Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2023-03-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2023.0154
Rebecca Wynne-Walsh
{"title":"Troubled Boundaries: Corporeal and Territorial Transgression in Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008) and ’71 (Yann Demange, 2015)","authors":"Rebecca Wynne-Walsh","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2023.0154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2023.0154","url":null,"abstract":"The legacy of the Troubles is still patently visible in Ireland. This period has never been absent from contemporary national discourse and, in fact, exists in living memory for the majority of the Irish. Brexit and the passing of Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume in August 2020 have only reinvigorated discussions on the Troubles, the IRA, and the Northern Irish peace processes, in which Hume was a central figure. This article presents a critical approach to the Troubles within a Gothic framework. This mode has long articulated anxieties engendered by the irresolvability of contested histories, territories and memories. I argue that the films Hunger and ’71 use gothic narrative structures and motifs to negotiate the emotionally and ideologically loaded Northern Irish conflict. Formally, the Gothic comes to the fore in each film's preoccupation with the unspoken and the visually untrustworthy. Both films rely on fractured chronologies and flashbacks to re-present lingering Northern Irish personal and collective traumas. I position Hunger and ’71 as essential components of an ongoing process of trauma negotiation in regards to the deep-set cultural wounds of the Troubles.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44464693","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0140
Rebekah Cumpsty
{"title":"Speculative Aetiology in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift: Towards a Decolonial Critique of History and Human","authors":"Rebekah Cumpsty","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0140","url":null,"abstract":"Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift (2019) yokes together human, technological and ecological shifts in a sinister speculative register. While it seemingly corresponds to the posthuman Gothic, this framing is insufficient to describe gothic presentations of the postcolony where people are treated as inhuman surplus. Posthumanist approaches risk reinscribing the dehumanizing discourses that sustain coloniality as a social and environmental organization. The novel presents a two-fold decolonial critique. First, it irreverently rehearses Eurocentric Zambian history and the gothic tropes that enlivened it, only to decentre this account for a decolonial aetiology voiced by a mosquito hive mind. Second, given that history is a story of how the ‘human’ came to be, the figures of biological excess unsettle the colonial category ‘human.’ These interwoven strands of decolonial critique unseat colonial evolutionary teleology in favour of a plural, multispecies aetiology, best read through a decolonial ecoGothic lens that exposes coloniality as both an ecological and social project.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41477578","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0138
Rebecca Duncan
{"title":"Introduction: Decolonising Gothic","authors":"Rebecca Duncan","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0138","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction to the special issue – ‘Decolonising Gothic’ – provides an overview of major existing approaches to gothic in the international context – namely postcolonial- and globalgothic – and highlights developments in contemporary Gothic production that demand a critical shift beyond these frameworks. The article outlines decolonial thinking as one productive response to this situation, and reflects both on what it might mean to ‘decolonise’ Gothic Studies, and on Gothic fiction’s own decolonising possibilities. The article concludes by introducing the essays collected in the special issue, foregrounding how each takes up the questions of decoloniality and decolonising in relation to gothic imaginaries from different regions of the world.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48213994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0141
Pramod K. Nayar
{"title":"The AgoraGothic","authors":"Pramod K. Nayar","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0141","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46117478","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0139
Maisha L. Wester
{"title":"The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness: Genre Tropes in Nineteenth-Century Moral Panics and (Abject) Folk Devils","authors":"Maisha L. Wester","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0139","url":null,"abstract":"‘The Gothic Origins of Anti-Blackness’ considers the intersections between Gothic texts and moral panics, a sociopolitical mechanism first theorized by Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). I revise Cohen's theory to clarify the peculiar eruptions of exponentially violent anti-Black discourses across various eras, noting that the folk devils targeted by moral panics are invariably abject figures upon which society projects a gothic visage. I reveal how the era of the (Anti-)Slavery debates exemplifies the reduction of Black populations to abject folk devils demonized amid white, western moral panics. The essay then explores Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis's Isle of Devils to expose how the moral panic over socioeconomic shifts, white cultural degeneration and slavery manifests in Gothic texts. Lastly the essay reveals how societies re-articulate the tropes and characteristics of such fictional Black ‘devils’ in their discussions of real populations, and the consequences of such renderings.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45009059","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0145
Ashley Kniss
{"title":"The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. By Elizabeth Parker","authors":"Ashley Kniss","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0145","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48064779","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.1093/nq/s3-iii.64.227b
D. Seed
{"title":"The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. By Jane Webb. Ed. By Nickianne Moody and Andy Sawyer","authors":"D. Seed","doi":"10.1093/nq/s3-iii.64.227b","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s3-iii.64.227b","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/nq/s3-iii.64.227b","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44734692","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0144
Rebecca Duncan
{"title":"Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies","authors":"Rebecca Duncan","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0144","url":null,"abstract":"This article theorises decolonial Gothic as a novel approach to Gothic fiction from formerly colonised regions and communities. It responds to an emerging body of Gothic production, which situates itself in a world shaped by persistently racialised distributions of social and environmental precarity, and where colonial power is thus an enduring material reality. To address such fiction, the article proposes, requires a reassessment of the hauntological frameworks through which Gothic and the (post)colonial have hitherto been brought into contact. Forged in the cultural climate of late-twentieth-century postmodernity, these hinge on the assumption of an epochal break, which renders colonial history a thing of the past; thus, they fall short of narratives that engage with active formations of colonial power. Accordingly, the article outlines an alternative approach, positioning Gothic fiction in the context of the capitalist world-system, which – into the present – is structured by colonial categories of race, heteropatriarchal categories of gender, and instrumentalising discourses of nature as plunderable resource.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48223418","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0142
Giulia Champion
{"title":"Decolonising Deep-Sea Gothic: Perspectives from the Americas","authors":"Giulia Champion","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0142","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0142","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that gothic tropes are central to depictions of the ocean across different genres and forms, but there is a colonial and decolonial trend in the use of horror in portrayal of the sea. This article identifies how gothic depictions of the deep-sea form part of a specific tradition of ecophobic representations of the deep in western narratives aiming to control and commodify. These depictions are profoundly marked by colonial legacies, as this paper shows by analysing briefly Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Deep-Sea Cables’ (1896) and William Eubank’s film Underwater (2020). The article then considers how gothic tropes persisting in post-colonial and decolonial cultural productions serve to identify, first, structural colonial violence still present today; and second, an anxiety about our ecosystem in a time of climate crisis in Rita Indiana’s novel La Mucama de Omicunlé (2015) and works emerging from the Caribbean and Latin America.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46429278","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gothic StudiesPub Date : 2022-11-01DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0143
Madelyn Marie Schoonover
{"title":"Indigenous Futurisms and Decolonial Horror: An Interview with Rebecca Roanhorse","authors":"Madelyn Marie Schoonover","doi":"10.3366/gothic.2022.0143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/gothic.2022.0143","url":null,"abstract":"This interview with Black and Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo author Rebecca Roanhorse explores the innovations she has brought to horror and science-fiction genres by speaking from the colonial difference and centring Indigenous histories, cosmologies, and spirituality in her works. The influence of Grace Dillon’s concept of Indigenous Futurisms on Roanhorse’s oeuvre is explored, as is the importance of Indigenous representation in white-dominated literary fields and how such representation can resist colonial repression while empowering Indigenous people in real life. Finally, Roanhorse speaks to the ways in which corporations such as Lucasfilm and Marvel are increasingly acknowledging a historic lack of diversity – or a historic offensive stereotyping of marginalised groups – and actively working to undo this harm by producing series entirely created by Indigenous writers that expand opportunities and give them the license to create stories from their unique cultural perspective.","PeriodicalId":42443,"journal":{"name":"Gothic Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43026445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}