The AgoraGothic

Abstract

This essay theorises an AgoraGothic, a Gothic of the empty, open spaces captured in the photographic essay, ‘The Great Empty’ in the New York Times, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. The decolonised spaces of metropolises, as humans were locked in, are an iteration of the colonial condition of the terra nullius, but also of the res nullius, abandoned by its owner and ready for occupation by others. The agora is haunted, with two registers of decolonisation: of losing human domination over built and natural spaces, and the return of the repressed non-human Other. As humans cower inside, the wait is interminable, as the virus stalks the outside.