Gothic and Racism – A Review

The publication of a revised and enlarged edition of Cristina Artenie's Gothic and Racism1 (2023) is timely. Over the last decade or so, gothic has emerged as a key mode in which contemporary cultural production is interrogating racial violence. A small sample of work demonstrating this development might include, for example, Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (2009), Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) or Remi Weeke's His House (2020). Corresponding to the appearance of these and related fictions, new directions have emerged in Gothic Studies, with scholars foregrounding the resistant politics of minoritized gothic traditions and exploring justice-centred frameworks such as decolonial thinking.2 Appearing in this contemporary context, Gothic and Racism also joins with critical trajectories established since the late-20th century. These consider how gothic images have long been leveraged in the production of popular racial imaginaries; how gothic provided a racialised language that both provoked and allayed imperial anxieties; and how, in the hands of postcolonial writers, gothic can function as a discourse for critiquing colonial regimes or for giving haunting voice to histories of trauma and cultural erasure.3 Taken together, all these various critical engagements provide a sense of gothic's long and intimate involvement with the materially efficacious fiction of race, and with the systems and practices of racism that, on a global scale, have organised socio-ecological realities in its violent image.4 It is surprising, then, that few full-length and wide-ranging studies of gothic and racism exist, and still more so given that gothic first appears in an ‘Enlightened’ and industrialising Britain culturally and materially powered by histories of enslavement and colonisation.5 A collection broadly titled Gothic and Racism would be well-placed to address how, from its inception, gothic registers, elides, colludes with or critiques a world produced by racialised systems of power, and, encouragingly in this respect, Artenie's volume is fuller in historical and regional scope than most existing analogous studies.6 The book covers the period from the 19th to the 21st centuries and includes chapters on Britain, Russia, Canada, the Caribbean, India and the United States. It also adopts a productively generous definition of gothic forms, moving between readings of highly canonised texts such as Dracula (which appears twice as a focus), to analyses that shed light on gothic aspects in fictions – Sholem Abramovitch's The Mare, Richard Wright's Native Son – less often categorised in this way. A comprehensive reading of the volume might therefore lead the reader to formulate their own impression of the extent and complexity of gothic's relationship with racism. However, the same reader will be offered only minimal guidance by the collection itself. Artenie's very brief introduction situates Gothic and Racism as a contribution ‘to the nascent field of Postcolonial Gothic Studies’ (p. 8, emphasis in original), but acknowledges this and wider scholarship through a single, general reference to what ‘analyses of Gothic narratives usually’ do (p. 7). Without a fuller picture of the established critical landscape, the collection's framing of its own intervention remains undeveloped: Gothic and Racism is positioned chiefly as a study that critiques gothic's characteristic ‘processes of othering’, in this way responding to scholarship in which, Artenie writes, ‘othering is often explained, but rarely challenged’ (p. 7). This characterisation of Gothic Studies' engagement with race, empire and enslavement would be difficult to sustain with only a cursory reading of relevant literary criticism going back several decades, key examples of which would include work by Patrick Brantlinger, H. L. Malchow, Simon Gikandi, Maisha Wester, or—perhaps most especially—Tabish Khair, whose book-length The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness (2009) offers precisely an extended and rich challenge to the racialised colonial dynamic of self and other. Rather than a critical orientation towards otherness, what seems more fully to distinguish Gothic and Racism is its combination of these two titular concepts. The potential for locating the volume in this way is also not fully taken up, however. An account of what is meant by ‘racism’ is conspicuously absent from the introduction and—with minor exceptions—also from the collection widely. The editor therefore misses an important opportunity to historicise systems and discourses of racial differentiation, which would help to ward off the possibility that race, through its repeated unglossed invocation across the volume, comes to appear as an essential category rather than the technology of power it really is. At the same time, without a sense of what the volume takes racism to be, the concrete nature of its relation to the gothic cannot but remain quite obscure. To navigate the chapters, the reader of Gothic and Racism therefore has to rely on the broad connection between gothic and alterity with which the book opens. While this view is borne out by certain of the contributions (from Wilson, Birch and Artenie herself), others take quite different perspectives, treating gothic as a register for—variously—imperial anxiety (Parui, Hanson, Nath and Pradhan), the experience of racial oppression (Orr, Earle), and the return of the repressed (Henderson, Berns, Zárate and Vasquez). Acknowledged in the organisation of the book, this diversity could usefully foreground the multiple ways in which gothic engages issues and histories relating to race while, also helping the reader to grasp the patterns that link the otherwise fairly disparate-seeming contributions together. To give a sense of these shared concerns, I will use them to structure my own brief discussion of the chapters. The first author to take an alterity-focused view of the gothic is Joanna Wilson, who examines the constructions and functions of monstrosity in Lovecraft's ‘The Call of Cthulhu’. Wilson argues that the eponymous monster constitutes ‘an overt other’ that ‘overshadows […] the othering of non-Western people’ for which Lovecraft's work is now infamous (p. 57). Having outlined the deeply racist logics that run through Lovecraft's fiction, the author is anxious to point out that their purpose is ‘not to denigrate Lovecraft’s work as simply xenophobic’ (p. 68)—a comment I would have liked to see explained more fully because such a denigration seems not inappropriate. Less hesitant with its criticism is Jessica Birch's chapter, which takes a refreshingly interrogative approach to the figure of the vampire, focusing on the fiction of Charlaine Harris. Birch challenges the critical tendency to view gothic ‘Others’ as avatars for populations subject to real racialised and gendered marginalisation: by essentialising difference and evacuating race of its historical content, this strategy is consistent with the logic of racism itself and—in Harris's fiction specifically—‘with […] neoconservative attempt[s] to conflate Southern identity with white, middle-class American identity’ (p. 75). Artenie's own very detailed and meticulous chapter reads across several major editions of Dracula, arguing that these texts' editors frequently reproduce ‘“othering effects” on the […] people and places that are represented’ (p. 161) in the novel. Underlying this issue, Artenie identifies a failure to consult Romanian studies as well as tendencies to rely on tenuous Victorian sources and fetishizing accounts of ‘Transylvania as a land of vampires’ (p. 160). Even with a more selective presentation of its evidence, this argument would be convincing. Artenie concludes with a call for an interrogative editorial practice, which—on the basis of the material provided—future editors would do well to heed. Three contributions in the volume position themselves in relation to the imperial gothic—a mode in which the contradictions and anxieties of declining empires are both registered and managed. In the first of these, Avishek Parui reads Dracula as a novel that exposes the ‘disturbingly proximal presence’ (p. 27) of ostensibly external threats to imperial Britain, arguing that—though coded through racialised discourses of contagion—Dracula himself ultimately expresses anxieties related to imperial capitalist excess. Also emphasising gothic ambivalence, but under different imperial conditions, Lance Hanson positions American Horror Story: Murder House as a response to waning US hegemony in the new millennium. For Hanson, porous boundaries in the titular ‘Murder House’ provide the alibi for a reactionary political agenda, envisioning a ‘culture that is threatened from the outside’ (p. 151) by racialised and gendered ‘Others’. The volume's most innovative and well-read engagement with the imperial gothic is also its least directly concerned with racism: Ipshita Nath and Anubhav Pradhan offer a nuanced and illuminating analysis of New Delhi's so-called ‘Mutiny Memorial’, which was built—unusually for the region—in the gothic style. Accounting for this choice, Nath and Pradhan argue that gothic is used to negotiate the contradictions of British imperial rule, insisting (via connections to English conservatism) on the ‘glorious legacy of fierce cultural independence, superiority and self-determination’, while at the same time invoking gothic's sensationalist associations ‘to exorcise the […] fear of ruination underlying the imperial project’ (p. 222). In the first of three chapters to identify gothic as a language for the experience of racial oppression, Meital Orr reads Sholem Abramovitch's The Mare alongside a selection of its European contemporaries, arguing that gothic elements in this text represent systemic anti-Semitism in the context of Tsarist Russia. ‘In Abramovitch's work, the source of terror and dread that define the gothic was racism’ (p. 52), Orr writes in conclusion, making a point also central to Monalesia Earle's analysis of quite different narratives. Earle has two chapters in the collection: the first reads Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall on Your Knees through the lenses of intersectionality, queer and critical race theory in order to examine how gothic stages and contests violent ‘acts […] that have been […] normalised by various social systems’ (p. 124). Also focusing on the gendered, classed and heteronormative dimensions of colonial power, Earle's second chapter considers Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night and opens with an ecocritical reflection on the postcolonial gothic. Earle notes how this mode—by encoding experiences of systemic violence—provides a register for ‘re-centring marginalized voice/body/nature’, while also ‘amplify[ing] the voices of different ethnic and cultural groups’ (p. 187). The detail of this chapter notwithstanding, the gothic somewhat disappears after the early sections, meaning that the possibilities outlined on the outset are not quite fulfilled by the end. Two remaining chapters in the collection foreground gothic's capacity for rewriting (North American) history, such that systems of enslavement and subsequent racial oppression are made palpable, demanding urgent attention. In a reading of Richard Wright's Native Son, Mark Henderson outlines how, by constructing the protagonist in gothic terms, this novel trades on ‘white fears’ that emerge from the system of white supremacy itself (p. 103). The text is therefore shown to treat racial oppression as the historical condition out of which rage and violence erupt, evincing a politics of racial liberation that eschews ‘the gentle, polite approach’ in favour of ‘an unflinchingly, angry honesty’ (p. 101). Also examining US legacies of racial violence is a chapter co-authored by Fenando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Mariana Zárate and Patricia Vasquez that identifies the uncanny as a repeating vehicle for histories of enslavement in US cinema, concluding with an image of post-racial America that is uneasily achieved through historical repression. The final passages expand the potential of this analysis to global proportions, writing that ‘it must be accepted that the racist past is not yet an extinct stage in history’ (p. 140), in order to avoid the disavowal that transforms this past into ‘a hideous monster’ (p. 140). To conclude, then, the timeliness of Gothic and Racism doesn't entirely translate to a robust critical intervention. Without an informed and deliberate editorial agenda to steer and organise the volume as a whole, the study promised by the title cannot emerge. The book is therefore not quite the theoretically grounded and systematic examination of Gothic and racism the reader might expect, but rather a collection of sometimes quite loosely associated—though nonetheless interesting—chapters, certain of which do individually make novel contributions to the intersecting fields of gothic, postcolonial and American literary and cultural studies. Rebecca Duncan is a Associate Professor in literature at Linnaeus University, where she coordinates the Cluster for Ecology, Culture and Coloniality at the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. She is the author of South African Gothic (2018) and co/editor of several collections, most recently ‘Decolonising Gothic’ (2022)—a special issue of Gothic Studies—and The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2023). The Cambridge Companion to World Gothic Literature is forthcoming in 2025. Rebecca is a recipient of project grants from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (2021–2024) and the Swedish Research Council (2024–2027).

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