Tropical Gothic in Literature and Culture

The Americas

Justin D. Edwards, Sandra G.T. Vasconcelos, Justin D. Edwards, Sandra G.T. Vasconcelos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317425779
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dei generi gotico, romantico e horror

Tropical Gothic examines Gothic within a specific geographical area of 'the South' of the Americas. In so doing, we structure the book around geographical coordinates (from North to South) and move between various national traditions of the gothic (Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, etc) alongside regional manifestations of the Gothic (the US south and the Caribbean) as well as transnational movements of the Gothic within the Americas. The reflections on national traditions of the Gothic in this volume add to the critical body of literature on specific languages or particular nations, such as Scottish Gothic, American Gothic, Canadian Gothic, German Gothic, Kiwi Gothic, etc. This is significant because, while the Southern Gothic in the US has been thoroughly explored, there is a gap in the critical literature about the Gothic in the larger context of region of 'the South' in the Americas. This volume does not pretend to be a comprehensive examination of tropical Gothic in the Americas; rather, it pinpoints a variety of locations where this form of the Gothic emerges. In so doing, the transnational interventions of the Gothic in this book read the flows of Gothic forms across borders and geographical regions to tease out the complexities of Gothic cultural production within cultural and linguistic translations. Tropical Gothic includes, but is by no means limited to, a reflection on a region where European colonial powers fought intensively against indigenous populations and against each other for control of land and resources. In other cases, the vast populations of African slaves were transported, endowing these regions with a cultural inheritance that all the nations involved are still trying to comprehend. The volume reflects on how these histories influence the Gothic in this region.

Section I

Tropical Undead

1 Mapping Tropical Gothic in the Americas

Justin D. Edwards

Space, place and region have always been central to Gothic literary and cultural production. We see this in the labyrinthine underground spaces found in eighteenth-century English novels by, among others, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe or in the tombs and claustrophobic spaces of nineteenth-century short stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We see it in how the Catholic nations of Southern Europe become significant places for the development of eighteenth-century Gothic plots about cross-dressing monks and bleeding nuns just as the dark forest and untamed frontier of the United States become meaningful places for the rise of national Gothic narratives in the wake of European-Aboriginal conflict and genocide. And we see this in how the European regions associated with the sublime become unsettling terrains that reflect eighteenth-century revolutionary political upheavals just as the images of decay and grotesquery in the regional U.S. Southern Gothic become important geographical markers for signifying difference, degeneration and chattel slavery. In all of these locations, Gothic texts explore dislocations and a sense of the unhomely in the homeland is caused by the transformation of geographic space into alienating or incorporating sites. Gothic thus casts a dark shadow over the nationalist projects that arise out of European Enlightenment thought, Romanticism and imperialist projects, signaling remote geographies that lie beyond the stable landscapes of rationality and logic.

Like Southern Europe or the East, the American tropics have long been sites of difference for Anglophone Gothic novelists. Monstrous threats from this region can be found in texts as diverse as Charles Brockden Brown’s Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (1799), Charlotte Smith’s Letters of a Solitary Wanderer (1800), Cynric Williams’s Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855), Florence Marryat’s Blood of the Vampire (1897) and others.¹ These texts interrogate the location of the Other and its relationship to national identities in England or the United States, worrying about what happens when the nation admits, or is infiltrated by, Otherness so that the homeland becomes an alien nation. In these narratives, the threat of Otherness posed by the American tropics comes to consolidate national identities by imagining models of difference that might form a means of resistance to foreign dangers. These Gothic texts, then, reflect anxieties about the displacements of national identities and how the monstrous Other might be identified as originating from a specific location—in this case, the tropics—and thus regulated and geographically contained. At the same time, though, these texts also betray an anxiety about how the threat of invasion can never be fully eradicated. Or, to put this another way, the Other is located and defined as geographically removed and simultaneously internalized as a way of defining the nation and a potential threat to national identity.

This chapter moves beyond Gothic texts from England or the United States that identify the monstrous Other as located in, or emanating from, the American tropics. In the American tropics, there is a long tradition of figures associated with Gothic—tyrannical villains, ghosts, blood-sucking cannibals, the undead—that move across geographic and national borders as well as historical periods. This is not to say that these figures are static, for they shift and change according to various historical or cultural contexts within the American tropics. But it is significant that these Gothic figures travel across the region in conjunction with the movements of people and the transnational flows of cultural production disseminated in oral narratives, novels, films, TV, visual culture and new media. Thus, it is important to reflect on how tropical Gothic in the Americas alters in relation to migrations or displacements that can, in some cases, engender social dislocations, cultural changes, traveling ideas and narrative shifts. Such movements across regions can help us to reflect historically on the pressure of transnational passages (slavery, colonization, neo-colonialism, etc.) and how gothic narratives have migrated and transformed aesthetic, ideological and political landscapes. Mapping these narrative movements in the unique geographical place of the American tropics offers insights into how different Gothic tropes intersect and overlap in a region where transnationalism, multiculturalism, syncretism and mongrelization have had a profound influence on cultural production.

Hybrids, Mongrels, Cannibals

In his short story ‘Monstro’, the Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz depicts an apocalyptic scenario wherein the people of Hispaniola are threatened by a mysterious disease called ‘La Negrura’ (The Darkness). The disease portends global disaster as the unnamed narrator describes, in retrospect, the spread of a black mold that grows on its ‘viktims’. As the virus spreads, the infected—referred to as ‘the Possessed’—lose cognition and, in a zombified state, come together to form large crowds before violently attacking the uninfected population. In his essay ‘Apocalypse’ (2011) Diaz comes to terms with what the Haitian earthquake ‘revealed […] about Haiti, our world, and even our future’. ‘Monstro’ explores how catastrophe generates profits for some and death for others, particularly in the wake of ineffective disaster responses from a global politico-economic Empire that has no interest in empowering the islands of the Caribbean archipelago. At the end of the story, the narrator and the other protagonists travel to the border that separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic. Their intention is to photograph the giant cannibal-zombies that are conquering the island in order to document how the world they knew, or thought they knew, has ended.

The cannibal and the zombie are not foreign to writing from or about the American tropics. Peter Hulme shows how European narratives of pre-Columbian America included cannibalism as a way of marking ‘the world beyond European knowledge’ and registering a horror that would fuel a ‘civilizing mission’ (3). Likewise, Anne Schroder and others have tracked how the Caribbean zombie has migrated to the U.S. and become a popular creature in Gothic film, TV and fiction. Schroder reads some of these texts as depicting the lurid figure of the U.S. zombie as historically linked to the Afro-Caribbean bogeyman (in films like Victor Halperin’s 1932 White Zombie and Jacques Tourneur’s 1943 I Walked with a Zombie). She argues that the depiction of the American tropics—specifically the Caribbean—in these films portrays this as a place outside ‘modernity’, emancipation or sovereignty (9–20). The shift from the Afro-Caribbean zombie to the U.S. zombie is clear: in Caribbean folklore, people are scared of becoming zombies, whereas in U.S. narratives people are scared of zombies. This shift is significant because it maps the movement from the zombie as victim (Caribbean) to the zombie as an aggressive and terrifying monster who consumes human flesh (U.S.). In Haitian folklore, for instance, zombies do not physically threaten people; rather, the threat comes from the voduon practice whereby the sorcerer (master) subjugates the individual by robbing the victim of free will, language and cognition. The zombie is enslaved.

‘Monstro’ moves fluidly from the zombie as a symbol of Caribbean slavery to the U.S. zombie of B-movie schlock. Its many references to other texts and narratives include appropriations and rejections of appropriations through transnational contexts and the mixture of globalized popular genres from Gothic-horror to sci-fi to humor-lite. This does not elide the Hispaniola context: the characters are rooted to the place even while they participate in a cosmopolitan position of privilege, which enables them to move seamlessly between Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the United States. Gothic aesthetics are used to deal with socio-political contexts in order to articulate concerns about a re-incursion of barbarism both as a manifestation of life on the island and a by-product of the hyper-capitalist Empire that faces self-destruction in the apocalypse. The story, then, draws on the various tropes of zombies and cannibals to highlight the value of life and the struggles for survival. ‘The metaphors that genres have established (mostly off the back of our experiences as people of color: the eternal other)’, says Díaz in an interview with Edwidge Danticat, ‘can be reclaimed and subverted and expanded in useful ways that help clarify and immediateize our own histories, if only for ourselves’ (Danticat 4).

The tropical Gothic of ‘Monstro’ is part of a varied and articulated process based on the palimpsest of cross-references to engender a mongrel text. This entails transcultural affiliations that exude ambiguity: the text is in a way doubly undecidable because it exposes the effects of numerous identifications that cannot simply be understood in the dualities and mergers associated with hybridity. In other words, it would be reductive to situate the text in a reading practice informed by hybridity wherein two different elements are combined to form something new through that hyphenated and now overdetermined word ‘cross-fertilization’. Even to speak of hybridity as an adjective—the Caribbean’s hybrid post-conquest culture—is inadequate because it implies an originality or uniqueness that erases the mixed characters of all cultures, suggesting that a ‘pure’ and ‘untainted’ culture might exist outside of an imaginary nation, region or place. A more nuanced way of reading the tropical Gothic text is in terms of mongrelization. This is not to invoke the derogatory meaning of ‘mongrel’ as a variation of that which is not a genuine or inferior thing of dubious origin (as in ‘the architecture was a kind of bastard suggesting Gothic but to true Gothic’). Nor does it refer to a text that deviates from a norm or standard. Rather, it calls attention to the problematic readings of texts in search of the ‘genuine’, the ‘norm’ or the ‘origin’. The mongrel text is a multiply constituted work, as every text is, but it also includes an unsettled negotiation that cannot be easily resolved. In its crossing of different types, the mongrel text has no definable type. This is the ‘real’ mongrel text: the mongreal.

Díaz’s cannibals are mongrels. They are of course real. We have no doubt. After all, ‘the Possessed’ fly into what the narrator describes as a ‘berserk murderous blood rage. No pleading with the killers or backing them down; they just kept coming and coming, even when you pointed a gauss gun at them, stopped only when they were killed’. Even after ‘The Detonation Event’ that is meant to contain the outbreak, there are ‘forty-foot-tall cannibal motherfuckers running loose on the Island’. Yes, they are all too real. But as a mongrel text, these zombie-cannibals also encode the text with the metaphor of cultural cannibalism and tropicália. In this context, cannibalism is appropriated as an anti-colonist project for critiquing, and at times absorbing, transcultural affiliations born out of the power dynamics of expansionist imperial politics. Here, the trope of cannibalism is read as a postcolonial reclamation of power wherein the colonized group uses agency to subvert the power of colonizers. Although the postcolonial project is questioned by the representation of contemporary forms of Empire in Díaz’s story, the paradigm of cultural cannibalism has a tropical trajectory that can be found at least as early as 1928 in ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ [‘The Cannibal Manifesto’] by the Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade. In this witty text, Oswald articulates a positive re-evaluation of the cannibal idea as a cultural norm that tries to address European conquest, postcolonial politics, indigeneity and the complexities of attempting to construct a Brazilian national culture. Cannibalizing a Dada publication of two small press issues, Cannibale (1920), Oswald’s playful cultural cannibalism challenges the dualities of, among other things, modern/primitive, genuine/derivative, normal/abnormal to appropriate the colonizing European inscription of the Americas—particularly the American tropics—as a barbarous land of monstrous creatures in need of civilization. Oswald’s cannibalization of European modernism, Rousseau, Montaigne and Shakespeare (‘Tupi, or not tupi that is the question’) is an eating of Europe without the ingestion: he is not what he eats; he is not a blurry copy of a European poet. His proposal is to ingest the European cultural legacy and digest it under the form of Brazilian art. He is the devourer and the mongrel; he takes what he can get wherever he can get it: ‘Só me interessa o que não é meu. Lei do homem. Lei do antropófago’ [I am only interested in what’s not mine. The law of men. The law of the cannibal.]

Seeing this from a different perspective, the Haitian zombie has been ‘cannibalized’ by American Gothic-horror cinema to create a monstrous figure that is conflated with that other ‘savage’ stereotype, the cannibal. Indeed, by the time the zombie flows into the North Atlantic consciousness, the cannibal already exists as a shadowy, yet powerfully evocative figure, of Otherness on the periphery of ‘civilization’. The zombie takes on the colonial features ascribed to the cannibal in the popular imaginary of the colonial powers wherein conquest narratives have, at least since the Early Modern period, linked the ‘Native’ to the flesh-eating cannibal. As zombiedom spreads, the ‘living dead’ become bestial hordes ravening to devour human flesh; or as the critic Steve Beard put it, films by George Romero and his contemporaries were ‘responsible for the familiar incarnation of the zombie as a ghoulish cannibal’, for giving the figure ‘extra bite’ (Beard 30–31; Warner 357–68).

The mongrelization of the zombie is illustrated through a reading of Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry’s ‘Zombie Manifesto’ (2008), which highlights a surprising flexibility and versatility in the dense and multiple layers of signification that have accrued to the figure of the zombie through its history of varied usage. After all, Lauro and Embry conjure a genealogy of zombie narratives from the Haitian zombi to the North American zombie to an emerging posthuman zombii. The Haitian zombie that was reconfigured as the U.S. cinematic zombie was in its Caribbean form ‘a somnambulistic slave singly raised from the dead’ but has now become ‘evil, contagious, and plural’ in its various North Atlantic screen manifestations (88). The very idea of a ‘zombie manifesto’ is absurd and, like all manifestos since Marx, it must be read with at least a touch of irony. If zombies lack agency and consciousness, how can this category of the undead be reconciled with the kinds of political, ethical or artistic principles that are proclaimed through the genre of a manifesto? This question addresses a conceptual instability at the core of our understanding of zombies. Throughout Lauro and Embry’s classification of various zombie figures and contexts, they move between the interwoven categories of zombification as an actual state and as a figurative description of specific kinds of (non)subjectivity. Drawing on Derridean discourse, they view the zombie as an ‘ontic/hauntic object’—a definition that succinctly articulates the conjunction and easy slippage between material and abstract notions of the zombie-as-mongrel (86; note 6, 86).

Any cartography of tropical Gothic must take place in relation to migrations and displacements that have, in some cases, engendered social dislocations, cultural changes, traveling ideas and narrative shifts. In his mapping of Gothic, David Punter identifies the nature of Gothic as a ‘para-site’ that is related to various migrations. He writes,

Gothic exists in relation to mainstream culture in the same way as a parasite does to its host, and […] Gothic writing can often be seen as a perversion of other forms, albeit a perversion which, as perversions do, serves to demonstrate precisely the inescapability of the perverse in the very ground of being. But I also mean to suggest that it is, in fact, impossible to see this relation as merely one-way: the parasite supports the host as much as vice versa, as the paradigmatic daylight world survives only in its infolding of the spectral world of desire. (3)

Here, site-specificity and Gothic para-sites suggest a series of deterritorializations that can help us to reflect historically on the pressure of monumental transnationalist shifts (economically, politically, geographically) and how Gothic narratives have migrated and transformed aesthetic, ideological and political landscapes. Mapping these movements in the unique historical geography of the American Tropics offers insights into how different Gothic narratives intersect and overlap. In addition, such migrations and displacements offer myriad dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of conquest, colonization and contemporary forms of Empire. These movements can help us rethink the rubrics of nation and narration, nationalism and mongrelization, while refiguring the relations of citizens across national borders and languages in a specific region.

Transfers, Translations, Circulations

A key way of mapping Tropical Gothic is in relation to the various historical, economic and material processes associated with the transnational flow of culture that began when...