn themselves. In the
words of the subway girl: ‘If they go on like this, men are going to have to get used to
us. Soon most women are going to look like me, if they don’t die. And wouldn’t that
be nice? A new kind of beauty’ (191). Ultimately, what they seek to do is repopulate
the country with new bodies that, like hers, do not conform to gender expectations of
beauty and traditional gender roles.
Silvina is in charge of filming and making the performance go viral on social media.
Her mother, a doctor, and María Helena, her mother’s friend, run a clandestine hospi-
tal where they care for the injured women until they heal and can reinsert themselves
into society. The ceremonial burns take place in Argentina’s Pampean region, a space
characterised by the vastness of the flat land, where the women could hide in plain
sight and where nobody would look for them. Moreover, the region is known for its
abundance of soy crops, Argentina’s primary commodity, and for the ruthless exploi-
tation of the soil (monoculture) at the hands of greedy landowners. If, historically,
women’s bodies are a territory to be conquered and colonised (Segato 2013), with the
displacement of the Burning Women to the Pampean grasslands, they are effectively
inserting their bodies in the place where Argentina’s patriarchal capitalism has gone
further in its forms of exploitation.

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 390 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

This attempt to sabotage conventional notions of femininity and ownership of wom-

en’s bodies is achieved by viralising the video of their bodies-turned-monsters. The videos,
according to the narrator, are watched by one million people. From a secluded place, the
women move to a no-place where their virtual corporealities are endlessly consumed by
others, not as sexual objects, but as freaks (at worst) and as the subjects of political and
social change (at best). This new form of monstrous corporality – disfigured and dissemi-
nated in the virtual world – implies a spectrality and a haunting: the ‘erasure’ of their bod-
ies and the constant lurking of their new selves in people’s lives through technology makes
them both visible and immortal. The videos reproduce ad infinitum what Western society
has professed for centuries: women are monsters. Nonetheless, this form of otherness is
closer to what Barbara Creed explains of the ‘monstrous-feminine’: its ‘presence does
challenge the view that the male spectator is almost always situated in an active, sadistic
position and the female spectator in a passive, masochistic one’ (2007, 7). The Burning
Women, thus, appropriate the misogynistic tools of the heteropatriarchy, and they decide
that their actions will only stop once they ‘[reach] the number of witches hunted dur-
ing the Inquisition’ (Enriquez 2017, 198). In order to become monsters, they need to
be witches first, burned at the stake just for being women. In this sense, in the women’s
departure to this remote and isolated place, and in establishing the clandestine hospital,
they conform to a new sorority based on empathy, fear and hope. Similar to the sister-
hood built in Melchor’s novel, this coven of sorts proposes a return to a pre-Columbian
society in which women, often perceived by the male European gaze as sorcerers, demons
or fantastic beings, ‘strongly defended the old mode of existence and opposed the new
power structure’ (Federici 2009, 229).
‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ can be read as a horror tale and, like ‘Real Women’, as
a dystopia, since it is ‘a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society’
(Gordin, Tilley and Prakash 2011, 1). Enriquez’s story presents a male-dominated
society where women are trapped and moulded into submission; where the future is
already here, and the fear of a terrible death haunts every woman. But the ending of
the story is unclear. For Silvina’s mother and María Helena, it is now Silvina’s turn.
She would inherit the women’s uprising and go from her ‘passive’ role of recording to
a more active participation in the burnings: ‘But Silvinita, oh, when Silvina burned it
would be beautiful, she’d be a true flower of fire’ (Enriquez 2017, 198). The closing
sentence of the story presents a sudden change in the narrative voice – from third-
person omniscient to free indirect speech – that denotes longing (‘oh’) and intimacy
(‘Silvinita’, a term of endearment). The reader, however, is left wondering if Silvina is
truly convinced of her mission and if the ending is indeed a prolepsis of the ultimate
sacrifice. Just like the narrator in ‘Auction’, Silvina and the Burning Women are pre-
sented with an excruciating decision: to painfully and violently transform their bodies
in an attempt to gain some control, or wait for an almost inevitable fate at the hands
of their male partners. The fire that burns them does not purify but it certainly allows
for the possibility of imagining other societal models.

Conclusion
The four texts analysed in this chapter use different formulations to highlight the
gothic nature of late capitalist consumerism. In them, bodies, spectral entities and
agencies are purchased and consumed in exchange for profit and power. Women’s

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 globalgothic americas 391

bodies – and, in particular, bodies of poor women – are especially subject to these
monstrous exchanges, which take the shape of exploitation, slavery, abuse, rape and
femicide. These corporalities, whether carnal or spectral, inhabiting the here-and-now
or the far-away, become goods to be consumed by the privileged, in a system that
reproduces itself endlessly throughout the American continent.
In an attempt to oppose these systems, the stories imagine alternative models of
resistance: from the monstrous resilience of the narrator of ‘Auction’ and the Burning
Women of ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ to the spectral revolution of the faded women in
‘Real Women Have Bodies’ and the occult opposition to capitalist exchanges exemplified
by Hurricane Season’s Bruja. These alternatives, however, always prove to be limited.
Melchor’s Bruja’s defiance of gender, sexual and economic boundaries is punished with
murder, which ends the access of women in La Matosa to herbal remedies, medicine and
emotional support pro bono. The faded women imagined by Machado seem to escape
the oppressive dualism of mind/body and learn to use their spectral realities to protest:
‘getting themselves into electrical systems and fucking up servers and ATMs and voting
machines’ (Machado 2019, 144). However, when given the chance to escape their literal
attachment to the dresses by cutting their seams, they choose to stay: ‘I see them all faintly
luminous, moving about in their husks. But they remain. They don’t move, they never
move’ (148). Similarly, the possibility of the Burning Women imagined by Enriquez to
be liberated from their corporeal reality seems to represent a rebellion. However, even
though they are able to anticipate men’s actions (through burning their own bodies), they
cannot fully subvert the system that controls, consumes and destroys them. In an effort
to end the burnings, local authorities start to stop-and-frisk women walking alone in the
streets of Buenos Aires; the clandestine hospital is raided several times by the police; María
Helena is imprisoned. As more women begin to challenge men’s power over them, they
become observed, scrutinised and questioned more than ever, as the authorities develop
an institutional attempt to crush any resistance. Like the Burning Women, the rebellious
protagonist imagined by Ampuero can only escape her fate by transforming her body in
an abject way. In ‘Auction’, the narrator’s revenge comes at the cost of her own self, of
losing command of her own body (ironically, by controlling her sphincter) and transform-
ing it into something so horrific that it needs to be expelled forever to the margins of the
city and of society, to the ‘via perimetral’.13 Her body will never be entirely hers and it will
always wear a stain, the scarlet A – made out of bodily fluids – that women everywhere
bear because their othered bodies are always up for Auction. Read together, this corpus of
texts highlights both the complexity of global, economic and structural violence against
women and the need to develop alternative solutions to the problems arising from the
oppressive systems that incarcerate them.

Notes
Part of the research for this chapter was conducted by Inés Ordiz thanks to the funding of the
Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland.

1. We use Deckard and Shapiro’s nomenclature here. The authors understand ‘neoliberalisa-
tion’ as ‘the material processes and technologies of capitalist penetration and development’
which could be reflected (and/or critiqued) by the ideologies, policies, models and para-
digms of ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘neoliberal world-culture’ (2019, 15).

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 392 inés ordiz and sandra m. casanova-vizcaíno

2. The original, Pelea de gallos, was first published by Páginas de Espuma (Madrid) in 2018.
3. Segato’s work has not yet been translated into English. The meaning of the neologism
‘dueñidad’ (from dueño, or ‘owner’ in English) is close to the idea of ‘dominion’, not just of
the land conquered and owned, but of everything in it, including people and resources.
4. We don’t know much about the man leading the auction but the narrator, who can only
perceive her surroundings using the senses of hearing and smell, imagines him to be ‘around
forty . . . fat, bald and dirty, wearing sleeveless white undershirt, shorts, flip-flops’. The
narrator continues: ‘I imagine his pinky and thumbnails are long. He speaks in the plural’
(Ampuero 2020).
5. The original, Temporada de huracanes, was first published by Literatura Random House
(Ciudad de México) in 2017.
6. We sometimes use the original name of the character in Spanish (‘Bruja’ for ‘Witch’) to
avoid repetition.
7. Also known as the Weeping or Wailing Woman, La Llorona ‘is a ghost said to haunt the
river banks and lake shores. Some know La Llorona as a murderous mother who killed
her children in an act of revenge or grief, and they believe she is condemned to wander the
earth in search of the children she sacrificed or, as others see it, relinquished willingly. For
people of Mexican ancestry, La Llorona traditionally serves as a cultural allegory, instruct-
ing people how to live and act within established social mores. At times, however, she is
simply a spooky bedtime story. Her tales are told to children to induce good behavior’
(Perez 2008, x). See Domino Renee Perez’s work for a rigorous and in-depth analysis of
this figure.
8. We do not agree with Godínez Rivas and Román Nieto’s interpretation of Bruja’s gender
as masculine – ‘La Bruja de la Matosa es un hombre’ (2019, 67), they state – and of her
murder as a mere act of homophobia, instead of transfemicide.
9. In 2019, Mexico had the second highest absolute number of both femicide cases and trans
murders in the world (Brazil had the highest number) (Gender Equality Observatory for
Latin America and the Caribbean, n.d.; Transrespect vs. Transphobia, n.d.).
10. And perhaps also damaging gender roles: both Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid
and Stephenie Meyer’s Bella leave everything for a man; William Shakespeare’s Ophelia
loses sanity because of one.
11. Italics by the authors.
12. The original, Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego, was first published by Anagrama (Barcelona)
in 2016.
13. We choose to keep the original in Spanish, via perimetral, or ‘perimeter road’. The English
translation, ‘highway’, does not fully convey the meaning of the city limits. The ‘via perime-
tral’ in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where Ampuero is from, was built in the 1980s with the purpose
of preventing heavy traffic inside the city. The highway, however, is known in the media for
being a dumpster for dead bodies. That the narrator’s body was left there becomes even more
symbolic: on the one hand, she now faces all sorts of dangers on the highway; on the other,
she is ‘banned’ from the city, condemned to live at its margins.

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 26

Tropical Gothic: Plantation Ecology,

Commodity Frontiers and the
Aesthetics of Excess
Esthie Hugo

Introduction: World-Gothic and the White Man’s Grave

O f all the environments to find their way into literary representation, none
is more associated with psychic breakdown than the tropics. Across a range of
historical and fictional texts, the tropical environment has been predominately rep-
resented as the site wherein all psychic integrity is lost. As Charlotte Rogers notes,
‘tales of men going mad in the wilderness have been popular in novels and films for
over a century’ (2012, 1). Many of these texts, the most famous of which is undoubt-
edly Heart of Darkness, narrate the story ‘of a seemingly rational individual who
ventures into the forest, loses his mind, lives among “the natives,” and turns his back
on society for good’ (Rogers 2012, 1). This use of white mental instability as thematic
device developed from colonial accounts of the excessiveness of the tropical world,
because the extreme heat of the tropics was believed to generate mental and corporeal
degeneration.
In geographical terms, the tropics marks the region that lies between the Tropics of
Cancer and Capricorn. It includes large proportions of the Americas, central Mexico,
the Caribbean, the majority of Africa and most of Southeast Asia, including Indonesia
and the Philippines, as well as most of Oceania. These tropical regions, as Rod Edmond
has argued, have functioned culturally ‘as Europe’s other, a thick belt around the middle
of the globe which white bodies entered at their peril’ (2005, 176). The term ‘tropicality’
first came into being with the arrival of European explorers and settlers, who travelled
to the tropical regions of the world in search of new resources. Thus, the tropics became
‘a category’, as Paul Sutter puts it, ‘created by outsiders to the region with interests in
it’ (2014, 179). This category was then employed as a means of organising ‘disparate
phenomena in ideological ways [which] constantly needed defence against instabilities
and anomalies’ (Sutter 2014, 179).
During the eighteenth century, fierce debates developed about whether white bod-
ies could acclimatise to the tropics. Some insisted that this was possible, sparking the
term ‘seasoning’ to describe the period in which white bodies supposedly adapted
to the new climate. Others were not convinced. Among these sceptics was British
sociologist Benjamin Kidd, whose treatise The Control of the Tropics (1898) served
as an influential text in justifying the colonial endeavour through the discourse of

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‘civilization’. ‘In the tropics’, Kidd writes, ‘the white man lives and works only as a
diver lives and works under water . . . Neither psychically, morally, nor politically,
can he be acclimatized in the tropics . . . If he has any right there at all, he is there in
the name of civilization’ (1898, 54).
Beliefs such as these, in the unsuitability of white bodies and psychologies to the
tropical world, clearly reproduce colonial accounts of the inferiority of ‘tropical
peoples’ (Edmond 2005, 179). Tales of white descents into madness assisted both in
driving a further wedge between the temperate and the tropical and in legitimising
race slavery. As Sutter argues, ‘many temperate peoples defined their white racial
identities in contradistinction not only to blackness but also to a geographical trop-
ics that seemed hostile to their presence’ (2014, 188). Thus, while black and brown
bodies were positioned as impervious to hot, humid and ‘diseased’ environments, the
excess of the tropics was believed to have a profound effect on white psychologies.
So pervasive was the anxiety around white tropical ‘ennui’ (Edmond 2005, 191) that
Charles Woodruff, a US army doctor stationed in the Philippines during the early
nineteenth century, wrote that prolonged exposure to tropical light caused white
bodies and minds to ‘break down’ (cited in Edmond 2005, 180).
Since its emergence, the power of the tropics as perilous socio-ecological category
has endured, making its way into a range of tropical literatures that employ the tools
of the gothic to give expression to the historical association of the tropical world with
immoderation, madness and diseased air. As Felix Driver and Luciana Martins suggest,
‘in the postcolonial world, these fantasies have if anything become more pervasive, if
distinctly less enchanting’ (2005, 4). Under these terms, the development of gothic in
tropical literatures certainly makes sense given the genre’s long-standing interest in all
things exaggerated and excessive. After all, as Tom Hillard notes, ‘the Gothic mode is
typically concerned with extreme states, such as violence and pain, fear and anxiety,
sexual aggression and perversion’ (2009, 690, my emphasis).
The development of ‘Tropical Gothic’ as a subgenre of traditional gothic has captured
the attention of scholars in recent years. ‘In this new subgenre’, writes Maria Clara Pivato
Biajoli, ‘European images associated with the tropics as either a paradise lost or a hell of
savages, diseases, and lust are reconfigured and combined with local folklore’ (2019, 10).
Indeed, tropical regions have long been environments particularly suited to the formation
of gothic: ‘sunlit and humid conditions’, write Justin D. Edwards and Sandra Guardini
Vasconcelos, ‘form a hotbed where Gothic lures – ghosts, zombies, vampires – move
freely through plantations, houses and tropical cities, haunting the bright landscape and
forming the basis for tropical chills’ (2016, 2). Thus, the burgeoning development of criti-
cal interest in gothic of the tropics should come as no surprise; descriptions of the tropical
world as ‘the white man’s grave’ (Sutter 2014, 188) unquestionably lend themselves to the
morbid language in which gothic has long been invested.
My understanding of Tropical Gothic necessarily draws on these formulations, but
it is also indebted to what Kerstin Oloff calls ‘world-gothic’ – so hyphenated to capture
the genre’s registration of the processes that undergird the operations of the world-
economy. ‘I understand the Gothic mode and Gothic effects,’ writes Oloff, ‘rather
than only the Gothic genre, as a particularly compelling instance of world-literature
that registers in form and content the processes shaping the capitalist world-system’
(2016, 123, emphasis in original). Under these world-systemic terms, gothic tropes
must be understood as decidedly global in orientation, for they are often ‘mobilised’,

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 tropical gothic 397

as Rebecca Duncan has noted, ‘to critique regimes of capital’ (2022, 182). Duncan’s
and Oloff’s use of the gothic paradigm draws inspiration from Stephen Shapiro’s point
that the genre has, since its inception, proliferated during recurring periods of global
economic transition. ‘Heightened supernaturalism’, writes Shapiro,

emerges as a cultural marker of a region’s initial appropriation by liberal political

economy, but it also reappears with each new turn of the screw, even while the
specific form of this discourse alters as the accumulated effects of each capitalist
spiral make the prior one’s ‘Gothic-effects’ less viable. (2008b, 32)

The point here, then, is that gothic is no mere phantom, free-floating, and without
historical basis. Rather, its ‘figures of violence and excess encode and make concrete
the disorientating local experience of world-systemic shifts’ (Duncan 2022, 182). As
such, gothic – or ‘world-gothic’ – possesses ‘proto-critical potential: in registering the
violent experience of incorporation into a rising regime of capital . . . gothic forms
enable an exposure of that system’s caustic effects’ (Duncan 2022, 182).
Taking its cue from these world-literary understandings of the form, this chapter
is interested in furnishing an analysis of Tropical Gothic through the lens of the com-
modity frontier. Originally coined by environmental historian Jason W. Moore, the
term ‘commodity frontier’ describes zones of extraction or production that reorganise
human and extra-human natures in such a way as to send vast reservoirs of relatively
cheap food, energy, raw materials and labour-power into the capitalist world-economy
(2015, 53). This description of the commodity frontier is based on Moore’s understand-
ing of global capitalism as having developed through a series of ecological regimes that
have, since the sixteenth century, spread across the world’s geologically and climatically
distinct ecosystems (see Moore 2003).
Moore reads the transformations elicited by these ecological regimes as a distinguish-
ing feature of capital as what he calls a world-ecology – a term intended to highlight how
capital accumulation relies on the extraction of the work/energy of humans and the rest
of nature (2015). The world-ecology, Moore argues, is shaped by a system of unequal
exchange between core and periphery, through which labour and other resources at the
latter are periodically exhausted through their extraction/exploitation by the former. In
consequence, Moore writes that ‘the production and distribution of specific commodi-
ties, and of primary commodities in particular, have restructured geographic space at the
margins of the system in such a way as to require further expansion’ (2000, 410). Thus,
the growth and development of capitalism occurs in commodity frontier zones, ‘so long as
there remains uncommodified land’ (Moore 2000, 410). Socio-ecological degradation –
of land and labour – in the commodity frontier propels further development, leading to
the extraction of new, uncommodified resources and thus further capitalist expansion.
As Moore writes,

When opportunities for appropriation decline . . . a familiar train of events

ensues . . . Workers, soils, forests, and other dimensions of unpaid work become
physically exhausted or collectively uncooperative. The . . . profitability of the
old . . . production complexes declines. Finally, the possibility of renewed capital
accumulation . . . depends upon finding new frontiers of appropriation. (Moore
2015, 101)

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The tropics have functioned within the world-ecology as peripheral in relation to colo-
nising cores, for they have historically served to provide the resources required to fuel
industrialisation. Key here is that while the tropics have traditionally been categorised
through a discourse of ‘peripheralisation’, they have nonetheless been historically piv-
otal in the rise of the cores to world dominance. As critics like Immanuel Wallerstein
have shown, the modern world-system is characterised by an international division of
labour that gives a three-tiered relational structure between differing capitalist zones:
the cores, the semi-peripheries and the peripheries (1974). Under this model, the cores
‘define the traffic in goods and commodified labor-power to their advantage’, while the
peripheries ‘are violently seized for the natural resources of their terrain, strategic loca-
tion, and labor of their peoples’ (Shapiro 2008a, 33). The semi-periphery, meanwhile,
comprises ‘areas which are in between the core and the periphery on a series of dimen-
sions, such as the complexity of economic activities, strength of the state machinery,
cultural integrity, etc.’ (Wallerstein 1974, 349). The tropics function according to the
relationality of Wallerstein’s core-periphery model, for these regions have historically
been peripheralised as primary commodity producers for core zones. The most famous
example of this relation has been the early modern Caribbean plantation, whose
slave-based production of sugar fuelled the wealth of European nations, enabling the
industrialisation of Britain in particular (see Mintz 1985).
Like the studies that have highlighted the foundational role played by the Caribbean
sugar frontier in the rise of large-scale industry, analysis of the tropical frontier allows
for the exploration of the interrelations between production in this region and the
expansion of capitalism as world-ecology in general. It enables, in this way, a demys-
tification of the capitalist logics of ‘productivity and plunder’ (Moore 2015, 9) that
determine the construction of exploitable life in peripheral regions. As Moore notes,
this includes the appropriation of gendered and racialised labour, which, like the
extraction of nutrients and energies from biophysical nature, is appropriated as one of
capital’s ‘free gifts’. In this sense, Moore’s world-ecology usefully brings together the
inextricability of resource extraction, gender and racial relations, and the environmen-
tal degradations that typically comprise the commodity frontier. We might distinguish,
then, between the colonial lexicon of Tropical Gothic as a discourse that ultimately
stabilises the ecological regimes of extraction, and the more recent reappropriations of
gothic in fictions of the tropics, which register the violence of the commodity frontier
and its gendered and racialised social formations and structures.
Indeed, several scholars have recently taken up the commodity frontier as a means
of considering how the socio-ecological conditions it contours affect world-literary for-
mations. Michael Niblett has been formative in developing this new body of criticism
by arguing that the commodity frontier ‘exemplifies in concentrated form the dynamics
of combined unevenness analysed by WReC’ (2020, 64). Expanding on the Warwick
Research Collective’s study, Niblett looks to the commodity frontier to theorise the rela-
tionship between transformations in ecology and cultural form. It is salient here that
Niblett’s argument shows the experience of incorporation registered in gothic to be an
experience of the commodity frontier. He argues, in line with Shapiro and Oloff, that
the particular logics of the commodity frontier ‘instantiate socioecological formation,
unevenness, volatility, and instability’ and that these logics offer the material basis from
which fantastical literary aesthetics spring (2020, 74). Niblett suggests that such aes-
thetics, in which gothic plays a central role, encode ‘the transformations engendered by

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 tropical gothic 399

commodity frontiers, supplying narratives that enable particular social groups to adjust
to such transformations, or generating tropes and figures that help to imaginatively
resolve specific socioecological antagonisms’ (2020, 4).
Elaborating this emergent body of commodity frontier literary critique, this chapter
focuses on the proliferation of gothic in two novels from the world’s tropical frontiers:
The Sky Over Dimas (2003) by Filipino author Vicente Garcia Groyon and Mexican
Gothic (2020) by Mexican author Silvia Moreno-Garcia. My interest here is in com-
paring how these texts employ the Tropical Gothic aesthetics of ecological excess and
mental disintegration to give expression to the socio-ecological transformations elicited
by the frontiers of sugar in the Philippines and silver in Mexico. Many have read the
gothic proliferation in postcolonial tropical texts as emblematic of the diverse cultures in
the region – the product of historical colonial contact. In such readings, however, gothic
merely serves as a literary equivalent of the mestizo, registering the clash of religious and
racial institutions in the characteristically ‘hybrid societies’ of tropical regions, which
have long been structured by ‘social, ethnic and cultural ferment’ (Deeds 2011, 234).
Working against this grain, an approach which reads gothic as mediating ‘all manner
of syncretisms and hybridities deriving from the interrelationship of religious practice and
ethnicity’ (Deeds 2011, 238), this chapter considers the gothic from the world-ecological
and world-literary perspectives outlined above, viewing Tropical Gothic not as an exam-
ple of ‘an invented tradition, where monsters seem to be nativist, folk traditions’ but as
a new literary construction that encodes ‘globalizing conditions in local-seeming idioms’
(Shapiro 2008b, 33). I thus understand Tropical Gothic as a powerful fictional mode for
mediating the socio-ecological revolutions enacted by capitalist penetration in the trop-
ics, which is represented in these texts specifically by mineral extraction and plantation
monoculture. By comparing Groyon and Moreno-Garcia, I explore the gothic themes
that permeate the representation of human-induced environmental events in the novels,
viewing these transformations as crises of capitalism that are registered and relayed in the
literatures of the Tropical Gothic.

‘Sugar Was a Syndrome’: Disintegrated Psychologies in

The Sky Over Dimas
At first glance, Groyon’s The Sky Over Dimas bears all the hallmarks of a classic
gothic tale. The novel opens with the oft-repeated gothic theme of madness: ‘the fact
is, George Torrecarion went crazy’ (Groyon 2003, 1). It is George’s psychic breakdown
which sparks the novel’s action; after receiving a phone call from his mother inform-
ing him of his father’s deteriorated mental state, George’s son Rafael leaves the city
of Manila to attend to him. The Torrecarion family are part of a social elite of plant-
ers called hacenderos and own a large, old and dilapidated hacienda (a sugar farm)
called Dimas, which is located in a remote region of Negros Occidental. Dimas was
established by Faustino Torrecarion, George’s great-great-grandfather, in 1848 during
the Spanish occupation, ‘when the sugar boom swept through the regions’ (2003, 14).
Accordingly, the land has been entirely devoted to the cultivation of the crop, which
has historically formed the backbone of the family’s income. While sugar had once
made the family rich, they have become ‘the shell of a once-great clan’ (2003, 11), and
thus are left fighting for an existence under conditions of crisis. The tale takes place

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 400 esthie hugo

during a 1980s depression in the world price of sugar, a moment that coincides with
the aftermath of the fall of the authoritarian Marcos administration, which marked a
neoliberal espousal of free market trade, ‘export-orientated industrialization’ and the
nationalisation of the sugar industry (Hawes 1987, 16). Yet, any hopes that money
from the sugar industry would be ‘transferred out of the agricultural sector and
into industrialization’ (Hawes 1987, 83) turned out to be hollow. Conditions in the
Philippines worsened substantially in the wake of Marcos’s fall from power as planters
‘faced foreclosure, mills stood idle, and workers and their families suffered malnutri-
tion and dislocation’ (Billig 1993, 122). Taking this period as its setting, the novel
maps the struggles of the Torrecarion family now ‘buckling under the full weight of the
Philippine sugar industry’s slow, majestic collapse’ (Groyon 2003, 3).
Aware that the sugar industry ‘was going nowhere’, George’s other son Rodel
hopes to diversify their income by adopting the rallying ‘battlecry for the ’80’s: diver-
sification’ (2003, 3). To that end, Rodel enrols himself in the Agribusiness Department
at Bacolod City College to educate himself on the latest developments in the field. In
Rodel, Groyon thus indexes a shift taking place in the Philippines since the sugar bust
by marking the country’s desperate attempts to move the power of rural agrarian elites
to urban-based commerce. Yet, George is not so easily won over by Rodel’s ideas of
‘planting alternative crops’ (2003, 3). The hold of sugar over him remains strong:
‘George’, we are told, ‘wanted nothing more than to be left alone to do his thing’
(2003, 3). Through the conflict between George and Rodel, the novel traces the tem-
poral and ideological differences between an older economy and a newer one. While
Rodel represents the new turn to diversification, George is bound to ‘the old-fashioned
world of Bacolod, where the people’s stubborn faith in the old and established was
as impregnable as the tall concrete walls that surrounded their mansions’ (2003, 4).
When Rodel dies in a mysterious fire that destroys most of the hacienda, Rafael has no
choice but to step into his brother’s shoes and assist his father in running the family’s
crumbling plantation business.
Like other ‘sugar islands’, Negros has been caught in the grip of an excessive reliance
on sugar for its economic development since the nineteenth century. Compared to the
plantations of the United States and the Caribbean, the practice of growing monocultural
sugar cane took place in the Spanish Philippines relatively late. Prior to colonisation,
sugar had been grown on Negros from as early as the sixteenth century, yet it was not
‘until the eighteenth century that sugar became anything more than a luxury crop’
(Billig 1993, 123). Negros first opened to international trade in 1855, when the port of
Iloilo was established on the adjacent island of Panay. By the century’s turn, Negros’s
plantation economy had ‘evolved into a social system without parallel elsewhere in
the Philippines or Southeast Asia’ (McCoy 1982, 325) as ‘Negros went from an island
with little formal ownership to one in which most prime land was held by a small class
of planters who had come from outside the island’ (Billig 1993, 125). Not much has
changed since then, despite a series of revolutions and uprisings that have taken place in
the Philippines throughout its Spanish, American and postcolonial history. Today, sugar
continues to overdetermine the Negrense lifeworld: of all the island’s arable land, more
than half is covered in sugar cane (Hawes 1987). The sugar grown on these plantations
accounts for 60 per cent of the Philippine sugar export industry and employs nearly
10 per cent of its population, making Negrosanon sugar a key component of the country’s
full-scale incorporation into the global economy.

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In his remarks on the development of these plantations, historian Alfred McCoy

uses similar terms to those employed by Sidney Mintz (1985) to describe the com-
bined unevenness of the Philippine plantation complex. McCoy notes how the Negros
planter class married their ‘capitalist instincts’ with ‘corporal punishment’ and ‘debt
bondage’ (1982, 323–6), thereby adopting a mode of production both advanced and
archaic (Billig 1993, 123). It is for this reason that many critics view the plantation as
a paradigmatic example of the combined unevenness that typically characterises the
commodity frontier. Yet, as Moore argues, the plantation has not only been economi-
cally essential to the growth of capitalism, but also ‘ecologically central’ (2003, 309).
While some corporate narratives have sought to reframe sugar cane’s image in recent
years by emphasising its ‘naturalness’ and ‘indigeneity to the South Pacific’ (Vandertop
2020, 3), research has proved the extreme deleteriousness of the crop on local envi-
ronments. Caitlin Vandertop observes, with reference to Fiji, how ‘the introduction
of plantation monocultures significantly disrupted local ecologies by undermining the
regenerative capacities of indigenous plants, soils and wildlife, just as the workers
“planted” by slavery and indenture were subjected to the depleting effects of exhaus-
tion, malnutrition and disease’ (2020, 3).
It is precisely the transformative power of the crop to alter and reorganise both
social and ecological relations which marks the development of the plantation as one
of ‘the constitutive moments of an epochal reorganization of world-ecology’ (Moore
2003, 309). Notable here is that the deepening incorporation of Negros into the
world-system via sugar monoculture was also ‘a moment’, to borrow from Moore,
‘of deepening environmental degradation’ (2000, 417). Though capital is a system
of ecological relations as Moore argues, it is important to highlight, then, that this
account does not nullify the more traditional conception of the world-system as a way
of organising societies. Indeed, in Groyon’s novel, the growth of the crop in Negros is
so extreme that when Rafael looks out over the family plantation, he can see neither
the workers nor the local mountain range: ‘he turned to look at the island and found
himself confronted with the implacable wall of cane. The tops of the mountains were
just visible in the distance’ (2003, 118).
Elaborating Moore’s theory of capital’s ecological regimes, several literary scholars
have noted that there is something quintessentially ‘gothic’ about the sugar crop itself.
Niblett has shown how an upswing in gothic and supernatural literary effects – what he
terms ‘saccharine irrealism’ – mediates the material conditions of sugar’s life cycle, in
particular its volatility, which he argues arises from a combination of ‘dependency on an
uncertain world market’ with ‘the biophysical instabilities of plantation monocultures’
(2015, 277). In a different but related vein, Oloff argues that the figure of the zombie
can be read as a particularly powerful instance of the ‘metabolic rift’, the change in
nature-society relations that is produced by the forced integration of the Caribbean into
the world-system (2016). Vandertop, meanwhile, points to the vast numbers of mosqui-
toes that proliferated in the plantation to show how the presence of these bloodsucking
insects corresponds to a discourse of vampirism and ‘vampiric creatures’ in Fijian fic-
tions, which make use of such characteristic gothic tropes to advance ‘a battle precisely
against the vampiric energy regime predicated on exhaustion’ (2020, 5).
Legible via the arguments put forward by these critics, Groyon’s novel sheds new light
on Tropical Gothic by encouraging materialist literary interpretations that go beyond
concepts of (monstrous) cultural hybridity or atavistic descents into the ‘primitive’ and

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 402 esthie hugo

‘barbaric’ tropical world. While Groyon’s novel makes use neither of the vampiric meta-
phor nor of the figure of the zombie, it does make frequent references to the power of
sugar to reorganise human and extra-human natures and does so through other gothic
vocabularies. To this end, the novel reaches towards a tropical discourse of malaise
and extremity to express sugar’s all-encompassing potential, and the disastrous effects
attendant upon the location of the international sugar regime in a hitherto uncapitalised
Negros. Once he arrives in Dimas, Raphael complains of sugar’s inimical overdetermi-
nation through tropical discourses of psychological debility: ‘sugar’, he tells us, ‘was a
syndrome’ (Groyon 2003, 95, my emphasis).
Under these terms, George’s mental breakdown serves as more than a simple
example of the ways in which gothic becomes ‘tropicalised’ as a result of the cultural
mixing or ‘cosmopolitanism’ that emerged from the colonial encounter. Nor does it
signal a gothic reworking of so-called ‘jungle fever’, the familiar trope of psychologi-
cal upheaval that has been the mainstay of much tropical literary criticism (Rogers
2012). Rather, the novel looks to the gothic to give shape to the extremity of sugar’s
seemingly supernatural power: as the narrator puts it, sugar ‘was so firmly lodged in
the consciousness of Bacolod, of Negros . . . take sugar away and Negros would fade
into memory’ (Groyon 2003, 95).
It is this continual denial, we later learn, that quite literally plagues George’s mind,
for he hopes to expose the family’s secrets in order to come to terms with the historical
violence which undergirds the accumulation of their sugar capital. Despite its obvi-
ous caustic effects, few are willing to admit the full extent to which ‘sugar was evil’
(2003, 95). The locals, including the Torrecarion family, refuse to ‘admit that Negros
was sugar’ (2003, 95). Repression, then, structures this region as much as the cane
economy does, leading the novel to employ a gothic dynamic of the returning of the
repressed to pull into focus the unseen violences which lie buried beneath the rapa-
cious success of Negrosanon plantation society. In a series of lucid and handwritten
notes, George begins to unravel the family’s past by excavating the reality that the
family’s fortunes are built on the complete extermination of an indigenous tribe of
Maghat peoples. ‘My family’, George writes, ‘only exists today because of . . . a whole
massacre’ (2003, 164).
It is the family’s inability to come to terms with its past, it seems, which has infiltrated
and broken down the psychological integrity of its other members too. Like George,
his wife Margarita similarly suffers from bouts of unexplained behaviour, including
frequent lapses into kleptomania and manic depression. Margarita also comes from
‘old money’ (2003, 46) and has inherited a derangement – a sugar syndrome – from
her family’s equally violent past. Indeed, as George tells us: ‘People are the products,
the end results of everything that came before in their families’ (2003, 49). George’s
invocation here of the family’s psychologies as being a product of sugar speaks to the
ways in which they cannot look beyond the ideological infrastructures that stabilise
the plantation economy, which constructs colonial lands and peoples as resources to be
plundered. Moore and Raj Patel refer to this as the transformation of natural resources
into ‘Cheap Nature’, the process by which nature and human labour is ideologically
constructed under capitalism into ‘something productive [so as] to transform that pro-
ductivity into wealth’ (Patel and Moore 2017, 57).
Yet the novel also refuses the historical processes that construct land and labour
in these ‘Cheap’ ways. To this end, the novel takes the form of a desperate struggle

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 tropical gothic 403

for the truth in an amnesiac society where ‘no one talks [and] no one tells the Truth’
(Groyan 2003, 11). But George’s mental crisis also gives concrete shape to a crisis in
economy and a desperate attempt to make sense of a collapsing global order in a stage
of ecological exhaustion. George’s handwritten notes serve as a counternarrative to
the ‘memoir’ written by Faustino. This memoir is described as the Torrecarion family’s
‘Arc of the Covenant’ (2003, 24) and relays the coming of the family’s patriarch in
Negros. Yet, this book, the family’s ur-history, merely serves as a creation myth that
looks to cleanse the family from any involvement in the bloody story of sugar. In his
attempts to rewrite this history, George looks, then, to make visible how capitalist land
and labour relations are built upon ideological narratives such as Faustino’s, which
obscure and thereby sustain the historical processes of colonial extractivism.
These falsehoods are not the only skeletons which the Torrecarion family must
exhume, for the family also hopes to uncover the real reason for Rodel’s death. We
later learn that they suspect a local German boy, named Jan, of murdering Rodel.
Jan clearly suffers from what the reader understands to be Down’s Syndrome: his
face bears the features of ‘a classic Mongoloid aberration’ (2003, 118). Yet the locals
describe him with recourse to a gothic vocabulary of monstrosity. Rumour has it that
his hair ‘grew in odd places, like the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet;
and that, when the moon was full, he turned into a bloodthirsty boar and rampaged
through the village until daybreak’ (2003, 119).
Yet, for all these suspicions of monstrosity, it is not Jan who turns out to be respon-
sible for Rodel’s death. Rodel, it transpires, is Margarita’s illegitimate son, born of her
affair with a ‘dark [and] good-looking’ (2003, 192) native man. This man turns up
one day on the hacienda in the hopes of seeing his son. Acting ‘only according to what
[his] blood expected of [him]’ (2003, 195), George murders this man by running him
over with his car. He buries his body under the family sugar mill, cutting his foot on
one of the man’s bones. Thus, we learn that his mental afflictions have resulted from
an unresolved infection which has plagued him since this night. Years later, George sets
the hacienda alight as a means of expunging evidence of his crime, unwittingly killing
Rodel in the process. In a fulfilment of the prophecy that all of its members will meet
a bloody end because ‘the hacienda is cursed’ (2003, 213), George, too, dies a violent
death. He sets himself on fire and dies of shock two hours later.
As much as the revelation of these secrets informs the novel’s climax, it brings little
change to the family by the novel’s denouement. By now, Rafael has learnt the truth
after reading his father’s notes. Yet, Rafael takes up the family’s mantle of secrecy,
keeping the ‘story . . . to himself . . . guarding it jealously’ (2003, 213). Like other
sugar families, then, Rafael remains caught in a pattern of forced amnesia, and it is
this which ultimately informs the novel’s critique. As much as the trajectory of the
novel maps the desperate attempts made to hold on to a world rendered archaic, it also
speaks to a more contemporary paralysis at work in the present-day Philippine sugar
industry, which, with so much fixed capital sunk into it, remains resistant to change.
Gothic provides a language, therefore, for sugar’s exhaustion by playing on the tropical
trope of the psychological deterioration of the Torrecarions.
It is via a turn to gothic that the novel gives new meaning to existent tropical
lexica, for it raises these tropes in terms that supernaturally correspond to a lived
experience of the sugar frontier. The irony of this is clear: while it was the action of
a few white, colonial humans that originally induced environmental transformation

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 404 esthie hugo

via sugar monoculture in Negros, the crop has now taken on an altogether new form,
its transformation so extreme that these same humans can now do little against an
ecological force of what they once merely considered a ‘Cheap’ resource to be freely
appropriated. As such, the Torrecarions’ ‘tropical ennui’ casts into concrete form the
socio-economic modalities that emerge from sugar’s monstrosity to asphyxiate all pos-
sibility of an alternative – and more equal – world.

‘This Demented Cycle’: Plunder, Patriarchy and the

Rotten World of Silver in Mexican Gothic
Like The Sky Over Dimas, Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic centres on the gothic
theme of repressed family secrets. The novel takes place in 1950s Mexico and traces
the tale of the Doyle family, who live in an old Victorian mansion in a forested
region of El Triunfo, a formerly thriving mining town located in Baja California
Sur, one of the country’s key mining areas. As such, Mexican Gothic’s historical
setting similarly centres on an archaic social modality desperately trying to cling
to power, and also literally to life, in a world structured by resource exhaustion
and historical rupture. While Mexico’s climate is not considered typically ‘tropical’
(although parts of the country do fall under the Tropic of Cancer), the novel none-
theless draws on the hallmarks of Tropical Gothic to consider the psychic and
bodily degenerations provoked by resource plunder in the region. Gothic thrives
here in the images of fetidity that the novel uses to describe both the family man-
sion, which looks ‘like a great, quiet gargoyle’, and the town, which ‘had the musty
air of a place that had withered away’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020, 20, 17). In a further
parallel to Groyon’s novel, the action of the text is set in motion by the news of
familial mental breakdown. The novel’s protagonist, Noemí, receives a letter from
her cousin Catalina detailing her belief that she is losing her mind and imploring
Noemí to rescue her from the Doyle mansion, where she is residing with her new
husband and his other family members.
Like the Torrecarions, the Doyles are a family who remain wedded to the old
ways. This is made clear not only by their refusal to leave the crumbling confines of
their Victorian home, but also in their refusal to speak Spanish. The Doyles moved
to Mexico in the nineteenth century after the breakdown of the English gold and
silver trade caused them to relocate their industry into the uncapitalised territories
of Mexico’s mountains. As such, it is to the gothic that the novel looks to concretise
the relocation of the silver frontier in Mexico after the collapse of the English mining
regime. By mapping the Doyles’ move to Mexico in order to start a new mine, the
novel shows how the capitalist world-ecology expands via processes of exhaustion,
for it maps the progressive displacement of crisis across site-specific geographies as
commodity frontiers are relocated. The mine that the family procured once made
them rich, but that was before the Revolution, which, they complain, ‘robbed us of
our fortune’ (2020, 237).
The family’s history is thus firmly tied to the history of what John Tutino terms
‘silver capitalism’ (2018, 31). Like the sixteenth-century Caribbean sugar frontier,
Mexican silver was essential to the emergence of the world-ecology: as Moore argues,
‘In the Americas during the early modern period, the two most significant generators

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 tropical gothic 405

of value were silver and sugar’ (2000, 413). Tutino likewise suggests that the two
frontiers are necessarily intertwined via their shared role in global capitalist expansion:

while the silver economy and the sugar and slave trades may appear separate . . .
they linked at a key junction: to purchase bound Africans, Europeans had to deliver
printed cotton cloth made in India. And the price of Indian cottons was . . . paid
mostly in American silver. So, while seemingly separate in their New World devel-
opment, the silver economy and the sugar and slave trades rose as linked sectors of
a burgeoning world economy. (2018, 33)

Much has been written on the development of the myth of what Martin Gitlitz terms
‘Silverado’ in Latin America during the early period of capitalist modernisation (2019).
The most famous example of this body of work is undoubtedly Eduardo Galeano’s
Open Veins of Latin America (1973). Galeano argues that during the Spanish discov-
ery of silver in the sixteenth century ‘wealth flowed like water’, eclipsing any of the
previous levels of wealth accumulated by gold mining (2009, 21). By the nineteenth
century, the yield of Latin America’s silver frontier had achieved gigantic proportions.
Silver flowed out of the local economy and into the coffers of the Spanish Crown,
stimulating a global trade that linked Spain, Europe, the Islamic world, South Asia and
China. Despite the numerous silver busts that have taken place since then, ‘the produc-
tion of silver would overshadow even the boom that had made New Spain the main
source of colonial revenues to Spain by the end of the colonial period’, illustrating
‘the remarkable resilience of Mexico’s silver production in the midst of a society being
violently shaken every few years’ (Guerrero 2017, 193).
Most of Mexico’s silver mines are in the country’s forested mountain regions, and it
is to these mines – now abandoned – that the novel looks for gothic inspiration. While
these mountains had once ‘gushed silver’ (Galeano 2009, 22), they are now little more
than holes in the ground. Many have noted how Mexican miners faced a livelihood
filled with peril from as early as the 1700s. Writing of the experience of these miners
in 1761, Francisco Javier de Gamboa described how

they suffer infinitely, the miserable smelters during this hour of immense fatigue,
because the furnace is the mouth of Hell . . . the smoke . . . poisonous . . . this evil
being so necessary, yet so terrible for those who toil at this work, so important for
the Republic. (Cited in Guerrero 2017, 316)

Meanwhile, the ecological impacts of silver extraction were already clear by the sixteenth
century. In one of the world’s earliest scientific texts, De Re Metallica (On the Nature
of Metals) (1556), Georg Agricola noted how ‘the fields are devastated . . . woods and
groves are cut down . . . then are exterminated the beasts and birds . . . when the ores
are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams’ (1912, n.p.).
Today, the legacy of the silver frontier includes not only many of its mining ‘ghost’ towns,
which attract scores of tourists every year, but also the pockmarked landscape, and the
deforestation of huge swathes of rainforest.
Certainly, Mexican Gothic can be said to serve as a kind of memento of the rural
towns left abandoned in the wake of the breakdown of the Spanish mining frontier.
Yet it also draws on both the Tropical Gothic and the Latin American tradition of the

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 406 esthie hugo

novella de la selva (the ‘jungle novel’) to cast the forest as a gothic space of unease.
Noemí frequently complains that the forest seems to close in around her: ‘the trees
grew close together, and it was dark under their branches . . . even the trees seemed
lugubrious’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020, 19). If the forest seems portentous then this is noth-
ing compared to the mansion, which is equally possessed by sinister environmental
forces that ‘threatened to swallow the place whole’ (2020, 41). An unidentified fungus
covers nearly every inch of the mansion’s walls, making it look ‘as if the forest had
tiptoed into the house . . . and left a part of itself inside’ (2020, 155). In a nod to the
protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s hallmark gothic tale The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892), Noemí becomes obsessed with the golden mould that grows on her bedroom
walls, frequently running her hands over them to ‘make sure there was nothing strange
lurking behind the wallpaper’ (2020, 57).
This fungus turns out to have supernatural potential indeed, as it emerges that
all members of the Doyle family are possessed by its powers. In this way, the novel
draws on the phenomenon of a real-life fungal pathogen named Massospora cicadina.
In order to bloom, this fungus periodically infects the bodies of cicadas, eventually
exploding its pores through their abdomens. These infected cicadas then mate with
each other, spreading the fungal infection through both the air and bodily contact.
The novel’s fungus works similarly: it infects the bodies of the Doyle family and even-
tually drives them mad. Howard Doyle, the family’s racist and sexist patriarch, is so
consumed by the fungus that he exists in a state of zombification: ‘he was a corpse,’
Noemí tells us, ‘afflicted by the ravages of putrefaction, but he lived. His chest rose
and dipped and he breathed’ (2020, 203, emphasis in original). Howard’s zombifica-
tion via the fungal infiltration serves, then, as a fantastically succinct metaphor for the
ways in which the biospheric transformations elicited by the enclosure of nature for
appropriation accrue and ultimately render continued appropriation impossible.
Dramatising capital’s need to instantiate new enclosures and new ecological
regimes to advance profit accumulation, Howard’s body deteriorates, forcing him to
possess a new body every few years. To this end, Howard chooses the body of a new
male family member to use as his host. Once he has done so, he continues the family’s
bloodline by marrying and procreating with his granddaughters and nieces. But his
survival does not only depend on the literal consumption of the bodies of his family
members. We later learn that Howard has used the bodies of his mine workers as the
necessary ‘mulch’ required to grow the fungus in the first place and thus ensure his
ongoing immortality. Noemí stumbles upon the graves of these workers in the family
graveyard. When she questions Howard about the nature of the workers’ deaths, he
merely emphasises the fealty of capital over human labour: ‘they needed to die,’ he tells
her, ‘you must make the soil fertile’ (2020, 236).
In Howard, the novel therefore locates its critique of the rapacious appetite of silver
capitalism. To this end, it makes use of the gothically monstrous to express the refor-
mulation of the commodity form on human bodily and ecological dispositions, thereby
illustrating how existing socio-ecological unities are violently disaggregated under capi-
talist incursion. The transformative consumptive operations of the silver frontier are
further manifested in the figure of the ouroboros, which serves as the Doyle family crest.
The ouroboros, the mythical figure of the snake that eats its own tail, both captures the
family’s historical practice of incest, and mythologically illustrates how the Doyles are
wholly drawn under silver’s power. ‘This house’, Noemí laments,

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 tropical gothic 407

was built atop bones. And no one noticed such an atrocity, rows and rows of
people streaming into the house, into the mine, and never leaving. Never to be
mourned, never to be found. The serpent does not devour its tail, it devours every-
thing around it, voracious, its appetite never quenched. (2020, 244)

Noemí’s task, then, is to break the link of the ouroboros, which requires her to kill
the family’s patriarch. She is not the first woman to hope to do so; we later learn that
Howard, similarly to George Torrecarion, suffers from an old wound that likewise
refuses to heal. He can no longer adequately bond with the fungal infection in his
body as a result of a gunshot wound inflicted upon him by his daughter, Ruth, during
a failed family murder spree. In order to keep the Doyle bloodline pure, Ruth had
been promised to her cousin, but she fell in love with a local mine worker named
Benito instead. Noemí later learns that Howard is rumoured to have had Benito
killed, driving Ruth to this act of vengeance.
Thus, while much of the novel looks back to and signals the return of repressed colo-
nial history, it speaks, too, to the excess of present-day resource plunder and the revival
of silver as Mexico’s primary commodity export. Today, Mexico is the world’s largest
producer of silver; despite increasing strike action, the mining industry was expected
to grow by 3.3 per cent and be valued at US$17.8 billion by 2020 (Investing News
Network 2018, n.p.). When the novel refers to silver’s ‘demented cycle’ (Moreno-Garcia
2020, 334), it is therefore referring as much to an archaic and ‘rotten’ world-order as to
a contemporary moment of cyclical – and uncanny – return. To that end, the novel’s turn
to the gothic language of enclosure becomes particularly salient. Certainly, the images of
the confining walls of the Doyle mansion read starkly in light of the production of space
in present-day Mexico through violent enclosures, including the US-Mexico border. The
novel’s turn to the tropes of Tropical Gothic can therefore be understood as a cultural
response not only to resource plunder but also to what critics have termed ‘the dehu-
manizing tide of American racism’ and the turning of the US against those of Mexican
descent (Casey and Watkins 2014, 3).
But the novel’s turn to the more quintessentially Tropical Gothic themes of mental
and corporeal degradation equally speak to the shadowing of the domestic sphere by
patriarchal power and the desperate attempts made by women to escape its bodily
predations. The novel’s climax takes place when Catalina finally breaks free from the
fungus that has controlled her and subsequently stabs Howard to death. Together, she
and Noemí set the mansion on fire and watch as the flames ‘eat’ both the house and
Howard ‘inch by inch’ (Moreno-Garcia 2020, 293). This climax captures how capital-
ism harnesses the logic of patriarchy to determine the production of gendered labour
appropriation in the domestic space, thereby naturalising and obscuring exploitative
patriarchal relations.
Key here, then, is that the novel looks to the household to draw out Tropical Gothic’s
critical potential, and in so doing, refuses to naturalise patriarchal exploitation by
staging women’s violent experiences of domestic control and discipline. Indeed, such is
the extremity of patriarchal power in the Doyle household that it can only be escaped
with recourse to equally excessive forms of violence. In this sense, the image of the
house’s infiltration by the fungus not only substantiates Moore’s arguments on global
capitalism’s ecological revolutions, but also points to the unequal social relations that
emerge from the extremity of resource extraction in the Mexican context. As critics

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 408 esthie hugo

have shown, gender relations in the country have worsened substantially since its rise
to prominence as the world’s primary silver producer; today, Mexico is home to some
of the highest numbers of intimate partner violence and femicide in the world (Staudt
2014; Tutino 2018).
Yet, the novel’s critique is not placed on the traditional ‘hypermasculinity’ of
Latino society in isolation, but on a patriarchal world-system more generally. Indeed,
Howard functions in the novel as much as a vector for the historical practice of colo-
nial plunder as for the parasitic quality of patriarchal capitalism, which feeds, as
Maria Mies has famously shown, on ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (1986, 77). Put
slightly differently, the novel points to the ways in which ‘racism and resource extrac-
tion go hand in hand; plunder and patriarchy make common cause’ (Niblett 2020, 49).
Underlying the novel, then, is a profound reflection on the nature of dependence, and
the locating of political struggle in the domestic space. The novel places gendered and
domestic violence within the context of silver capitalism and thereby calls attention
to the inextricability of resource extraction, gender relations, and the environmental
degradations of the commodity frontier. As such, the novel’s turn to Tropical Gothic
manifests the frequently opaque triangular systemic relation between capitalism, the
exploitation of natural resources, and gendered violence.
Like Groyon’s novel, Mexican Gothic ends with a reflection on human autonomy
but raises this in gendered terms. To this end, it grapples with the gendered concep-
tions of freedom during an era of ecological exhaustion and social violence. While the
Torrecarion family merely settle ever more deeply into a trajectory of paralysis, Noemí
views crisis as an opportunity for societal change. As she puts it at the novel’s conclu-
sion, her hope is that ‘the world could be remade, kinder and sweeter’ (Moreno-Garcia
2020, 301). Thus, in contrast to the sedentary figure of the white male in The Sky Over
Dimas, Mexican Gothic offers us a celebratory and notably feminist image of a wom-
an’s actions against the socially ensnaring and ecologically devastating mechanisms of
a world-system predicated on inequality and violence. As much as the novel turns to
Tropical Gothic to narrativise the systemic enviro-social relations of world-ecological
violence, it simultaneously looks to make action against these relations possible. Gothic,
then, not only offers a tool through which to understand the socially unequal and eco-
logically imperilled world which we currently inhabit, but also offers us visions which
might nurture the critical resources required for remaking it.

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 27

Asian Gothic: Asian Folklore and

Globalgothic
Katarzyna Ancuta

T he search for the ‘global’ face of gothic demands that we address the relation-
ship between gothic and folklore. Glennis Byron reminds us that ‘[a]s the global
thrives on producing the local, commodifying it, and marketing it, so contemporary
global Gothic increasingly appropriates and commodifies local or regional folklores’
(2012, 374). Asian Gothic is largely a product of such commodification – conceived of
as an umbrella category encompassing a number of local or regional varieties of gothic,
driven by a consistent flow of productions repackaging Asian folklore and urban leg-
ends for the global market, and frequently motivated by socio-cultural, economic or
ecological shifts brought about by transnational relationships. Gothic is often said
to have originated from folklore. Carina Hart has observed that gothic ‘shares many
formal and conceptual features with folklore’ (2020, 1), appropriating folkloric figures
and placing them within a gothic narrative framework (3). Manuel Aguirre has argued
that as a genre, gothic ‘operates half-way between literature and folklore’ (2019, 171)
and its function, at least to some extent, is to keep folklore alive (2013, 14).
Folklore itself is a rather complex category, as it encompasses not only a large body
of oral and written texts, but also diverse beliefs and practices – it is not only a collec-
tion of antiquated lore, but also a lived experience. This experiential aspect of folklore
has prompted Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville to recognise ‘living Gothic’ – a
formulation of gothic arising from ‘our engagements with the living past, within the
experiential contexts of lived practice, and the legacies that it leaves to the living narra-
tives of folklore and tradition’ (2014, 2). The study of Asian Gothic benefits from such
an approach, as it allows us to acknowledge that many Asian texts exist in a symbiotic
relationship with folklore past and present, and that it is the present form of folklore
that often affects the local production and reception of these texts. Unsurprisingly
also, it is the folklore side of Asian Gothic that most frequently ends up globalised.
This chapter discusses three major media forms that drive the globalisation of
Asian Gothic: literature originally written in English, film, and original television series
created specifically for global streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO
Go. The chapter focuses in more detail on three texts: a novel, Ponti (2018), written
by Singaporean author Sharlene Teo, discussed in a larger context of texts featuring
a Malay monster known as the pontianak; a Taiwanese film, The Tag-Along (Cheng
2015), examined in relation to other East Asian films that feature forest-dwelling
child-like spirits/demons that imitate human voice and lure their victims into the wil-
derness; and an Indonesian mini-series, Halfworlds (2015), produced by HBO Asia

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and directed by Joko Anwar, which will be situated in the context of the director’s
overall engagement with folk horror. The chapter argues that such productions pro-
mote an understanding of globalgothic in terms of texts that reconfigure elements of
gothic in order to negotiate transnational relationships from the socio-historical or
cultural vantage point of a certain region, in this case the regions of East and Southeast
Asia, and that these texts are to a large extent the results of specific production and
distribution practices and strategies characteristic of global media.

The Sisterhood of the Pontianak:

Mobilising Local Monsters for Global Causes
The pontianak is a spirit of a woman who died while pregnant or in childbirth
known from Malay folklore native to the Nusantara region, which includes Malaysia,
Singapore and Indonesia. Categorised very broadly as a birth-spirit (Skeat 1900), or
a birth-demon (Ong 1988), its features are often conflated with those of many similar
creatures in the region: langsuyar and matianak in Malaysia, kuntilanak and sun-
delbolong in Indonesia, phi tai tham klom in Thailand, even to a certain extent the
White Lady and tiyanak1 in the Philippines. Most records portray the pontianak as a
woman dressed in white, with long black swaying hair often reaching her ankles or at
least covering her face. She is seen walking or waiting by a lonely strand of the road,
or perched atop a tree branch from which she can lunge at her victims. She has long
claw-like fingernails to rip one’s flesh apart and, sometimes, a hole at the nape of her
neck from a long nail that was used to subdue her. She is even said to be able to fly.
The pontianak can change her appearance from that of a beautiful maiden to an old
hideous hag. She is often heard emitting a blood-curdling shriek or bursting into a
cackling laugh before she is to strike. She is also frequently seen carrying a baby.
Andrew Hock Soon Ng situates the pontianak between a ghost and a vampire,
given the fact that she is said to be thirsting for blood, has fangs and is suppressed
by pointy objects but also can possess people. He also notices that much of what we
know of the pontianak today has been recalibrated by popular culture, specifically
the creature’s cinematic representations, which confusingly multiply ‘[its] signifiers to
the point that it is no longer clear where popular culture ends and traditional belief
begins’ (Ng 2009, 167). Lee and Balaya argue that most pontianak films are hybrid
productions incorporating a variety of cross-cultural influences from Western cin-
ema to Japanese Noh and Kabuki plays, while at the same time employing ‘localised
versions of beliefs, religious practices, customs, values and traditions within the film
plots’ (2016, 162–3). They are also products of regulatory practices of cinema and
state censorship that seem particularly intent on controlling the production of horror
films by limiting the amount of blood and violence that is permissible on screen, or
demanding that such films contain ‘strong moral values’, which affects the representa-
tion of the creature (164).
Most scholarly analyses of popular representations of the pontianak discuss the
figure in the broader context of the monstrous feminine, abjection, desire, patriarchal
oppression of women, and feminist resistance. Alicia Izharuddin observes that the ponti-
anak stands in as ‘a metaphor for the violence against women and the violence of being
women’ (2020, 1,006). Ng sees the pontianak as a metaphor for ‘the Malay woman’s

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schizophrenic identity’ (2009, 167), forged through her struggle for agency and auton-
omy within cultural structures that require her to be obedient and dependent on men.
The creature’s inherent duality (beautiful maiden/ugly crone) mimics the contradictory
perception of women in the Malay imaginary, seen as symbols of communal purity but
also easily compromised and corruptible (173). And even though the story always ends
with the vanquishing of the monster and the patriarchal order restored, the lingering
laughter of the creature asserts her defiance of the male-centred symbolic order respon-
sible for her repeated making and unmaking in a never-ending array of texts.
While the representations of the pontianak in Malay popular culture can already
be seen as hybrid, these figures depend largely on localising foreign influences within a
more familiar setting. A broader impact of such works is seldom felt, as Southeast Asian
films and untranslated literary works are not readily accessible to a larger international
audience. The global presence of the pontianak can thus be more easily attributed to
literary works of Malaysian and Singaporean authors like Tunku Halim, Sandi Tan or
Sharlene Teo, who write in English and whose stories continue to redefine the creature
and repackage it for global consumption.
Each of these writers takes a different approach to the topic. Marketed as ‘the
Malaysian Stephen King’, Tunku Halim consciously engages with generic (Western)
horror/gothic conventions while resorting to local folklore to exoticise his stories. His
pontianak often borrows attributes of other creatures to construct a figure of abjection:
a threatening ‘monstrous feminine’ ready to destabilise patriarchy. In Dark Demon
Rising (1997) the creature exhibits the penanggalan’s ability to detach her head, while
in ‘Night of the Pontianak’ (2001) she can twist her head around like Linda Blair in
The Exorcist. Sandi Tan relates the pontianak to the primitive aspect of femininity and
indigenous culture that needs to be understood and incorporated into her protagonist’s
identity before she is allowed to mature. Unlike Halim’s heroines who are Malay, in
Tan’s novel Black Isle (2012) the protagonist is a Chinese immigrant. Her confronta-
tion with the pontianak, which in the novel means the survival of the heroine rather
than the destruction of the monster, is seen as a rite of passage, marking her transi-
tion from a child into an adult and from a foreigner/immigrant into a native/citizen.
Sharlene Teo’s pontianak is a memory of a celluloid monster and an abstract concept
guiding the novel’s reflection on the nature of monstrosity in relation to memory, femi-
ninity and motherhood. It is a ‘Schrödinger’s monster’ that is and is not there. Teo’s
heroines are a product of Singaporean multiculturalism and transnationalism that feels
equally at ease with Malay folklore, Chinese geomancy, spirit mediumship and the
globalised world of media and advertising. The pontianak in Ponti (2018) functions as
both an external pop cultural reference and an integral part of womanhood in general.
Told in three interwoven narrative strands, Ponti depicts an intimate world of
women. The story is told from three different perspectives in roughly twenty-year
intervals: in 2003, a sixteen-year-old Szu re-evaluates her relationship with her mother
at the time leading to and following her mother’s death; in the late 1970s, Amisa, Szu’s
mother, has a brief brush with fame, cast as a lead actress in a low-budget monster
film; and in 2020, Circe, Szu’s former friend, works on a promotional campaign for a
remake of Amisa’s movie, which brings back memories of their shared past. Separated
in time and space, these three women live lives of loneliness filled with guilt and regret.
Amisa, whose acting career never took off, cannot settle into a family life, ultimately
blaming her daughter for her failures. Szu resents her mother for her passive-aggressive

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behaviour bordering on neglect and cruelty, yet after her death finds herself drown-
ing in grief. Teenage Circe abandons Szu, unable to deal with her friend’s depression,
only to find herself equally lonely and isolated as an adult. All three women live in the
shadow of an imaginary female figure, the celluloid monster, Ponti – a beautiful unde-
feated immortal, laughing in the face of danger, always ready to return again, even
after she has seemingly been dispatched by the hero:

She’s worse than a typical Pontianak. She’s Ponti! With a shriek, an exclamation
mark. She is furious because she will never find peace. She got her heart broken from
a stillborn child and her husband cheating and beating her. She’s unreasonable and
crazy and every womanly wrong. (Teo 2018, 171)

The shrieking, laughing monstrous woman in the movie symbolises female resilience
and defiance in the face of adversity. Izharuddin comments: ‘the pontianak’s laugh
alone signifies the intangible and non-visual excesses of the monstrous feminine, a fig-
ure who traffics in both desire and repulsion’ (2020, 1,007). The titular Ponti of the
novel has no shrieking exclamation mark after her name. She does not need one as her
purpose is not to wage war against patriarchy, at least not directly. Teo’s novel curiously
offers us the world without men, or at least the men depicted in the novel are weak
and insignificant. Szu grows up without a father and her most intense relationship is
that with another teenage girl, Circe. Amisa is emotionally exploited by a film director
who promises to make her a star and leaves her to her fate when this does not happen.
Disappointed, she retreats into herself, unable to form emotional attachments with
anyone, including her husband, who eventually leaves her, and her daughter, supported
only by her friend, a spirit medium, who takes on the role of her sister. Circe distances
herself from her husband, which leads to a divorce. Alienated from everyone around
her and racked by guilt spurred by the resurgence of memories of Amisa and Szu, she
begins to identify with a tapeworm nesting in her stomach. Although men play a part
in the women’s undoing, they are significantly absent in the story that focuses more on
the internal conflict within its female protagonists, their self-imposed loneliness and
isolation in reaction to disappointment, grief and guilt.
If Ponti is not a typical pontianak, Ponti is also not a typical gothic novel, although
it can be read as such and it does feature a number of gothic conventions – there’s a
monster, and a medium who communicates with the dead; there are themes of disease
and death, dysfunctional families, isolation, alienation and breakdown of communi-
cation. The novel is particularly effective in the way it deals with grief and the way
it draws our attention to the fact that the pontianak is not only a figure of revenge,
but also one of mourning. Most pontianak narratives situate her in a vengeful spirit
scenario – a woman who died at the hands of men returns from beyond the grave
to punish the wrongdoers, acting as a signifier of the failure of patriarchal ideology
to protect and respect women (Ng 2009, 173). But the pontianak is also a maternal
figure, all the more tragic because she is an impossible mother to a stillborn baby.
In the pontianak myth, the mother and her child are inseparable. Teo draws on that
bond, a connection formed through birth and death in her novel.
Throughout the story, Szu frequently refers to her mother as a monster – in relation
to both her acting past and her emotional unavailability. Szu disapproves of her mother’s
lifestyle – Amisa is a functioning alcoholic and a phoney spirit medium conning people
out of money – and she considers her cold, cruel and calculating. She also takes her for

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granted: ‘My mother was a semi-famous monster and I thought she would live forever’
(Teo 2018, 128). When Amisa dies shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer, Szu’s
grief is inconsolable:

I peer out of my window before I go to bed. I stare through the curlicued grilles
into the garden with the bird’s nest ferns and clusters of dark trees. The long, wet
grass doesn’t move. I listen out with senseless superstition for the sound of a baby
crying. If you can hear a baby crying loudly from somewhere in the vicinity, the
Pontianak is far away, willing you to get near to her. If the crying is distant, that
means the monster is close.
But if my Pontianak is now a ghost, she is a very shy ghost. She doesn’t want to
make herself known. I wake late at night supernaturally sure there is a flutter by my
ear, only to find the insistent normality of my bedroom. Warm air and the crickets in
the garden reminding me they are out there. But not here, not her. (Teo 2018, 146)

Szu refers to her mother as the pontianak out of habit but, ironically, the act of mourn-
ing turns her into a grieving ghost herself. She grows depressed and develops an eating
disorder. Unable to cope, she becomes dependent on her friend, Circe, who finds the
situation overwhelming and abandons Szu to her fate. Twenty years later, Circe remem-
bers their parting:

being friends with Szu was like carrying around a heavy, sloshing bucket of water.
Her grief weighed me down and I couldn’t escape its drip: not in the cinema, not
studying in cafes, not even on my own. She followed me around school and in the
afternoons afterwards, like a phantom with her blanched face and hollow eyes.
(Teo 2018, 265)

The daughter of a monster has become a ghost haunting her friend.

Teo’s novel uses folklore to tell a different monster tale. Her Ponti is not simply a
vengeful spirit native to the Malay Archipelago. She has outgrown the folkloric ponti-
anak and become a more general signifier of a different side of feminine monstrosity: a
mother unable to be a mother, a daughter only capable of finding her mother in death,
the poisonous emotions of guilt and regret that destroy a sisterly relationship. She can
also be seen as a symbol of female strength and endurance, as the novel ends on a posi-
tive note with the hope of Szu and Circe rekindling their broken friendship. Still, while
gesturing towards a more universal female experience, the novel’s reconfiguration of
the pontianak is also an example of transcultural commodification of local folklore
produced anew to align with the sensibilities of the global age. A Malay folk creature,
whose image is mediated through a horror movie shot by an Indonesian director and
repackaged for global consumption in a novel written in English by a British-educated
Chinese-Singaporean writer, is no longer seen as fully ‘local’ but rather as a product of
transcultural exchange.

Return to the Forest: Globalisation, Spirits and Ecogothic

The global reach of novels like Ponti is certainly accelerated by the fact that they are writ-
ten in English, since this makes them instantly accessible to a much larger audience. Unlike
literature, films do not have to be concerned with linguistic limitations, since the language

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they resort to is significantly more universal. Regardless of their country of origin, most
films are made using a highly standardised set of production methods, they resort to
similar imagery and sound design, use similar camerawork and editing techniques, and
often additionally adhere to specific genre conventions. This makes them accessible to
global audiences even without subtitles, even more so in the case of horror films which
tend to follow their genre codes rather closely. In the wake of the international success of
Japanese millennial horror in the early 2000s, and owing much to an aggressive market-
ing campaign of several Western DVD distributors, ‘Asian Horror’ became a recognisable
label. It is worth noting that this label already situates the films globally, as obviously
within their respected countries they are not exactly seen as ‘Asian’, or even specifically
‘Japanese’, ‘Korean’ or ‘Thai’, since such categories imply external evaluation. Interest-
ingly, however, ‘Asian Horror’ was eagerly embraced by Asian filmmakers who saw it as a
pan-Asian genre, the compliance with which awarded them a better opportunity to reach
international markets. One of the common conventions of this genre was adaptation of
local folklore for global consumption.
The idea of using local content within a larger global format like that of a genre is
nothing new – we have seen it in films and in literature before. What has changed in
the twenty-first century is how this content is used. Ponti resorts to Malay or Singa-
porean folklore but it does not simply embed its pontianak in a generic horror story.
Instead, it adapts it into an appealing gothic feminist metaphor relatable to women in
Singapore and Malaysia but also to women in general. Izharuddin observes that the
pontianak’s ‘loud shrieks and excessive laughter constitute temporary bursts of respite
and resistance in a culture replete with impositions on women’s voices’ (2020, 1,010),
and that in oppressive patriarchal cultures, like the Malay culture, female spirits and
demons are ironically afforded more agency and capacity for reckoning than the living
women. Reading the pontianak in the broader context of femininity, (failed) mother-
hood, loneliness and grief allows it to transgress the boundaries of its culture. In films,
on the other hand, we can observe a growing interest in the ecological dimension of
folklore, which in the Asian context is often linked to animism.
In recent years we have seen an increased number of films set in a forest, par-
ticularly in uninhabited mountainous areas replete with caves. Such natural spaces,
disappearing at an alarming rate due to commercially driven deforestation, ongo-
ing urbanisation and human intervention, are seen as anti-anthropocentric spaces of
resistance beyond the reach of globalisation. Traditionally portrayed as the domain
of the spirits and all types of (preter)natural creatures, such areas are commonly
viewed as sites that are simultaneously dangerous and sacred. While animism is often
simplistically considered a ‘pre-modern’ worldview that affords agency to the human
and non-human alike, this is not the case in Asian cultures where modernity did not
eradicate such beliefs. Animistic beliefs and practices are part of Asian supernatural-
ism, shamanism, magic and popular religions, all very much alive today. They form
a fabric of everyday life and contribute to what could be termed ‘living folklore’. In
their darker format, concerned with evil spirits, demons, curses and destructive forces
of nature, they can be seen as a strong contender for what Piatti-Farnell and Beville
(2014) call the ‘living Gothic’.
The Tag-Along (Cheng 2015) is one of the highest-grossing Taiwanese horror films
in history. Its original title, translated as ‘Little Girl in Red’, refers to a local urban
legend from the 1990s related to a viral video that showed a group of hikers being

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followed on their trail by a little girl in red that no one remembered seeing (Belaunde
2016), but a creature portrayed in the film is also identified as moshenzi (alt. spelling
mosina) – a mountain demon said to play tricks on humans, and make them get lost
in the forest and even lose their minds. In the film, the spirit mimics human voice – we
are warned never to turn back when we hear someone unexpectedly calling our name.
This puts it in league with other similar East Asian creatures that imitate humans to
lure their victims into the forest, like the Jangsan beom – a quadrupedal hairy cryptid
native to the Jangsan Mountain region near Busan in South Korea capable of imitating
a variety of sounds including human speech, depicted in the Korean film The Mimic
(Huh 2017) as a tiger spirit possessing humans, or the Japanese amanojaku (alt. spelling
amanjaku), portrayed in The Vanished (Tanaka 2006), a demon that kidnaps and
devours people and can impersonate them by wearing their flayed skin.
The three films share several similarities. All of them are derived from folklore
and urban legends related to forest-dwelling spirits/creatures. Each of these creatures
is capable of imitating human voice and form and is portrayed as a child, or is child-
like in appearance. In each case, the creature’s aim is to lure people into the woods,
sometimes more specifically into a mountain cave, where they subsequently disappear.
It is unclear what exactly happens to them, although in The Tag-Along it is hinted that
they become incorporated into trees, in The Mimic they are probably devoured by the
tiger spirit, and in The Vanished they continue to linger as a ghostly presence in the
forest. While they may be occasionally described as evil, the creatures are mostly per-
ceived as akin to natural phenomena like landslides or earthquakes – potentially fatal
to humans but also possible to avoid by staying clear of their territory. The action of
the films takes place largely in rural or peri-urban areas in the vicinity of a large forest.
Locals act with respect and reverence towards these areas which are seen as the realm
of the spirits and as such are either avoided altogether or entered with care. Things are
not the same with outsiders who act as catalysts of events in each film, and yet all the
protagonists survive their ordeal and get a chance for a ‘happy’ ending once they have
learnt their lesson. All the films feature scenes referencing local shamanistic practices –
Taiwanese Taoist-related dong-gi spirit mediumship (known as tongji or jitong in
Mandarin), Japanese Shinto and Korean Shindo respectively. All the films also include
themes related to family and parenthood. The specific positioning of the creatures as
the representatives or guardians of nature also seems to suggest a pattern where local
folklore is used as a response to the largely globalised practices driving the deforesta-
tion and ecological devastation in the region.
The Tag-Along begins by introducing Wei, a property agent living with his grand-
mother, who dreams of starting a family with his girlfriend, Yi-Chun, who works
as a radio DJ. Assuming that the overbearing presence of his grandmother may be
the reason why Yi-Chun does not seem to be in a hurry to move their relationship to
the next phase, he decides to mortgage his grandma’s house, buy a flat and propose,
only to be rejected on the spot. Yi-Chun seems to be particularly averse to Wei’s sug-
gestion they should have a baby, replying that she wants to focus on her career instead.
Disappointed, Wei returns home to his grandma and finds her missing. The next day
he receives a camera with a strange video showing a group of people hiking through
the forest followed by a girl in a red dress. The camera is identified as belonging to
one of the neighbours, who is also missing, and sometime later we are shown a CCTV
recording of Wei’s grandma leaving home with the same girl.

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The presence of the strange girl is soon confirmed as having something to do with
the disappearances of people who are shown hearing voices of their loved ones before
being mysteriously transported to the forest. The disappearance is often accompa-
nied by poltergeist-like phenomena to confirm that we are dealing with something
supernatural. A few days later Wei’s grandmother suddenly reappears. She is found
walking down the road unable to remember how she got there. At this time, however,
it is Wei who is acting strange. Yi-Chun finds him eating bugs and worms, seemingly
unaware of this fact, or peering into an empty hospital ward claiming he is looking at
babies and wondering why she does not want to have one. Unsurprisingly, the next
day Wei disappears as well. Yi-Chun scours the internet looking for clues, especially
intrigued by the death’s-head hawkmoth that was found in Wei’s grandmother’s vomit.
She receives a mysterious phone call with directions from a man who apparently died
years before and joins a search team heading for the forest. Soon, she finds herself
lost and eventually enters an area surrounded by trees that seem to have consumed
humans. She is confronted by the little girl in red, who we find out is not a girl at all
but rather some unidentified and threatening creature. This confrontation leads us to
the reveal that Yi-Chun has had an abortion, but before she lets herself be consumed
by guilt and regret, she manages to extricate Wei from the grasp of a tree and the two
of them are whisked to safety by the rescue team. The film ends on a positive note with
Yi-Chun married to Wei and pregnant with his child.
Visually, the film is clearly indebted to Japanese horror that can be seen as the
driving force of the pan-Asian genre. This is most evident in the creature design
whose hair-covered face and jerky movements have become a standard depiction
of the Japanese onryo (vengeful spirits). The existence of the viral video is also a
common trend in J-horror. The death’s-head hawkmoth, on the other hand, takes us
straight to The Silence of the Lambs and the idea of wearing another person’s skin,
although here the skull on the insect is meant to resemble the face of the spirit-child
instead. The red dress is also a common denominator in Asian folklore, signifying a
vengeful spirit, or a connection to witchcraft and demons. The film can additionally
be read in a larger context of ecohorror or ecogothic narratives describing the chang-
ing relationship of humans to nature.
In The Tag-Along, the missing humans end up incorporated into trees, which is
meant to be a form of punishment for destroying the forest. Since none of the protago-
nists are shown doing anything that might provoke such retribution, we can assume
that all humans are meant to share responsibility for our joint exploitation of the
planet. It may also be seen as a reminder that those living in regions rendered especially
precarious by the extractive practices of multinational actors are the ones who dispro-
portionately pay the price for environmental devastation they have not caused. The
forceful return to nature holds people accountable for their failures at being human.
The forest spirit is said to haunt those who live unfulfilled lives filled with regret – it
comes to them under the guise of the friends and family members they have hurt or
neglected and drives them insane by latching on to the feeling of guilt inside them.
Wei’s grandmother follows the voice of a friend she ignored, Wei follows the vision of
the grandmother he wanted to escape, Yi-Chun goes looking for the man she refused
to marry and is taunted by memories of her (their?) aborted child.
Family, motherhood, childbirth and abortion are motifs central to many Asian
horror films; this includes the notion of aborted foetuses haunting their mothers,

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barraging them with a deadly combination of guilt and grief. In Taiwanese beliefs,
foetus ghosts (yingling), typically represented in the form of a child between one and
five years of age, are thought to return to judge and punish their mothers, commonly
by causing an illness in the family (Moskowitz 2001, 45, 49). In Asian folklore, baby
spirits are often considered equally potent as ghosts of mothers who died while preg-
nant or in childbirth (like the pontianak). This is also evident in the prevalence of
black magic rituals related to raising baby spirits from foetuses, a practice common in
Southeast Asia (kuman tong, toyol) but also known in Taiwan (xiaogui). The Taiwanese
xiaogui are said to be blood-drinking foetus demons thought to be particularly pow-
erful because they exist in a liminal state that is closer to the natural world than that
of adult ghosts (Moskowitz 2001, 155–6). They are often called upon to satisfy their
master’s greed, hatred or desire for vengeance (151).
The aborted foetus is the ultimate abject, both a corpse, ‘the most sickening of wastes’
representing ‘fundamental pollution’ (Kristeva 1982, 3, 109), and an external projection
of ‘the desirable and terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abject inside
of the maternal body’ (54). Whether miscarried, terminated or stolen from the mother’s
womb, it is an embodiment of loss and a site of haunting. Motifs like these are a famil-
iar territory to gothic, whose conventions include absent mothers, monstrous mothers,
demonic pregnancy, the horrors of childbirth and the trauma related to child loss. Gothic
narratives frequently depict abortion as ‘a violent attack on the unborn’ (Valerius 2013,
29) and produce ‘violated victims’ and ‘perverse villains’ (30). ‘Monstrous mothers’ are
necessary narrative devices to promote the deviant and unstable gothic plot that opposes
the notion of the orderly and protective mother figure (Anolik 2003, 27–8). The motif
of motherhood is also frequently tied in with the depictions of nature as feminine or
motherly with all the consequences of the above.

I Want My Ghost TV: Globalgothic Comes Home

Films like The Tag-Along straddle the boundary between horror and gothic. While
horror is a well-defined genre present in cinema since its birth, gothic often seems a
superfluous term in this context, occasionally recognised as a particular style, visual
aesthetics, mode or tone that can be found in some horror films, or discussed as a set
of conventions such films employ. Asian horror films, however, like to deviate from
Western horror genre norms. They frequently follow circular or fragmentary narrative
structure, allocate different functions to the supernatural, and introduce unexpected
elements of comedy or romance that merge with horror tropes. Asian Horror differ-
entiates between body horror (inclusive of the recent vengeful ghost films, which are
remarkably corporeal) reminiscent of Western exploitation films, and subtler super-
natural narratives focusing on the themes of haunting, anxiety, liminality, transgres-
sion and excess, which can be easily seen as gothic. Such themes can also be found in
Asian television.
Derek Johnston observes that ghosts and ghost stories have been linked with tele-
vision since the beginning of the medium (2018, 378), evolving together with the
development of television technologies – from ghostly low-resolution, low-contrast
projection to modern high-definition screens allowing for a recognition of spectral fig-
ures hidden within the image (379). Helen Wheatley calls television ‘the ideal medium
for the Gothic’ (2006, 1), bringing its terrors/horrors home, as the domestic space

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is where the gothic originates, is acted out and, ultimately, is viewed (7). Wheatley
defines gothic television in relation to its complex and fragmentary narrative structure
and conventional plot lines, as well as its characteristic audio-visual form executed
through a combination of stylised mise en scène, cinematography, editing and sound.
While the plot lines are organised around familiar gothic tropes, the style tends to
veer towards impressionistic subjectivism, heavily reliant on dark visuals – drab, shad-
owed, dimly lit but also aiming to evoke fear and disgust in the viewers – and eerie
claustrophobic sets, which serve as an oppressive background to the stories (3).
Like television in general, gothic television developed first as a national medium
limited to its respective countries of origin, but since the 1990s it has expanded
exponentially thanks to a growing number of global satellite and cable networks.
While in the early days this mostly meant that American-made content became more
available to non-American audiences, the increased global exposure led to the gradual
globalisation of this content, particularly in relation to folklore. Early American gothic
television narratives frequently reached out to European folklore with their origin
stories of vampires and werewolves. Later productions, like Supernatural (2005–2020,
WB/CW) and Grimm (2011–2017, NBC), added, among others, references to Asian
folklore: Supernatural featured such creatures as the Japanese dream-devouring baku,
Malay cicada-spirit bisaan and Indian vampiric vetala,2 while Grimm devoted an entire
episode to the Philippine aswang (season 3, episode 14). The globalisation of gothic
television has rapidly accelerated with the introduction of digital internet-delivered
television, and it is on the streaming video-on-demand platforms of today that we can
best experience its globalgothic version.
In 1992, HBO created Singapore-based HBO Asia as its pan-Asian division. In
2010, in a joint venture with Hong Kong studio Mei Ah Entertainment, HBO Asia
launched its Red channel devoted entirely to the promotion of Asian content shown
in original languages with localised subtitles. In 2015, the channel’s scope expanded
to cover also productions from Japan, South Korea, mainland China and most of
Southeast Asia. Today HBO Red is available as part of the global HBO Go platform.
Like its parent network, HBO Asia also produces original content and, unsurpris-
ingly, folklore-related supernatural series are among its most successful productions.
These include a Singaporean vengeful ghost mini-series Grace (2014), Taiwanese
spirit-medium teen drama The Teenage Psychic (2017), Indonesian fantasy monster
series Halfworlds (2015), followed by its Thai sequel in 2017, and two six-part horror
anthology series Folklore (2018, 2021) featuring works of prominent Asian directors.
While Grace and The Teenage Psychic are shows revolving around ghosts similar
to those known from Western gothic television, Halfworlds takes us into a very dif-
ferent territory. Directed by Joko Anwar and set in contemporary Jakarta, Halfworlds
is a dark fantasy series that posits the existence of a shadowy underworld filled with
demonic creatures. These creatures, known collectively as demit, are recognisable to
anyone familiar with Indonesian folklore: kuntilanak (a ghost of a woman who died
while pregnant or in childbirth, similar to the Malay pontianak), palasik (similar to the
Malay penanggalan, a female spirit capable of detaching its head, often said to feed on
foetuses), genderuwo (a beast-like muscular male demon known for seducing women),
banaspati (a male entity with a flaming head) and tuyul (a foetus demon, similar to
the Taiwanese xiaogui). The demit have been given a double makeover in the series,
appearing first as ancient gods and protectors of humankind, demoted to demons as a

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 asian gothic 421

result of a demit-human conflict, and portrayed in more contemporary times as crimi-

nals and secret puppet-masters in control of the human population. In both versions,
their appearance is warrior-like and their supernatural abilities are overshadowed by
more conventional weaponry.
Halfworlds gives its demit creatures a powerful origin story. Described in an opening
sequence as children of gods ‘summoned from the embers of creation’ (a possible refer-
ence to the jinn as the spirit of fire), they emerge from a volcano to prey on creatures
that preyed on humans. This wins them the gratitude of men and they are worshipped
as deities. Then the worlds of demit and humans turn on each other and the creatures
begin to be feared as demons and monsters. Legend has it that the war had something to
do with the event called ‘The Gift’, a phenomenon never clearly explained in the story.
Whoever receives ‘The Gift’ will have a chance to rule over both demit and humans, but
in the wrong hands it may lead to the annihilation of both worlds. Many centuries later
‘The Gift’ is back, and this is where the main story begins.
Halfworlds fits Wheatley’s description of gothic television. Its storyline is sketchy
and fragmentary and evokes a set of familiar conventions: monsters, absent mothers,
broken families, nightmares, victimised heroine, racial impurity, buried secrets and an
impending apocalypse. The setting is suitably liminal – abandoned buildings, impos-
sibly narrow dark alleyways cutting deep into an urban slum, decrepit ancestral homes,
open garbage pits and gloomy underpasses, all too ready to be filled with ghosts and
monsters. The cinematography, unsurprisingly, favours high-contrast setups and relies
on dark visuals. The plot revolves around a young woman called Sarah, an orphaned
street artist troubled by nightmarish dreams blending scenes of political riots, her par-
ents’ death and monsters. Her drawings of fantastic creatures bring her the unwanted
attention of the very same creatures she thought only existed in her dreams. Saved from
a deadly attack by a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a half-breed recipient of
the previous ‘Gift’, she learns of the existence of the demonic underworld concealed by
a powerful family of mortals. With the date of the new ‘Gift’ approaching, Sarah finds
herself caught between the two worlds, stunned by a discovery of her own demonic
origins and faced with a choice that can define the fate of the universe.
Told in eight thirty-minute-long episodes, the story seems chaotic. Despite a promis-
ing start, original concept and appealing visuals, the series suffers from uneven pacing
and does not develop a coherent arc. Regardless of its imperfections, however, it is clear
that Halfworlds represents a newer stage in the development of global television, or, in
this specific case, globalgothic television. First of all, although the series is based in folk-
lore, it uses folklore in a different way. Rather than resorting to local legends to exoticise
a more generic story, the script reworks these tales into a new origin mythology where
fixed folklore characters are reborn as completely different creatures. Halfworlds’ demit
may have been derived from Indonesian folklore, but without the series’ opening credit
sequence explaining this connection they would not be recognisable as such. Separated
from their typical horror settings, they have been transplanted into a Young Adult (YA)
fantasy story, perhaps the fastest-growing global transmedia genre today. The decision
to rebrand humble animistic spirits as glorious mythological deities brings them closer
to Greek or Norse gods that frequently feature in Western YA fiction. It also allows the
series’ creators to situate the story in a context larger than Indonesia, and indeed the
second season of Halfworlds is set in Thailand, while the third one is planned to take
place in the Philippines.

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None of this has been lost on the critics. Looking back on the series in 2020, James
Guild favourably compared its revisionist approach to folklore with that of Game of
Thrones (2011–2019), concluding that ‘it’s only fitting that HBO Asia should spin out
fantasy yarns that are firmly rooted in the history and folklore of Asia’ (Guild 2020).
The success of Halfworlds subsequently paved the way for HBO’s pan-Asian horror
anthology series Folklore, the first episode of which was also directed by Joko Anwar.
Halfworlds launched the global career of Anwar and made him redirect his interests
towards folk horror. Though he was not a novice director at the time he made the
series, he was not particularly well known outside of Indonesia. The films he made
after his HBO debut brought him international recognition and raised questions about
the global marketability of Indonesian horror cinema.
Two of those films are particularly notable. Released in 2017, Satan Slaves, a
remake of the 1980 Indonesian film under the same title directed by Sisworo Gautama
Putra, tells the story of ghostly returns, possession, black magic and devil worship,
while Impetigore (2019) deals with witchcraft, ghosts, ritualistic murder and haunted
shadow puppets (wayang kulit) made from human skin. Both films are international
co-productions made with South Korean CJ Entertainment and Impetigore addi-
tionally with American Ivanhoe Pictures. Anwar also scripted a remake of another
Indonesian horror classic, The Queen of Black Magic (Stamboel 2019), originally
directed by Liljek Sudjio in 1979, a ghostly black-magic gorefest filled with body
mutilations and impossible curses. While rooted firmly in local folklore, customs and
traditions, the films fit the generic Asian Horror vengeful ghost/body horror formula
that makes them highly marketable to global audiences. Unsurprisingly, they quickly
became available on streaming platforms like Shudder and Amazon Prime, reflecting
a recent change in film distribution practices in the region.
A growing number of Southeast Asian filmmakers have turned to streaming services
hoping to reach a wider audience, and folklore-based horror films are among the most
commonly acquired titles. Although originally made for cinema, such productions get
more exposure when rebranded as global television content available to buy or rent
online. In an interview for Nikkei Asia, Anwar admits: ‘Streaming platforms [have]
turned the world into a big market where everyone can access films from all over,
including Indonesia, and I can only be grateful for that’ (Ferrarese 2021). Recognising
folklore as responsible for his films’ appeal, Anwar concludes: ‘Our nation is rich with
demons, not including the corrupt politicians . . . We should be the biggest exporters
of ghost stories’ (Ferrarese 2021). Ironically, however, in order to export such stories,
they need to be recoded for transnational consumption, which inevitably means disas-
sociating them from local cultural and cinematic practices in favour of the global, the
transnational and the transcultural.

Conclusion: The Global Side of Asian Gothic

Asian Gothic is a category reflective of global/local dynamics. It allows us to local-
ise the gothic in Asia and discover a vast array of local and regional texts that can
be read as gothic, but it is also invested in investigating transnational connections,
inter-Asian cultural exchange systems and the role such texts play in contributing to
larger globalgothic trends. Literature written or translated into English, and films and
television programmes available through global distribution platforms and streaming

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 asian gothic 423

services, are among the texts capable of reaching the largest possible audiences. But
the increased availability of such texts is often combined with the need to standardise
their content, at times imposed quite rigorously by the publishers, producers and other
industry professionals responsible for the texts’ distribution. The result of such prac-
tices are texts that not only engage with the ways gothic responds to all manner of
changes brought about by globalisation, but are themselves the products of transcul-
tural exchange affecting the media and entertainment industries at the level of produc-
tion and distribution.
Folklore and gothic have a long-standing relationship and many Asian Gothic texts
reach out to local folktales for material. Some of these texts place folkloric figures in
gothic plots – a familiar tactic employed since the beginnings of the genre, even if in
non-Western contexts it is always involved in the process of translating or negotiat-
ing specific meanings associated with such figures, since concepts like ‘monstrosity’,
‘supernatural’ and ‘afterlife’ are culture-bound. Other texts remind us that folklore
is also a living category and that in animistic Asian contexts, Asian Gothic is insepa-
rable from lived experience and the cultural practice in which it is embedded. Ponti,
The Tag-Along and Halfworlds are examples of texts that do both of these things,
using conventional gothic plots to introduce Asian folklore and its monsters to global
audiences while engaging with the lived experience of folklore, tradition and associ-
ated cultural practices on a philosophical level. Locally rooted but part of a global
mediascape, such texts can thus be read as simultaneously Asian and globalgothic.
They remind us that gothic does not belong to one culture but it is also susceptible to
cultural flows.

Notes
1. Although tiyanak is most frequently considered to be a ghost of a baby rather than its
mother, it is worth noticing that Skeat describes pontianak as the stillborn child of langsuyar
(1900, 325), so the connection is there. Skeat also places pontianak in the same group as
penanggalan, the flying-head spirit (related to such creatures as palasik in Indonesia, phi
krasue in Thailand, ap in Cambodia, or manananggal in the Philippines), which can explain
why the characteristics of these two entities are often blended in popular culture texts.
2. List of Supernatural creatures compiled as part of Supernatural fandom project available
at https://supernatural.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Creatures.

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 28

Desert Globalgothic
Rune Graulund

G othic is dark. The desert is light. Gothic is characterised by ‘an absence of the
light associated with sense, security and knowledge’ (Botting 2014, 2). It is cold,
clammy, wreathed in fog, and is traditionally set in shadowy castles or decrepit houses
full of winding passages, hidden rooms and ancient secrets, heavy draperies and other
forms of folded and private spaces. The desert is none of these things. Defined by an
intensity of light and a lack of precipitation, while also presenting wide open spaces
in which little or no human construction is to be found, ‘Desert Gothic’ may therefore
seem oxymoronic. Conceptually, the desert does not lend itself easily to traditional
gothic tropes.
If the desert is in general resistant to gothic theorising, a similar sense of impervious-
ness to gothic can be seen in that historically the desert came late to the gothic colonial
canon. With its origins in Europe, later manifestations of gothic outside the European
continent could be relied on to replicate at least some of the core characteristics of the
original template. American gothic, for instance, may be short on ‘medieval history,
ghosts in crumbling castles, emotional extremes, and a debased aristocracy’ (Weinstock
2017, 1). Nevertheless, it ultimately reimagined central gothic figures of darkness and
dereliction in novel yet still familiar forms through the by now stock (American) gothic
tropes: the cabin in the woods, native American burial grounds, the freak show, the
horrors of slavery, and the plantation house (Murphy 2009, 2013; Simmons 2017;
Weinauer 2017; Crow 2017). With the desert routinely perceived to exist fully outside
of history (rather than in, before or after), such ‘attraction to the imagined vitality of
past ages’ (Botting 2014, xiii) was however not so easily transferred to a space that had
become ‘a trope, a cipher signifying deficiency, lack, absence’ (Gersdorff 2009, 16). It is
telling that early American gothic tales like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘Young Goodman
Brown’ (1835) unfold in the New England woods rather than in the Mojave Desert,
just as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is set in a damp and
dilapidated manor by a tepid lake in what is likely to be New England, rather than
next to a salt pan on a sunbaked mesa somewhere in the Southwest. This is reflected in
the critical literature, too. In their attempt at explaining how the ‘mutation of Gothic
landscapes’ spread into the twenty-first century, for instance, Sharon Rose Yang and
Kathleen Healey stress in Gothic Landscapes (2016) that ‘landscape plays such a cen-
tral role in the genre’ precisely because the ‘power and obfuscation of storms, fogs,
dark forests, and night’ embodies ‘the genre’s fluidity’ (Yang and Healey 2016, 14, 5).
With a traditional gothic focus on darkness and ‘obfuscation’, it is therefore no surprise
that Yang and Healey have plenty to say about ‘shadowed depths of caves, forests, or
tarns’ but little to say about the desert. To them, as to so many others in gothic studies,

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it is difficult to view the bright light and open horizons of the desert as part of a canon
whose archetypal landscapes are essentially the desert’s antithesis.
If a Desert Gothic seems self-contradictory, a Desert Globalgothic may seem even
more so. While there may be ‘a continuity between American gothic – which is always at
least implicitly hybrid – and globalgothic, which foregrounds hybridization’ (Campbell
2013, 158), it is reasonable to question if such a continuity can be established between
gothic in its original manifestation in Europe two centuries ago, on one end, and late-
twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Desert Globalgothic at the other? For if Desert
Gothic is problematic even in a national or regional context, what happens when we
scale this up to the global, or make an even deeper cut and go planetary?
In the following, I will first trace the development of the colonial desert histories
of three anglophone settler nations (Australia, South Africa and the United States)
in order to outline three different stages of assimilation of and to desert regions as a
national landscape. In this, the concept of terra nullius is of vital importance. This idea
of the desert as ‘nobody’s land’ should in principle have made it more easily subsumed
by the imperialist project. However, with the eventual elision from terra nullius on
to what I have here termed ‘terror nullius’, it becomes clear over time that this has
historically not been the case. In a comparative reading of J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for
the Barbarians (1980) with Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985), I am thus
arguing that the horror of gothic can be expressed in the horrible clarity of glaring
sunlight as well as it can in the obfuscation of darkness, albeit of course with a differ-
ent inflection. Finally, I conclude the chapter by pondering the future of a planet, and
a Planetary Gothic, in which all darkness has been banished. What chilling horrors
may the future hold, for gothic, for humanity, as indeed for all things living, dead or
undead, if the world entire has been burnt to cinders?

Terra Nullius: Australia, South Africa, the United States

In charting the move from ‘gothic’, singular, to a ‘proliferation of gothics’, Glennis Byron
points out in the introduction to Globalgothic (2013) that in reading for globalgothic
manifestations, one must simultaneously be attentive to ‘historically specific conditions’
as well as to ‘the development of an increasingly integrated global economy’ (Byron
2013, 1). The chapters in Globalgothic testify to this in their diverse outlooks. With
a range of national examples from Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, Canada, the United
States, Austria and New Zealand, many of the readings presented in Byron’s book are
first and foremost readings of national gothics, and only secondly the global economy,
or indeed ‘the global’ as such. Following Byron’s example, it therefore makes sense in
this chapter first to examine national examples of Desert Gothic prior to any attempt at
forming a hypothesis about Desert Globalgothic as such.
In what follows, I will argue that some continuity does indeed exist between the
origins of gothic in Europe and its later national and regional manifestations. I will
however also argue that in the potential horror of an all-encompassing planetary condi-
tion, a Desert Globalgothic at its most extreme may turn the genre on its head. For in
starting out by examining a range of national and regional Desert Gothic narratives,
and reading them comparatively, the chapter will move on to the truly global perspec-
tive of a planet that is steadily heating up, in time threatening to turn Earth into one
massive planetary desert hellhole bereft of (human) life as we know it. In this, I will

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claim, even if manifestations of gothic are different when set in glaring sunlight rather
in gloom, darkness and shade, central gothic anxieties over the transformative power of
technology and humanity’s place in the universe are revisited in the frightening outlook
of a planet on which no shade, no darkness, no cold is ever again to be found. I will
attempt to trace the similarities, but also the differences, between a European gothic
transplanted to three separate settler nations in which the desert (eventually) figured
as a prominent landscape. Specifically, I will look at three anglophone national tradi-
tions, namely those of the United States, of Australia and of South Africa. For while the
colonising efforts of the British settlers in these regions were geographically diverse, and
happened along different timelines,1 the manner in which the respective deserts were
co-opted into the national narrative as the fledgling settler nations attempted indepen-
dence from the British Empire share many traits. This includes an intense anxiety over
a landscape that was decidedly alien to European sensibilities, and over the violent dis-
placement and erasure of the indigenous peoples who did in fact live in the desert, albeit
in a necessarily transient and nomadic way that the colonising force neither recognised
nor understood (see Veth, Smith and Hiscock 2005; Davis 2006).
Three reasonably similar stages of assimilation can be identified in the colonisation
of deserts in the United States, Australia and South Africa. During the first stage, the
desert was ignored or shunned in favour of other, more easily malleable and profit-
able landscapes. In the second stage, the desert is acknowledged as being potentially
valuable, albeit not in its own right. Rather, it is appreciated for its potential to be
turned into farmland, or for its mineral wealth. It is only in the third and final state,
relatively late in the formation of statehood, that the desert is fully incorporated into
the idea of a national self and home, and even then it is still considered an abnormal
national space. Formerly awful and embarrassing, a ‘hideous blank’ (Haynes 1998,
36) that was ‘incomprehensible to the collective imagination of the “civilized” portion
of the country’ (Teague 1997, 3), the desert would in time grow to be perceived as
signifying some of the best qualities of a rugged settler life far from the bustling impe-
rial, cosmopolitan centre. With the Outback, the Veld and the Great Basin praised for
fostering toughness, resilience and intimacy with the land, the desert would continue
to remain a place of extremes. The desert is ‘the last pocket of space left in the idea
of the frontier’ (Bowden 1997, 139), American Charles Bowden claims in Blue Desert
(1986), a terrain in which the South African Laurens van der Post in The Lost World
of the Kalahari (1958) suggests that ‘one felt curiously close to the secret world’ of a
bygone age (van der Post 1986, 227). It is a place of which Australian Robyn Davidson
could, in Tracks (1980), confidently claim that ‘I was remembering exactly who I was’
(Davidson 1980, 154). Thus, the descendants of European colonisers like Bowden, van
der Post and Davidson were, in the twentieth century, beginning to feel comfortable
in the desert, locating there a sense of belonging and authenticity that they otherwise
could not find in the modern world. Still, it is telling that the original inhabitants of the
deserts they visit (because they all ultimately leave again) are if not exactly gone then at
least heavily diminished. The Lost World of the Kalahari is, as the title implies, about a
people and a way of life that has largely disappeared. And while Davidson both meets
and travels with indigenous desert peoples, the narrative is explicitly that of a young
white woman travelling through an almost empty landscape.
Australia proves a particularly poignant case of an annulment, as much of the
desert landscape as of the indigenous people who had for millennia made it their

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 428 rune graulund

home. Classified as a space that was terra nullius, which is to say ‘nobody’s land’, the
Australian desert appeared particularly amenable to the convenient legal definition of
international (European) law, according to which land could be seized if it was either
unpopulated or ‘unused’. As the only populated continent to consist mainly of arid
and semi-arid land, Australia and its indigenous desert peoples therefore present a
clear case of terra nullius in action precisely because, according to European standards
of ‘use’, both land and people of the desert were deemed useless. ‘At the heart of the
colonial culture of seeing was the invisibility of the Aborigines,’ the eminent historian
of Australian colonial history Paul Carter has remarked, meaning that ‘[b]y the latter
part of the nineteenth century they had become in the popular imagination as dream-
like and enigmatic as the interior’ (Carter 1992, 67). Paradoxically, though, with the
indigenous as ghostly presences who were never fully acknowledged, the colonial proj-
ect of exorcising them from the land would over time be doubly compromised. As
they lingered unacknowledged just at the edge of vision, indigenous claims to the land
would prove difficult to banish fully precisely because the colonising gaze refused to
acknowledge the indigenous presence in the first place. As with ghosts, the former yet
still-present inhabitants of a seemingly empty house whom we can never fully see, or
clearly communicate with, terra nullius has an inbuilt tendency towards the haunted.
While the concept of terra nullius was, from a legal and historical perspective,
employed with particular vehemence in Australia, the ‘invisibility’ bestowed by the
‘colonial culture of seeing’ in Australia can conceptually and in practice also be seen
in the encounter with desert cultures in the United States and South Africa. Theodore
Roosevelt, for instance, while admitting that ‘torture’ and ‘wild terror’ were com-
monplace on the American frontier, also insisted that this ‘particular kind of political
culture’ was excused simply because ‘the man who puts the soil to use must of right
dispossess the man who does not, or the world will come to a standstill’ (Roosevelt
quoted in Grandin 2019, 120). Deemed to be void of financial value, but also empty of
people and of meaning, the desert was in such a calculus perceived as the most radical
of tabula rasas: a blank slate in which nothing happened, yet precisely also a place in
which anything could happen, unseen and unwitnessed by normal, civilised society in
more populous environments. Here we see how terra nullius will at some point inevi-
tably switch to become ‘terror nullius’. For as legal definitions of land ownership and
the aspirations of colonial power encounter the reality of a supposedly empty land-
scape which is in fact anything but that, violence and terror will necessarily follow –
epistemologically (in what the colonial gaze violently refuses to acknowledge),
physically (in the very real violence perpetrated), and of course historically (in the
subsequent denial that any such violence has taken place).

Terror Nullius: The Negative Aesthetics of

Colonial Desert Gothic
From a gothic perspective, what is of principal importance in the discourse of seeing is
that which is unseen, invisible and hidden. In the opening chapter of his seminal Gothic
(2nd edn, 2014), for instance, Fred Botting identifies what he terms ‘negative aesthetics’
as a central characteristic of gothic. Botting notes that ‘deficiency, the absence, exclusion
or negation of knowledge, facts or things’ (Botting 2014, 6) characterises this aesthetics,

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a description that is not dissimilar to the most basic definition of the desert as word and
terrain. Scientifically demarcated by the absence of precipitation, the desert is also etymo-
logically speaking a space of ‘absence’ and ‘deficiency’, seeing as ‘desert’ originates from
Latin ‘desertum’, literally a ‘thing abandoned’, as well as ‘deserere’, meaning to ‘forsake’.
Also, with the absence of water, and therefore of life, ‘Deserts can be and have often been
regarded as the geographical correlate of death’ (Tynan 2020, 3), which is of course a
‘negation’ of life as well as a cornerstone of any gothic sensibility. The second and seem-
ingly contradictory aspect of Botting’s negative aesthetic, namely that of ‘excess’ (Botting
2014, 6), is richly on display in the desert too. This is materially the case in the transgres-
sive temples to consumption and unbridled capitalism that are Las Vegas and Dubai. But
we also see it expressed in visions of the desert as a space in which bestial murders (films
like The Hills Have Eyes (1977) or Natural Born Killers (1994)), mutated monsters and
animals (films like Tremors (1990) or It Came from the Desert (2017)), wild experimen-
tation with drugs and sex (the novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the Burning
Man Festival), and mysterious disappearances (films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975),
or novels like Voss (1957) or The English Patient (1992)) naturally occur. Indeed, as a
long range of European (and in particular French) philosophers never tire of informing
us, the desert is a liminal space in which norms are subverted and boundaries are trans-
gressed and in constant motion.2
In this overview of colonial Desert Gothic traditions, it is important to acknowledge
that this status of the desert as a site of unsight is a pattern we see repeated in colonial
encounters across the globe. Also, it seems at least initially to follow the three stages of
assimilation described in the above. First ignored or abhorred, it was a space that was
invisible because, as phrased in William Lewis Manly’s Death Valley in ’49 (1894), it
was so awful as to be ‘more than any pen can paint, or describe’ (Manly 1982, 164).
As a space to be feared because it was too strange and too awful, the desert was for a
long while unbecoming to the otherwise ravenous colonial gaze. In the second stage of
colonial appropriation, in which the gaze is in fact turned toward the desert, it remains
however curiously unseen, simply because the colonial gaze refuses to acknowledge
what is in fact there. Out of sight even when the object of focus, the desert is in this
stage transformed into a terrain ‘useful’ to the colonial effort, either through irrigation
in order to turn it into farmland, or by being torn apart so as to obtain what hides
beneath the surface (uranium, rare earth metals, oil, diamonds). Surprisingly, in its
third and final stage of being assimilated into the national geography as a landscape
in its own right, invisibility and deliberate misdirection of the colonial gaze continue,
even as the desert and its history are now finally and supposedly square and centre.
John C. Van Dyke’s The Desert (1901), Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain (1903) and
Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) do mention indigenous people in passing, but
mostly as noble savages of a bygone age, thus rendering invisible much of the violence
perpetrated against them, now as well as then. In what are appreciative but also ulti-
mately romanticised memoirs of time spent in the desert, exercises in peaceful solitude
do not sit well with what was in fact a site/sight of remarkable horror and violence
(see also Graulund 2009).
It is telling that it is in fiction and not in documentary that we can locate some of
the most poignant, but also gruesome, depictions of the eradication and displacement
of indigenous desert cultures. Given the desert’s remote and comparatively unpopu-
lated nature, clashes between European coloniser and indigenous peoples could play

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out on an even more extreme and unchecked scale. They could, in turn, stay dormant
in the public imagination for some time, yet would eventually (as always) come back to
haunt later generations. In two of the most famous examples of such, J. M. Coetzee’s
Waiting for the Barbarians and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or, The Evening
Redness in the West, the horrors of terror nullius are made visible in re-envisionings
of a colonial desert frontier past that are imagined as anything but void – of action,
peoples or violence. Heavily allegorical and scathing in their investigations of the bru-
tal encounters between a colonising force and the supposed ‘barbarians’ they set out
to civilise, Coetzee’s and McCarthy’s books are stylistically and in terms of plot almost
antithetical. In Blood Meridian, lengthy passages of murder, mutilation and rape are
recounted over and over as we follow a gang of unruly men hunting for scalps, often
in sentences running over half a page with not a single full stop to catch our breath.
In Waiting for the Barbarians, as is almost always the case with Coetzee’s fiction, the
writing is spare. And while the promise of violence is constantly there, shimmering as
a haze in the background, very little in fact does happen in terms of violent skirmish.
Like the protagonist of the book, we too as readers are kept waiting for the barbarians.
These differences aside, it is however clear that the authors share a conviction that
the desert is a unique place. It is awful and awesome, meaningless and void, but it is
therefore somehow also more true, and more authentic than other more forgiving,
less horrific and less spare environments. It is in the desert that the truly barbarous
acts carried out by representatives of the colonial settlers come most grotesquely to
the fore, and hence it is also a space in which uncomfortable truths must be acknowl-
edged. We see this in the irony of Coetzee’s title; while the people of the city wait for
barbarians who never come, it appears ever clearer to the reader that the supposedly
civilised people inside the walls are in fact the real barbarians. Indeed the protagonist
of the story, the unnamed magistrate of the town, gradually comes to realise this him-
self. Early on in the book, as a response to ‘an episode of hysteria about the barbar-
ians’ (Coetzee 2004, 9) from the imperial capital, a band of ‘barbarians’ are captured
in the desert and brought back to the town. The magistrate muses that

It would cost little to march them out into the desert (having put a meal in them first,
perhaps, to make the march possible), to have them dig, with their last strength, a
pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even to dig it for them!), and, leaving
them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new
intentions, new resolutions. But that will not be my way. The new men of Empire
are the ones who believe in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages; I struggle on
with the old story, hoping that before it is finished it will reveal to me why it was
that I thought it worth the trouble. (Coetzee 2004, 26)

As a man of ‘the old story’, it is no coincidence that when the magistrate is not acting
in the official capacity of running the town, he dabbles in archaeology. Dreaming of
digging up ‘the bones of folk who thought they would find safety behind high walls’
(Coetzee 2004, 16), the magistrate hopes to discover not just the meaning of his own
purpose, but that of empire too. Digging up the bones and detritus of the past, he is
however also forced to admit that while ‘I pamper to my melancholy and try to find
in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy’ (Coetzee 2004, 18),
no such is to be found. In Coetzee’s book, as in so many versions of the old story of

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imperialism carried out in other desert regions of the planet, the desert remains resistant
both to inscription and to being read. Experienced as ‘a palimpsest, a surface we draw
upon time and again, each message eventually erased by the elements to offer up an
almost blank slate’ (Fox 2002, 2), indigenous desert peoples as well as the ground they
populate are in Desert Gothic often rendered as perplexing and horrifying ciphers that
are terrible to behold precisely because no sense can be made of them.
This meaninglessness, of existence but mainly of the supposed civilising purpose
of the imperial project, is literally hammered in later in the book. When elite imperial
soldiers, led by the brutal colonel Joll, are sent to the magistrate’s district from the
imperial capital in order to quell the imagined uprising, the magistrate ends up impris-
oned alongside the so-called barbarians he is accused of fraternising with. Again, the
discourse of seeing is centre stage here. For as Colonel Joll and his men round up a
band of indigenous peoples from the desert and bring them to the town in order to
have them publicly flogged, beaten with rods and, importantly, a hammer, we are once
again faced with a failure of sight, a central ‘deficiency’ of vision that fails to recog-
nise the prisoners for what they truly are, but also making clear to the magistrate just
how barbarous the proceedings are: ‘“Look at these men!” I recommence. “Men!”’
(Coetzee 2004, 117), the magistrate cries out, but he is never fully heard, himself to be
blinded by blows soon thereafter. Finally, as the book comes to a close and the soldiers
and Colonel Joll leave, the magistrate is left to muse over just what these bloody and
heinous acts carried out in the name of empire have all been for, but also struggling
to process what in actual fact it is he has been witness to: ‘There has been something
staring me in the face, and still I do not see it’ (Coetzee 2004, 170).
There is a magistrate of sorts in Blood Meridian too, although ‘the judge’ that
McCarthy presents to us is the antithesis of Coetzee’s just and mild-mannered bureau-
crat, who attempts to defuse rather than instigate violence. A Lucifer-like character,
the ultra-violent man (or devil?) Judge Holden first appears in Blood Meridian sitting
on a boulder in the middle of the desert, offering his help to the marauding gang of
men, which the novel spends inordinate amounts of energy describing in gory detail.
Prodded by the judge, the gang turns even more brutal, as they go on a murdering
spree through the arid lands of the American Southwest, eventually crossing the bor-
der into Mexico. If the magistrate is the (reluctant) protagonist of Waiting for the
Barbarians and Colonel Joll his antagonist, Holden is certainly the most clear-cut of
the antagonists in Blood Meridian. Yet unlike the magistrate, the violent young anti-
hero known solely as ‘the kid’, the closest thing to a protagonist McCarthy seems
willing to offer in a roster of characters that are by and large despicable, has few
redeeming characteristics.
The magistrate, Colonel Joll, Judge Holden and the kid, despite their differences,
all share the task of keeping the barbarians at bay and the settlements in the frontier
safe. In this, protagonists and antagonists of both books are all ostensibly the agents
of empire, complicit in a colonial force of viciousness that perpetuates a seemingly
endless and meaningless cycle of violence, which ultimately goes nowhere. The gothic,
in these texts, is thus employed to dramatise the suppressions that take place as terra
nullius is turned into terra populus, a supposedly more civilised space built on progress
and enlightenment, but in actual fact a place of brutality resting on pillars of bone. As
the kid, towards the end of the book, finds himself wounded, exhausted and thirsty,
‘studying the barrenness about’ him and the way further forward, it is remarked by

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the narrator how ‘[t]he desert upon which they were entrained was desert absolute
and it was devoid of feature altogether and there was nothing to remark their progress
upon it’ (McCarthy 1985, 295). Having butchered and scalped hundreds of people,
it is significant that it is the desert that the kid returns to towards the end. As the
judge comments: ‘This desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls
for largeness of heart but is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very
nature is stone’ (McCarthy 1985, 330). Similarly, towards the end of Waiting for the
Barbarians, we hear not just of how the soldiers of the garrison sent to hunt down the
barbarians ‘were not beaten – they led us out into the desert and then they vanished!’
(Coetzee 2004, 161), but also that the town itself is built upon bones of former towns,
former garrisons and former empires. Like P. B. Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, in which a
traveller from an antique land tells of the ‘Colossal Wreck’ of empire half-buried under
the desert sand, while ‘no thing beside remains’, the outpost of empire administered by
the magistrate is, too, doomed to fail, crumble and die. As the magistrate muses while
wading through the fields close to town and into a lake on the edge of the desert:

Empire has created the time of history. Empire has located its existence not in the
smooth recurrent spinning time of the cycle of the seasons but in the jagged time of
rise and fall, of beginning and end, of catastrophe. Empire dooms itself to live in
history and to plot against history. One thought alone preoccupies the submerged
mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it
pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere.
By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations,
pyramids of bone, acres of desolation. (Coetzee 2004, 146)

Again, it is important to stress that it is precisely in the desert, an environment (largely)

without seasons and spanning ‘acres of desolation’, that such revelations come most easily
to the fore. For while the magistrate does not himself participate physically in the slaugh-
ter necessitated by the ‘mad vision’ of empire, he realises that he is ‘no less infected with
it than the faithful Colonel Joll as he tracks the enemies of Empire through the boundless
desert, sword unsheathed to cut down barbarian after barbarian’ (Coetzee 2004, 146). A
citizen of a repressive empire, the magistrate is – as are all who turn a blind eye to the acts
of a violent regime, thus perpetuating its reign – complicit and hardly absolved from guilt.
Steven Shaviro has claimed that Blood Meridian is essentially an existentialist
novel, a book about ‘exile [as] our primordial and positive condition’ (Shaviro 1999,
147). As ‘Blood Meridian caresses the harsh desert landscape, slides amorously over
its surfaces’ (Shaviro 1999, 153), he remarks, it becomes a novel not so much about
American history or the specific geography of Mexico and the Southwest, but about
language, the human condition, empire, time, geology, death. Yet as with most of
McCarthy’s novels, even when he is at his most allegorical and existentialist, his most
planetary and cosmic, Blood Meridian is also rooted in very specific historical atroc-
ities and in accounts of such.3 In comparison, Waiting for the Barbarians is more
abstract, veering towards generalisable allegory that, while clearly informed by South
African colonial history, as is all of Coetzee’s writing, becomes almost Kafkian parable
in its disavowal of historical specificity. Nevertheless, in both stories imperial history
told through the prism of the desert remains remarkably similar. In the terror nullius of
the desert, the glaring light and open vistas make the gothic horror of colonial violence

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 desert globalgothic 433

and oppression stand out like a naked bone. ‘Nature appears hostile, untamed and
threatening’ (Botting 2014, 4), Botting remarks of the traditional Eurocentric gothic
landscapes. The same can certainly be said of Desert Gothic, but with the distinctive
difference of favouring aggressive exposure over ‘obscurity’, cruel light over ‘darkness’
(Botting 2014, 4). Where traditional gothic relies on ‘denying a clearly visible and safe
picture of the world’ (Botting 2014, 6), Desert Gothic clearly makes visible that noth-
ing is safe, ever. In this, the desert becomes the place in which the nation, and perhaps
humanity as such, shows its true colours, an ‘evening redness’ that is as darkly gothic
as it is bloody and brutal.

Towards a Planetary Desert Gothic

In Byron’s Globalgothic, two main understandings of globalgothic can be discerned. The
first is that of the global transmigration of gothic, previously a specifically place-bound
and cultural manifestation. On this account, the gothic goes temporarily transnational
after the late twentieth century, settling periodically into a new tradition as it is success-
fully transplanted to a new country, continent or setting, only to then potentially go
transnational once more as it leaps somewhere else again. As described by Yang and
Healey in Gothic Landscapes:

From its initial British incarnations, Gothic spread to France, Germany, and back
again, to later cross the Atlantic for the Americas, as well as to reach out to
Scandinavia, the Baltic, and the Eurasian regions of the Ukraine and Russia. The
‘colonized’ worlds of Australia, Africa, and Asia have also been noted for adapta-
tions of the Gothic. (Yang and Healey 2016, 2)

In this sense, a germ originally spawning in Europe has over two centuries colonised
the globe through a ‘proliferations of gothics’ (Byron 2013, 1), mutating along the way
but nevertheless sustaining a continuity with the ‘original’ gothic of Germany, France
and Britain. Byron points out, however, that as gothic travelled, it also became obvi-
ous that ‘the tropes and strategies Western critics have associated with the gothic, such
as the ghost, the vampire and the zombie, have their counterparts in other cultures’
(Byron 2013, 3). Hence gothic forms can be detected globally long before the European
tradition of gothic had even formed. What is more, and this is the second major thrust
of Byron’s conception of globalgothic, in the transnational and global proliferation of
culture ‘going global’, we have with late-twentieth-century globalisation witnessed a
movement that was vampiric and cannibalistic, parasitical and demoniacal. ‘Globali-
sation itself, then, becomes a gothic manifestation, a material and psychic invasion, a
force of contamination and dominance’ (Byron 2013, 5). Indeed, as Fred Botting and
Justin D. Edwards remark in their contribution to the volume, ‘globalisation engenders
a context through unbelonging’, a powerful sense of uprooting of formerly supposedly
stable ‘identities, genders, races and classes’ that globalgothic was able to successfully
capitalise upon (Botting and Edwards 2013, 23).
What is missing from Byron’s as well as Botting and Edwards’s account is how-
ever the question of the planetary. Published almost a decade ago, Globalgothic picks
up on important trends of a world gone global, examining noughties anxieties about
finance, technology and culture. But it has little to say about weather, climate, resource

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imperialism or environmental degradation, or about the uneven distribution of these

phenomena that reproduces inequalities initiated across colonial histories, of the kind
to which I have referred above. The same year that Globalgothic was published, how-
ever, new and more ecologically minded analyses of gothic were beginning to emerge, as
exemplified by Andrew Smith and William Hughes’s Ecogothic, an attempt at redress-
ing the dearth of gothic analyses in which an ‘ecological awareness’ and the question of
‘climate change’ were at the fore (Smith and Hughes 2013, 1). In the interim, a range
of works with an ecogothic slant have blossomed, most recently illustrated by titles
like Elizabeth Parker’s The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the
Popular Imagination (2020), Sladja Blazan’s Haunted Nature: The Cultural Work of
Environmental Haunting (2021) and Justin D. Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan
Höglund’s Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (2022). In the
concluding section of this chapter, I will, using the desert as a key topos, try to complete
the trajectory from a national and regional gothic to that of a transnational, global and
finally planetary gothic.

The Planetary Uncanny: The Death of the Local (and the Global)
In the move from an ecogothic to a Planetary Gothic, and in particular to a Planetary
Desert Gothic, we see how the ‘Earth-System unconscious’ (see coda to this book)
has become increasingly difficult to ignore. The blinkered insistence of an ‘ethics of
proximity’ (Heise 2008, 29) that Ursula Heise found problematic in Sense of Place
and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (2008) has become
even more so in the decade and a half that has passed since the publication of her
seminal text. Proximity and the local, community and intimacy, care and all else that,
as the phrase goes, is ‘close to home’, are obviously as important as ever when writing
place. But in a world in which we struggle to explain ‘what it means for human agents
to find themselves behaving like Earth or cosmic forces’ (Clark and Szerszynski 2021,
7), it is important to acknowledge, as William L. Fox remarks about the deserts of
Utah and Nevada, that ‘big space means big time’ (Fox 2000, 6). In the desert, as in
the planetary, too insistent a focus on the proximate, the familiar and the local literally
fails to take in the whole picture.
We see this explicated in that gothic is often about house and home – as the central-
ity of Freud’s unheimlich demonstrates – and that one focus of transnational gothic has
accordingly often been displacement: a sense of unbelonging that the desert epitomised,
precisely because it is a place defined by absence and ‘desertion’, a sense of estrange-
ment that becomes even stronger the further the subject moves from home. This is not
to say that discomfort and displacement from home does not play a role in national
Desert Gothic; it is important, for instance, in American Don Waters’ Desert Gothic
(2007), Australian Thea Astley’s Drylands (1999) and Coetzee’s In the Heart of the
Country (1977). However, it is in transnational texts like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering
Sky (1949) that the sense of disorientation and displacement associated with the desert
becomes truly prominent. As an American couple head to the Sahara in the post-war
years in an effort to fix their failing marriage, a range of grotesque encounters with both
locals and tourists lead them further and further into the desert. The journey eventually
resolves in the death of Port, the husband, as well as the kidnapping and ravishment of
Kit, the wife, as she is kept a (somewhat willing) captive of a Bedouin sheikh. The book

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is ripe with clichéd descriptions of sex, excessive consumption of alcohol and hashish,
gender swapping, sadomasochistic love and an aggressive Orientalism that would not
have been out of place in an early-nineteenth-century gothic drama. But in its constant
circling around the ‘sheltering sky’, the novel delves into first unsettling paranoia and
then true terror that rings ominously true to contemporary ears. Over and over, we hear
of ‘the sky’s agonizing light’, of the disorientation of being ‘suspended between sky and
sea’, and of ‘the violent blue sky, always threatening to fold back on itself’ so that ‘the
rip can occur, the edges fly back, and the giant maw be revealed’ (Bowles 2000, 160,
241, 251, 252). Bathed in constant light in a landscape in which they can feel no real
respite or sense of belonging, ‘the blinding white sky’ (Bowles 2000, 58) is ultimately
nothing but a reminder of that which lies behind:

‘You know,’ said Port, and his voice sounded unreal, as voices are likely to do after a
long pause in an utterly silent spot, ‘the sky here is very strange. I often have the sensa-
tion when I look at it that it’s a solid thing up there, protecting us from what’s behind.’
Kit shuddered slightly as she said: ‘From what’s behind?’
‘Yes.’
‘But what is behind?’ Her voice was very small.
‘Nothing, I suppose. Just darkness. Absolute night.’ (Bowles 2000, 79)

The Sheltering Sky is a problematic novel for a number of reasons, and it is certainly
not a novel in which ecology plays any large part. Still, the sense of dread that conjoins
the vision of a bare and denuded landscape with that of the sky, and by inference with
the planetary and the cosmic, is prescient of a sense of environmental dread that is now,
in the early twenty-first century, ever-present. At the cusp of what is often referred to
as ‘the Great Acceleration’, an era of history in which ‘the human impact on the Earth
and the biosphere . . . has escalated’ explosively (McNeill and Engelke 2014, 4), Bowles
would in 1949 have had no clue about the environmental and climatic problems in store
three-quarters of a century later. And yet the novel captures the eerie nature of a world
that is fundamentally broken in a manner that is unsettling to any twenty-first-century
reader. At the end of the twentieth century, the sense that ‘we’ inhabited a world gov-
erned by social, financial and ‘cultural globality’ (Homi Bhabha cited in Botting and
Edwards 2013, 16) had become so pervasive and so hegemonic that the larger planetary
systems of the biosphere, the hydrosphere, weather systems and the ‘giant maw’ of the
cosmos beyond receded from view, at least temporarily. Even then, in the heyday of
enthusiasm for the global, where it was envisioned that ‘connectivity is globally encom-
passing [and there was] a sense that the world is becoming, for the first time in history,
a single social and cultural setting’ (Tomlinson 1999, 10), some observers suspected that
the social, the cultural and the global could not sum up the world entire.
One such example of resistance to the global is that of Death of a Discipline (2003)
by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, published two decades ago. Death of a Discipline
calls for a replacement of the global with the planetary, and as Spivak explains:

I propose the planet to overwrite the globe. Globalization is the imposition of the
same system of exchange everywhere. . . . The globe is on our computers. No one lives
there. It allows us to think that we can control it. The planet is the species of alterity,
belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. (Spivak 2003, 72)

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Significantly, Spivak at this point goes on to raise the concept of the ghostly in the ‘fig-
ure of the pterodactyl’, claiming this as proof that the ‘uncanny is planetary’ precisely
because the extinct dinosaur ‘is prior to our thinking of continents’, hence it ‘remains
other; it cannot dwell, nor can it be buried’ (Spivak 2003, 80). From a perspective
twenty years later in what is now most commonly referred to as the Anthropocene,
‘a geohistorical event’ and an era ‘in which human societies achieve geological agency’
(Menely and Taylor 2017, 5, 8), Spivak’s conjuring of geological deep time is pro-
phetic, as is the uncanny sense of something going (far) beyond the human, the social
and the cultural.
As she reflects on the differences between the global and the planetary uncanny,
Spivak then inserts herself into the argument:

My plane is flying now over the land between Baghdad, Beirut, Haifa, and Tripoli,
into Turkey and Romania. I am making a clandestine entry into ‘Europe.’ Yet the
land looks the same—hilly sand. I know the cartographic markers because of the
TV in the arm of my seat. Planetarity cannot deny globalization. But, in search of
a springboard for planetarity, I am looking not at [an] invocation of the rural but
at the figure of land that seems to undergird it. The view of the Earth from the
window brings this home to me. (Spivak 2003, 93)

The passage is remarkable, both for its prescience and for the things it in hindsight so
glaringly misses. Spivak is literally using her elevated position, flying above land that
‘looks the same—hilly sand’, to make a point about the planet as such (all hilly sand),
and of all of ‘us’ being in it together. Striving for inclusivity is of course commendable,
as is her suspicion of ‘the global’ as a cosmopolitan panacea that will over time magi-
cally cure all the wrongdoings of the past. Twenty years on, however, the inattention to
the emissions of the plane in which she is sitting, which are contributing to turning even
more of planet Earth into ‘hilly sand’, does stick out like a sore thumb. A cosmopoli-
tan and by all means global subject, Spivak is therefore not quite planetary in the way
that we would conceive of the term now, not quite yet. For while many environmental
concerns are admirably present in Death of a Discipline, the climate emergency is not.

Code Red
Looking back, iterations of a Planetary Desert Gothic can be seen to have been emerg-
ing for at least half a century, possibly more. The post-apocalyptic genre, for instance,
relies heavily on visions of a ravaged earth, and a considerable number of these visions
are framed by a desert setting. Novels like J. G. Ballard’s The Burning World (1964),
Edan Lepucki’s California (2014) and Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife (2015),
comics like Judge Dredd (1977–) and Tank Girl (1988–), computer games like Waste-
land (1988) and the Fallout series (1997–), films like A Boy and His Dog (1975), The
Book of Eli (2010) and of course the Mad Max franchise, from Mad Max (1979) up
to and including the latest instalment, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), are all rich in gro-
tesquery and horror, violence and freaks, mutants and monstrosities, and, of course,
the environmental horror of a planet stripped bare to the bone. Having receded some-
what in the period after the end of the Cold War and the threat of a nuclear holocaust
wasteland, an even more forceful imaginary of a Planetary Desert Gothic now seems

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 desert globalgothic 437

to be emerging out of the climate emergency. Recent and poignant examples of this
can be seen in Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Dune (2021), re-envisionings of 1980s
science fiction movies and 1960s science fiction novels in which both the planetary and
the Planetary Desert Gothic stand strong. Terrifyingly, though, it is not in fiction that
the most powerful iterations of a Planetary Desert Gothic are playing out, with 2016
and 2020 going toe to toe for the title of hottest year on record, and with the 2021
IPCC report issuing a ‘code red for humanity’ (McGrath 2021). In a present in which
we are looking towards the future, and towards a planet that will be much warmer
than it is today, perhaps so hot that it will be virtually uninhabitable (Wallace-Wells
2019), the future can thus at one and the same time be said to belong fully to the
gothic while also not at all. For while a planet fully transformed into one vast desert is
a future in which death (that most gothic of negativities) reigns supreme, such a future
is also one in which any sort of home or dwelling would be difficult to locate. This has
vital implications for the gothic. Given that gothic has traditionally revolved around
a tension between the homeliness of the heimlich and the uncanniness of the unheim-
lich, it seems reasonable to now ask: where will gothic dwell? After all, in order to be
‘unhomed’, some sort of homeliness should be identifiable in the first place.
To conclude, in tracing the emergence of a Planetary Desert Gothic, and a future
planet potentially comprising mostly desert, it is possible to sketch out vital evolutions
in Desert Gothic imaginaries, from the period of formal colonialism to the present,
but also beyond. In all its different forms, Desert Gothic makes it clear that colonisa-
tion is not only a social- but a socio-ecological programme: colonialism functions not
only by constructing racialised subjects, but also by constructing land and resources
in ways amenable to colonisation. As pointed out by Martín Arboleda in Planetary
Mine (2020), this may however come with a silver lining, a light in the darkness. For
if ‘the shift from the global to the planetary is also understood as a steppingstone
toward novel formations of collective consciousness and of collective agency’, perhaps
the vampiric ‘geography of extraction’ (Arboleda 2020, 16) that has for so long, and
so destructively, governed the planet will finally see the sharp light of day, rather than
continue to hide in the shadows. One can only hope that it is not too late.

Notes
1. Jamestown Colony was founded in 1607, a century and a half before James Cook would
in 1770 ‘discover’ and map the Australian coastline, and a full two centuries before South
Africa was in 1806 conquered from the Dutch by the British. Geographically, in terms
of deserts the US differs from South Africa and Australia in particular in that, while the
American Southwest is largely arid, the majority of the US landmass is not. It was therefore
relatively late in the colonisation process that the European colonisers were forced to deal
with arid environments in any consistent rather than passing manner.
2. Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in particular are prone to employ the des-
ert as a philosophical metaphor in their writing (for e.g. mobility, speed, war, thinking),
but Jean Baudrillard, Albert Camus, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabès and Jean-François
Lyotard also do so on a fairly regular basis.
3. Blood Meridian is perhaps one of the critically most richly covered American novels in
existence, but for one thorough example see John Sepich’s Notes on Blood Meridian:
Revised and Expanded Edition (2008), in which he minutely details the texts likely to have
informed McCarthy’s text.

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 438 rune graulund

References
Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London:
Verso.
Botting, Fred. 2014. Gothic. 2nd edn. Abingdon: Routledge.
——— and Justin D. Edwards. 2013. ‘Theorising Globalgothic.’ In Globalgothic, edited by
Glennis Byron, 11–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bowden, Charles. 1997. Blue Desert. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Bowles, Paul. 2000. The Sheltering Sky. London: Penguin Books.
Byron, Glennis. 2013. ‘Introduction.’ In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 1–10. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Campbell, James. 2013. ‘From Sleepy Hollow to Silent Hill: American Gothic to Globalgothic.’
In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 157–74. Manchester: Manchester University
Press.
Carter, Paul. 1992. Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language. London: Faber
and Faber.
Clark, Nigel and Bronislaw Szerszynski. 2021. Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene
Challenges to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 2004. Waiting for the Barbarians. London: Vintage.
Crow, Charles L. 2017. ‘Southern American Gothic.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Ameri-
can Gothic, edited by Andrew Weinstock, 141–55. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davidson, Robyn. 1980. Tracks. London: Picador.
Davis, Diana K. 2006. The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fox, William L. 2000. The Void, the Grid and the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press.
———. 2002. Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Gersdorff, Catrin. 2009. The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction
of America. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Grandin, Greg. 2019. The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind
of America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Graulund, Rune. 2009. ‘From (B)edouin to (A)borigine: The Myth of the Desert Noble Savage.’
History of the Human Sciences 22, no. 1: 79–104.
Haynes, Roslynn D. 1998. Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and
Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heise, Ursula. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the
Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCarthy, Cormac. 1985. Blood Meridian, or, The Evening Redness in the West. London:
Picador.
McGrath, Matt. 2021. ‘Climate Change: IPCC Report is “Code Red for Humanity”.’ https://
www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58130705.
McNeill, J. R. and Peter Engelke. 2014. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of
the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Manly, William Lewis. 1982. Death Valley in ’49. San Jose: The Pacific Tree and Vine Co.
Menely, Tobias and Jesse Oak Taylor. 2017. ‘Introduction.’ In Anthropocene Reading: Literary
History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, 1–24. University
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Murphy, Bernice M. 2009. The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2013. The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sepich, John. 2008. Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition. Austin: University
of Texas Press.

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Shaviro, Steven. 1999. ‘“The Very Life of the Darkness”: A Reading of Blood Meridian.’ In
Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy, edited by Edwin T. Arnold and Dianne C. Luce, 145–58.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Simmons, David. 2017. American Horror Fiction and Class: From Poe to Twilight. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Smith, Andrew and William Hughes. 2013. ‘Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic.’ In Ecogothic,
edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, 1–14. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University
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Teague, David W. 1997. The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert
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Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press.
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Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
van der Post, Laurens. 1986. The Lost World of the Kalahari. Orlando: Harcourt and Brace.
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Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties, edited by Sharon Rose Yang and Kathleen Healey,
1–18. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

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 29

Queer Gothic Narratives of Palestine

in Alon Hilu’s The House of Rajani and
Ayman Sikseck’s Tishrin
Karen Grumberg

T he transnational histories of the Middle East, including Ottoman imperial-

ism and European colonialism, render it fertile ground for investigating regional
globalgothics.1 An apt starting point is Israel/Palestine, a gothic nerve-centre steeped
in the horrors of its histories: a gruesome genocide in Europe, centuries-old Jewish
communities across North Africa and the Middle East abruptly abandoned, military
occupation and the devastation of the Palestinian Nakba. In the territorial dispute
between Palestinian nationalism and Jewish nationalism (Zionism), history and histo-
riography have emerged as foremost battlegrounds. Official histories are questioned
in Israeli academic, public and cultural discourse.2 That the gothic is amenable to the
expression of contested histories is unarguable; the Hebrew novels I examine here are
no exception. But something more is at stake in their gothicism. It beckons beyond
‘alternative histories’ – those that challenge authoritative accounts – to consider the
way stories are told, manipulated and silenced.
The two authors I bring together here are both preoccupied with storytelling, and
both experiment with obfuscation in narrative. Alon Hilu (b. 1972) and Ayman Sikseck
(b. 1984) write in Hebrew, were born in Jaffa, and live in Israel. Both have published
highly acclaimed novels in Hebrew, and both have publicly discussed their homosexu-
ality and their experience coming out.3 These seemingly straightforward biographical
facts, however, belie the challenge they pose to hegemonic Israeli identity – European,
Jewish and heterosexual. Hilu, an Israeli Jew of Syrian origin, and Sikseck, a Muslim
Palestinian citizen of Israel, exemplify the complex matrix of identities that defy the
perception of Israelis and Palestinians as neatly divided along ethno-religious lines in a
mono-national Israel. Their perspectives reflect the globally inflected histories of Israel
and the Middle East as a whole. Without discounting the hierarchy that positions Jews
above Muslims in Israel, I see these authors’ experiences as gay Arab men raised in
the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa as bearing on their writing and on their under-
standing of history. These experiences create the conditions for narratives of Palestine
that might be conceptualised as queer: ‘transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to
dominant ideology’, as George Haggerty characterises the gothic iteration of queer
theory (Haggerty 2006, 2).
Hilu’s The House of Rajani (‫אני‬′‫אחוזת דג‬, 2008) and Sikseck’s Tishrin (‫תשרין‬, 2016)
involve land purchase in Jaffa, a phenomenon that dispossessed Palestinian tenant
farmers before 1948 and presaged and catalysed the loss of Palestine.4 But the historical

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 queer gothic narratives of palestine 441

events are overshadowed by the stories that narrate them. Their narrative mechanisms
become the stories themselves. The nation remains crucial, but its stories speak to the
limitations inherent in the quest for historical truth. The gothic in these novels func-
tions to foreground narrative irresolution and express historical dispossession as the
inheritance of a diverse range of Hebrew readers. Both novels resist singular accounts
– whether authoritative or restorative – through gothic form and content, imagining
Palestine as the heart of a labyrinth around which unresolved, conflicting and contradic-
tory narrative paths assemble and shift restlessly.
I begin by introducing the authors and their novels, and then examine their gothic
spatiality in the context of land purchase in Jaffa. Reading the cemetery as both space
and text, I move from the story to its telling. In the final section, I analyse the novels’
queer gothic sensibility, reflected in the relation of masculinity to a storytelling appa-
ratus that relies on secrets, ambivalence and obfuscation.

Spectral Stories of Palestine

Hilu’s Rajani unfolds in the late nineteenth century, when political Zionism was gaining
momentum and attracting European Jews to Ottoman Palestine. The novel encompasses
correspondence, diary entries and other writings by Isaac Luminsky, a newly arrived
European Jewish agronomist, and Salah Rajani, a sensitive boy who suffers horrific
visions of impending catastrophe. The rich soil of the Rajani estate and the beauty of
Salah’s mother, Afifa, spur Luminsky to seduce her and compel her to sell the estate.
Meanwhile, Salah’s father, recently returned from abroad, suddenly dies, sparking suspi-
cions of murder. When Salah discovers his mother’s affair with Luminsky, his love for the
blue-eyed Jew becomes hatred. Salah’s perception of Luminsky as an angel and a demon,
by turns, is subsumed by his realisation of Luminsky’s role in his terrifying visions of
Palestine’s destruction. Supernatural figures abound, accentuating Salah’s prophecies: a
vampiric water genie; his father’s vengeful ghost; the spectre of a young woman who had
drowned herself; an evil spirit haunting tenant farmers and colonists alike. Explicitly,
the novel offers a restorative history meant to expose perspectives, like Salah’s, stifled
by hegemonic Israeli discourses. This enterprise, while rare in Hebrew literature, comes
three decades after the Israeli New Historians began revising the narrative of 1948.5
Though, as Orit Bashkin has shown, Hilu’s engagement with the Arabic language and
Islamic culture adds an important dimension to this effort, ‘the real story’ he exhumes is
an open secret (Bashkin 2016). Hilu, however, is not only interested in historical ‘truth’.
His novel ‘does not directly replace the Zionist with the Palestinian national view’, as
Yochai Oppenheimer points out, but ‘undermines such a binary division’ (2012, 402). I
see Hilu’s aims as even more radical: his novel not only rejects the binary but also prob-
lematises history-telling itself.
The events occasioned by the novel’s publication in Israel highlight the challenges
of such an endeavour. Originally, the characters were named after historical figures,
the Dajani family (Palestinian landowners from Jaffa) and Haim Margaliot Kalvarisky
(a Zionist pioneer). After Kalvarisky’s descendants sued, Hilu settled by agreeing to
change the title and names in translations and subsequent Hebrew editions; Dajani
became Rajani and Kalvarisky became Luminsky.6 The novel’s preface marshals the gothic
‘found manuscript’ device to assert historicity, even claiming the source as the Zionist
archives – a nod, too, at the New Historians, who relied on conventional historical

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 442 karen grumberg

methods and archival documents to revise radically Israeli history. Though an author’s
note asserts the novel’s fictiveness, the preface specifies, in Walpolian fashion, that the
Hebrew is rendered in ‘authentic’ nineteenth-century style, and that the original Arabic
texts were translated into Hebrew (Hilu 2010, n.p.).7
In Sikseck’s Tishrin, Wahid, a Palestinian-Israeli chemistry lecturer at the Univer-
sity of Haifa, discovers a hidden black-and-white photo of a young woman in a closet
in his parents’ Jaffa apartment; captivated, he asks his incarcerated older brother,
Zuhayr, to help decipher the mystery. The woman, Wahid’s aunt Nadia, had been
murdered by her husband decades earlier, supposedly in an honour killing. These
violent circumstances – based on an actual incident in Sikseck’s family’s past – led to
a pact of silence, one the family is reluctant to relinquish (Sudilovsky 2016). Their
silence only enflames Wahid’s obsessive quest to decode the secret. As his resentment
grows regarding the family’s resistance to his investigations, he develops his own
sexualised secret identity. Nadia’s spectre haunts the novel, occasionally appearing
to her sister.
Stylistically, these novels differ substantively: where Rajani is melodramatic and over-
wrought, Tishrin is quiet, subtle and melancholic. In some respects, though, Sikseck’s
novel can be seen as the realisation of the prophecies that torture Salah in Hilu’s novel.
But this novel, too, is not concerned primarily with the restoration of historical truth.
As in Rajani, in Tishrin the mechanics of storytelling and their limitations become the
story itself: secrets; perpetually shifting perspectives; and letters, voicemail messages and
other texts that are often unanswered, avoided or disrupted. Language factors into this
narrative friction. As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Sikseck writes in the language of the
educational and cultural institutions that have informed his development as an author –
Hebrew – but his characters are understood often to be speaking Arabic. Rajani is nar-
rated in archaic Hebrew; some of the dialogue and texts are understood to be French,
and Salah’s voice, indexed via lyrical Hebrew, is Arabic. Both novels invoke an uncanny
Hebrew haunted by the Arabic that Israel has systematically suppressed. Language, the
most fundamental component of narrative, signals the impossibility of a ‘straight’ story
from the first word.

The Loss of Place: The Fall of the House of Rajani

Jaffa historically was ‘the cultural center of Palestine’, home to a thriving cultural and
political scene (LeVine 2005, 134). As a vibrant port city by the late Ottoman period,
Jaffa exemplifies what Mark LeVine calls ‘cosmopolitan Levantine modernity’ (2007,
282). Its reputation as ‘mother of strangers’, notes LeVine, was born of Jaffa’s ‘wel-
coming attitudes towards outsiders’ (2007, 283). Jaffa today is a ‘mixed city’, with
Jewish- and Palestinian-Israeli residents. Its ‘mixture’ is also temporal: the disconcert-
ing amalgam of past and present is evident both materially, in the physical space of the
city, and psychologically, in the human encounter with it.8 This ambiguous temporal-
ity lends Jaffa an uncanny quality, signalling the absent presence of Palestinians who
fled permanently, despite their intention to return after the 1948 War. Understanding
Jaffa, following Daniel Monterescu, as the uneasy ‘alter ego’ of its predominantly
Jewish neighbour, Tel Aviv, intensifies this uncanniness (2009, 648).9 The city’s sym-
bolic significance owes much to the international visibility of the Jaffa orange, by
World War I Palestine’s primary export.10 A symbol of Palestine and its gateway to

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 queer gothic narratives of palestine 443

the global economy, its groves were purchased by European Zionists, who eventually
secured its trademark and adopted it as an Israeli national symbol (Khalidi 2010, 58).
The traumatic loss of Palestine finds expression not only in documented histories of
dispossession but also in the distinctly Jaffan mythology of lost orange groves, trans-
mitted through generations.11
Rajani opens with Luminsky and his wife on the high seas. A Zionist and recent
graduate of the Montpellier Faculty of Agronomy, Luminsky is overjoyed when the
boat docks near Jaffa’s port, assuring his dour wife that she would soon ‘sample
oranges from the Land of Israel’ (Hilu 2010, 11). From Luminsky’s Orientalist
perspective, Jaffa is a lively city of violence and vice, debauchery and seduction;
though he enjoys the city’s salacious offerings, he has come to Palestine to work the
land. The swampy soil he finds in the Jewish settlements, however, is unsuitable for
cultivation.
The moment he sees the lush but neglected Rajani estate – the novel’s main setting,
signifying both Jaffa and Palestine – he is determined to acquire it. The soil’s unre-
strained fertility is a motif, as is the inextricability of territorial and sexual desire.12
The house itself exudes decadence, ‘steeped in gloom and a mouldy smell of great old
age’ (Hilu 2010, 85). Heavy curtains, secret passageways, ‘daggers and lances and
spears affixed to the walls’ of labyrinthine corridors: the sepulchral house confines
Salah and his mother, their only companion a maidservant described as ‘an evil-eyed
old woman’ (Hilu 2010, 48). Luminsky’s first encounter with the worn but magnifi-
cent old house underscores its gothicism as a force informing his desire both for Afifa
and for the land:

Over everything hung a pall of mystery and sorrow, as though the estate had been
left behind in the race against time and its fine trees and orchards had grown
wild, and this impression was very different from the vivid one I had formed upon
glimpsing the young and seductive woman of the estate . . .
[My] soul wondered who the owners of this estate were and how it had come to
pass that they had been so negligent in their care, and why it was that the fruit trees
were stuck in mire, their leaves dropping to the ground and their fruit rotting, and
why it was that such a grand house should be stifling and gloomy, as if all love of
mankind and vitality had been sucked from it. (Hilu 2010, 47–9)

Luminsky describes the dilapidated condition of the Rajani estate in increasingly maca-
bre terms: ‘old and crawling with green vines, enshrouded in its gloomy melancholy
as if death itself had wrapped its fingers around it and caused it to fall into eternal
slumber’ (Hilu 2010, 90). Salah, also alert to the estate’s gothicism, notes its sinister
nocturnal soundscape: ‘a thousand ravens cawed shrilly from every branch of every
tree, the cypresses stood in hot dispute with one another, a myriad waves stormed the
distant sea, and the river, Wadi Musrara, snarled strangely’ (Hilu 2010, 92). Luminsky
stresses decay and neglect, affixing the blame on the carelessness or indifference of the
owners; Salah describes a house alive among its natural surroundings, but unmistak-
ably ominous. Issuing from Luminsky, the account of the estate’s gothicism conjures
the Zionist resuscitation of a near-dead Palestine; European modernity, technology
and progress are arrayed against a static, extra-historical Arab existence. From Salah’s
perspective, the gothicism gestures at horrors yet to come.

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 444 karen grumberg

Upon the mysterious death of Salah’s father, Luminsky takes charge, vigor-
ously asserting the estate’s position in the global economy through increased export
of oranges and the acquisition of new technology, including a diesel engine from
Manchester to replace a mule in irrigating the groves. But supernatural forces conspire
against these developments, setting the stage for a classic account of colonial gothic.13
Terrorised by Al-Roch, the angry spirit of the dead, the tenant farmers recall Salah’s
visions: ‘The land has cursed us and wishes to vomit us out, soon we shall no longer
dwell in this place’ (Hilu 2010, 140). Luminsky, incensed by what he considers super-
stitious nonsense, evicts the tenant farmers and replaces them with European Jewish
colonists. A distressed Salah overhears Luminsky pressuring Afifa for the property
deed, insisting that ‘the estate is his, his for ever and ever, he is the one who has rescued
it and . . . all the monies now flowing into Mother’s coffers from the citrus harvest are
there only through his wisdom and efforts’ (Hilu 2010, 176). These episodes corrode
Salah’s love for Luminsky and catalyse his visions of the destruction of Palestine.
Hilu’s novel reaches its climax in an encounter between Salah and Luminsky
in the nearby cemetery, where, earlier, ‘Father’s hands protruded from the grave,
cold and bony’, to place a dagger in Salah’s hands and instruct him ‘in the voice of
death and hell’ to murder Luminsky (Hilu 2010, 173). Initially determined to do so,
Salah is beset by doubts about his sanity and disappears, resolved to take his own
life instead. Luminsky’s search for the boy brings him face to face with the estate’s
supernatural emissaries. Fleeing from the bloodthirsty vampire-genie who inhabits
Salah’s beloved pool, a horrified Luminsky sees the land itself rise up against him:
‘the trees closed in on me from every angle . . . and my eyes popped from their
sockets in deep astonishment as the orchards lined up in whole battalions.’ He feels
certain that ‘the entire estate was bewitched, producing genies and spirits at every
juncture and vomiting me out’ (Hilu 2010, 262). Luminsky and the tenant farmers
call on the same verse from Leviticus – concerned with the defilement wrought by
forbidden sexual relations – to interpret their encounters with wrathful apparitions:
‘ ‫י ׁ ְֹשבֶי ָה‬-‫ אֶת‬,‫ וָ ֶאפְק ֹד עֲוֺ נָּה ָעלֶיהָ; וַ ָּתקִא הָָארֶץ‬,‫‘( ’וַ ִּת ְטמָא הָָארֶץ‬And the land was defiled, therefore I
did visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land vomited out her inhabitants’, Lev.
18: 25). Having expelled the farmers from their land, Luminsky is expelled by the
land itself. The biblical allusion probably concerns the colonial defilement of the
land by Luminsky and his Jewish workers; it might also refer to the transgressive
sexual desires that shape the novel – Salah’s love for Luminsky, Luminsky’s affair
with Afifa, and the homosexuality of other characters.
The novel ends with Luminsky’s departure to northern Palestine to oversee a new
settlement. The Rajani estate is abandoned: ‘From the day of Salah’s death no one had
worked the land of the estate, since the colonists had been sent packing; some had
returned to Mother Russia while others had emigrated to America, each to his own
strange destiny’ (Hilu 2010, 274). The epilogue notes that ‘descendants of the Rajani
family escaped from Jaffa by sea during the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 along with
75,000 other Arab residents of Jaffa. They have dispersed and live now in Europe,
America, Jordan, and Egypt’ (Hilu 2010, 279). These far-flung emigrations and exiles
are supplemented by an inventory of Jaffa’s transformations after 1948: Bauhaus
buildings, railway tracks, a highway, business and commercial centres, and parks now
occupy the site of the estate. Luminsky’s dreams of European modernity in a Jewish
state – and Salah’s nightmares of expulsion and exile – have been realised.

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 queer gothic narratives of palestine 445

The Place of Loss: Reading the Cemetery

Hilu’s novel begins with the arrival at Jaffa of Europeans by sea and ends with the
global dispersal of both disillusioned Zionists and Arabs who had lived in Jaffa for
generations. Sikseck’s novel, in some respects, picks up where Hilu’s postscript leaves
off. Set in the autumn of 2009, Tishrin tells of Palestinians who stayed. Infusing their
relations with the city is a melancholy affect, the by-product of perpetual loss, materi-
ally inscribed in the cemetery.
As in Rajani, Jaffan land purchase underpins Tishrin and its most gothic effects.
Familiar with the account of Nadia’s murder as an honour killing, Wahid suspects
there is more to the story. He is right, as readers learn eventually. Nadia’s husband
Nidal came from Gaza to Jaffa seeking employment in the citrus groves, ‘considered
promising and important in those years when land was becoming scarce’. But he hid a
shadowy past. Years before, he had worked in a Jaffan grove that was acquired by the
notorious Arab land agent Al-Yafawi, ‘the Jaffan’, so called because ‘back then, Jaffa
was his city and he divided it as he wished’. Nidal, a nationalist opposed to the city’s
Judaisation, despaired at ‘the Jaffans who sold their land to the highest bidder’ (Sikseck
2016, 142). When Al-Yafawi proceeded to sell the grove, Nidal fatally stabbed him.
Nidal concealed his past when he married Nadia, but she grew suspicious, discovered
his role in Al-Yafawi’s murder and issued an ultimatum. Nidal killed Nadia, hiding
her body in a well, because she posed a risk to his nationalist activities. He eventually
confessed but lied about his motive, claiming Nadia had committed adultery. Even
after police discovered a knife connecting her murder to Al-Yafawi’s, the cover story
persisted. This family secret is one iteration of the reverberations effected by decades
of land purchase, a process depicted at its inception in Hilu’s novel.
The violence of the Jaffan past is supplanted by its ongoing transformations, indi-
cating a different sort of violence. ‘How much Jaffa has changed,’ reflects Nawal.
‘Today the city is full of people who are strangers to one another’ (Sikseck 2016,
114). As her musings shift to profound ruminations on truth, secrets and lies in her
family, she turns to the street visible through the open door and sees Nadia’s spectre,
as if summoned: ‘she wore the same dress, the last one she ever wore, and looked
at Nawal with a half-smile on her face . . . She wanted to tell her how beautiful she
still looked . . . beautiful as she had been before they lost her’ (Sikseck 2016, 115).
Nadia’s loss is one in a web of losses, with Jaffa – strange and estranging – as its
centre. This uncanny estrangement becomes the predominant experience of Jaffa, as
evident from Nawal’s recollection of a walk through the Old City: ‘I felt like I was
in an Egyptian film. As if they made a film about Jaffa here, and forgot the set. But
we were born here, how did everything become so unrecognizable?’ (Sikseck 2016,
205). The ‘mother of strangers’ has become the place of strangeness. Addressing the
representation of trauma in gothic texts, Laura Westengard distinguishes between
‘normalized, daily trauma’ and trauma’s ‘moments of shocking spectacle’ (2019, 2–3).
She argues that, though the spectacle dominates analyses of trauma in queer gothic,
‘insidious trauma’ is crucial in expressing the ‘refusal of traditional conservative nar-
ratives’ (2019, 4–5). The melodramatic flourishes of Hilu’s text and its focus on the
originary moment of the loss of Palestine constitute shocking spectacle; by contrast,
Sikseck’s quiet novel evokes the unassuming ‘crannies and crevices’ of gothic trauma
by depicting the ongoing aftershocks of that loss (Westengard 2019, 2–3).

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The disappearance of the Arabic language is a related loss. Presumably, the charac-
ters communicate in Arabic, but the language is literally absent. The absence is evident,
first, in Sikseck’s writing not in his mother tongue, Arabic, but in his agile ‘stepmother
tongue’, as he characterises Hebrew (Sudilovsky 2016). The loss is also thematised in
the novel. The first time Wahid sees his wife, she is posting flyers advertising lessons
in conversational Arabic: ‘Discover Arabic’. Entranced by her name, Ranin, he must
ask his mother to explain its meaning – ‘a sad voice, weeping, or an elegy for a broken
heart’ (Sikseck 2016, 118). Ranin tells him that many of her students are Arabs eager
to improve their Arabic. Hearing that he is from Jaffa, she nods knowingly: ‘it happens
a lot in mixed cities, “the Arabic disappears”’. Wahid had never heard of Ranin’s home
village: ‘Back then in Jaffa, who knew anything about Arab settlements? We were too
busy scrubbing away our accents . . . Maybe that’s why our Arabic disappeared’ (Sik-
seck 2016, 119). Lying in the hospital after a car accident, he resolves to visit Nadia’s
grave, to prevent her from vanishing like the Arabic language. Nadia, Jaffa, Arabic:
each one haunts, deferring disappearance.
As Sikseck’s Jaffa is experienced primarily in terms of absence and loss, it is unsurpris-
ing that the cemetery, charged with inscribing and memorialising loss, is a key site in the
novel. The Jaffa cemetery is where, over a century earlier, Salah Rajani’s mad mother fell
into her husband’s open grave, grasping at his shroud; where Salah attempted to avenge
his father’s death by murdering Luminsky; and where the troubled boy encountered the
skull of the tragic Naima bint Naim. While in Rajani the permeable boundary between
the living and the dead terrifies, in Tishrin, the same quality establishes the cemetery as a
place where loss can be confronted and represented in ways that the outside world resists.
Jaffa signifies absence; the cemetery inscribes presence.
But the cemetery’s textuality can be manipulated, its stories distorted or con-
cealed. The sociologist Salim Tamari documents how such manipulations reflect
Jaffa’s competing histories. Throughout the Jaffa cemetery in Jabaliyya, he notices
that ‘old Arabic grave slabs (shawahid) were being replaced by new Russian ones’.
He distinguishes the older Russian-inscribed graves of Jaffa’s small Russian Ortho-
dox community from ‘the sudden flood of Russian-inscribed graves in the 1980s and
1990s’, likely to be of Christian Soviet immigrants disguised as Jews or married to
Jews. ‘Many of them had occupied the Arab graves and had their names carved on
the marble slabs. You could still see many of the Arabic inscriptions underneath the
Cyrillic ones’ (Tamari and Hammami 1998, 77–8). Such palimpsests afford a glimpse
of the histories interred within, attesting, however faintly, to the grave’s original
inhabitants and to their stories, affording an opportunity for recovery by visitors like
Tamari. Such recoveries are more difficult if text is withheld altogether. In Tishrin,
another grave at the cemetery holds the remains of Nadia’s namesake, Nawal’s baby,
who died at six months of age: ‘To this day’, says Nawal to Nadia’s ghost, ‘[Zuhayr]
doesn’t know that in the big cemetery in Ajami, a few metres from your grave, his sis-
ter lies in an unmarked grave, and with her is buried the final link I’d let my children
have to this story’ (Sikseck 2016, 134). The unmarked grave allows Nawal to keep
this secret-within-a-secret, even as its material trace remains. Nawal’s articulation of
this story constitutes its only defence against erasure.
When Wahid visits Nadia’s grave, he worries he will be suspected of being a grave-
robber, ‘or, even worse, a representative of the Jewish national settlement in Jaffa trying
to take over real-estate plots’ – an allusion to the story behind Nadia’s murder (Sikseck

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2016, 152). Promising to visit Nadia’s grave again, he wonders whether he truly can:
‘how can you return and visit a place you’ve actually never been?’ He decides to ‘open
a window in his life’s routine, like his mother, to the huge cemetery spread at his feet,
and to look down, to the gravestones’ (Sikseck 2016, 156). For Nawal, Nadia has been
ever-present, her grave ‘never outside the house, my bedroom, the dreams I dream’
(Sikseck 2016, 206). Even as Wahid invites the graves into his life, however, Nawal
resolves to hold them at bay. Cemeteries, she observes, are located outside of cities, ‘or
on mountains like in Jerusalem, or behind a fence and a wall, like on Trumpeldor Street.
So that the graves wouldn’t pour into the streets and houses’ (Sikseck 2016, 206). This
spatial logic safeguards the separation of the living and the dead: ‘so that we’ll let them
be, and they’ll let us be’ (Sikseck 2016, 246). Indeed, she notes, Islam instructs to forget
the dead, to allow them to rest in peace. Determined to prevent Nadia’s death from
permeating Wahid’s world as it has her own, Nawal keeps the secret. The cemetery
hosts these negotiations: its graves may spill into one’s life, announcing their presence;
or they may be contained behind a wall or at the edges of town, maintaining absence.
At the novel’s end, Nawal visits the cemetery to avow the same boundaries Wahid
intends to dissolve. Addressing Nadia’s ghost, she laments again the city’s transforma-
tion: ‘Jaffa isn’t as you remember it, Nadia. Not much is left of Jaffa. Nor of the Jaf-
fans. Remember the well, the grove, and the orange trees of the Abu Saif family?’ She
recalls their mother’s dire warning after they pilfered oranges: ‘she told us that at night
the bats take over the wells and that if we return there without permission, they’d take
revenge, get tangled in our hair and peck our scalps with their teeth’ (Sikseck 2016,
204). The vengeful guardians of the groves, however, are powerless against the global
forces that hungrily survey them; even their banishment of Luminsky in Rajani only
delayed the inevitable. ‘Everything has disappeared,’ sighs Nawal; indeed, one can
look back to Luminsky to chart the beginning of this disappearance. By 2009, a sleek
modern sculpture of an orange tree in the Old City is ‘the only orange tree in a public
space in Jaffa. There are no more groves.’ For Nawal, the disappearance of Jaffa’s
groves bears directly on the elisions in the family story: ‘As though someone got into
our family albums and made whole series of photos disappear . . . Who will believe us
now that there’s no more proof?’ (Sikseck 2016, 205). The last stand against silence,
the cemetery’s gravestones elicit stories otherwise lost – but their narratives, too, are
prone to obfuscation, interference and erasure.

Queer Narratives of Loss: Resisting a Straight Story

Explicitly in Hilu’s novel and implicitly in Sikseck’s, Jaffa’s loss reflects the trauma
of Palestinian dispossession writ large. Both novels are concerned with the act of
storytelling, thematising it, interrogating it and exposing its vulnerabilities. Both use
narrative strategies that unsettle their stories, calling on highly subjective, private
texts to express discordant perspectives. Such strategies, activated by a preoccupa-
tion with sexuality and masculinity, queer the story they tell, disrupting conventions
of historical and literary narrative – the ‘straight’ story. Westengard’s call to read
gothic trauma not only through spectacle but also through its insidious quotidian
manifestations helps frame a comparative reading of these texts: Hilu represents the
originary moment of dispossession, while Sikseck investigates its reverberations over
generations.

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That the gothic is inherently queer is, by now, taken for granted. ‘From the perspec-
tive of hegemonic mainstream culture’, observes Jeffrey Weinstock, ‘queer is always
Gothic: different, odd, strange, disconcerting, uncanny, evil. The Gothic text from
this perspective is always queer precisely because queerness is always already Gothic’
(2011, 87). Though he cautions against ‘naturalizing the association between queer
and Gothic’, Weinstock acknowledges their mutual dynamics. To resist abstracting
queerness, he urges attentiveness to questions of gender and sexuality, and reminds
us that the deviant sexuality of the gothic ‘helped to shape modern conceptions of
normative sexuality’ (Weinstock 2011, 91, 88). In this spirit, my reading of these nov-
els as queer considers how the sexual identities they depict contribute to narrative
strategies that resist a straight story. In both, the story of Palestine, intertwined with
expressions of unfixed masculinities, suggests that contradictions, uncertainties and
concealment are an integral part of the truth and not its impediments. That recogni-
tion itself becomes the gothic inheritance both novels offer their characters and their
Hebrew readers.
In Rajani, journal entries, short story fragments and letters are embellished with
intertexts and allusions spanning the Bible and the Quran to Shakespeare, Ann Rad-
cliffe and Edgar Allan Poe. This multidimensional textuality contributes to Hilu’s
revision of Zionist narratives. But even as Rajani works to illuminate marginalised
subjectivities, it probes the limits of history-telling. Not only the lawsuit but also Hilu’s
intertextual references have raised questions about the novel’s fidelity to history. Orit
Bashkin, a prominent historian, argues that his Shakespearean allusions ‘undermine
the references to the Arab literary sources’ because they ‘accentuate desire’ between
Luminsky and Afifa, rather than the ‘conflict and resistance’ that historically char-
acterised relations between Zionists and Palestinians (2016, 163). Notwithstanding
the aforementioned poetics of desire identified with Zionist territorialism, such
critiques are concerned with authenticity – whether as faithful representation of a
historical truth, or as adherence to an Arab/Middle Eastern cultural sensibility. But
the novel’s interstitial status – between fiction and history, East and West, the Quran
and Shakespeare – is the point. Hilu’s strategic cultivation of such ambiguity is key to
the globalgothic mode of his writing, in that it expresses the anxieties accompanying
the transregional dynamics reshaping Palestine. Even the preface’s claim of archival
sources refers not to official, public historical documents – land deeds, legal decrees
or travel documents – but rather to the most subjective and private texts imaginable –
journal entries and letters. The texts’ intimacy, the shifting perspectives and the pos-
sibility that narrative reliability is compromised by characters’ madness or dissimula-
tion: these challenge the reader’s ability to follow the development of the plot. The
dilemma is readily apparent in Luminsky’s and Salah’s incompatible accounts of the
same episodes.
One fascinating example of such contradictions demonstrates the novel’s preoc-
cupation with masculinity as a function of narrative. The effendi, Salah’s father,
has returned home after a period abroad. Luminsky records in his diary the much-
anticipated encounter:

the man before me did not look like a man at all, but like a woman. His expres-
sion was feminine and feeble . . . his fingers bejewelled and his neck bedecked with
gold . . . Had I not been certain my legs were standing on Arab lands I would have

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 queer gothic narratives of palestine 449

thought I was in the presence of a whoring ballerina in a Viennese street theater.

(Hilu 2010, 85–6)

This description contrasts starkly with Salah’s: ‘Father is strong and frightening, able
to move mountains and hurl boulders’, a man who ‘casts fear into the hearts of the
entire household’, epitomising masculinity with his ‘massive, muscled arms’ and ‘grand
moustache, black and dense’ (Hilu 2010, 87, 92). Such contradictory perspectives
seem calculated to make readers feel uncomfortable. By forcing a confrontation with
the unfixed, subjective nature of masculinity – gender as a ‘process of identification in
flux’, in Oppenheimer’s words – they resist authorial authority and unsettle expecta-
tions of a clear account (2012, 395). Other textual devices, such as the interception
and forgery of letters, further erode the notion of a straight story.
The question of masculinity in Hilu’s novel is informed by the gendered dynamics
of Zionism itself. The Zionist affiliation with a European masculinity at odds with
traditional Jewish masculine ideals; the value of physical strength over intellectual
force; the perceived link between masculinity and conquest of the feminised land;
and the perception of both the Arab other and the diasporic Jew as inherently femi-
nine: all shape the novel.14 When Luminsky first meets Salah, he feels the boy has ‘no
knowledge of the ways of men. . . . His every action is conducted in the shadow and
image of the female’ (Hilu 2010, 67). In Luminsky’s eyes, Salah’s deficient masculinity
makes him ‘in some ways a Jew’; at the same time, Luminsky considers the flamboy-
ant homosexuality of his Arab assistants, Saleem and Salaam, in keeping with Arab
norms, suggesting a corresponding emasculation of diaspora Jews and Arabs (Hilu
2010, 106).
Salah, for his part, falls in love with Luminsky – ‘a man, a real man’ – and sur-
reptitiously admires the ‘muscled hills’ of his body (Hilu 2010, 72). When Salah’s
ardour for Luminsky collapses, he turns to another model of masculinity, the ‘noble
manliness’ of the Quran, to revise the story he has been secretly writing and to hatch
a plot of vengeance (Hilu 2010, 227). He fails to execute it and decides to take his
own life; before drowning himself, though, he dons his mother’s wedding dress. Dying
in drag, Salah’s final act, defies the kind of narrative resolution promised by familiar
forms like revenge plots. It suggests that he identifies less with the father he vows to
avenge and more with suffering women: his mother and Naima bint Naim. The scene
literalises Ellen Brinks’s interpretation of ‘Gothicized tales of dispossession as effemi-
nization’, whereby ‘Gothic dispossession breaks or impedes the symbolic functioning
of patriarchal culture – especially matters concerned with property, heirs, kinship ties,
and masculinity and male sexuality’ (2003, 15). By contrast, Luminsky is depicted as
excessively heterosexual, calling to mind the emphatic masculinity of the ‘New Jew’
as the antithesis of effeminate diasporic Jewishness: he frequents Jaffa’s brothels, is
preoccupied with Salah’s femininity, and, most critically, explicitly connects his car-
nal passion for Afifa to his desire for her land.15 In Rajani, discordant versions of
masculinity – the gothic’s ‘double-bind of transgression and discipline’, in Brinks’s
words (2003, 18) – shape the story of the loss of Palestine.
Tishrin, too, harnesses ambivalent masculinities to mediate its stories. One exam-
ple is the contrast of Wahid’s perceived vulnerability with the strength and resilience
of Zuhayr. When Wahid initiates an affair with a Jewish woman, he introduces himself
as Zuhayr and performs a masculinity alien to himself, but which he associates with

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 450 karen grumberg

his incarcerated brother, reflecting the notion that heterosexual males are ‘plagued by
insecurities and varieties beyond the official story of the heterosexual man’, in Cyndy
Hendershot’s words (1998, 3). Perhaps the most compelling example of how questions
of masculinity dictate the narrative is the cover story for Nadia’s murder. The secret
is neither the act of murder nor the identity of its perpetrator; the secret is the reason
behind the murder. The cover story is concerned not with denying Nidal’s responsi-
bility but with establishing an acceptable justification. By mendaciously claiming the
murder as a defence of his honour, Nidal banked on familiar cultural norms valorising
heterosexual masculine honour. Nidal’s cover story persists even after his implication
in Al-Yafawi’s murder. As Luise White observes, because secrets and lies ‘must be
constructed out of what is socially conceivable’, they reflect collective norms (2000,
13–14). Like Wahid’s performance of Zuhayr, Nidal’s cover story reflects the illusion
of the coherence of normative heterosexual masculinity, and charts another narrative
structured on concealment.
In Tishrin, secrets further destabilise a fragmented and unreliable narrative land-
scape. Secrets, as Frank Kermode has shown, ‘break down the conventional relation-
ship between sequential narrative and history-likeness’ (1980, 90). Similarly, Matei
Calinescu notes that ‘the very structure of narrative is analogous to the structure of hid-
ing/disclosing a secret or a series of secrets’ (1994, 448). Attentive readers can decipher
textual secrets by reading ‘below the surface of sequential reading’ (Calinescu 1994,
462). These theorisations, compelling as they are, are concerned less with secrets at
textual surfaces, upon which plot coalesces, and more with those embedded within nar-
rative, which may elude casual readers. Yet in gothic texts, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
argues, the surface is, crucially, the locus of sexual identity, which is ‘social and rela-
tional rather than original and private’ (1981, 256). In the gothic, Gero Bauer posits,
secrets are ‘an integral part of modern discursive productions of gendered power struc-
tures’ and as such ‘shape social worlds’ (2016, 16, 31). Surfaces – not depths – are the
domain of the secret in gothic texts. Their social function renders secrets meaningful in
history, too, as White observes: ‘the valorization of information that results in the con-
tinual negotiation and renegotiation of secrets shows individuals and publics imagining
the experiences labeled as secret because of the imagined power of a specific version of
events’ (2000, 11). This power is the motivation for the ‘gendered pathology of protect-
ing a secret’, which Bauer considers critical to gothic; at the same time, this ‘masculine
secrecy’ indicates a threat to conventional hegemonic narratives (Bauer 2016, 16, 39).
In these Hebrew novels, secrets do disrupt narrative conventions, but their gendering
is unfixed: women keep secrets and masculinity itself is interrogated. Alongside other
narrative strategies, the thematisation of secrets particularly in Tishrin actively works
to queer the story, raising fundamental questions about the quest for truth.
Hilu’s novel, in challenging the very notion of historical truth, suggests that story-
telling is inherently violent. Narrative sparks violence in Rajani’s plot, as when Salah
reads his short story – a thinly veiled account of Luminsky’s seduction of his mother
and murder of his father – and elicits Luminsky’s wrath. Violence emerges beyond
the plot, as well, as characters are forced to relinquish control of their story. Salah
experiences this terrifying disempowerment keenly, suddenly realising that he and
Luminsky are merely ‘characters trapped inside a dreadful book . . . and we change
from page to page, from chapter to chapter, as the eyes of others – readers – watch us
at all times, and hands turn the pages of our story then lay us down’ (Hilu 2010, 188).

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 queer gothic narratives of palestine 451

Writing – even writing by an author determined to restore suppressed narratives and

to confront open secrets – is appropriation.
Similarly, in Tishrin, the characters feel compelled to assert control over the story
that has come to control them – to know the truth. As Sikseck explained in an inter-
view on Israeli television, the very notion of a singular ‘truth’ invites violence: ‘the
violence in the insistence on the truth, this amorphous concept, the insistence that
there’s one version, and that we can find it if we really insist. And the extent to which
it’s foolish and suicidal certainly when it comes to historical truth, certainly in Israel’
(London et Kirshenbaum 2016). Huda, Nadia’s daughter and Zuhayr’s wife, confronts
this illusion of a singular story signifying a clear truth:

Do you know what the truth was in Gaza? That my father was a hero who sacrificed
his life for Palestine. No one ever spoke of my mother. That was the truth. . . . When I
married Zuhayr, I discovered another truth, your family’s truth. Nadia’s truth, about
the mother and the sister she was. And the truth about her murderer. . . . There isn’t
one truth. Not in this story. . . . Everyone is certain that their experience, their private
memory, is the truth . . . And that’s the biggest lie that we tell ourselves . . . That we
need the truth . . . That we know the truth. (Sikseck 2016, 165–6)

When Zuhayr writes Ranin a letter revealing his mother’s truth, he concludes with a
cryptic explanation for his revelation of the secret: ‘It’s time this story stopped passing
as an inheritance among people who don’t understand why they’re telling it, so that
one day it will stop passing as an inheritance altogether’ (Sikseck 2016, 145). Is it the
story itself or the mode of its transmission that troubles him? Repeating the story with-
out purpose, intention or understanding: Zuhayr sees this as another manifestation of
narrative violence, now figured as an inherited impulse. Though he participates in this
violence by revealing the secret, at the same time, he hopes that doing so will end its
genetically transmitted contamination. In Sikseck’s novel as in Hilu’s, the chief inheri-
tance is traumatic loss, its heirs absent fathers, suffering mothers, broken families, dead
infants. These novels revise the gothic anxiety regarding legitimate inheritance, focusing
on the transgenerational and collective transmission of disinheritance and its effects.
Such transgenerational trauma seems to lend itself to psychoanalytic interpretation;
Nicolas Abraham’s characterisation of ‘a shameful, unspeakable secret’ as a phantom
‘silently transmitted to someone else’, in Esther Rashkin’s words, describes the secret as
inheritance, but prioritises its content and its eruption in narrative (1992, 2–3). In these
novels, the dispossession is on the surface of narrative, not its depths, its revelation and
concealment articulated in writing and dialogue.
There is often good reason to resist straight stories, to probe, puncture or redraw
their boundaries to confront their violence. The undulating and fragmented narrative
landscapes of The House of Rajani and Tishrin are strategically cultivated by their
authors, whose relation to history is filtered through non-hegemonic sexual, ethnic
and national identities. Unquestionably, these authors’ positionality vis-à-vis mostly
Jewish-Israeli readers of Hebrew differs: Hilu writes to other Jews, while Sikseck is
an other writing to Jews. These fundamentally differing standpoints, however, are
complementary, contributing critical dimensions to our understanding of the same
traumatic event. The literatures of Israel/Palestine have always been more complex
than the clear-cut literary-ideological paradigms with which they have been associated,

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 452 karen grumberg

such as Palestinian ‘literature of commitment’ (iltizam) or generational typologies of

Hebrew literature; certainly, these novels repudiate such clarity. Their evocation of the
gothic to interrogate both the act of storytelling and the content of the story, however,
is striking. Specifically, through their globalgothic representation of land purchase in
Jaffa – one iteration of the global forces informing the competing nationalisms of Israel
and Palestine and the anxieties attending the geopolitical reshaping of the region –
these novels speak to the transnational experiences of migration, dispersal and exile
that attended it historically. Enmeshing masculine power and feminine subversion,
fictions and histories, truths and lies, these novels’ renunciation of a straight story is,
itself, the story they tell.

Notes
1. Few studies have examined Middle Eastern gothic works, which encompass elements of
British gothic as well as of local traditions. Tugce Bicakci Syed wrote a 2018 dissertation
on Turkish gothic and has published several articles on the subject. Ahmed Saadawi’s
Arabic novel Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad, 2013) has engendered
its own critical corpus. Haytham Bahoora (2015) and Ikram Masmoudi (2019–20) have
addressed Iraqi gothic more broadly. To date, the only book-length study on gothic in a Middle
Eastern context is my book Hebrew Gothic (2019). My edited volume Middle Eastern Gothics
(2022) includes chapters on gothic literature in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish.
2. The most consequential example is the emergence of the Israeli New History in the early
1980s. Having accessed previously sealed archival documents from the 1948 War, sev-
eral historians began publishing revisionist accounts of the war, radically reassessing key
aspects of the Israeli narrative and instigating a collective reckoning with Israel’s past.
3. For example, Hilu addressed his experience of coming out in the 2014 introduction to the
re-release of his debut novel, Mot ha-nazir (Death of a Monk, 2004); Sikseck came out
publicly in a 2016 interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonot (31 May 2016;
https://www.yediot.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4810061,00.html).
4. ‘Tishrin’, the Arabic month coinciding with October/November, is transliterated in Hebrew.
Though not yet translated, the novel’s copyright page lists ‘Blood Ties’ as the English title.
5. See note 2.
6. For more on the incident and its relation to history and fiction in Hilu’s novels, see Ginsburg
2015.
7. All citations from Hilu’s novel are from Fallenberg’s translation; all citations from Sikseck’s
novel are my own translation.
8. Tamari and Hammami (1998) characterise Jaffa’s dissonant temporality as ‘a collision of
the two Jaffas – the one of loss and dreams and the one of everyday lived-in places’ (74). On
embedded traces of the Palestinian past in the Jaffa of Sikseck’s short stories, see Mann 2015.
9. Monterescu calls for ‘a spatial theorization of ambivalence’ to better understand Jaffa (2009,
648, emphasis his). For more on Jaffa’s relationship with Tel Aviv, see also LeVine 2005,
particularly chapters 5 and 6; for a postcolonial architectural perspective, see Rotbard 2015.
10. By 1914, citrus groves covered approximately 7,500 acres of the Jaffa region; see Khalidi
2010, 97.
11. The sobriquet ‘City of Oranges’ reflects Jaffa’s past as Palestine’s economic centre thanks
to the city’s orange groves. For more on the Jaffa orange’s symbolism, see: Mendel and
Ranta 2016, 57–9; Bardenstein 2007; Abufarha 2008, 348–52. Bardenstein and Abufarha
also consider the orange in Palestinian literature, with a focus on Ghassan Kanafani; on the
ubiquity of oranges in poetry, song and memories of Jaffa, see LeVine 2005, 147; on Israeli
and Palestinian literary evocations of the orange, see Hamdan 2018.

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12. The link between Zionism and sexual desire has been examined prolifically. See, for exam-
ple: Biale 1992; Gluzman 2007; Pinsker 2008; Neumann 2011.
13. Several important studies address settler/colonial gothics; see, for example: Gildersleeve
2021; Goddu 1997; Lawn 2006; Sugars 2014.
14. In his analysis, Oppenheimer argues that the novel’s representation of gender is part of its
parody of ‘ideological biases of the Zionist narrative’ (2012, 388–9).
15. See note 12.

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Narratives of War.’ The Arab Studies Journal 23, no. 1: 184–208.
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 30

Nordic Gothic
Yvonne Leffler

T here is a gothic tradition in Nordic literature and film dating back to the
Romantic period. Nordic writers and filmmakers have frequently employed gothic
tropes and narrative strategies to evoke feelings of terror and horror; their works
have been produced in response to the international tradition of gothic with references
to works published and produced outside the Nordic countries. Since the beginning,
Nordic Gothic has been densely intertextual while at the same time it has been adapted
to the local audiences. Due to the notoriously realism-prone literary tradition in the
Nordic countries, it was not until the 1990s that the existence of gothic fiction was sys-
tematically examined by a number of scholars (Leffler 1991, 2013; Fyhr 2003, 2017;
Wijkmark 2009; Johnsson 2009; Kastbjerg 2012, 2013). Most of the early studies
were dealing with nineteenth-century literature and canonised writers. In the last
decade, there has been a growing interest in gothic stories in different media after the
millennium (Troy et al. 2020; Leffler 2013; Kastbjerg 2013; Launis 2013). Building
on these studies, this chapter will begin by giving an introduction to the Nordic tradi-
tion of gothic from the early nineteenth century until the present moment. Thereafter,
three works will be discussed in detail: John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Låt den
rätte komma in (2004; Let the Right One In), Leonora Christina Skov’s transgendered
gothic story Silhuet af en synder (2010; Silhouette of a Sinner), and André Øvredal’s
mockumentary Trolljegeren (2010; Troll Hunter). This will highlight some distinct
features in today’s Nordic Gothic, such as a combination of gothic and social realism, a
transgendered version of Female Gothic, and the uncanny wilderness and environmen-
talism in Nordic stories. It will also demonstrate in what way Nordic Gothic engages
with globalgothic, that is, gothic in a globalised space, and then in particular with glo-
balisation and global threats from a specific regional vantage, the Nordics.

The Rise of Gothic Fiction in the Nordic Countries

By the end of the eighteenth century, many of the first English, German and French
gothic novels were translated into the Nordic languages. For example, Matthew Lewis’s
The Monk (1796) was published in Danish and Swedish in 1800 and 1800 to 1804
respectively. Five novels by Ann Radcliffe were distributed in Swedish between 1800
and 1806, among them The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1794).
The latter was staged in Stockholm, at the Arsenalen theatre, as Eleonora Rosalba,
eller Runierna i Paluzzi in 1801 to 1802, while François Guillaume Ducray-Duminil’s
French novel Viktor, ou l’Enfant de la Forêt (1796) was staged at the same theatre as
Victor, eller skogsbarnet in 1803 to 1804.

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 456 yvonne leffler

The first phase of imported gothic novels inspired local writers. John Polidori’s The
Vampire (1819) encouraged Danish Bernhard Severin Ingemann to write Varulven
(1834; The Werewolf) and Swedish Victor Rydberg to publish his serial Vampyren
(1848; The Vampire). While Rydberg expanded Polidori’s story, Ingemann changed it
into a multi-layered portrayal of a split werewolf character. The Swedish writer Erik
Johan Stagnelius wrote several dramas, in some of which he combined gothic themes
with the conflict-ridden characters recognised from the German Sturm und Drang
movement. His play Riddartornet (1821–23; The Knight’s Tower) revolves around
Sir Rheinfels’s incestuous desire for his daughter, and the drama reaches its climax
when Rheinfels forces her to murder her imprisoned mother. Explicit references to
Radcliffe’s novels and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto are found in the Finn-
ish author Axel Gabriel Ingelius’s Swedish-language novel Det gråa slotted (1851; The
Grey Castle) and Swedish Aurora Ljungstedt’s Hin Ondes hus (1853; The House of
the Devil). Both stories explore dark secrets associated with haunted houses, passion-
driven male protagonists and victimised gothic heroines.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the second surge of English-language
gothic reached the Nordic countries. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and
Mr Hyde (1886) were circulated in Danish and Swedish. Other writers with gothic quali-
ties, such as French Charles Baudelaire and British Oscar Wilde and Joseph Conrad, had
an impact on Nordic writers. Swedish August Strindberg considered himself a reincarna-
tion of Poe because he was born in the same year as Poe died (Johnsson 2009, 40). In
his, as well as in Henrik Ibsen’s, works, the male double in combination with avenging
ghosts is a recurring motif. In Strindberg’s Spöksonaten (1907; Ghost Sonata), the
motif of the double is combined with haunting Nordic fylgias, who drain the living
of life and blood (Johnsson 2009, 165–74). In Ibsen’s Gengangare (1881; Ghosts),
the Nordic concept of a ghost returning to take revenge is used as a metaphor for
syphilis to expose the hypocrisy of the bourgeois society. Thus, in Strindberg’s and
Ibsen’s works, Nordic folklore and gothic conventions are fused to address topical
social issues.
Even more important for the upswing of Nordic Gothic at the fin de siècle is the
Swedish Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf’s fiction, in which the Nordic landscape,
regional customs and popular beliefs play a vital role. Her novel Herr Arnes penningar
(1903; The Treasure) is a murder and ghost story, where a harsh Arctic landscape in
combination with the Nordic myth of werewolves adds to the gothic atmosphere and
the ambiguity of the story (Leffler 1991, 153–66). Lagerlöf explores various aspects of
the return of the past and the relationships between the characters and supernatural
beings known from Nordic folklore in order to transgress boundaries between life and
death, dream and reality, and human and nature. As demonstrated by Sofia Wijkmark,
these motifs predominate in her short stories, such as ‘Frid på Jorden’ (1917; Peace
on Earth) and ‘Karln, En julsägen’ (1891; The Bloke, A Christmas Tale) (Wijkmark
2009). In that way, Lagerlöf frequently employs the Nordic landscape and regional
folklore to depict evil forces in untamed nature as well as within humans. In several sto-
ries, such as ‘Spökhanden’ (1898; The Ghost’s Hand) and Gösta Berlings Saga (1891;
Gösta Berling’s Saga), she explores gothic elements to highlight patriarchal structures
and inequality between men and women. Her version of Female Gothic – using gothic
themes and metaphors to articulate female experience of imprisonment – inspired other

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female writers, such as Norwegian Ragnhild Jølsen, whose novel Rikka Gan (1904)
revolves around a young woman in pursuit of identity and independence but victimised
by her family, their house and its past.
When the new art form of cinema emerged in the 1920s, Nordic filmmakers were
pioneers in creating gothic atmosphere on the screen. Benjamin Christensen’s Swedish-
Danish silent film Häxan (1922; The Witch) illustrates popular ideas along with facts
about authentic witch trials of the past. The ghostly ride of the witches inspired Walt
Disney to illustrate Modest Mussorgsky’s music Eine Nacht auf dem Kahlen Berge in
his animated film Fantasia (1940). Victor Sjöström’s Swedish film Körkarlen (1921;
The Phantom Carriage) is famous for its technique of double exposure to visualise the
world of the dead and to enhance the gothic qualities of Lagerlöf’s novel Körkarlen
(1912; The Soul Shall Bear Witness), on which it is based. The first Nordic vampire
film, Danish Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931–32), is an audio-visual tour de
force of the protagonist’s journey to an isolated island beyond time and space, at
the border of day and night, life and death. As demonstrated in several analyses, the
ambiguity of the narrative and the vagueness of vision confound the spectator’s ability
to make sense of the events that take place on the screen (Leffler 2000, 133–5; Peirse
2008; Weber 2016).
One of the internationally most widely read Scandinavian writers of gothic fiction
from the same period is Danish Karen Blixen, known by her pen name Isak Dinesen
(James 1983; Kastbjerg 2012, 242–342). In 1934, she published in English her col-
lection Seven Gothic Tales, which includes one story set in Denmark, ‘The Supper at
Elsinore’. It describes a dysfunctional merchant family and the incestuous relationship
of three siblings, whom death cannot part. In the end, the two sisters summon their
executed bother to join them in a secret chamber in their family home. Their reunion
in a wintry Danish setting is both a revival of the past and an atonement of repressed
sins. It is also, as in Lagerlöf’s and Jølsen’s stories, a creepy story about female con-
finement, where the sisters’ final reunion with their long-dead brother displays the
persecution of the past.
During the period of post-war anxiety in the mid- and late twentieth century, gothic
tropes were frequently exposed in the films by one of Sweden’s most prolific direc-
tors, Ingmar Bergman. Det sjunde inseglet (1957; The Seventh Seal) is highly influ-
enced by the gothic imagery of his predecessor Sjöström and his film Körkarlen. In
Persona (1966), the claustrophobic setting of the Swedish archipelago and the strug-
gle for power between a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and her traumatised mute patient
(Liv Ullman) present a psychological horror drama. The film plays on the Jungian
concept of persona, themes of vampirism and doppelgängers to depict the two women.
The use of mirrors and smoke duplicates and dissolves their faces, turning them into
ghostly doubles and showing different aspects of them. Referring to the characters in
Persona, Bergman’s Vargtimmen (1968; Hour of the Wolf) is even more in the tradi-
tion of horror films. A painter (Max von Sydow) and his wife (Liv Ullman) visit an
island to cure his insomnia, but instead, weird or imagined people approach him. It
is, as Lynda Buntzen and Carla Craig show, impossible to distinguish between what
is real and what belongs to the painter’s hallucinatory world of demons (Buntzen and
Craig 1976–77, 25). Just as in Dreyer’s vampire film, Bergman’s gothic imagery in
his early films deals with transgressions of an individual’s physical and psychological
integrity in time and space.

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 458 yvonne leffler

The remote Arctic area of Scandinavia is the setting in a number of narratives in the
mid-twentieth century. Erik Blomberg’s Valkoinen peura (1952; The White Reindeer)
is located in Finnish Lapland. The film explores pre-Christian Sámi mythology and
shamanism and is about a young woman (Mirjami Kuosmanen) whose visit to a sha-
man turns her into a shape-shifting white reindeer that attracts and kills male herders.
Sápmi is also the setting of the American-Swedish Rymdinvasion i Lappland (1959;
Terror in the Midnight Sun), which was directed by Virgil W. Vogel. It screens an alien
invasion of the Nordic north with a King Kong-like monster, a damsel in distress, and
a square-jawed male hero.
Not only the Arctic but also the endless Nordic forest serves as a labyrinthine gothic
setting in many films. In Norwegian Kåre Bergstrøm’s De dødes tjern (1958; Lake of
the Dead), based on a novel by André Bjerke, the horrors take place at a woodland
lake and are tied to the wrongdoings associated with the place. When some visitors
from Oslo arrive to visit a friend, he is missing and they find themselves increasingly
exposed to weird influences originating from the lake. In contemporary gothic, the plot
is often structured as a journey into the unknown, a hostile place beyond preconceived
conceptions of time and space. In Michael Hjorth’s Swedish film Det okända (2000; The
Unknown), a group of young scientists are sent to investigate a remote fire-ravaged area
in northern Sweden and they find themselves increasingly threatened by an alien force of
nature. In Hjorth’s film, which was inspired by Myrick and Sánchez’s The Blair Witch
Project, there is no monster to trace and fight. Instead, the Swedish forest acts as a living
organism and an enemy. The Nordic landscape is also depicted as monstrous in Nicolas
Winding Refn’s Danish film Valhalla Rising (2009). The story is set in 1,000 ad when
a mute warrior and his boy slave board a Viking vessel in Iceland and go on a journey
into a land of obscurity and death. During their journey – with references to Joseph Con-
rad’s novel Heart of Darkness (1899) – the vessel is engulfed by endless fog on its way
towards a strange land where mysterious arrows kill the crew one by one. The terror
that they experience affects their perception and soon they – as well as the spectator of
the film – believe that they are not being attacked by hostile enemies but by nature itself.
From the 1990s onwards, well-recognised authors, such as Swedish Kerstin Ekman
and Birgitta Trotzig, have explored the uncanny qualities of the Nordic landscape
and local folklore. In the opening of Ekman’s gothic crime story Händelser vid vat-
ten (1993; Blackwater), a violent crime scene is described through a series of unreli-
able sensory impressions, and the crime haunts the characters for years to come. In
many of Trotzig’s stories, dark forces invade the human mind. Her novel Dykun-
gens dotter (1985; The Mud-King’s Daughter) refers to Hans Christian Andersen’s
fairy tale ‘Dund-kongens datter’ (1858; The Mud-King’s Daughter) and the Brothers
Grimm’s ‘The Frog King or Iron Heinrich’, and it tells a story about the transforma-
tion of the human body. In addition to these writers, Mare Kandre’s novels Bübins
unge (1987; Bübin’s Kid), Aliide, Aliide (1991) and Bestiarium (1999) are structured
as gothic narratives in which the gothic landscape endows the stories with a mythic,
symbolic meaning (Fyhr 2003, 178–203). In the same tradition of Nordic Gothic is
Maria Gripe, a Swedish young-adult writer. As demonstrated by Carina Lidström, her
Skuggserie (1982–88; The Shadow Series) is suffused with gothic elements and Jungian
archetypes, such as the concept of the shadow (Lidström 1994).
The gothic revival in Nordic literature is particularly noticeable in today’s fiction for
young adults. In Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren’s bestselling Engelsfors

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Trilogy – Cirkeln (2011; The Circle), Eld (2012; Fire) and Nyckeln (2013; The Key) –
six teenage girls discover that they have developed supernatural abilities, thus having
been chosen to battle against evil demons that are taking over the woodlands surround-
ing the small village of Engelsfors. As in many stories for young readers, the witches
in the trilogy must learn to be responsible and co-operative and to set aside their own
interests for the good of others. Thus, the young heroines are encouraged to adopt
traditional female virtues, such as empathy, in order to support the welfare of other
living beings. However, the story and many others in the same category also describe
a utopian matriarchal world where women are in charge and set the rules. They are
about ‘girl power’ and how it may save the world, or those things worth fighting for
and protecting for coming generations.
The true return of gothic to the Nordic mainstream was Lars von Trier’s TV drama
Riget (1994–97; The Kingdom). Although it is set in a modern, well-organised and
medically advanced hospital in the Danish capital, Copenhagen, the premises are
built on marshland that calls forth a repressed past that confirms recurrent injustice
and inequality in Denmark. Trier’s series was a success even outside Scandinavia and
resulted in a US remake, Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital (2004). It also initiated
a gothic renewal in the Nordic countries. At the turn of the millennium, one of the
most successful and influential stories was John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Swedish vampire
novel Låt den rätte komma in (2004; Let the Right One In). Lindqvist’s novel was
quickly translated into many languages and it was adapted into two films: a Swedish-
language film directed by Tomas Alfredson in 2008, and an American remake, Let
Me In, by Matt Reeves in 2010. Like many of Lindqvist’s later stories, such as his
zombie novel Hanteringen av odöda (2005; Handling the Undead), it illustrates one
of the most predominant tendencies in today’s Nordic Gothic, a combination of gothic
and social realism, where Lindqvist uses supernatural elements and gothic themes to
confront social issues and challenge established ideas of the Swedish welfare state.
His successful version of gothic has paved the way for several other Swedish writers
and novels, such as Mats Sandberg’s Hemmet (2017; The Home). In their stories,
these writers, Helena Karlsson and Sofia Wijkmark argue, dismantle the concept of the
Swedish ‘folkhem’, meaning the people’s home, a metaphorical concept established in
the 1930s by the Swedish Social Democratic Party to describe a society of modernity
and rationality, where all people are treated as equals and part of the collective welfare
system (Karlsson 2013; Wijkmark 2020).
In the late twentieth century, the representation of the wilderness and its creatures
was frequently used to confront current social and environmental issues. Several sto-
ries depict tourists and urbanised people visiting remote areas and their fearful con-
frontation with untamed nature and native creatures. For example, Júlíus Kemp’s first
Icelandic horror film Harpoon: Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre (2009) is set in
an Arctic Icelandic landscape, and it openly refers to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre in
order to comment on Iceland’s financial crisis in 2008 and the disadvantages of today’s
global tourist industry. In Kemp’s film, Iceland’s financial situation has reduced native
whalers to entertainment for disrespectful international tourists, a situation that has
turned certain whalers into violent manslaughterers.
Thus, today’s writers and filmmakers often make use of Nordic mythology to con-
front postcolonial issues and the situation of the indigenous population in the Nordic
regions. Myth connected to the Finno-Ugric Sámi people inhabiting Sámpi, the northern

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parts of Scandinavia, has been explored in many gothic stories, such as the aforemen-
tioned film Valkoinen peura (1952; The White Reindeer). Today’s gothic fiction set in
the wilderness is increasingly inhabited with creatures from popular beliefs and folk-
tales. Stefan Spjut’s Stallo (2012) and Stalpi (2017) start as crime novels but turn into
gothic mystery stories that revolve around ominous shape-shifting trolls who fight back
when their old customs and territories in the Sámpi region are threatened. The ecologi-
cal theme is even more explicit in André Øvredal’s Norwegian film Trolljegeren (2010;
Troll Hunter), which is a successful example of how Nordic myths and folktales can be
transformed into international horror targeting global audiences.

Vampire Romance and Social Realism

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel, Låt den rätte komma in, shares some traits with
Nordic crossover literature, literature for and about young adults. It deals with vulner-
able teenagers who develop exceptional capabilities that carry them into a magical
world, and at the same time, the story emphasises the life choices that the protagonists
must face in order to develop into mature adults. In Lindqvist’s novel, the social ten-
dency is noticeable from the very start when the time and location are described. The
story takes place in the early 1980s, that is, in the period of increasing neoliberalism
and speculation preceding the financial crisis of the early 1990s. The site of horror is
Blackeberg, a working-class suburb of Stockholm meticulously planned as part of the
Swedish ‘folkhem’ project, but where many inhabitants live on the margins of society.
The deficiencies of the welfare society in a globalised world of neoliberalism are clearly
demonstrated when two members of a group of middle-aged alcoholics fall victim to
the vampire without much attention from the authorities because of their marginalised
position in the local society.
The main plot is centred on Oskar, a twelve-year-old boy who lives with his divorced
mother in an apartment complex and who occasionally visits his alcoholic father in
the countryside. Oskar is the victim of persistent bullying by older schoolmates, and
his suffering occurs below the radar of his community of adults, parents and teachers.
There is nobody to prevent the harm done to Oskar or to help him achieve justice. In
order to endure, he gains morbid interests in violent crime and forensics, and he imag-
ines himself confronting and punishing his pursuers. This victimised boy, who wets
himself when intimidated, compensates for his underdog position by dreaming about
what it would be like to watch someone being executed in an electric chair. However,
his life changes for the better when he befriends a vampire child, Eli, who has just
moved in next door together with an adult male helper, Håkan.
Like many vampire romances, such as the Twilight series and The Vampire Diaries,
Lindqvist’s novel is a coming-of-age story, in which Oskar falls in love with somebody
who represents not only a different way of life but also an alien being. The vampire Eli
is the kind of monster that Judith Halberstam calls a ‘meaning machine’ that represents
various categories in one body, such as gender, race and class (Halberstam 1995, 3–8,
21–2). When Oskar realises that Eli is a vampire, something he only knows from fic-
tion, he is confronted not only with the advantages of being undead with exceptional
mental and physical skills but also with the disadvantages of being confined to a diet
of fresh human blood and a life restricted to the dark hours of the day. He must revise
his moral concepts and view on killing another being. In his fantasies, the victimised

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Oskar repeatedly stabs his tormentors to punish and take revenge while he realises
that Eli is driven to slaughter for very different reasons. As a vampire, Eli has to kill
– or make a helper do it – in order to survive. In that way, Oskar must reflect on the
difference between killing for survival and murdering to hit back and take vengeance.
By falling in love with Eli, Oskar re-evaluates not only his view on killing people
but also his ideas of romantic love, and his conceptualisations of sex and gender. When
he first observes Eli at the playground outside his house, he immediately identifies a
delicate, badly dressed young girl with long dark hair. Although Eli tells him they can-
not be friends, he is smitten and he later asks Eli for a date, because that is how he
thinks he should act according to his ideas of a boy-meets-girl story. When he asks for
a date, he is informed of Eli’s gender status. Eli responds to his invitation: ‘I can’t. I’m
not a girl’ (Lindqvist 2007, 188). Then Oskar is informed that although Eli is not a
girl, Eli is also not a boy. The cause of Eli’s gender ambiguity is that Eli was born a boy
but was castrated when still a child, something Oskar learns about when he is trans-
ported into Eli’s memories by a kiss. By getting to know Eli, the vampire transgresses
all concepts Oskar is familiar with and has used to navigate in his social life. As an old,
unsexed and undead vampire, Eli is neither child nor adult, neither boy nor girl, nei-
ther dead nor alive. Eli is something in between all categories Oskar recognises. In that
way, their romance demonstrates different aspects of teen anxiety and in particular, as
Benny LeMaster points out, it interrogates heteronormativity and points at same-sex
romance, transgender identity and queer possibilities (LeMaster 2011).
Lindqvist’s vampire and coming-of-age novel also tells another and complex story
about horror and suffering that may not be captured by ordinary realist representa-
tions of teenage life. As Oskar befriends the vampire it is gradually humanised at the
same time as Oskar’s human social life is brutalised. A victim of mobbing in and out
of school, Oskar’s experience of physical and psychological violence escalates through-
out the story. As Penny Croft and Honni van Rijswijk argue, he is forced into what
Claudia Card calls the ‘gray zone’, where victims of evil are under extreme stress and
therefore develop into complicit evildoers because in their situation moral judgement
is difficult (Croft and Rijswijk 2015). Despite Oskar’s various strategies, he has no
way to escape persecution, and it climaxes when the bullies try to drown him during a
swimming class. However, at the very last minute, Eli arrives to save him by decapitat-
ing his tormentors.
Although Oskar is saved in an extremely violent way, the scene is triumphant
and exhilarating and a righteous moment of judgement. Still, Oskar’s rescue and the
saving of his life is too late to save his humanity. Throughout the story, the reader
witnesses how his situation is gradually turning him into a monster and an outsider.
When he is rescued by Eli, his mental transformation has already turned him into
a ruthless avenger and a child criminal who is engaged in theft and has set fire to
a classroom. He committed assisted killing when he helped Eli to kill the vampire
hunter Lacke. On the one hand, and in line with the coming-of-age theme, Oskar’s
relationship with Eli makes him less dependent on his parents for care and protection.
On the other hand, he is gradually turning his back on society and its norms for a
life with Eli beyond civilisation in his role as vampire helper and instrument of vio-
lence. The last scene, when Oskar is on board a train with Eli in a trunk beside him,
indicates that there is no way back for him. He has replaced Eli’s former caregiver,
Håkan. He is prepared to kill to support Eli in the vampire’s predatory and colonising

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 462 yvonne leffler

mission to find new hunting grounds as a fresh source of human blood. The last scene
implies that Oskar’s love for and loyalty to Eli will gradually turn him into the same
grown-up paedophiliac as Håkan. In the last scene, he is transporting Eli on a train
bound for Karlstad, the town where Håkan worked as a teacher and was accused
of paedophiliac misconduct. In that way, the ending of the novel confirms the dual
nature of Eli and Oskar’s romance, and their ambiguous future together.

Female Gothic and Transgendered Identity

Family secrets and guilt-ridden female protagonists form a recurring constellation in
Nordic writers’ version of Female Gothic. Obtaining redress, in combination with the
absence of nuclear families and reliable biological relations, is a predominant theme
in many of today’s stories. One of the most illustrative examples of this is Danish
Leonora Christina Skov. Like most gothic stories, the structure of her novel Silhuet af
en synder (2010; Silhouette of a Sinner) is complex, with multiple timelines, several
female protagonists, stories within the story, and unreliable narrators and viewpoints.
The main plot unfolds in the Danish castle Liljenholm and explores its history and its
dysfunctional family in the 1930s and early 1940s. The novel opens in 1973, when its
first-person narrator, Agnes, is writing a new foreword to her story about Liljenholm,
which she first published in 1943. Within this frame, the main plot starts in 1941,
when Agnes arrives, along with her partner Nella von Liljenholm, who is the heir of
the estate. Besides narrating their stay at the castle, Agnes is documenting and writ-
ing a novel about its history and the family of Liljenholm. Like the setting in many
gothic stories, the castle is haunted; the draughts sweeping through the rooms make
sounds like human wailing, the electric lights are repeatedly switched off because of
power outages, and the visitors are constantly reminded of the previous inhabitants by
their portraits, left-behind garments and hidden notes and diaries. The dead ancestors
are also said to occupy a certain tower of the castle from which peculiar sounds and
screams are heard. Like in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the tower is the very
centre of horror, domestic violence and female imprisonment, at the same time as the
female protagonists are simultaneously persecuted victims and courageous heroines.
Initially, Skov’s novel appears to be a version of Female Gothic with explicit refer-
ences to Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). In particular,
the latter is an important intertext. In Skov’s story, the former lady of the house, Anto-
nia von Liljenholm, was a bestselling writer of Female Gothic and a friend of Daphne
du Maurier, and her private library holds du Maurier’s novels with dedications from
the author. In addition, Nella and Agnes are in search of letters that Nella knows her
mother received from du Maurier. Like Manderley in du Maurier’s novel, Liljenholm
proves to be a place haunted by memories of its former housekeeper. When Nella
eventually finds Antonia’s copy of Rebecca, the writer’s dedication confirms that du
Maurier’s portrayal of the sinister Mrs Danvers was inspired by Liljenholm’s house-
keeper Miss Lauritsen.
In contrast to du Maurier’s Rebecca, Silhuet af en synder is not about a victimised
wife who is neglected by her husband and threatened with psychological manipula-
tion by a sinister housekeeper. Still, it is a story about women’s anxieties, domestic
entrapment, spectral maternity and family secrets. Contrary to du Maurier’s persecuted
protagonist Mrs de Winter, Skov’s Agnes has a secret agenda for her stay at the castle,

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that is, to explore her own origins and family history. Gradually, she exposes a family
story even more disturbing and transgressive than that of du Maurier’s Manderley. It
is known that insanity runs in the Liljenholm family and that in each generation the
mothers give birth to twins, one of whom is destined to be mentally ill and to commit
suicide. According to Nella’s knowledge, her grandfather’s twin sister killed herself at
the age of fourteen, and later her grandfather and her grandmother committed collec-
tive suicide. In the next generation, the twin sister of her mother Antonia threw herself
out of a window of the tower at the same time as Nella’s father strangely disappeared.
In addition, Nella’s recollection of her childhood spent in the castle is heavily influenced
by her nightmarish experiences of the hauntings of her ancestors and her close relation-
ship to her nurse, the housekeeper Miss Lauritsen, who was the only one she trusted
and confided in.
In Skov’s novel, the members of the Liljenholm family are not only born twins, they
also reproduce and double each other from one generation to the other as part of their
innate incestuous nature. The presence of the dead and their influence over the living
become increasingly apparent when Nella and Agnes arrive at the deserted mansion
and decide to start a new life. While they explore the castle to expose its family history,
they start to dress up as their predecessors and to act accordingly. While Agnes wears
clothes left by Nella’s father before he went missing, Nella dresses in her grandmother’s
petticoats and old-fashioned dresses. Later on, Nella’s borrowed garments turn out to
be designed by Agnes’s foster mother, which creates an uncanny connection between
Liljenholm and Agnes’s mysterious origin as an orphan. In that way, both Agnes and
Nella seem to be connected to the castle, at the same time as the lesbian couple prove
and negotiate their gendered personas. Nella endorses her bisexuality and increasingly
feminine identity, which eventually leads her to marry a man and give birth to two
children, while Agnes progressively leaves behind the subordinate position of female
victimhood as an orphan and foster child. Instead, she grows into the role of the for-
mer lady of the house, the bestselling writer Antonia von Liljenholm.
The connection between sex and gender is constantly contested in Skov’s novel. It
is not primarily a story about distressed female protagonists who are threatened with
extortion, rape and forced marriages. Instead, Skov uses the gendered conventions of
Female Gothic to explore non-heteronormative sexualities. Hetero- and homosexual
incest between family members is custom in the Liljenholm family, but while homo-
erotic sexuality seems to be approved of, heterosexual incest is punished by death.
The former Lord Horace and his wife die because he committed incest twice and
therefore caused his pregnant sister’s suicide, as well as his daughter’s unwanted child.
Thus, Skov’s novel does not revolve around a feminine heroine and her love for the
heir of the estate. Instead, the customary battle between the heroine and her female
predecessor in Female Gothic is replaced by another conflict, the first-person narrator’s
search for knowledge and recognition. Her sexual desire is subordinated to her desire
for identity, to find out about her origin, find her family and construct a recognised
gender-transgressive social position. She also proves herself proficient in revealing and
handling the truth, however painful.
Unlike most female protagonists and narrators of Female Gothic, Agnes is not pri-
marily imprisoned in a house and a female body. Instead, she is inhibited by her lack
of origin. Her quest to find her family is not only to form an identity but also to be
in control of her life and her history. Contrary to du Maurier’s narrator in Rebecca,

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 464 yvonne leffler

Skov’s Agnes in Silhuet af en synder does not repress her memories of her ordeals at the
castle so they surface only in her nightmares. Whereas the narrator in Rebecca starts
her story: ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’, Agnes opens her narrative:
‘In all these years, there has not been one single day I have not thought of the time
I returned to Liljenholm.’ She has actively revised, reinterpreted and reconstructed
the autobiographical story she is telling. In that way, she exerts agency by asserting
her status as narrator in control of her narration and thereby her life and posthumous
reputation.

Gothic Environmentalism and Wilderness

While female writers, such as Leonora Christina Skov, have transformed the gothic
conventions to explore topical gender subjects, many transnationally bestselling works
have returned to a motif of Nordic Gothic that has recurred since the early nineteenth
century: the depiction of the boundless and uncontrollable Nordic wilderness
(Leffler 2013). The environmental message is explicit in André Øvredal’s found-footage
mockumentary Trolljegeren (2010; Troll Hunter), which is an illuminating example in
terms of artistic qualities and box-office popularity of the Norwegian film industry’s
endeavours to demonstrate its specific cultural identity to a global audience. Central to
the story is the concept of trolls. According to Nordic mythology and folktales, trolls
are stupid and ugly brutes who hate Christians and dwell in hollows and caves in the
mountains. Although they are not nocturnal creatures, they may explode or turn to
stone if they are exposed to strong sunlight.
Øvredal’s film accentuates its realist approach to trolls through the presence of a
diegetic camera operated by one of the protagonists as part of the narrative. In the
film, a group of university students set out to make a documentary about a suspected
bear poacher only to discover that he is an operative of the Troll Security Service, a
top-secret branch of the Norwegian government that tries to keep the local and native
race of trolls under control. Whenever a troll breaks out of its territory, the troll hunter
Hans must track it down and kill it before its existence is revealed to the public.
Increasingly frustrated over working conditions, Hans decides to expose the existence
of trolls and the government’s incompetence in handling the situation. He guides the
camera team into the trolls’ habitat in an effort to find out why so many of them are
suddenly moving out of their lands. When the students understand Hans’s aims, they
look upon him as a hero on the side of the trolls and they ask if they may assist him
and film his efforts to get a blood sample of a troll in order to find out the cause behind
the trolls’ increasingly aggressive behaviour. Before they set out, the members of the
team disguise themselves with ‘troll stench’ and check whether any of them trusts
in Jesus, because trolls are believed to prey on Christian blood. By this means, Troll
Hunter acknowledges the existence of trolls on the screen at the same time as the audi-
ence learns what is known about trolls from old Nordic myths and folktales.
Despite its title, Troll Hunter is more about trolls than about the main characters,
that is, the heroic troll hunter Hans and the filming students. By focusing on the trolls,
the camera team is simply the means to operate the camera in order to catch the
subject, the trolls and their activities. As pointed out by Anne M. Canavan, the cam-
era eye is sometimes able to show more than the characters are able to discern or to
report about, for example, in some scenes shot at night or during their escape from the

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 nordic gothic 465

trolls (Canavan 2012, 202–10). In that way, the reliability of the camera-as-narrator
is repeatedly established in a way that verifies the film’s usage of documentary modes.
Still, as observed by Noel O’Shea, for example, the changing focus and the visual
variation convey an inconsistent presence of the mise en scène itself (O’Shea 2017, 41).
The digital camera sometimes fails to keep the characters in focus but – in or out of
focus – it never fails to convey the gloomy Arctic scenery, its forests and marshlands,
fjords and snow-clad mountains, in a way that turns the landscape into a character in
its own right.
Still, the operating of the camera varies in the film. During the first part of the
expedition, the operator is the amateur Kalle. He denies being Christian, but later
he is revealed to be a true believer who attracts the trolls. During a risky nocturnal
expedition, the trolls spot his Christian blood and he is killed. Fortunately, the cam-
era is saved, and the team finds a new professional and not-Christian operator, the
Muslim Malica. When she replaces Kalle behind the camera, it results in another kind
of intradiegetic gaze and a different narration of the story. While Norwegian Kalle is
too familiar with the Nordic landscape to catch its uniqueness, Malica uses the camera
to communicate a tourist’s view of the spectacular scenery. In that way, her artistic
camerawork improves the visual narration. At the end of the film, the viewer is placed
in a voyeuristic position and relates the filming to the discourse of classical filmmaking
of genre film and popular cinema.
However, Malica’s camerawork conveys not only the Nordic scenery but also the
vulnerability of its species. The trolls are progressively presented as a primitive sub-
species to archaic humans or, as Johan Höglund argues, an indigenous population
destined for extinction by modern urbanised society and its exploitation of nature
(Höglund 2017). At first, the students are sure of themselves in their environmental-
ism and they set out to protect bears. When they find out that Hans is not hunting
bears but controlling trolls, they join him in his mission to discern what is driving
the trolls beyond their appointed ranges. Is the trolls’ aggressive behaviour caused by
climate change, habitat demolition, human intrusion or something else? During their
investigation, it turns out that the trolls are not primarily driven by global warming,
increasing exploitation by ecotourism or anything else caused by human agency, but
by another non-human agent, a virus, that is, rabies. During the investigation, the
trolls appear more vulnerable and defenceless to the team as well as the viewer of the
film. The initial depiction of trolls as dangerous monsters is replaced by the represen-
tation of an endangered species fighting for survival. Malica’s filming of Hans’s last
fight with a giant troll portrays it as a victim in pain that Hans has to kill out of mercy.
As Nathaniel A. Rivers argues, the environmental rhetoric of the film, as well as
the role of the humans, is ambivalent (Rivers 2015). The film does not conclude with
a solution, such as an explanation for the outbreak of rabies and a cure to stop it;
nor does it end with the deaths of the infected trolls. Instead, the troll hunter leaves
his assignment and vanishes over the horizon while the documentary team tries to
escape the authorities that arrive to get their hands on their footage. In the end, the
audience is told by a text sequence that the Norwegian government persists in deny-
ing the existence of trolls and the audience is requested to contact the authorities with
any information about the lost students and their whereabouts. Then, the film con-
cludes with a clip of an interview with the Norwegian Prime Minister Stoltenberg at a
press conference. In front of the camera, he regrets the need to disrupt nature to build

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 466 yvonne leffler

new power lines, but then adds: ‘Norway has trolls, so more power lines are needed.’
Accordingly, and once again, the viewers are reminded about the aim of the students’
filming, to make a documentary about Hans and his assignment for the government,
and hence the mockumentary character of the film. Yet, the fate of the film team is not
revealed, nor is the identity of whoever finally got hold of the footage and finished and
screened the documentary.

Nordic Gothic Revisited

Although they are dissimilar in many respects, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Låt den
rätte komma in, Leonora Christina Skov’s Silhuet af en synder and André Øvredal’s
Trolljegeren all remind us of a long tradition of Nordic Gothic. They are all densely
intertextual and produced in relation to transnational developments and cross-
fertilisations of cultural differences. While Lindqvist’s and Skov’s stories transform the
genre conventions of vampire fiction and Female Gothic, Øvredal’s film is a playful
version of gothic mockumentaries. The three works are all examples of how Nordic
writers and filmmakers adapt their works to domestic audiences and explore gothic
tropes and modes to address topical global issues, such as social vulnerability, subur-
ban problems, gender norms and ecological anxieties. In all stories, the protagonists’
quests and encounters with the unknown are used to reveal social problems in today’s
Nordic welfare states, such as segregation and child abuse in Låt den rätte komma in,
domestic violence and gender inequality in Silhuet af en synder and devastation of the
wilderness and its native population in Trolljegeren. Thus, these stories all demon-
strate a characteristic tendency in Nordic Gothic since its rise in the early nineteenth
century, that is, to voice and expose cultural anxieties and societal concerns, and to do
so in a specific and recognisable Nordic setting.

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 31

‘In Brussels no one can hear you scream’:

EU Gothic
Barry Murnane

F rom its emergence in the early 1980s, gothic studies has been a predominantly
Anglo-American critical discourse, both in its institutional locations within
English departments and in its primary focus on English and American literature
and film. There have been some notable exceptions to this rule, with critics includ-
ing Avril Horner (2002), Peter Mortensen (2004), Diane Long Hoeveler (2010),
Matthew Gibson (2013), Angela Wright (2013) and many others demonstrating that
the gothic has been a transnational and trans-European phenomenon from its incep-
tion in the eighteenth century. In recent years, the framework of globalgothic devel-
oped by Glennis Byron (2013) has made a compelling case for conceptualising the
gothic in even less anglophone ways within the continental and global realignments
of politics, society and culture of globalisation. The cross-cultural manifestations and
inflections of European gothic are familiar in discussions of late-eighteenth-century
gothic, but in this chapter I aim to situate contemporary gothic narratives in literature
and film from Europe against the background of ‘the collapse of blocs and borders, the
emergence of transnational and economic unions, [and] spectres of superstates’ that
Fred Botting and Justin Edwards have identified at the heart of globalgothic (2013,
12). The most obvious reference point in thinking about European gothic in this way
is the emergence of the European Union (EU) as precisely such a transnational union,
or ‘superstate’, over the last thirty years. For the purposes of this chapter, I will use the
critical neologism ‘EU Gothic’ to describe different manifestations of the gothic that
have emerged within the ambit of the EU, taking the processes of enlargement begin-
ning with German unification in 1990 and the creation of the EU with the Maastricht
Treaty (1993) as a key historical reference point. The EU will become visible as a back-
drop for fictional narratives which are haunted by the effects of past nationalisms and
national traumas, while also engaging with new insecurities arising from contradic-
tions within the EU’s formative ideologies between the national and transnational, the
local and dislocated, and the liberal social policies and restrictive neoliberal biopolitics
of and in the bloc.

Documenting the Spectres of Nations

From its inception, the EU has been haunted by historical traumas. The bloc’s history
begins with Robert Schuman’s suggestion that a European Coal and Steel Community
(ECSC) between France and West Germany could reduce national competition and

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 eu gothic 469

military conflict in post-World War II Europe.1 Unlike the Council of Europe, which
was founded in 1949 to enable dialogue between nations, Schuman’s idea was moti-
vated by reneging on aspects of national sovereignty to guarantee supranational peace
and prosperity, a proposal that was aided by the accession of the Benelux countries
and Italy to the ECSC in 1951. The Treaty of Rome in 1957 brought deeper collabora-
tion between its signatories in the form of the European Economic Community (EEC),
introducing the legal basis for a customs union, common agricultural and transport
policies, a common structural fund, and the foundation of the European Commission,
Council and Parliament. The idea of the single common market was only fully realised
in the Maastricht Treaty, at which stage the EEC dropped the moniker ‘Economic’ in
favour of the broader European Community, and ultimately European Union. This
reflected the greater supranational organisation with common monetary, social, foreign
and security policies from the Mediterranean to the polar circle, from the Atlantic to
the Black and Baltic Seas. Lurking constantly in the background – indeed, providing the
unification process with its justifying narrative – were the spectres of two world wars.
Given its professed aim to transcend the national paradigm, it is notable that the
EU’s programme of cultural funding has provided financial and structural support to
numerous films that engage with these traumatic memories in broadly gothic modes.
These include Delicatessen (one of the first awards made under the EU MEDIA fund-
ing programme in 1991) and El laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). These are
examples of gothic narratives that not only emerge from the geographical region of the
EU, but in which the EU actively invested (IMDB 2021).
Delicatessen is a disturbing and darkly humorous dystopian film. It is set in a
decaying city some time in the future where food is so scarce that a butcher, Clapet,
has started to sell human meat to his customers. He sources this from young men he
hires as assistants and then slaughters. One day, Stan, a former circus performer and a
vegetarian, arrives in the shop looking for work. The problem for Clapet is that Stan
is such an expert worker with unrivalled knife skills that he puts off murdering him.
Clapet’s daughter Julie falls in love with Stan and engages the help of an underground
group of vegetarians, the Troglodistes, to help rescue him from Clapet. In the end,
after numerous botched murder attempts, Clapet is killed and the Troglodistes help
Julie and Stan to start a new life. Delicatessen is open to multiple interpretations: there
is clearly an engagement with the ethics of eating meat, for example, and the dysto-
pian setting and food shortages suggest an engagement with environmental disaster
(Austin 1996, 137). It is notable, however, just how much of the film’s action is limited
to events in and around the tenement house itself. Given how inhospitable the home
seems to be, locating the film within the long tradition of unhomely gothic homes
seems fitting. Not only do Clapet’s violent murders of his neighbours and the can-
nibalism of his lodgers point in this direction, the fact that the rest of the community
appears to be fully aware that the meat they are consuming has come from those who
live in their own homes heightens this horror. This sense of unhomeliness is visually
aided by the use of confusing and disturbing camera angles, expressionist lighting and
frequent nocturnal settings, all oriented towards fantastic cinematography.
Critics have frequently noted how both the mise en scène and a host of cinemato-
graphic allusions locate the action in Delicatessen in the 1930s and 1940s. The use
of clothes and props (domestic appliances like stoves, coffee grinders and wireless
radios) in particular achieves this historical anchoring. The film also borrows heavily

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from the aesthetic of Marcel Carné, amongst others, inviting an interpretation of the
inhospitable home in Delicatessen as an allegorical representation of Vichy-era France
(see Hayes 1999, 199). Indeed, there are several parallels to the German occupation,
including the themes of food shortages, a black market, collaboration between the
murderous butcher and the neighbours, and the presence of an underground resistance
movement. Indeed, the tyrannical butcher Clapet is not only derived from the horror
genre, he also recalls actual war criminals like Klaus Barbie, nicknamed the ‘Butcher
of Lyon’ (Austin 1996, 137). These contexts suggest we view Delicatessen as a repre-
sentation of the Vichy regime’s complicity in Nazi atrocities, especially the Holocaust
(Hayes 1999, 203–5). Indeed, although we never see actual cannibalism, one of the
most disturbing aspects of the film is the matter-of-factness of the interactions between
Clapet and his cannibalistic customers, suggesting that this monstrosity is systemic
rather than a deviant aberration. Delicatessen thus revisits France’s repressed engage-
ment with totalitarian politics, and locates the film within the central EU narrative of
coming to terms with the traumatic recent past in Europe. Produced with EU financial
assistance, it is a literal example of EU Gothic.
Similar links between traumatic memory resulting from warfare, nationalism and the
gothic have been powerfully demonstrated by critics like Linnie Blake and Adam Lowen-
stein, amongst others (Blake 2008; Lowenstein 2005), allowing us to view Delicatessen
as part of this broader development in recent gothic and horror cinema. While engaging
with different historical traumas, critics such as Xavier Aldana Reyes and Ann Davies
have shown how recent Spanish narratives – particularly in film – also focus on similar
issues with respect to Spanish fascism and the legacies of the Francoist regime (Davies
2016; Aldana Reyes 2017, 209–15). Spain’s transition to democracy following the end of
Franco’s rule in 1975 culminated in its accession to the EU alongside Portugal in 1986,
the incorporation of these former dictatorships (following Greece in 1981) serving as a
prime example of the EU’s status as a guarantor of liberal democracy on the continent.
As Aldana Reyes has argued, however, it was not until the Socialist Party entered govern-
ment in 2004 that any meaningful engagement with Franco’s regime or the Civil War
became visible, with some of the most powerful responses coming in the gothic mode.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) is one case in point and it too was produced
with assistance from the MEDIA programme.
Del Toro had already used the gothic mode to engage with the repressed memories
of the Civil War in El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone (2001), with its ghost
Santi haunting a children’s home and representing the forgotten victims of the war
(Davies 2015, 46–7). While the earlier film is set in the last phase of the war, and features
children threatened by actual fighting, Pan’s Labyrinth is set in the liminal period when
the war has been decided but the final surviving Republicans, the maquis who were
subsequently ‘deleted’ from all official records, have not been completely suppressed.
The film tells the story of Ofelia, who relocates to the border region with France when
her mother marries a loyal Francoist, Captain Vidal. The film is a confusing mix of
historical war film, fairy tale and horrific child-quest narrative, which utilises the gothic
as ‘a shared iconographic language that . . . allows for an engagement with notions of
good and evil, oppression and liberation, power and insurrection’ (Aldana Reyes 2017,
220). The fantasy elements feature supernatural creatures (such as the iconic Pale Man,
with his eye-hands) but the real monsters are human rather than supernatural, and
this points towards the engagement with Spain’s traumatic history. The plot revolves

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around the tyrannical acts of the family’s patriarch, suggesting that Vidal as the brutal
pater familias is an allegory for Franco himself (Hubner 2018, 163–4).
As remarkable as they are, these supernatural elements provide little reprieve from
the historical violence. Ofelia’s fantastic excursions always return to the actual victims of
Vidal’s torture, such as the partisan with a ruined hand in the first torture scene, where the
long takes and lingering close-ups generate visceral moments of brutality, heightening the
effect of Vidal’s victims’ suffering (Luckhurst 2010, 18–19). Given this concentration on
actual violence, we are encouraged to see the enchanted fairy tale spaces to which Ofelia
escapes allegorically: this is a landscape reverberating with symbolically displaced repre-
sentations of the suffering and trauma of Spain’s fascist past, a past from which accession
to the EU was supposed to provide a clean, democratic break.

From Spectres of Nations to Spectral Union

As different as they are in style and historical reference, Delicatessen and Pan’s Laby-
rinth offer a useful departure point for defining an EU Gothic in formation. Both films
register the trauma of totalitarianism and populism in the twentieth century. As such,
these films speak to the remnants of a horrific recent past against which the process
of European integration actively defines itself. The political rhetoric around the EU’s
development remains haunted by these traumatic memories. Thus, modern Europhiles
argue that ‘democracy and politics should be rethought at European level because
national governments now look like zombies. They are like walking dead in the sense
that they can no longer govern but they do not tell this to the people’ (Marini 2014).
Eurosceptics, on the other hand, question the legitimacy of the EU to impose
directives on the nation states, arguing that it cannibalises national sovereignty with
a neo-colonial, gargantuan bureaucracy and its abstract directives from faceless,
unelected technocrats. For them, only the national is grounded in reality, while the
EU is a phantasmagorical technocracy stitched together around chimerical ‘Western’
values (Boffey 2021). This ambivalent status was already central to the key founda-
tional myth of the EU as a bulwark against the horrors of European totalitarianism
in the 1950s. Schuman’s announcement of the ECSC already spoke of European
unification in these uncanny terms:

Nearly five years to the day after the unconditional surrender of Germany, France
is now taking the first decisive step towards the construction of Europe and is asso-
ciating Germany in this venture. . . . Out of all this will come forth Europe, a solid
and united Europe. (Cited in Probst 2003, 48)

This image vacillates between the spectres of fascism in the past and those of a future
transnational union to come (on spectres from the future, see Lewis and Payne’s 1989
interview with Derrida). True, Schuman’s future Europe is a benevolent power, but
this is still an act of conjuration, a séance summoning up a ‘new’ Europe (albeit based
on an older, humanist ideal) with a promise to banish the spectres of ‘old’ Europe’s
nationalisms. This promise of unity is visionary in every sense of the word: the idea of
a new political order begins to manifest here, visible as a shadowy outline but not (yet)
grounded in reality. This Europe is hauntological, ‘neither living nor dead, present nor
absent: it spectralizes’ (Derrida 2006, 63).

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The EU is the institutionalised manifestation of this spectre, a process also

described as ‘Europeanisation’. The actual processes of Europeanisation never truly
realised Schuman’s vision, however, because from the start the bloc’s central decisions
were reached in the European Council where national leaders acted primarily in their
own national interests, if needs be, through vetoes. Polemically speaking, this has pro-
duced a fundamental deficit that remains at the core of the European project: the EU
appeals rhetorically to post-national democratic structures but in practice remains tied
to national competencies. Brussels itself is perhaps the best symbol of this: the capital
of the EU by convention, located parasitically in the capital city of a member state, on
grounds it rented and then bought from Belgium, with unelected bureaucrats develop-
ing laws and directives that can only be enacted by the individual nation states. This
is an uncanny place for a spectral union, hovering ambivalently between the transna-
tional and the national.
This is precisely the picture of the EU and Brussels that emerges in Austrian writer
Robert Menasse’s 2017 novel Die Hauptstadt (The Capital, 2019). The novel’s mul-
tiple plotlines move back and forth between a murder in a Brussels hotel, the story
of Matek Oswiecki, a Polish hitman working for an Eastern European secret service,
Fenia Xenopholou and her team of bureaucrats’ plans for an EU commemorative event
to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the EU Commission, and the work of lobbying
think tanks. The story culminates in a terrorist attack on Maelbeek metro station (the
site of an actual Islamist attack in 2016). The Capital is not primarily a gothic nar-
rative, vacillating between crime thriller, political satire and a mimetic representation
of the various communication networks that make up the EU. If this is realism, it is
of a weird kind, however, and has more in common with Dickens’s Bleak House than
Balzac. The murder and terrorist plots conceal grand conspiracy theories involving
NATO, the Catholic Church and religious fundamentalists that would not be out of
place in a gothic novel from the 1790s. Lurking beneath its humour and satire, The
Capital offers a fundamentally uncanny, but no less accurate, representation of the
European project as an intangible idea with a dislocated and dislocating bureaucratic
hub, but with tangible effects around the continent.
The Capital depicts the EU as a spectral transnational technocracy; indeed, the
heady mixture of democratic deficiencies, regulatory obsessiveness and national par-
ticularism at the heart of Europeanisation is the target of some of the novel’s strongest
criticism. The main problem is not European integration, however, but rather the
lack of an actual post-national, integrated political union (Menasse has written about
this repeatedly; see for example 2015). In characters like Holocaust survivor David
de Vriend and the economist Alois Erhart, the idea of the EU as protection against
nationalism and populism becomes clear. This is most obvious when Erhart explains
his support for a ‘New Pact of Europe’: ‘Nationalism, racism, and Auschwitz: never
again!’ (Menasse 2019, chap. 13). What remains of Erhart’s European idea is an
increasing and equally problematic focus on neoliberal economic management cul-
tures, however. Following the announcement of Fenia’s plans to commemorate the
Treaty of Rome in Auschwitz, the individual nations’ various lobbying activities begin
to unfold: ‘the Polish government instructed Polish officials in the various ministries
to pull the plug on this European Commission campaign, which was an attack on
the pride of the Polish nation’ (Menasse 2019, chap. 11). When the President of the
European Commission involves the European Council in the process, the Austrians,

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Czechs and Germans all join in this chorus, each attempting to distract attention from
their own responsibility for World War II. The EU emerges here as a set of opaque
networks of communication, dissimulation, political opportunism and bureaucratic
intrigue that sinks the project: ‘That is the new generation here, Bohumil had said,
they’re not Europeans, only careerists in the European institutions’ (Menasse 2019,
chap. 7). This is a perfect reflection on the stereotypical view of the EU as a spectral-
ising bureaucracy of Kafkaesque proportions. Faced with such visions of Brussels, I
am not the only reader to have been reminded of the episode in the Danish political
drama Borgen where the Prime Minister Birgitte Nyborg is about to appoint a new
EU commissioner. When one of her aides advises Nyborg to nominate a rival to the
post to make him disappear from domestic politics, it is the EU’s very transnational
technocratic and bureaucratic organisation which is captured in the haunting threat:
‘In Brussels, no one can hear you scream’ (Borgen 2011: season 2, episode 2; see
Erlanger 2018).
An odd conjunction becomes visible here between a professed Europhile like
Menasse and anti-Europeans on the political right like the PiS Party in Poland, Viktor
Orban’s Fidesz Party in Hungary, Nigel Farage in the UK, or Janez Jansa and the SDS
in Slovenia, in that both present Brussels and the EU institutions as phantasmagorical,
spectral forces. Farage’s former colleague as an MEP, Leonidas Donskis, recalls the
UKIP leader telling the then President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, in
a speech that ‘all your European institutions will be plain dead’ (Donskis 2014), sug-
gesting that the EU was already as good as dead. For these populists and demagogues,
the transnational Europe of the EU is a spectral union: nowhere and everywhere, a
dislocated bureaucracy, threatened and threatening, a protectionist lobby. This inverts
Schuman’s image, of course, to advocate less unity and more national control. Written
against this background, The Capital depicts the EU as a spectralising bureaucracy
machine in its own right, but Menasse also encourages us to identify these Eurosceptics
as uncanny revenants themselves. For him the problem is clearly not European integra-
tion, but rather the lack of real democratic structures beyond shared national economic
interests. The story around Matek speaks to a resurfacing of these conservative politics.
His collusion with the Vatican and the Polish secret service reveals the EU to be under
threat from revenants of populist politics across the bloc as a whole. Matek sees himself
as a ‘Soldier[] of Christ’ (Menasse 2019, chap. 7) and obviously represents a reaction-
ary brand of politics driven by conservative Christian morals and ideology out of synch
with the EU’s liberal principles.
The Capital thus deploys gothic tropes to render visible the ambivalent status of
the EU between its promises of supranational union and the loss of (however troubled)
established identities. In Menasse’s view, Europeanisation alternates between a utopian
political project that banishes the ghosts of the past and a transnational machinery that
generates new spectres, including the revenants of precisely such populism and nation-
alism as the EU sought to replace.

Uncanny Homelands on the EU’s Margins

Whether through cross-border financial transactions, movements of people, or amal-
gamations of cultures, Europeanisation has produced profound transnational effects
but without overcoming the national paradigm. As we have seen, this led critics and

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advocates alike to see the EU as an abstract body made up of faceless, unelected and
unaccountable bureaucrats – a spectrality machine (dis)located in Brussels. Such
criticism ignores the fact that like other agents in the transnational networks of the
globalised world order, the EU conforms to the logic of glocalisation (Polan 1996;
Sassen 2001): Europeanisation is not completely dislocated, nor is it without concrete
biopolitical ramifications that are felt ‘on the ground’ in very real ways. I have previously
argued that such localised effects of transnational agency have enabled the generation
of new uncanny spatial and social relations that can be identified as one key manifesta-
tion of globalgothic (Murnane 2013). As has also been discussed elsewhere in this
volume, when the local is a momentary position on a transnational network, then
stable locations and identities such as region and nation, or self and other, appear to
be interpenetrated by processes of political and cultural significance (possibly) happen-
ing elsewhere. Globalgothic emerges in a world in which the home/the local is always
already uncanny/unhomely/foreign and manifests as a mode of cultural representation
in which such uncanny experiences are rendered visible. In the case of the EU, such
moments of glocalisation arise from treaties which enact wide-reaching policies that
profoundly affect the realities of its citizens, some in the interest of progressive social
policies and others of a more restrictive nature. This produces contradictions between
the expressed utopian ideals of the EU and its real effects on the ground. These contra-
dictions lie behind a new wave of gothic texts and films particularly from the margins
of the Union, as I wish to suggest now with reference to recent Greek cinema.
The EU operates explicit and implicit biopolitical regimes which encompass –
internally – liberal political, economic, legislative and cultural matters. These include
honouring human rights, a competitive market economy, upholding the rule of law,
functioning free and democratic structures, and guarantees of freedom of movement,
thought, religion, assembly, expression and information. Alongside these internal prior-
ities, the EU is committed – externally – to joint security and foreign policies, including
protection of the EU’s trade interests and single market by strict policing of its external
borders. These wide-reaching policies include directives regarding health care (ranging
from occupational health to rules for medical research), business and finance (captured,
for example, in the austerity politics after 2010), reproduction rights and workplace
equality (in response to an ageing population and declining fertility rates across the
bloc), and finally migration (in the oft-invoked – and much criticised – idea of ‘Fortress
Europe’). Each of these examples adheres to the processes of governmentality described
by Michel Foucault as biopolitics, as they focus on the management of human life on
the macro-level of entire populations and the micro-level of individual human bodies
and choices (Foucault 2003).
It is arguably the EU’s joint crises of the early 2010s, the financial crash and the
arrival of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East, that have produced the
most visible and anxiety-inducing effects on a local level across the EU in recent years.
These are issues that also run to the heart of what has become known as the ‘Greek
Weird Wave’. These films are not concerned predominantly with the supernatural,
most are not even recognisably fantastic in nature, and indeed Dimitris Papanikolou
defines their ‘weirdness’ by virtue of the fact that if anything, they are overtly met-
onymic in their relationship to contemporary Greek and European reality (Papaniko-
lou 2021, 126–8, 228–31), a weird form of realism linked to Mark Fisher’s concept of
‘Capitalist Realism’ (Fisher 2009, 23–7). As I have argued elsewhere (Murnane 2016),

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however, many contemporary gothic narratives operate with similar metonymic meth-
ods and several of these Greek films construct scenarios closely related to the gothic.
Two films here are a case in point, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kynodontas/Dogtooth (2009)
and Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence (2013), where the connection to the gothic
is most clearly visible in their preoccupation with inhospitable, uncanny homes, often
linked with troubling acts of familial violence. In their often quite visceral brutal-
ity, these films generate responses of extreme psychological distress (Lübecker 2015,
104–10). Yannis Veslemes’s Norvigia/Norway (2014), on the other hand, features a
clearly supernatural figure in the vampire, Zano, who descends on Athens in the year
1984, looking for a good time.
Norway is certainly a weird film, taking its visual lead from pulp genre movies and
TV series like The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Hunger, post-punk synthpop
video aesthetics and 1980s New Wave fashion (Mademli 2015; Boyce 2014). Zano
appears in the guise of a 1980s hedonist, telling us that his heart will stop the moment
he stops dancing, or consuming more than just blood, especially hard drugs. As his
humorous tag line makes clear, the film plays for laughs as much as it does for shocks,
but then comedy is a characteristic that need not contradict the gothic as a mode
(Horner and Zlosnik 2005; Spooner 2017). Indeed, the film also includes outright
fantastic and horror elements, including numerous acts of brutal neck-biting and
Zano’s trip into a bizarre underworld accessed through a portal in the mountains. Here
Zano encounters the villain who has been manipulating him throughout the film and
who wants to be bitten by a vampire to gain eternal life. The image of a melancholic,
tired Zano hanging out of car windows and roaming in the dark between underground
clubs with his friends, the prostitute Aliki and the Norwegian drug dealer Peter, recalls
Jim Jarmusch’s vampire maudit from Only Lovers Left Alive, which was released
only one year before Norway. Another point of reference is German Expressionism:
produced on a shoestring budget, the Athenian cityscapes were built using small-scale
models and backlighting, very much in the visual tradition of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.
Norway depicts an Athens that is heavily laden with the trappings of a transnational
and all-pervading gothic imaginary (Kadritzke 2014).
Making sense of Norway is difficult; it is such a mash-up of different genres and
odd stories that this partly seems to be the point. The film is more than just an aesthetic
game, however, and Zano seems to function as a medium to re-evaluate the past and
its legacy to the reality of contemporary transnational and globalised late modernity,
including a thinly veiled critique of those who have shaped Greek and European soci-
ety in the past. Thus the underground villain in the Parnitha mountains, Mathousalas,
appears to be a mixture of Fredersen in Metropolis and an evil dictator hooked up to a
life-support machine in full military uniform. Set in 1984, this fantasy scenario opens
up multiple lines of interpretation, invoking the memory of Greece’s own military
junta, on the one hand, but also drawing playfully on stereotypical images of Hitler
(Dalton 2014). Alternatively, the idea of a bloodsucking dictator figure may be more
contemporary in focus, offering a thinly veiled commentary on the current situation
in Greece. Vampires have always functioned as emblems of hedonistic excess and their
consumption of blood has long been equated with the dangers of capitalism. Zano’s
life of dancing, consuming drugs and slinking through the underground scene in
Athens is certainly located in this tradition. Mathousalas’s desire to attain eternal life
through becoming a vampire is clearly an allegory of how the excesses of the previous

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generation have now ended up sucking the life and hopes out of the current genera-
tion of youths in Greece. To underline this contemporary focus, at one point we see
a portrait of the late leader of the Greek Socialist Party, Andreas Papandreou, prime
minister throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s, who was also the father of George
Papandreou, the prime minister who agreed to place Greece into special measures by
applying for joint IMF and EU support in 2010.
On the other hand, Mathousalas’s similarities with Hitler invoke populist
responses to the EU’s austerity programme in Greece and elsewhere. Mathousalas’s
underground lair is dimly lit by odd, runic neon signs, recalling the ultranationalist
Golden Dawn Party’s own use of such symbolism. Similarly, a famous cartoon
by the Syriza Party depicted the German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble in a
Wehrmacht uniform (Spiegel 2015). In both cases, we can identify a criticism of
overly simplistic nationalist and anti-migrant solutions to the Greek financial crisis.
This reading also extends to the other major strain on Greek society in the last ten
years: the European migrant crisis. In the course of the Brexit referendum, Eurosceptics
like the Golden Dawn have turned repeatedly to gothic tropes to demonise asylum
seekers and migrants. Nigel Farage famously invoked images of the undead when he
produced his vile ‘Breaking Point’ poster in the Brexit referendum, showing a train of
refugees on the Slovenian-Croatian border. The doctored image was clearly chosen
to resemble a zombie apocalypse, playing with fears of a Muslim ‘invasion’ enabled
by the EU’s supposedly lax migration policies towards refugees. Incidentally, the
image resurfaced in Viktor Orban’s general election campaign in Hungary in 2018 –
the revenant of a revenant – to stoke the same nativist fires there as in the UK. That
nothing could be further from the truth and that the EU’s border regime is anything
but lax was irrelevant in both of these contexts.
Indeed, Farage’s zombie invasion poster was arguably so successful not simply
because it responded to identitarian ideologies, but because it was grounded in a rigid
biopolitical narrative of the EU’s own making. Farage’s zombie invasion was merely
the grotesque figuration of the EU’s own policies; indeed, European leaders like cur-
rent Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte have themselves referred repeatedly to Europe
being at ‘breaking point’ (Elliot and Traynor 2016) and of the need to ‘resist the
unchecked influx of migrants and work harder on [their] return’ (Rutte 2018). The
difference between Rutte and Farage is merely one of rhetorical subtlety; the protec-
tionist message remains problematically similar. In Norway, Veslemes deploys Zano
as a transnational, itinerant vampire moving through the non-places of the Athens
underworld, from train stations to dance clubs, from dreary alleyways to art deco
cinemas, both invoking and deconstructing this right-wing ideology of migrants as
an undead threat. All of which suggests that the weird nature of Norway demands to
be historicised in terms of contemporary social and political history. In drawing on
an undead figure like the vampire, one of the archetypal globalgothic figurations for
representing the conflicts and dangers within the transnational networks of commerce,
communication and finance in capitalist globalisation, Norway is readily relatable to
contemporary biopolitical questions and issues in Greece.
Not all movies in the Greek Weird Wave are as overtly fantastic as Norway, but
many do develop discomforting and uncanny representations of the transnational
flows and congeries of globalised capital and its European instantiation, the institu-
tion and policies of the EU. Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence starts by depicting

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a seemingly happy middle-class family celebration, with an older man dancing with
a young woman and younger children, before a young girl celebrating her eleventh
birthday jumps from the window of their comfortable but cramped apartment. In
what follows, the investigation of this suicide reveals a family story involving abuse,
exploitation, child sex-trafficking and incest set against the background of the Greek
financial crisis. We learn that the father is recently unemployed: he joins queues to
apply for state support and he frequently claims that this is the reason why he prosti-
tutes the rest of the family. We assume at first that the different generations are living
together because of the financial difficulties after 2010 which ripped the Greek middle
classes asunder. It gradually becomes clear, however, that the younger children may
be the offspring of the father and his older daughter, or the unwanted pregnancies as
a result of the sex work forced on her by the father. Either way, Miss Violence depicts
a family patriarch inflicting abject suffering on his family in the name of making ends
meet during the financial crisis.
This economic framework is important, because this dysfunctional family is run
like a new-style financial project: the father marketises his children and grandchildren
as a self-sufficient, lean enterprise while the Greek middle classes crumble into poverty.
Even when the film ends with the mother ritualistically murdering the father, it seems
that this is more because he has lost control of the enterprise than because she disagrees
with the ethics of the enterprise in the first place. In fact, after the murder we see her
commanding the children to stand in line, assuming governance rather than disbanding
it. There is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher repeatedly claimed. In Miss Violence
it seems psychological manipulation, violence and deviance is a price that needs to be
paid to create and maintain the exterior of middle-class prosperity and order in a time
of economic crisis.
The fact that the father claims in Miss Violence that the crisis is responsible for
his harrowing actions suggests a link to the EU’s austerity policies in Greece and
elsewhere in Europe in 2010 to 2012. The ‘budgetary responsibility’ he enacts on
his own family in the face of the economic decline of the middle classes produces a
brutal, incestuous cycle of violence, sexual abuse and trafficking, revealing a biopo-
litical regime of governing life itself that is truly harrowing. The father’s justification
can only be partially true, however, given that the abuse seems to have pre-dated
the film’s action by several years. In the father’s longer-term reign of terror, the film
renders visible the biopolitical toxicity of marketisation and ‘enterprising up’ of indi-
viduals at the heart of neoliberal economics, revealing a false, horrific economy that –
we assume – was at the heart of the Greek boom years around 2000. Given the fam-
ily was toxic before the film starts, Miss Violence reveals the ridiculous paradox of
the EU’s austerity programme: deploying neoliberal economic policies to cure the
effects of neoliberal economic policies is highly questionable and does untold harm.
The original democratic and liberal promise of the European project has been struck
through here: it is a promise that has not been delivered on in times when budgetary
responsibility is valued higher than democracy or liberal values, a promise that has
produced failed markets and social institutions.
Like the dilapidated cityscape we see around the family home, this particular bub-
ble has burst. We are left with a vision of the family as an inhospitable place, and the
suffering and deviance that occur therein are figured as the precondition for, rather
than the inverse of, middle-class prosperity. As critical as the film is about the impact

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of austerity, Miss Violence refuses to admonish Greece for its complicity in this finan-
cial crisis. Unlike the ultranationalists of the Golden Dawn Party, who simply reject
and demonise the EU outright, this film dwells on the EU’s democratic and social defi-
ciencies. In the claustrophobic scenarios, captivity and stunted development, we see
too little of the ideals of liberty, equality and solidarity in an EU that focuses primarily
on balancing the books.
There are no instances of the supernatural in Miss Violence, but as isolated as this
family home seems, it is caught up in a relay of national and transnational signifiers
anchoring the family firmly within broader socio-economic and political scenarios.
Although a seemingly self-contained space, the apartment block is haunted by traces
of foreign and unfamiliar meanings and signs, making it seem an uncanny, inhos-
pitable and weird space in its own right. Ipek Celik’s argument with respect to the
family’s locked-down seclusion in Dogtooth (Celik 2013), for example, also applies
to Miss Violence: the model of an isolated, self-sufficient family locked away from the
world actually echoes the concern with patrolling the freedom of movement into (and
indeed within) the EU which continues to dominate EU debates today. Through its
border patrol agency Frontex – structured as an agency in order to circumvent the fact
that border security is actually a national matter – the EU has been extremely active in
protecting the freedom of movement within its single market at the cost of freedom of
movement into it, especially by stateless individuals and refugees. For those migrants
lucky enough not to die during passage, further biopolitical measures await, includ-
ing diverting and managing migrant flows to specific routes and accommodating them
in makeshift camps (Davitti 2019). With a migration crisis reaching its peak during
the period Miss Violence was made, Greece came to be one of the major European
sites for the organisation, detention and deportation of people around the European
Union. The construction of camps for holding migrants is one of the most visible
signs of how EU biopolitics manifested glocally in Greece. Actual migrants might be
entirely absent in Miss Violence, but by turning the narrative inwards towards an
obsession with creating a safe, almost hermetically sealed familial space (a brutal,
imagined scenario, of course), the EU’s migrant crisis maintains a haunting presence
on the margins of the film.
In the fixation with surveillance, discipline and segregation, the family in Miss Vio-
lence seems to represent the pure, financially pressured European family in the age of
European austerity. Likewise, the brutal fate of the children speaks to the stultifying
grip of right-wing politics on Greece’s youth – and latterly, xenophobia and national-
ism in the form of the Golden Dawn Party too. The demonisation of migrants that we
find in the right-wing populist discourse about the EU is countered in the Greek Weird
Wave with a brutal vision of the deviant Greek family unit itself. There is a more con-
crete link in this respect to Norway, not least because Zano arrives in the dead of night
from a foreign location. It is not too far-fetched to locate this particular transnational
vampire with the undead figurations familiar from conservative politicians and nation-
alists around Europe like Farage, Orban or Greece’s own Nikolaos Michaloliakos. Of
course, as already suggested, Vaslemes’s film ironises the nativist rhetoric of ethnic and
cultural purity and eternal Greek identity by depicting Mathousalas as a visual revenant
of a Hitler-like dictator, demanding to become a vampire himself. This reveals the local
responses to the financial and migration crisis as vampiric revenants of earlier popu-
lisms and xenophobic politics in their own right.

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 eu gothic 479

In these films, seemingly stable locations are revealed to be interpenetrated by unceas-

ing processes of European signification; their respective scenarios are overwritten with
EU directives, policies and biopolitical regimes. This produces disturbing, uncanny col-
lisions of specific localities and supranational policies and communiques with local acts
of identity-formation and social organisation conducted through wider European, and
even global, circuits and flows. As uncanny as this is in Miss Violence, and as psychologi-
cally disturbing as the film is, this uncanny nature of the EU is not registered in tropes
of the supernatural, however. We see a more decisive turn towards fantastic in Norway,
of course, with Zano’s vampirism clearly aiming to generate an aesthetic of the weird
as supernatural and gothic. Despite these differences, both films are still obsessed with
contemporary politics, power relations and regulation of life under the auspices of the
nation state and the EU, and they each render the contradictions and power structures
within this nexus within the framework of globalgothic production.

The EU as Gothicised Union

EU Gothic follows three trajectories. Firstly, it registers the EU as haunted by the spectres
of Europe’s nationalist histories. Secondly, it engages with contemporary EU structures
and policies to reveal its institutions as spectralising in their own right. Indeed, in doing
so, these works can draw on the centrality of gothic registers to the structures, politics
and rhetoric of the EU since its earliest incarnation as the ECSC in the 1950s. Here it
is notable that pro-EU and anti-EU positions alike draw on images of monstrosity and
spectrality in their negotiation of the EU’s contradictory and increasingly questioned
status. Thirdly, each of the texts and films discussed here is concerned with rendering
the effects of the EU’s biopolitical and economic regimes visible through gothic images,
tropes and techniques, particularly from its geographic margins. The ghosts at the intel-
lectual core of European unification have not been exorcised by the bureaucratic insti-
tutions it has spawned, it seems, and it is these contradictions to which what I have
described as EU Gothic responds.

Note
1. The following overview is based on the work of Smith and Stirk (1990), Desmond Dinan
(2004) and Kaiser and Varsori (2016).

References
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Lanthimos, Yorgos, director. 2009. Dogtooth. Greece: Boo Productions. DVD.

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8133_Duncan.indd 482 31/05/23 4:33 PM
 Coda

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8133_Duncan.indd 484 31/05/23 4:33 PM
 Planetary Gothic: An Invitation
Rebecca Duncan

I n the introduction to this collection, I outlined a series of difficulties that arise

from the critical approach to gothic fiction that equates the ‘global’ with ‘globalisa-
tion’. In particular, I highlighted how the version of the world on which globalgothic
has so far been predicated – one that sees old geopolitical hierarchies dissolved into
dematerialised ‘flows’ (Byron 2013, 3) – appears increasingly implausible at our pres-
ent moment, when uneven distributions of climate- and pandemic-related vulnerability
are vividly exposing the racialised, gendered and geographical inequalities that have
endured despite late-twentieth-century proclamations of a new world order. In fact, if
globalgothic is understood as gothic that engages a novel transnational landscape of
frictionless mobility and cultural exchange, then it may be the case, I suggested, that
the term applies largely to fiction from certain deindustrialised (Northern) regions –
places where the shape of society did indeed transform with the relocation of manu-
facturing to postcolonial nations across the Global South.
As it falls short, in this way, of the South’s geohistorical experience, the globalisa-
tion theory of globalgothic may also obstruct critical routes into gothic’s engagement
with currently unfolding climate and cognate crises – a focus of gothic fiction to the
existence of which many contributions in this volume attest. This impasse is visible in
the register of culture, tradition and identity to which much globalgothic criticism has
limited itself so far, and arises as a result of the presentism that underpins the identi-
fication of the late twentieth century as a new world order. Such a proposition only
makes sense, as I argued with recourse to Andreas Malm (2018), through the erasure
of a historical continuity, which consists in the persistence of those forms of material
capitalist production supposedly superseded by the emergence of an ostensibly free-
floating or spectralised late-twentieth-century market. The effacement of this history
is simultaneously the effacement of global heating and the conditions that produce it,
since these are inseparable precisely from the processes of extraction through which
capital has always operated, into the present.
For a theory of gothic production that accounts, on the one hand, for contempo-
rary gothic’s real investment in questions and anxieties surrounding climate break-
down, and which is, on the other, truly global in scope, it is thus necessary to move
beyond turn-of-the-millennium accounts of globalisation. In this coda, I reflect on two
recent conceptions of ‘the planetary’ that make room for such a critical shift. Though –
as I will show – ‘Planetary Gothic’ may describe a certain set of fictional aesthetics and
preoccupations, the term is also intended in a broader and more open sense, to name
a range of approaches to gothic fictions, which contextualise these amid the tran-
sregional relationships of power and production that organise both human societies

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 486 rebecca duncan

and more-than-human nature on a global scale. To the world-ecological/world-literary

analysis of globalgothic outlined in the introduction to this volume, this coda will thus
add a selection of complementary (but by no means exhaustive) propositions regard-
ing Planetary Gothic. One aim here is to name, and thus give further coherence to, a
renewed materialist impulse in gothic studies, which understands gothic production as
a key vocabulary for, and sometimes also a commentator on, located experiences of
variegated but global socio-ecological shifts and crises. Another objective, however, is
to invite participation in an emergent conversation: one that responds to the question
of how gothic imaginaries register, collude with or interrogate the material and ideo-
logical vectors that unevenly contour the planet – on which I will say more shortly – in
our apocalyptic present.

Global and Planetary: The Earth-System Unconscious

In The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) – perhaps the most influential recent
engagement with the planetary within the humanities – Dipesh Chakrabarty draws a
distinction: ‘the concept of globe in the word globalisation [i]s not the same’, he writes,
‘as the concept of the globe in the expression global warming’ (18, emphasis in origi-
nal). The difference between these two categories lies, for Chakrabarty, in the position
within them of the human. While the first ‘globe’ ‘is a humanocentric construction’, the
second ‘decentres’ humanity (19), and belongs to the domain of the planet. This latter, in
Chakrabarty’s view, is synonymous with the Earth System, a term that designates how
‘planetary processes . . . involving the actions of both the living and the non-living are . . .
interlocked in complicated, complex, and precarious ways’ (77). The discipline of Earth
Systems Science (ESS), on which Chakrabarty draws to elucidate his argument, exam-
ines these interrelationships by attending to biological and geological transformations
over hundreds of millions of years, while also locating Earth in comparative relation to
exoplanets beyond our solar system – ‘contrary to what we might think’, Chakrabarty
writes, ‘the science of global warming is not . . . specific to this planet’ (75). Operating
on scales that exceed those occupied by Homo sapiens, ESS thus recounts a history at
the crux of which is ‘complex, multicellular life in general’ and not life as it pertains to
our species alone (83). It is for this reason that Chakrabarty understands the planetary as
non-anthropocentric – as a category that, in his words, ‘decentres’ the human.
By contrast, the human remains squarely central to the history of globalisation as
Chakrabarty conceives of it. In his view, this unfolds a situation in which ‘[h]umans are
now spread all over the globe’, and in which ‘there is nowhere else to go’, given that,
in addition to the land, ‘we control the skies and the water’ (73). The process through
which this totalising dispersal is achieved is inseparable, Chakrabarty writes, from ‘the
history of European expansion, trade, [and] the mapping and navigation of the seas’
(71), and so also from the intertwining histories of colonialism and capitalism. Recount-
ing all of this, the narrative of globalisation is thus one in which ‘humans historically
connected into a human sense of the globe’ (71), and in which dimensions of the Earth
System feature as important only to the extent that they relate to the demands of such
expanding human societies. Hence, Chakrabarty concludes, ‘the globe of globalisa-
tion embodies . . . [an] anthropocentric and anthropological practice of representation’
(75). As such, it is conceptually incommensurable with the non-anthropocentric scales
of the planetary, though – as Chakrabarty notes – it is planetary processes, the linked

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 coda: planetary gothic 487

elements of the Earth System, that nonetheless undergird and ‘enabl[e] conditions for
both human existence and flourishing’ (85).
Here we come to the central point: while they name distinct historical temporalities
and scopes, the planet and the globe are not unconnected. Not only is the planet the
globe’s condition of possibility, but the global – as what Chakrabarty calls ‘capitalist
globalization’ (3) – is also intervening in planetary processes, which ‘until now have
operated mostly independently of human activities’ (4). Events connected to current
shifts across the Earth System – changing weather patterns and sea levels, desertifi-
cation, species loss and a host of others – thus constitute what Chakrabarty names
‘intimations of the planetary’, through which a non-anthropocentric history intrudes
into the too-narrow anthropocentric frame. There is an important resonance here with
Amitav Ghosh’s literary assessment of ‘climate change and the unthinkable’ – the sub-
title of his Great Derangement (2016). For Ghosh, unfolding climatic transformations
also resist interpretation through traditions of knowledge rooted in a humanist para-
digm, though for him this is specifically because humanism – a product of Western
Enlightenment – rests on a binary distinction between humans and the rest of nature.
The effects of contemporary global heating thus confront this epistemic position with
something like the return of what it has repressed: the social – or, for Chakrabarty,
global – origin of these apparently ‘natural’ events may provoke the wider realisation
that human activity has always been sustained by its unacknowledged entanglement
with what Ghosh refers to as ‘nonhuman forces’ (2016, 31).
As I have already discussed in my contribution this volume, Ghosh’s argument lays
one foundation for a conception of the gothic as a key mode for narrating climate break-
down and related socio-ecological crises: as a literary form birthed in ‘the underside of
enlightenment’ – as Fred Botting puts it (1996, 1) – gothic has arguably always pro-
vided space to examine that for which the humanist paradigm cannot account. Recast
in Chakrabarty’s terms, the point opens room for a theorisation of ‘Planetary Gothic’
as gothic fiction in which the anthropocentric process of globalisation is brought into
contact with the vast spatial and temporal magnitude of the Earth System on which it
has relied, and which it simultaneously represses and – in the present moment – also
provokes. Such a gothic would thus stage a socio-ecological situation in which – as
Chakrabarty puts it – ‘[t]he planetary now bears down on our everyday consciousness’
and the ‘age of the global as such is ending’ (2021, 85).
Jaco Bouwer’s ecohorror film Gaia (2021) is here worth mentioning again for the
clarity with which it elaborates this scenario in a gothic register. As we will recall, Gaia
excavates a monstrous and ancient mycelium network – a planetary being, in Chakrab-
arty’s sense of the term – which has been lying dormant and unacknowledged beneath
the human world since before humans evolved, but which during the film unleashes
itself in an act of retribution for the ecocidal effects of globalised industrialisation. The
strategy through which this vengeance unfolds is a transformation of the human spe-
cies into fungal incubators for the mycelium entity, a narrative trajectory which vividly
suggests the transience of Homo sapiens in the context of a grander geohistory. We are
called to consider, in other words, that the Earth System will transform and endure,
despite the demise of a globalised human population – a point that Chakrabarty makes
himself: ‘Many traditions of thought . . . may have considered the earth-human rela-
tion special; with regard to the planet we are no more special than any other forms of
life’, and thus like such other forms before us, we may disappear (2021, 90).

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 488 rebecca duncan

It is not unimportant that Gaia can be read as a film that problematically subordi-
nates issues of race, class and gender to concerns relating to the destruction of extra-
human nature – an argument I have made elsewhere in this collection. That this text
dramatises a Planetary Gothic mode, retrieving something like an Earth-System uncon-
scious from beneath the surface of human society, might thus give pause for thought
over the terms in which Chakrabarty’s argument operates. In particular, it could be
asked whether the level of the species at which the planetary demands that we address
climate and cognate crises might work against Chakrabarty’s acknowledgement of the
accountability of capitalism – acting through colonialism and patriarchy – in produc-
ing these deleterious and unevenly experienced circumstances. It is noteworthy, for
example, that Chakrabarty makes a turn towards the discourse of overpopulation
to explicate the Earth-System shifts with which his argument is concerned: he indicts
‘[p]olitical thought since the seventeenth century’ for its apparent ‘indifferen[ce] to
human numbers’, and concomitant reliance on the assumption that ‘the globe was
always resourced enough . . . no matter how demanding humans became on the earth’
(2021, 90–1). Such comments come quite close to a Malthusian analysis (and here it
seems important to point out that Malthus was himself an eighteenth-century political
economist), in which climate-change culpability is distributed evenly across the prolif-
erating species. This, as Vishwas Satgar notes, is an inevitably racialising manoeuvre,
in that it effectively ‘blames the most populous countries . . . including Africa, while
failing to appreciate the disproportionate impacts on particularly the black working-
class and . . . women’ (2018, 49).
In examining Planetary Gothic as a set of fictional concerns with the Earth-System
unconscious, we would thus do well to proceed with critical faculties attuned to the
ecological histories and dynamics of racialised and gendered power. For an example of
a text that itself approaches the planetary with such issues in mind – and which thus
demonstrates the generative possibilities of a Planetary Gothic fiction – we might turn
to Lee Haven Jones’s Welsh-language folk horror The Feast (2021). Here, oil explora-
tion on a newly well-off family’s estate in the Welsh mountains wakens an ancient god-
dess from her resting place beneath the hills, and – as in Gaia – provokes her vengeance
on the accountable parties. Unlike in Bouwer’s text, however, it is not the human species
writ large who are subject to this wrath; instead, the film traces out a complex inter-
section of gender and class, in which extractivism is aligned with extravagant wealth,
grotesque forms of misogynistic violence and the gruesome consumption of (animal)
bodies. It is notably through Cadi (Annes Elwy) – the hired help at the titular feast –
that the autochthonous spirit of the hills operates. The scenario reflects the gendered
and classed distribution of socio-ecological vulnerability (Cadi first has to die to serve
as the goddess’s vessel), while symbolically redressing this inequity as she takes revenge
for the sexual and environmental violences enumerated across the film. The Feast con-
cludes with the goddess returning to her primordial bed in the earth, a moment that
– again as in Gaia – summons the non-anthropocentric scale of Earth-System time, but
does so by foregrounding the demise of an ecocidal and patriarchal system of capital
accumulation, rather than the cosmic temporariness of the human species. As such,
the film mobilises Chakrabarty’s ‘intimations of the planetary’ in a way that studiously
avoids the Malthusian fallacy, calling implicitly for forms of sociality that are not predi-
cated on the suppression or subordination of the more-than-human world, while also
positioning this as the condition of possibility for all social forms.

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 coda: planetary gothic 489

The Planetary Mine

Chakrabarty’s account of the planetary and the global as distinct but connected histori-
cal categories thus provides a framework for identifying and analysing Planetary Gothic
fiction, in which gothic forms excavate the Earth-System unconscious that subtends
anthropocentric discourses of globalisation. As I noted in the introduction to this coda,
however, Planetary Gothic should also be understood as a critical approach, naming
related modes of locating and examining gothic forms in the context of transregional
power relations that bear diversely on human societies, the biosphere and nature. Here,
the planetary is best conceived as existing in the contact zone between Chakrabarty’s
two notions of the globe, and entails a perspective on capitalism as thoroughly entan-
gled with the effects and processes of the Earth System. Though its approach is different
from Chakrabarty’s, Martín Arboleda’s Planetary Mine (2020) – to which I will turn
shortly – helps to illuminate this interpenetration, and does so by returning us to that
conception of late-twentieth-century globalisation as novel geography of flows.
As we have seen with Jason Moore and Giovanni Arrighi in the introduction to this
volume, the history of capitalism has been punctuated by periods of heightened specula-
tion and market expansion that closely resemble the final decades of the last millennium.
Though in each case such moments may have appeared to usher in a new form of capital-
ism, they have in fact unanimously heralded a deepening and widening of the material
(imperial) processes of exploitation and extraction through which capitalism has always
functioned (Arrighi and Moore 2001, 56–7) – processes that operate, as we have repeat-
edly seen in this volume, via colonial conceptions of race and patriarchal conceptions of
gender. Discourses of globalisation that prioritise hypermobility and hybridity, spectral
finance and the circulation of (cultural) commodities can thus be understood as at best
addressing only one dimension of the late-twentieth-century global situation. Reiterating
the sense in which present social and environmental crises are exposing the limitations of
established critical lexica, Arboleda elaborates on this situation as follows:

The very idea of the ‘global’ . . . is being gradually superseded by that of the ‘plan-
etary’, in which the earth reemerges as an unfamiliar place riddled with eerie,
destructive and menacing forces. As opposed to the ‘spaces of flows’ and ‘liquid
modernities’ that populated earlier visions of globalisation, the notion of the plan-
etary designates a convoluted terrain where fences, walls, and militarised borders
coexist with sprawling supply chains and complex infrastructures of connectivity.
This realm is traversed by . . . tendencies towards functional integration in the
world economy and towards radical ethnoracial and sociospatial fragmentation.
(Arboleda 2020, chap. 1)

Running through and sustaining this complex landscape is the ‘planetary mine’ that
gives Arboleda’s book its title. This is not ‘a discrete sociotechnical object’ (chap. 1),
but rather an emerging geography of deterritorialised extraction, which incorporates
increasingly diverse forms and spaces of economic activity. Thinking with the planetary
mine makes visible, for example, the mineral composition of computing and storage
infrastructures that underpin global communication and finance, or the reliance – in
urban planning and transport sectors – on technology engineered for the mineshaft. It
similarly reveals the resonances between mineral speculation practices and the strategies

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of urban displacement imposed by corporate real estate on low-income communities,

or the replication and dissemination, in recent waves of global labour casualisation, of
employment conditions long endured by mine workers, especially (though not exclu-
sively) in the Global South (see Arboleda 2020, chaps. 1 and 8).
All of this helps to clarify the acknowledgement of persistent classed and racialised
hierarchies and borders in which Arboleda’s shift from the global to the planetary
consists. Not only does the physical locus of the mine – suffused in ecocide, in histories
of class, gender and colonial oppression – ground and enable the streams of money,
goods, people and information that characterise globalisation’s picture of the world;
the conditions of existence within these flows are themselves increasingly modelled on
extractivist tactics. The planetary emerges from this situation as a globally extensive
network of relationships, which on different levels and scales binds together ecosys-
tems, the geosphere and multiple facets of social life, in configurations inflected by
ongoing histories of power. Such a view accounts for globalisation’s fluid and dema-
terialised landscape, but also sees beyond it to the uneven geography of biophysical
extraction and human exploitation – a territory contoured over five centuries of capi-
talism by colonialism and heteropatriarchy – from which this landscape is inseparable,
and by which it has always been sustained. It is in this context that the multiple, linked
and complementary critical approaches that I suggest we collect under the sign of
‘Planetary Gothic’ locate the fictions they address.

Planetary Gothic: An Approach

Like earlier conceptions of globalgothic, a planetary perspective on gothic fiction takes as
its premise that what links different regions of the world together is a system of capitalist
relations (Byron 2013; Botting and Edwards 2013); it diverges from globalgothic, how-
ever, in its understanding of such relations, which – viewed with the planetary in mind –
always unfold within the sustaining context of the Earth System, and thus organise both
human societies and the rest of nature. As they are alive to the more-than-human in this
way, planetary approaches also foreground the histories and intersectional discourses of
power that shape which lives and environments are treated as exploitable, or as expend-
able in the face of unevenly distributed socio-ecological collapse. The account I gave, in
this volume’s introduction, of globalgothic beyond globalisation can be understood as
falling within the planetary’s critical frame. Building on literary accounts of the world-
ecology (Niblett 2012; Oloff 2012; Deckard et al. 2015), my suggestion there was that
the ‘global’ dimensions of gothic might be revealed, by situating a given text at the nexus
of the transregional and socio-ecological histories contouring its site of production, or
by attending to impulses within gothic narratives themselves to map such histories and
relations. The following three theses join with and expand these proposals, each demon-
strating a perspective on gothic fiction that addresses and provides insight into a certain
dimension of the planetary as – in Arboleda’s formulation – ‘an unfamiliar place riddled
with eerie, destructive and menacing forces’ (chap. 1).

Planetary Gothic Is Regional Gothic

The phrasing may appear contradictory, but as we have seen, the established globalisa-
tion theory of globalgothic production runs into problems because it generalises the

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 coda: planetary gothic 491

perspective that is available from certain, deindustrialised/financialised regions. If we

are to read gothic texts in relation to global capitalism, then this shows that we need
to be sensitive to how global capitalism operates and is differently experienced across
different regions of the world, at different periods in history. A planetary approach
would thus not seek primarily to examine how the global is metaphorised in gothic
forms; it would instead first ask how gothic fiction apprehends the violent local effects
of transregional capitalist relationships,1 and only then – if necessary – telescope the
analysis outwards to gothic as a more encompassing global allegory.
This would be the difference, for example, between reading the figure of the contem-
porary zombie as a general metaphor for unbridled capitalism – an approach taken, for
instance, by Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry in their influential ‘Zombie Manifesto’
(2008) – and distinguishing the listless or cannibalistic Romero-style horde from, say, the
undead workers that populate the contemporary African and African diasporic folklore
to which I drew attention earlier in this collection. Positioned in its regional context, the
former might reflect, as Roger Luckhurst notes of Romero’s own work, ‘the shift from
Fordist production to low-wage, de-skilled service industries’ in the deindustrialising
United States (2015, 151). The latter, by contrast, might register the threatening inten-
sification of forms of labour and environmental precarity instantiated under colonial
rule – an analysis I have made in this volume and elsewhere (Duncan 2022c). In both
cases, then, the zombie responds to and mediates global capitalist relations, but does so
as these are specifically experienced in different regions.

Planetary Gothic Is Capitalocene Gothic

As we have seen above, a planetary approach emphasises the uneven distribution of
social and environmental precarity, foregrounding regions across the Global South in
particular as especially vulnerable to the biophysical effects of the climate emergency.
Though the term ‘Anthropocene’ has gained critical dominion over the last decade
or so, it cannot adequately describe this inequality. The notion of a geological epoch
driven by the ‘anthropos’, or humanity generally, in fact risks placing culpability on
those humans – racialised, gendered, impoverished – who are the victims of unfolding
socio-ecological collapse, as Moore has argued (2019, 50). To grasp the climate emer-
gency through real socio-ecological inequality thus requires that we attend to how
certain regions and communities have been rendered disproportionately precarious
through centuries of extraction and exploitation; in short, it demands that we under-
stand capitalism, operating through colonialism and patriarchy, as the driving force
currently reshaping the Earth System.
I have already discussed at length in this collection how the Anthropocene analy-
sis appears in gothic fictions chiefly as a monstrous dissolution of the human/nature
binary – a posthuman synthesis frequently prioritised at the expense of attention to
racialised and gendered power relations from which ecological destruction is insepara-
ble. Capitalocene Gothic is, by contrast, sensitive to these intersecting inequities, and –
as in The Feast above – locates culpability in the system of capital, rather than with an
abstract conception of humanity. An apposite example of this strategy is offered by the
Singaporean writer Ng Yi-Sheng’s short story ‘Sin’, which features in his speculative
collection Lion City (2018). ‘Sin’ tells how Singapore is invaded, during an instance
of the infamous Southeast Asian transboundary haze, by peaceable monsters, who

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 492 rebecca duncan

have fled their home in nearby hell on the grounds that its climate is now entirely
inhospitable. The Singapore state refuses to take in the migrants, with the result that
when they depart, the city is permanently shrouded in the deep and unbreathable
smog. In this way, the story skewers Singapore’s unrelenting position on migrants from
nearby nations, all of them especially at risk from the changing climate. As its title
suggests, however, ‘Sin’ also highlights Singapore’s own part in producing these condi-
tions, subliminally evoking issues that range from the sand mining which effectively
raises the sea level in neighbouring countries, to the burning of indigenous forests
for palm oil plantations, and – further – to the migrant labour system, which brings
workers from elsewhere to the island nation on low-wage, precarious contracts. The
story’s hell-dwellers, and the smog with which they curse Singapore, thus indict a set
of exploitative and extractive relationships which link Southeast Asian socio-ecologies
unequally together in the face of unfolding climatic shifts. Such relationships – as Ng’s
collection overall makes clear – are inseparable from interlocking histories of colonial-
ism and patriarchy in the region (see Duncan 2021).

Planetary Gothic Is Decolonial Gothic

The planetary demands a decolonial perspective, because it reveals that the globalised,
financialised market of the late twentieth century does not represent a new world order
that supersedes formal colonialism, but instead reactivates and intensifies the socio-
ecological relationships that have operated through colonialism and patriarchy across
capital’s history. Viewed through a planetary lens, in other words, the world is not
postcolonial or neo-colonial – both terms that rest on a posited break with the past
– but rather remains structured by a colonial power that is ongoing. Contemporary
fiction from formerly colonised regions and communities frequently engages with this
active history – with what the decolonial philosopher Aníbal Quijano distinguishes
from colonialism via the term ‘coloniality’ (2000, 533) – in gothic tropes and devices
that mediate conditions of disproportionate social and environmental precarity, while
also summoning the endurance of colonial relationships as the wider frame in which
such inequity and violence exists.
Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019) is a film that demonstrates such a strategy, as we
have already seen in this collection. This text deploys revenant figures to link atmo-
spheric toxification and (gendered) exploitation in contemporary Dakar to the lon-
ger history of enslavement that shapes West Africa’s relationship with the so-called
developed world. A number of additional examples of decolonial gothic are offered
in the volume: Sheri-Marie Harrison’s illuminating reading of Helen Oyeyemi’s fiction
demonstrates how this addresses and unsettles unresolved histories of trauma that
mutate out of the period of colonial occupation and into the present. Similarly, Gregory
Luke Chwala’s account of Michelle Cliff’s gothic points to the persistent colonial rela-
tions that inhere in Caribbean social spaces and environments, while also tracing out
how the author uses gothic forms to generate decolonial queer ecologies that imag-
ine beyond such active systems of violence. As I have suggested elsewhere (2022a),2
fictions such as these markedly exceed the haunting vocabularies of the postcolonial
gothic, as much as they move clearly beyond the preoccupation with porous national
and cultural borders that has characterised the established globalgothic framework.
Instead, they grapple with material situations shaped by violent intersections of race,

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 coda: planetary gothic 493

gender, nature and capitalism, and in this sense position themselves in the planetary
context described above.
Regional, Capitalocene and decolonial approaches to gothic fiction each demon-
strate, but do not exhaust, the possibilities of a planetary framework for gothic criticism,
which expands, nuances and grounds the framework of globalgothic analyses. Even as
it can be understood as a concern in gothic fiction with elaborating the Earth-System
unconscious, Planetary Gothic is also a perspective and an emergent conversation which
invites further reflection, discussion and critical experimentation.

Notes
1. The world-literary framework laid out by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) pro-
vides the tools for reading (gothic) forms in the context of transregional capitalism’s regional
effects. For a longer discussion of globalgothic and world-literature, see the introduction to
this volume.
2. For further examples and analyses of decolonial gothic, see the 2022 special issue of Gothic
Studies entitled ‘Decolonising Gothic’.

References
Arboleda, Martín. 2020. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London:
Verso. Ebook.
Arrighi, Giovanni and Jason W. Moore. 2001. ‘Capitalist Development in World-Historical
Perspective.’ In Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations, edited
by Robert Albritton et al., 56–75. New York: Palgrave.
Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge.
——— and Justin D. Edwards. 2013. ‘Theorising Globalgothic.’ In Globalgothic, edited by
Glennis Byron, 11–24. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Bouwer, Jaco, director. 2021. Gaia. Decal.
Byron, Glennis. 2013. ‘Introduction.’ In Globalgothic, edited by Glennis Byron, 1–10. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2021. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
Deckard, Sharae et al. [WReC]. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New
Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Diop, Mati, director. 2019. Atlantics [Atlantique]. Netflix.
Duncan, Rebecca. 2021. ‘Haunted Technonature: Anthropocene Coloniality in Ng Yi-Sheng’s
Lion City.’ In Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Non-Human, edited
by Sladja Blazan, 135–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
———. 2022a. ‘Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies.’ Gothic Studies
24, no. 3: 304–22. https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0144.
———, ed. 2022b. ‘Decolonising Gothic.’ Special Issue, Gothic Studies 24, no. 3.
———. 2022c. ‘De/Zombification as Decolonial Critique: Beyond Man, Nature and the Posthu-
man in Folklore and Fiction from South Africa.’ In Decolonizing the Undead: Rethinking
Zombies in World-Literature, Film and Media, edited by Giulia Champion, Roxanne Douglas
and Stephen Shapiro, 141–58. London: Bloomsbury.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Haven Jones, Lee, director. 2021. The Feast. IFC Films.

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Lauro, Sarah Juliet and Karen Embry. 2008. ‘A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the
Era of Advanced Capitalism.’ boundary 2 35, no. 1: 85–108. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-
2007-027.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2015. Zombies: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books.
Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World.
London: Verso. ProQuest Ebook.
Moore, Jason W. 2019. ‘Capitalocene and Planetary Justice.’ Maize 6: 49–54.
Ng, Yi-Sheng. 2018. Lion City: Stories. Singapore: Epigram. Kindle.
Niblett, Michael. 2012. ‘World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature.’ Green Letters 16,
no. 1: 15–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2012.10589097.
Oloff, Kerstin. 2012. ‘“Greening” the Zombie: Caribbean Gothic, World-Ecology, and Socio-
Ecological Degradation.’ Green Letters 16, no. 1: 31–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468841
7.2012.10589098.
Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America.’ Nepantla:
Views from South 1, no. 3: 533–80. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/23906.
Satgar, Vishwas. 2018. ‘The Anthropocene and Imperial Ecocide: Prospects for a Just Transition.’
In The Climate Crisis: South African and Global Democratic Eco-Socialist Alternatives, edited
by Vishwas Satgar, 47–68. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.

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 Notes on Contributors

Sofia Aatkar completed her AHRC- and M4C-funded PhD at Nottingham Trent Uni-
versity. Her article ‘Postcolonial flânerie in Caryl Phillips’s The Atlantic Sound and
Ferdinand Dennis’s Behind the Frontlines: Journey into Afro-Britain’ was published in
Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is Senior Assistant Professor at Universidad de las Américas

Puebla (UDLAP) in Mexico. He has published widely on Mexican gothic and Mexican
horror cinema, and is the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed online journal Studies in
Gothic Fiction.

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan
University and Co-president of the International Gothic Association. He is the author of
the books Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016)
and Body Gothic (2014), and the editor, with Maisha Wester, of Twenty-First-Century
Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (2019).

Katarzyna Ancuta is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Thai-

land. Her research interests oscillate around the interdisciplinary contexts of contemporary
Gothic/horror, currently with a strong Asian focus. Her recent publications include contri-
butions to Film Stardom in Southeast Asia (2022), The Transmedia Vampire (2021), The
New Urban Gothic (2020) and B-Movie Gothic (2018). She is the author of Where Angels
Fear to Hover: Between the Gothic Disease and the Meataphysics of Horror (2005). She
also co-edited two collections: Thai Cinema: The Complete Guide (2016, with Mary J.
Ainslie) and South Asian Gothic: Haunted Cultures, Histories and Media (2022, with Dei-
mantas Valančiūnas) and three journal issues on Thai (2014) and Southeast Asian (2015)
horror film, and Tropical Gothic (2019).

Lucie Armitt is Professor of Contemporary English Literature at the University of

Lincoln. She is a specialist in all areas of the literary fantastic and has been publishing
on the gothic since the 1990s. She was the twentieth-century specialist in a six-person
academic advisory team (led by Dale Townshend) to the major British Library Exhibi-
tion ‘Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination’ (October 2014 to January 2015).

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 496 notes on contributors

Her principal books include (with Scott Brewster) Gothic Travel Through Haunted
Landscapes: Climates of Fear (2022) and, as a sole author, Fantasy (2020), Twentieth-
Century Gothic (2011), Fantasy Fiction (2005), Contemporary Women’s Writing and
the Fantastic (2000), Theorising the Fantastic (1996) and Where No Man Has Gone
Before: Women and Science Fiction (1991).

Linnie Blake is Reader in Gothic Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan

University where she founded the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies in 2013. She
has published widely on numerous aspects of gothic and horror cinema and is the
originator of the term ‘Neoliberal Gothic’, this being a submode that proffers a cri-
tique of global inequalities, national conflicts and individual social and psychological
trauma wrought by neoliberal economics.

Fred Botting is Professor of English at Kingston University, London. He has taught Eng-
lish Literature, Critical Theory, Film and Cultural Studies at the Universities of Lancaster,
Keele and Cardiff. He has written extensively on gothic fictions, and on theory, film and
cultural forms. He is the author of, among other books, Gothic Romanced: Consumption,
Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions (2008), Limits of Horror: Technology,
Bodies, Gothic (2008) and Sex, Machines and Navels: Fiction, Fantasy and History in the
Future Present (1999), as well as Gothic (1995, 2013).

Elsa Bouet is currently a lecturer in English at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research
interests include post-1945 to the present dystopian fiction, science fiction, the New
Weird, Afrofuturism and the gothic. Her research to date has mostly focused on the
tensions between ideology and utopia, and looked at the ways in which political prac-
tices and structures veil themselves as utopian to create exclusion. She is also part of a
Scottish-based interdisciplinary research network, Social Dimensions of Outer Space.

Sandra M. Casanova-Vizcaíno is Associate Professor of Spanish at Binghamton Uni-

versity-State University of New York. She completed her PhD in Hispanic Studies at
the University of Pennsylvania, and she specialises in contemporary gothic and horror
fiction from the Hispanic Caribbean. She is the co-editor of Latin American Gothic in
Literature and Culture (2018). Her book El gótico transmigrado: narrativa puertor-
riqueña de horror, terror y misterio en el siglo XXI (The Transmigrated Gothic: Horror,
Terror and Mystery is 21st-Century Puerto Rican Narrative) was published in 2021.

Gregory Luke Chwala is Graduate Professor of Humanities and Culture at Union

Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he specialises in Victorian gothic
literature, British Empire and LGBTQ+ studies. He has published work on queer,
trans, race, postcolonial, decolonial and gothic studies in journals such as the Victo-
rian Review and eTropic. His current projects include a book that explores decolonial
queer ecologies in gothic and speculative fiction, and a book on transembodiment in
steampunk fiction.

Kevin Corstorphine is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Hull. He has

published on many authors of gothic, horror and the weird, with his most recent work
including articles on H. P. Lovecraft and Clive Barker. His research interests focus on

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 notes on contributors 497

space and place, including haunted houses, gendered and racialised spaces, memory,
trauma and the repressed. Together with Laura Kremmel, he is the editor of The Palgrave
Handbook to Horror Literature (2018). He has recently developed a gothic video
game aimed at children with autistic spectrum disorders and is also working
on a project to use gothic studies to analyse nihilistic attitudes to climate crisis.

Rebekah Cumpsty is Assistant Professor of Anglophone World Literature at Weber State

University, Utah. Her publications have appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Lit-
erature, Interventions and Wasafiri. She is co-editor of ‘The Body Now’ (2020), a special
issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and her monograph
Postsecular Poetics: Negotiating the Sacred and Secular in Contemporary African Fiction
was published in August 2022.

Sharae Deckard is Associate Professor of World Literature at University College Dublin.

She has published multiple essays on ecogothic in volumes including Twenty-First-Century
Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University Press 2021), EcoGothic (2016),
Global Ecologies and Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (2015) and
Ecocriticism of the Global South (2015). Articles on the ‘oceanic weird’ in Rita Indiana’s
Tentacle and the ‘enduring nuclear’ in post-Soviet ecogothic recently appeared in Humani-
ties and Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures. Her books include
World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent (co-edited with Stephen
Shapiro, 2019), Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, and the Future of Critique (co-edited with
Rashmi Varma, 2018) and Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory
of World-Literature (co-authored with WReC, 2015).

Rebecca Duncan is Researcher in Literature at the Linnaeus University Centre for Con-
currences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, where she coordinates the ‘Aesthetics
of Empire’ Research Cluster. Her first monograph, South African Gothic (2018), was
shortlisted for the 2019 Allan Lloyd Smith Prize, and her recent work appears in the
journals ARIEL and SFFTV, as well as collections for University of Minnesota Press,
Bloomsbury and Palgrave. She is the co-editor of Patrick McGrath and his Worlds:
Madness and the Transnational Gothic (2020), and of ‘The Body Now’ (2020), a spe-
cial issue of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. ‘Decolonising
Gothic’, her guest-edited special issue of Gothic Studies, was published in November
2022. Rebecca is recipient of a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Project Grant (2021–24).

Chloé Germaine is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan Univer-

sity. She teaches courses on children’s and Young Adult literature and games. She
is the author of two monographs, Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic Fiction
(Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and The Dark Matter of Children’s Fantastika
Fiction: Speculative Entanglements (2023). She has also published articles and book
chapters on zombies, weird fiction, postcolonial gothic, witches and games. She is a
member of the Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, where she works on participa-
tory youth projects, and co-director of the Manchester Game Centre.

Monica Germanà is Reader in Gothic and Contemporary Studies at the University of

Westminster. Her research concentrates on gothic and popular culture, with a specific

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 498 notes on contributors

emphasis on Scottish Gothic and gender. Her publications include Bond Girls: Body,
Fashion, Gender (2019), Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing (Edinburgh
University Press, 2010), Ali Smith: New Critical Perspectives (2013), co-edited with
Emily Horton, and Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh University
Press, 2017), co-edited with Carol Davison. She was awarded a Visiting Research Fel-
lowship from the University of Aberdeen in 2019 to explore the Special Collections of
the Sir Duncan Rice Library. She is currently collaborating with Scottish and Icelandic
academics and practitioners on a collaborative research project under the title of The
North and the Scottish Imagination: Arctic Pasts and Futures. Her own research in
the field concentrates on Scottish/Arctic cultural links, with particular reference to the
‘otherworldly’, gothic and fantastic themes recurrent in the representation of Scotland
and the North in travel diaries, fictional accounts, oral superstitions and maps.

Rune Graulund is Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture at the Insti-
tute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He
is co-author, with Justin Edwards, of the books The Grotesque (2013) and Mobility
at Large (2012), and co-editor of several volumes, including – with Justin Edwards
and Johan Höglund – the collection Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic
Anthropocene (2022). His recent work includes articles for Studies in Travel Writing,
Philosophy and Literature and Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
He has research interests in speculative fiction, especially as this relates to questions of
migration, empire, ecology and the Anthropocene.

Karen Grumberg is Arnold S. Chaplik Professor of Israel and Diaspora Studies in the
Department of Middle Eastern Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature at the
University of Texas at Austin, where she is also Director of the Center for Middle East-
ern Studies. Her edited volume Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities
and the Restless Past was published in 2022. She is the author of Place and Ideology in
Contemporary Hebrew Literature (2011) and Hebrew Gothic: History and the Poetics
of Persecution (2019). Her interests include ‘juxtapositional’ comparative methodologies,
Hebrew translation culture and the gothic.

Steffen Hantke has written on contemporary literature, film and culture. He is author
of Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary Literature (1994) as well as editor of
Horror Film: Creating and Marketing Fear (2004) and American Horror Film: The
Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010).

Sheri-Marie Harrison is the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Faculty Suc-
cess in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri, where she also
researches and teaches contemporary global anglophone literature, and mass cul-
ture of the African diaspora. Her book Difficult Subjects: Negotiating Sovereignty
in Postcolonial Jamaican Literature was published in 2014. Her work has been pub-
lished in various locations including Modern Fiction Studies, Small Axe, The Journal
of West Indian Literature, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia and The Los Angeles
Review of Books. She has a chapter in the multi-volume edited collection Caribbean
Literature in Transition, and is also currently working on two monograph proj-
ects: an author study of Marlon James and a study of genre in contemporary Black

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 notes on contributors 499

fiction. She is also a co-editor of Critical Essays on Jesmyn Ward (Edinburgh University
Press, forthcoming in 2023) and the Routledge Companion to the Novel (forthcoming
in 2024).

Johan Höglund is Professor of English at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has published

extensively on the relationship between imperialism and popular culture in a number of
different contexts, including the late Victorian era, the long history of US global expansion
and decline, and the often-unrecognised era of Nordic colonialism. He is the author of
The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence (2014), and the co-
editor of several scholarly collections and special issues, including ‘Nordic Colonialisms’
for Scandinavian Studies (2019), ‘Revisiting Adventure’ for Journal of Popular Culture
(2018), Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth: The Gothic Anthropocene (2022), Nordic
Gothic (2020), B-Movie Gothic: International Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press,
2018) and Animal Horror Cinema: Genre, History and Criticism (2015).

Esthie Hugo is Associate Lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannes-

burg. She completed her PhD at the University of Warwick in 2023. Her PhD traced
the interconnections of gender, race and ecology in world-literature from the planta-
tion to the present. Esthie has published research on African speculative fiction as well
as on food and plantation slavery in Caribbean women’s poetry.

Timothy Jones is a lecturer in Gothic Studies at the University of Stirling. His book
The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture (2015) received the Allan
Lloyd Smith Prize. He is Associate Editor of Gothic Studies. Recent chapters and arti-
cles have treated Aleister Crowley, weird tales, Alan Garner, Robert Aickman and
Frank Sargeson.

Laura R. Kremmel is a lecturer at Brandeis University. Her work engages with the
fields of British Romanticism, gothic studies, medical humanities/history, disability
studies and horror film. Her book, Romantic Medicine and the Gothic Imagina-
tion: Morbid Anatomies, was published in 2022. Her co-edited volume The Palgrave
Handbook to Horror Literature, consisting of thirty-eight chapters by international
scholars, was published in 2018, including her own chapter on medical horror. She
has also published on the gothic and disability in both European Romantic Review
(2016) and Studies in Gothic Fiction (2018).

Yvonne Leffler is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Gothen-

burg. Her main research interests are Swedish nineteenth-century novels and pop-
ular, in particular gothic, fiction. Her PhD thesis in 1991 investigated the gothic
tradition in Swedish nineteenth-century novels. Since then she has published several
books and articles on the early Scandinavian novel, popular fiction, and Scandi-
navian Gothic in literature and film. She has directed several literary and interdis-
ciplinary research projects. In 2019, she concluded a project on the transnational
reception of Swedish nineteenth-century literature, which included scholars both
in Sweden and in other European countries. In 2020 she and three other scholars
published a book on today’s Nordic Gothic. In 2023, she published Swedish Gothic:
Landscapes of Untamed Nature.

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 500 notes on contributors

Roger Luckhurst is the Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at

Birkbeck College, University of London. His areas of research include late-nineteenth-
century literature and pseudo-science, modernism, science fiction, literary theory, con-
temporary literature and culture. His monographs include The Invention of Telepathy
(2002), Science Fiction (2005), The Trauma Question (2008), The Mummy’s Curse
(2012) and The Shining (2013). He is also the editor of Late Victorian Gothic Tales
(2005), Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (2006), Stoker’s Dracula
(2011) and H. P. Lovecraft: The Classic Horror Stories (2013). He is the editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, and the author, most recently, of Corridors:
Passages of Modernity (2019) and Gothic: An Illustrated History (2021).

Barry Murnane is Associate Professor in German and Comparative Literature at the

University of Oxford. He has published widely on the gothic, including a monograph
on Franz Kafka and edited volumes on German Gothic, and he has written on gothic
issues from medicine to neoliberalism, and from pharmacy to the Anthropocene.
He was a member of the AHRC network on Global Gothic based in Stirling from 2008
to 2010.

Inés Ordiz is Lecturer in Literature at the National University of Distance Education

(UNED, Madrid, Spain). She holds a PhD in Modern Languages from the University
of León (Spain), with a specialisation in comparative gothic literature of the Ameri-
cas. She is the co-editor of the volumes La (ir)realidad imaginada: Aproximaciones
a lo insólito en la ficción hispanoamericana (2014) and Latin American Gothic in
Literature and Culture (2018).

Stephen Shapiro teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary

Studies at the University of Warwick. His publications include Pentecostal Modernism:
Lovecraft, Los Angeles, and World-Systems Culture (2017) and four editions of
Charles Brockden Brown’s gothic fiction (with Philip Barnard), and he is a co-editor
(with Mark Storey) of the Cambridge Companion to American Horror and Decolo-
nizing the Undead: Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film, and Media (with
Giulia Champion and Roxanne Douglas, 2022).

Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of

Lausanne. Her research interests include everything Gothic, as well as melodrama,
adventure, war narratives, American counterculture and eco-criticism. She has co-
edited volumes on Neoliberal Gothic, Gothic and Terror(ism), and War Gothic, among
others, and has published two monographs: The Poetics and Politics of the Ameri-
can Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010)
and Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture: Popular Conceptions of War
since World War II (2021).

Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the

University of São Paulo. She did postdoctoral studies at the University of Cambridge
(1993–94) and at the University of Manchester (2008), and was Visiting Research
Associate at the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford (2005). Over
the past years, she has been carrying out research on the presence and circulation

8133_Duncan.indd 500 31/05/23 4:33 PM

 notes on contributors 501

of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novels in nineteenth-century Brazil.

She has edited several books, has published articles and chapters both in Brazil and
elsewhere, and is the author of Puras Misturas. Estórias em Guimarães Rosa (1997),
Dez Lições sobre o Romance Inglês do Século XVIII (2002) and A Formação do
Romance Inglês: ensaios teóricos (2007), for which she received the 2008 Jabuti Prize
for Literary Theory and Criticism. At present, she is the coordinator of the Labora-
tory for the Study of the Novel (LERo) and of the project ‘The Global Novel’, with
researchers from the University of Surrey. She is curator of the João Guimarães Rosa
Archive, at the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, and holds a CNPq Research Productivity
Grant (Grade 1A).

Maisha Wester is Associate Professor in American Studies and in African American and
African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She is the author of African American
Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places and Voodoo Queens and Zombie Lords (2012),
as well as numerous articles and essays and she co-edited Twenty-First-Century Gothic:
An Edinburgh Companion (2019) with Xavier Aldana Reyes. Her research is in Black
diasporic gothic literature and racial discourses in US horror film.

8133_Duncan.indd 501 31/05/23 4:33 PM

 Index

abjection, 30, 31–2, 59, 63, 81n1, 179, 230, austerity, 315, 319, 325, 330, 474, 476, 477–8
331, 413 Avranas, Alexandros see Miss Violence
affect, 132, 180, 181, 190, 229, 305, 322,
341, 347 Belzebuth (film), 367, 373–7
Afghanistan War Bennett-Coverley, Louise, 23, 24, 25–6
Soviet, 161, 171, 173 Betaal (TV series), 242
US, 161, 166, 167, 172–3 biocapitalism, 256
alt-right, 195, 196, 325, 332 biolabor, 260
‘America under alien occupation’, 186, biopower, 53, 54, 56, 65, 87, 90
191n6 Black diasporic Gothic, 28, 70, 73, 75, 76–7,
American century, 182–3, 190 79–80, 296, 297, 300–2, 306
American empire see imperialism ‘The Black Gondolier’ (short story), 135–7,
American Horror Story: Cult (TV series), 139
195–7 Black Sunday (film), 184–6, 190
American Sniper, 151, 152, 154, 155–7, Blackenstein (film), 86
159, 160–1, 162, 163 Blaxploitation, 86
Amerika (miniseries), 186, 188 Blood Meridian (novel), 426, 430, 431–2
Ampuero, María Fernanda see ‘Auction’ The Blood of the Vampire (novel), 239
animism, 66, 221, 223, 233–4, 416, 421, 423 Blood Quantum (film), 242–3
climate crisis, 223, 233 Body Worlds (exhibition), 261–2
‘new’, 222, 225, 226, 227, 229 border
see also folklore; materialism; modernity Brexit, 324, 325, 330–1, 476
Anthropocene, 63, 114–15, 175, 223, 233, Frontex, 478
237–8 globalisation, 367, 369, 371, 377, 473
critique of, 117–18, 119, 121–2, 221–2, gothic, 64–5, 373, 380
491 inequality, 66, 368, 372, 374
see also Capitalocene; temporality see also hybridity; migration; surveillance;
Anthropocene Gothic, 115, 117, 118, 128 Trump administration
Anwar, Joko see Halfworlds Botting, Fred, 117, 155, 163–4, 207–8, 319,
apeth, 27–8 353, 355, 356, 428–9, 487; see also
apocalypse ‘Theorising Globalgothic’
climate, 137–8, 139, 224, 436, 486 Bouwer, Jaco see Gaia
pandemic, 246–7 Brexit vote, 95, 96, 322, 323–6, 341, 476;
‘revelation’, 1–2 see also border; European Union; folk
zombie, 46, 80, 203n4, 333, 476 horror
Arboleda, Martín see Planetary Mine British horror 310–11, 316, 328, 33; see also
Aristide, Oana see Under the Blue folk horror
Atlantics, 115, 122–8, 492 Brodber, Erna, 70
‘Auction’ (short story), 381, 382–4, 391 Myal, 72, 76–7, 78, 79–80

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 index 503

Burke, Edmund, 60, 87, 355–6 gothic, 14, 114, 117, 138, 142–3, 144,
Butler, Octavia see Dawn 221, 224, 233, 353, 437
Byron, Glennis, 1, 3–5, 8, 11, 84, 100, 166, planetary, 227–9, 231, 433–4, 436,
173, 280, 311–12, 411, 426, 433, 468, 487–8
485, 490 sublime, 355, 357, 360–2, 363
see also Anthropocene; animism;
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (game), Capitalocene; climate inequality;
159–62 ecogothic
Cam (film), 344 climate inequality, 36, 115, 118, 121–2, 126–7,
The Capital (novel), 472–3 137, 221–2, 223, 488, 491–2
capitalism, 46, 63, 133, 202, 238, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age
327; see also Capitalocene; class; (book), 486–7, 488, 489
colonialism; consumerism; enslavement; Coetzee, J. M. see Waiting for the
extractivism; globalisation; Gore Barbarians
Capitalism; Marx, Karl; modernity; Cold War, 152, 156, 167, 168–9, 171,
neoliberalism; patriarchy; Planetary 173–4, 182, 185, 188, 210, 436
Mine, world-ecology; world-system; decolonisation 183, 185–6
zemiperiphery Collins, Wilkie see The Haunted Hotel
Capitalocene, 115, 126–7, 128, 238, 491, colonialism 166–7, 177, 225, 280, 282, 296,
493 362, 437, 440
Capitalocene Gothic, 14, 115, 128, 491–2 capitalism, 6, 8, 10, 118, 128, 143, 210,
Captive State (film), 186–9, 190 216, 221, 237–8, 239, 241, 247, 354–5,
Carbon (graphic novel), 138–9 486
carbon horror, 144 neo-colonialism, 64, 70, 72
Carey, M. R. see The Girl with All the Gifts patriarchy, 87, 92, 95–6, 120, 125–6, 489,
Caribbean gothic, 100, 101, 103 491
Carmilla (novel), 230, 239 see also coloniality; decolonisation;
Caro, Marc; see Delicatessen decoloniality; enlightenment;
Carpentaria (novel), 353, 357–9, 362 enslavement; globalisation; imperialism;
Castro, Ana Luísa de Azevedo see D. neoliberalism; tourism
Narcisa de Villar coloniality, 27, 100–1, 102, 127–8, 206–8,
Chakrabarty, Dipesh see The Climate of 218; see also decoloniality
History in a Planetary Age Coma (novel), 254–5
Cheng, Wei-hao see The Tag-Along commodity frontiers, 132, 397, 398–9, 401,
The Children of the Abbey (novel), 270–1 404, 408
circulation of novels, 267–70 conspiracy theory, 12, 472
class, 198, 199 consumerism, 62, 382, 386, 390
gender, 197 Cook, Robin see Coma
middle-, 49, 72–3, 202–3, 242, 269, 281, core-periphery see world-system
385, 477 Covid-19, 1, 247; see also climate crisis
polarisation, 193–4 Croker, B. M. see ‘The Dâk Bungalow at
solidarity, 46, 198, 202 Dakor’
working-, 138, 140, 313, 268, 460
Cliff, Michelle, 101–2 D. Narcisa de Villar (novel), 273–4, 275,
Abeng, 103–5, 109–10, 112 277
No Telephone to Heaven, 106–8, 110–12 ‘The Dâk Bungalow at Dakor’ (short story),
climate change see climate crisis 285–7
climate crisis dark ecology, 221, 227, 329
colonialism, 26, 215, 216, 225 Dark Matter (novel), 289–90
Covid-19, 2–3, 237–8, 485 dark web, 346
global warming, 7, 132, 139, 141, 143, Dawn (novel), 207, 208–11
246, 289, 361, 465, 486 De Léon, Jason, 368, 371, 372, 386

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 504 index

Death Stranding (game), 143–5 Embassytown (novel), 207, 211–14, 218

decolonial gothic, 25–8, 30, 31–3, 35–6 endriago, 381, 382–3, 385
Planetary Gothic, 492–3 enlightenment
versus postcolonial gothic, 25, 26, 28, 492 colonialism, 54, 70, 238, 431
see also the uncanny gothic, 155, 226, 241, 269, 356
decolonial queer ecologies, 101–4, 105, 107, human-nature binary, 2, 115, 116–17,
109–12; see also transgender narratives 118, 122, 363, 487
decoloniality, 13, 24–5, 26, 28, 104–5, 381 modernisation, 49
decolonisation, 23, 64, 100, 101, 102–3, see also modernity
108, 110–12; see also Cold War Enriquez, Mariana; see ‘Things We Lost in
deindustrialisation, 6–7, 189, 485, 491, 193; the Fire’
see also financialisation; zombies enslavement 25–6, 34, 58, 74–80, 92–3, 95,
déjà vu, 282, 283, 284, 292 106, 133, 174, 26, 275–7, 305–6, 327
del Toro, Guillermo capitalism 57, 61, 65–6, 76, 77, 197,
Cronos, 375 208–9, 269, 492
The Devil’s Backbone, 167, 470 complicity of gothic writers, 56–7
Pan’s Labyrinth, 167–8, 470–1 gender, 74, 95–6, 112, 272–5, 304, 383,
Delicatessen (film), 469–71 393
demit, 420–1 modern slavery, 253, 388
Desert Gothic, 425–6, 429, 431, 433, 436–7; world-system, 2, 40, 50, 128
see also Planetary Gothic see also plantations; queer coalitions;
desktop horror, 347n10 sugar; zombies
diaspora entanglement, 115, 118, 121, 128, 217,
gender, 449 223–6, 230, 231, 232, 233, 244, 358,
global, 95 487, 489
literature, 33–4, 80, 133, 225 environmental uncanny, 117
religions, 296–9, 301–2, 306 EU Gothic, 18, 468, 470, 471, 479
see also Black diasporic gothic; migration; European Union
immigrant fiction Brexit, 324, 326–7, 331
Dimaline, Cherie see The Marrow Thieves Europeanisation, 471–2, 473
Diop, Mati see Atlantics history and formation of, 468–9
Dogtooth (film), 475, 478 ‘migrant crisis’, 476, 478
Dracula (novel), 24, 48, 57, 97, 153, 239–40, uncanny, 471, 472, 473–5, 476, 478, 479
295, 456 see also biopower; nationalism;
duppy, 59, 70, 73–4, 77–8, 80, 104, 106, 300, neoliberalism
301 excess
transgression, 414, 416, 419
Earth System, 7, 114, 117, 486–8, 489, 490, tropical aesthetic, 395, 396, 399
491 superfluity, 65, 66
Earth-System unconscious see Planetary see also ‘metabolic rift’; the sublime;
Gothic waste
ecogothic Extractive Gothic, 14, 131–2, 134–5, 137–8,
climate crisis, 132, 138, 224, 363, 418 141, 143
ecophobia, 102, 131, 134, 135 extractivism, 237, 238, 243
‘environmental unconscious’, 355, 362 extreme 132, 144–5
sublime, 357, 360, 361, 364
‘terror’ versus ‘horror’, 132–3 Feardotcom (film), 345–6
see also Anthropocene Gothic; The Feast (film), 488
Capitalocene Gothic; Extractive Gothic; Federici, Silvia, 10, 25, 382, 386, 388
Planetary Gothic Female Gothic, 197, 201, 272–5, 455,
Edwards, Justin D., 208, 300, 338; see also 456–7, 462–4; see also transgender
‘Theorising Globalgothic’ narratives

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 index 505

financial crisis ghosts, 56, 275, 276, 291–2, 304,

global (2007–8), 35, 198, 459 405
Greece (2010), 476, 477–8 colonial, 26, 54, 75, 173–4, 280, 282,
financialisation, 4, 5–7, 9, 12, 381, 491; 286, 297, 303, 305–6, 356
see also deindustrialisation ecological, 123, 126–7, 128, 143,
Fisher, Mark, 46, 310, 314, 328, 474–5 228, 231
folk horror folkloric, 28, 30, 59, 70, 104, 106,
Brexit, 318, 320, 322, 333 300, 412, 415, 417, 419, 420–1,
folklore, 310–11, 316 422, 456
‘invented tradition’, 313 technological, 66, 338–9, 341, 344, 345,
see also British horror; globalisation; 390, 419–20
nationalism; nostalgia; witchcraft travel writing, 288, 304
folklore, 12, 27, 41, 48, 360–1, 396 see also haunting; modernity
Africa, 123, 491 The Girl with All the Gifts (novel), 245,
Asia, 411, 413, 415, 416–20, 421–2, 423 246–7
Caribbean 33, 70, 78, 81n5, 174, 287–8, Glitch Gothic, 341
297, 300, 301 Global South
Europe, 168, 309, 325, 384 critique of, 292n1, 353–5, 364
Latin America, 370–1 global division of labour, 6–7, 47–8,
Middle East, 169, 170 124–5, 337, 388, 485
Nordic region, 289, 456, 458 pandemic inequality, 237
see also apeth; demit; duppy; folk horror; see also climate inequality; Structural
ghosts; mosina; onryõ; pontianak; Adjustment Programmes
Santa Muerte; soucouyant; witchcraft; global warming see climate crisis
zombies globalisation
‘Fortress Europe’, 18, 324, 474 exploitation, 218, 253
Foucault, Michel, 39, 60, 474; see also folk horror, 313, 316, 318–20
biopower globalgothic, 1, 2–5, 7, 9–11, 26, 84,
Frankenstein, 25, 56, 85–6, 86–7, 91, 93, 175, 184, 309, 311–12, 353, 411,
94, 95, 225, 241, 255, 338 416, 420, 423, 433, 455, 467, 476,
Frankenstein in Baghdad, 87–90, 151, 162–4, 486, 490
176–7, 452n1 post/colonial, 28, 84, 85, 100–1, 170,
Frankisstein, 94–7 206, 207, 354
Freud, Sigmund, 184, 185, 226–7, 228, world-systems analysis, 2–3, 5–8
290–1, 327, 330, 356, 434 see also Anthropocene; border;
fundamentalism, 167, 182 imperialism; masculinity; nationalism;
neoliberalism; monstrosity; patriarchy;
Gaia (film), 115, 116–17, 118–21, 487–8 the planetary
The Gatekeeper (novel), 224 Gore Capitalism (book), 381, 382, 383,
gender see capitalism; class; colonialism; 385
diaspora; enslavement; Female Grand Tour, 281
Gothic; ‘housewifization’; masculinity; Greek Weird Wave, 474, 476, 478
monstrosity; neoliberalism; patriarchy; Groyon, Vicente Garcia see The Sky Over
queer coalitions; queer gothic; Dimas
transgender narratives
‘general zombification’ see zombies Haiti, 50, 54, 60–1, 64, 287–9, 297–8, 299,
Ghosh, Amitav, 355 300–1
The Great Derangement, 117, 360, 487, Halfworlds (TV series), 411–12, 420–3
117 The Handmaids Tale (TV series), 197, 198,
Gun Island, 224, 227, 353, 359–62, 364 202
The Hungry Tide, 353, 359–62, 364 The Haunted Hotel (novel), 290–2

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 506 index

haunting Iran-Iraq War, 166–7, 169, 175, 176

colonial history, 76, 124, 168, 177, 292, Iraq War, 159, 161–4, 166, 171–2, 177
303–4, 428 irrealism, 12–13, 123–4, 132, 353, 355,
landscape, 100, 106, 328, 329 356, 357, 358, 363, 401; see also
patriarchy, 273, 274, 390, 418–19, 463 world-literature
present absence, 387–8, 446–7 Ishiguro, Kazuo; see Never Let Me Go
narrative, 32, 71–2, 75, 442
return of the repressed, 470 Jameson, Fredric, 7–8, 12, 322
temporality, 138 Jeunet, Jean-Pierre see Delicatessen
see also hauntology Johnson, Amryl see Sequins for a Ragged
hauntology, 309–10, 318, 319, 320, 325, Hem
328, 471 Jones, Lee Haven see The Feast
Helme, Elizabeth see St Clair of the Isles
The Helmet of Horror (novel), 339–40 Kairo (film), 338–9
Hilu, Alon see The House of Rajani Kipling, Rudyard, 72, 153, 157
Holmqvist, Ninni see The Unit ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’, 284–5
Hopkinson, Nalo, 70, 72 Kyle, Chris see American Sniper
‘Ganger: Ball of Lightening’, 73–4 Kwaymullina, Ambelin see The Interrogation
‘Tan-Tan and Dry Bone’, 77–80 of Ashala Wolf
Horsley, Kate see The Monster’s Wife
hospitality, 228–31, 233, 283; see also the La Llorona, 27, 28, 384, 392n8
uncanny Lanthimos, Yorgos see Dogtooth
The House of Rajani (novel), 440, 441–2, The Last Winter (film), 143
443–4, 445, 447, 448–9, 450–1 Latour, Bruno, 116–17, 223
‘housewifization’, 125 Le Fanu, Sheridan see Carmilla
Hurricane Season (novel), 381, 384–6, 390, Leiber, Fritz see ‘The Black Gondolier’
391 Let the Right One In (novel), 460–2
Hurston, Zora Neale see Tell My Horse liberalism 38, 41–4, 47, 152, 200, 267
hybridity Lillywhite, Austin, 118, 223
culture, 226, 326, 374, 376, 399, 401, Lindqvist, John Ajvide see Let the Right
412, 413, 489 One In
ecology, 245, 371 Lovecraft Country (series), 201
genre, 224, 225, 426 Lovecraft, H. P., 134–5, 138, 141, 144, 201
technology, 207–8, 209–11, 214, 215, Lovelock, James, 116
217–18
McCarthy, Cormac see Blood Meridian
I Am Legend (novel), 242–3 Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de see As vítimas-
immigrant fiction, 28–9, 30; see also algozes
diaspora Machado, Carmen Maria see ‘Real Women
imperial gothic, 14, 16, 153, 238, 295–7 Have Bodies’
imperialism, 57, 61, 85–6, 164, 177, 221, The Magic Island (travelogue), 59, 61,
238, 280–1, 287, 325, 434, 440 287–9
cultural, 76, 77 Marble Hornets (web series), 340–1
globalisation, 1, 10, 100, 218 The Marrow Thieves (novel), 225
resource, 133, 134, 137, 358 Marryat, Florence see The Blood of the
US, 102, 110, 111, 112, 151–3, 156–7, Vampire
161–2, 174, 182 Marx, Karl, 47, 129, 239
The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (novel), 225 Marxism 49, 41, 209
invasion narrative, 23–4, 25–6, 30–1, 53, masculinity
136, 280, 324, 325, 327, 331, 476; division of labour, 124–5, 408
see also migration globalisation, 84, 88, 90

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 index 507

heteronormativity, 104, 385 The Monster’s Wife, 90–3

queer, 448–450 monstrosity
race politics, 86, 196–197 decolonial, 33
see also endriago; patriarchy gender, 94, 96, 413, 415
masochism, 329, 330–2; see also sadism globalisation, 90, 93
master-slave dialectic, 54–5 ‘play of shadows’, 54, 56–7, 63–4
materialism revolution, 60–1
animist, 226 socio-ecological, 227–8, 403–4
cultural, 44–5 technology, 207–8
extractive, 225 see also decolonial gothic; necropolitics;
realism, 36n1 zombies
Matheson, Richard see I am Legend Moore, Jason W., 2–3, 6–7, 12, 115,
Mbembe, Achille, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58–9, 117–18, 126, 128, 131, 142, 222–3,
65–6 239, 397–8, 401, 404–5, 491; see also
Megan is Missing (film), 343 commodity frontiers; world-ecology
Melchor, Fernanda see Hurricane Season Moreno-Garcia, Silvia see Mexican Gothic
Menasse, Robert see The Capital mosina, 417
‘metabolic rift’, 357, 363 Myalism, 82n11
Mexican Gothic (novel), 399, 404–8
Mexico-US border see border nationalism
Mies, Maria, 125, 239, 408 Afrikaner, 119, 128n2
Miéville, China see Embassytown English, 34, 324, 325, 327, 329
Mignolo, Walter D., 24, 100, 102, 238 European Union, 468, 470, 472, 473, 478
migration globalisation, 28, 95, 319
border crossing, 27, 63, 369–70, 371 Palestinian/Israeli, 440, 452
climate, 361–2 Scottish, 49
colonialism, 23, 24–5, 34, 35, 75, 93, Uighur, 190
124, 285 necropolitics, 53, 56, 58, 65, 66
cultural forms, 26, 27, 267–70 ‘negative aesthetics’, 428, 429
exploitation, 250, 253 Neoliberal Gothic, 193, 202–3
‘hostile environment’, 331 neoliberalism, 8–10, 66, 95, 123, 166, 193–4,
xenophobia, 9–10, 95, 196, 236, 318, 241, 328, 367, 387, 460
320, 476 colonial legacy of, 6–7, 8, 62, 65, 112,
see also border; European Union; 124, 128, 177, 207, 354
immigrant fiction; invasion narrative; extraction, 134, 137, 143, 144, 145, 400
refugees; Windrush generation gendered exploitation, 125–6, 381, 388
Miss Violence (film), 475, 476–9 globalisation, 206, 217, 227, 338
Mittelholzer, Edgar, 70 European Union, 323, 324, 468, 472, 477
My Bones and My Flute, 71, 72, 75 see also Trump administration
mockumentary, 455, 464, 466 Never Let Me Go (novel), 256–7, 259–60
modernity New History (Israeli), 441–2, 452n2
animism, 226, 233, 416 Niblett, Michael, 12, 137, 355, 398–9,
colonial/capitalist, 11, 24, 50, 61, 64, 70, 401
100, 167, 237–8, 241, 247 non-anthropocentrism, 15, 117, 128, 486,
‘combined and uneven’, 354 487, 488
the ‘folk’, 313, 317, 320, 328, 333 Norasid, Nuraliah see The Gatekeeper
ghosts of, 54, 55 Nordic Gothic, 455, 456, 458, 459, 464,
gothic, 56, 166 466
Levantine, 442 Norvigia (film), 475, 476, 478–9
the novel, 167 nostalgia, 184, 282, 314–15, 316–17, 319–20,
petro-, 135, 137, 143 325, 329

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 508 index

Obeah, 76, 77, 78, 82n11, 109, 296 plantations, 54, 56, 109, 127, 128, 131, 168,
The Objective (film), 172–4 224, 237, 239, 425, 492; see also sugar
Okorafor, Nnedi platform capitalism, 343
‘Africanfuturism’, 225 Poe, Edgar Allen, 71, 131, 272, 448, 456
Lagoon, 225–6, 229–30, 232–3 ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, 282–3,
Oloff, Kerstin, 396, 398, 401 433
onryõ, 345, 418 ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, 153
organ transplantation The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of
donor, 250–1, 252–4, 255, 258–9, 260 Nantucket, 134, 142
harvesting, 250–1, 253–4 ‘A Tale of the Ragged Mountains’, 283–4,
Øvredal, André see Troll Hunter 285
Oyeyemi, Helen, 28, 29–30, 80, 84 populism, 191n7, 194, 198, 200, 323,
The Icarus Girl, 29–33 324, 471, 472–3, 476, 478; see also
White is for Witching, 33–6 ‘sadopopulism’
Ponti (novel), 411, 413–15
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 23, 56, 101, pontianak, 411, 412–15, 416, 419, 420,
295–6, 297, 298 423n1
patriarchy postcolonial gothic, 26, 28, 30, 84, 100–1,
capitalism, 2–3, 95, 118, 143, 197, 239, 112, 295, 296, 303, 305–6, 357, 492–3;
247, 381, 389, 404–8 see also decolonial gothic
family, 41, 477 posthumanism, 117, 207, 208, 215, 218, 244,
globalisation, 84–5, 88, 89 340
gothic, 170, 272–4, 412–13, 414, 416, critique of, 118, 120, 121–2, 491
449, 456 post-truth, 342; see also Trump administration
hetero-, 14, 17, 18, 24, 119, 128, 236, the Punisher (superhero), 157, 158
240, 383, 390, 490 Punter, David, 268, 282, 292, 355–6, 368
queer resistance, 93–4, 110 The Purge (film franchise), 193, 198–200
science, 92–3
terrorism, 181, 184 queer coalitions, 108–9, 110–11
see also colonialism; haunting; witchcraft queer ecologies see decolonial queer ecologies
Paver, Michelle see Dark Matter queer gothic, 57, 85, 86, 94, 97, 100, 101,
Peele, Jordan, 202 239–40, 440, 441, 445, 447–8; see also
Get Out, 152, 201 ‘straight stories’; transgender narratives
Us, 201–3 Quijano, Aníbal, 2, 127–8, 206, 492; see also
Pelevin, Victor see The Helmet of Horror coloniality
periodicity (genre), 38, 46–7, 138
petro-fetishism, 136–7 Radcliffe, Ann, 16, 23, 97, 188, 268, 269–70,
‘pirogue phenomenon’, 127 271, 337, 448, 456
the planetary The Mysteries of Udolpho, 281, 295, 455
ethics, 228–9, 231, 233 ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ (short story),
pandemics, 237, 238, 244, 246 386–9, 391
versus the global, 227, 426, 433–4 ,435–6, refugees, 35–6, 63, 65, 241, 320, 324, 476,
486–7, 490 478; see also border; migration
see also Arboleda, Martín; Chakrabarty, Reis, Maria Firmina dos see Úrsula
Dipesh; climate crisis; Spivak, Gayatri resource imperialism see imperialism
Planetary Gothic, 485–6 Ringu (film), 345
approach, 490–3 Roche, Regina Maria see The Children of
Desert Gothic, 426, 434–5, 436–7 the Abbey
Earth-System unconscious, 487–8 Romero, George A., 62, 252, 287, 491
see also decolonial gothic The Crazies, 242
Planetary Mine (book), 437, 489–90 Night of the Living Dead, 160, 241

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 index 509

Saadawi, Ahmed see Frankenstein in Baghdad surveillance

sadism, 331–2, 333; see also masochism biomedical, 256, 259
‘sadopopulism’, 331, 333 border, 63, 367–8, 371, 378n3, 478
St. Clair of the Isles (novel), 270, 271–2 digital, 17, 66, 144, 338, 341, 345
Saint Death (novel), 367, 370–3, 374 military, 166, 171, 173, 187, 188
Santa Muerte (folk deity), 370–1
Seabrook, William see The Magic Island The Tag-Along (film), 416–19, 423
secrets, 442, 445, 446, 450, 451 Tell My Horse (travelogue), 59, 61, 295,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 86, 88, 93–4, 296, 297–302, 306
450 temporality
Sedgwick, Marcus see Saint Death Anthropocene 224, 225, 436
Segato, Rita Laura, 381, 383, 389, 392n4 ‘combined and uneven’, 267
self-harm, 322, 329–31, 346 extractive, 132–3, 138
Sequins for a Ragged Hem (travelogue), 295, non-anthropocentric, 341, 355,
296–7, 302–6 486–7
Shelley, Mary see Frankenstein terrorist, 183–4
Sikseck, Ayman, 440; see also Tishrin uncanny, 315, 359–60, 407, 442–3
Silhouette of a Sinner (novel), 455, see also Earth System; haunting;
462–4 periodicity; the sublime
Skov, Leonora Christina see Silhouette Teo, Sharlene see Ponti
of a Sinner terra nullius, 362, 426, 428, 431
The Sky Over Dimas (novel), 399–404, ‘terror nullius’, 428, 430, 432
408 ‘terrortainment’, 179
Slack, Jeremy, 371, 377 ‘Theorising Globalgothic’ (essay), 3, 4,
slavery see enslavement 8–11, 12, 13, 26, 85, 309, 369,
Slender Man (creepypasta), 340–1 433–4, 468
social media, 63, 97, 310, 389 ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ (short story),
Online Gothic, 337–8, 342–5 381, 389–90, 391
politics, 324, 341 Thompson, Tade
soucouyant, 28, 33–4, 35, 70, 74, 80 Rosewater, 207, 214–18, 225, 229–32
speculative fiction, 43, 117, 223–4, 226, The Rosewater Insurrection, 227
227 Tinsley, Omise’eke Natasha, 108
spirits see animism; folklore; ghosts; haunting Tishrin (novel), 440–1, 442, 445–7, 451
Spivak, Gayatri tourism
‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, 212 climate crisis, 289–90, 360–1, 465
Death of a Discipline, 227, 228, 435–6 colonialism, 280, 285, 286, 302–3
Stoker, Bram see Dracula gothic, 281–2, 286, 292
‘straight stories’, 447–9, 451–2 Townshend, Dale, 228, 229–30, 362
Structural Adjustment Programmes, 6, 9, Train to Busan (film), 175, 242
124, 126, 127, 213 transgender narratives
‘structure of feeling’, 16, 315, 322, 327, decolonial, 101, 102, 107, 111, 112
329, 333 Female Gothic, 455, 461, 462–4
Stryker, Susan, 94, 97 trans embodiment, 94–5, 96–7
the sublime see also decolonial queer ecologies; queer
ecological, 360–2 coalitions
gothic, 100, 281, 353, 355–7, 364 travel writing, 16, 295–7, 299, 303–4,
temporal, 358–60 305
see also climate crisis triskaidekaphobia, 291, 292
sugar, 13, 57, 61, 126, 269, 274, 288–9, Troll Hunter (film), 455, 460, 464–6
398, 399–405; see also plantations Tropic Death (short-story collection),
‘supplemental humanity’, 59, 66 133–5

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 510 index

Trump administration, 96, 145n1, 188, 189, Warwick Research Collective (WReC), 12,
331, 241 123, 354–5, 356–7, 398, 493n1;
‘alternative facts’, 196, 203, 342 see also world-literature
‘America first’, 189–90, 191n7, 194 waste, 65, 78, 91, 92, 110, 126, 354, 357,
border wall, 194–5 363; see also excess; ‘metabolic rift’
neoliberalism 194–5, 196–8, 200, 201–2 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 388, 435,
448
Under the Blue (novel), 245–6 Whale, James, 86
Under the Shadow (film), 166, 169–71 Windrush generation, 23, 319
Underwater (film), 141–2 Winterson, Jeanette see Frankisstein
the uncanny, 208, 290–1, 374, 375, 386, witchcraft
442 folk horror, 317–18
decolonial, 27–8, 31–2, 33 matriarchy, 459
ecology, 131–2, 133, 136–7, 221–2, 224, patriarchy, 384–6, 391
225, 226–7, 355, 360, 361, 363, 436, response to neoliberalisation, 9–10
455, 458 World War Z (film), 241, 242
hospitality, 229–30, 231, 233 World War Z (novel), 63, 175
‘unheimlich’, 227, 275, 280, 356, 434, world-ecology, 2, 3, 5, 13, 131, 132, 137,
437 246, 357, 397–8, 401, 404–5; see also
see also European Union; environmental world-literature; world-system
uncanny; haunting; temporality; world-literature, 12, 354–5, 396–7,
undead see vampire; zombies 493n1
Unearth (film), 139–41 world-system 2, 11–12, 38–41, 44, 48,
Unfriended (film), 344 50–1, 137, 167, 246, 298, 354–5,
Unfriended: Dark Web (film), 346–7 357, 396–7
The Unit (novel), 257–60 core-periphery 40, 47, 269, 398
Úrsula (novel), 274, 277 crisis 5, 41, 46
see also enslavement; globalisation; world-
Valencia, Sayak see Gore Capitalism ecology; world-literature; zemiperiphery
vampire Wright, Alexis see Carpentaria
contagion, 238–41, 241–2
metaphor for capital, 63, 236, 475 X-Files (TV series), 250, 251, 255
romance, 460–2
see also pontianak zemiperiphery, 48–51
Veslemes, Yannis see Norvigia zombies, 46, 60, 61, 168, 238, 241, 325,
Vietnam War, 159, 168–9, 173, 185 396, 459, 471, 476
As vítimas-algozes (novel), 275–7 colonial, 10–11,70, 72, 160, 175
Vodou, 58, 75, 296, 297–8, 299–302, 306 contagion, 242–3
‘Voodoo’, 60, 61, 287 deindustrialisation, 62, 491
ecology, 401, 406
Waiting for the Barbarians (novel), 426, enslavement 59–60, 64, 76–7, 174, 252,
430–1, 432, 434 287–9, 300, 333
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 2, 13, 38–42, 43, 47, folklore, 79, 80, 122, 295, 300–2
48, 239, 269, 354, 398 ‘general zombification’, 62–6
Walrond, Eric see Tropic Death South African, 9–11, 236
War Gothic, 15, 167, 168, 169, 171 see also apocalypse

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