microsoft word 3.1_full issue.docx sara gonzález and dina pedro | 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1532 1 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media sara gonzález universidad de santiago de compostela dina pedro universidad de valencia the gothic tradition has occupied a central position in our cultural milieu ever since the eighteenth-century century, owing to its mutable ability to tackle the profound anxieties of every period (sottilotta 4). hence, the gothic has considerably evolved since its origins; from deepset plots and archetypal characters to an ample range of shades of grey, american culture can be seen as particularly prolific in its reinvention and subversion of the traditional gothic tropes. indeed, recognizably gothic elements, archetypes, and images can be detected even in traditions that appear to differ very markedly from it, such as popular culture. horace walpole’s the castle of otranto: a gothic story (1764) has long been considered as the novel that inaugurated the gothic tradition, and that influenced nineteenth-century gothic narratives, which focused on the socio-economic and political concerns of the victorian period, such as technological advances, psychoanalytical theories, or occultism (sottilotta 4). nonetheless, present gothic greatly differs from previous forms of gothicism, given that it is concerned with our “obsessive postmodern anxiety about all manners of excess and hybridity (capitalist, technological, sexual, multicultural) or as a sign of a general instability, degeneration or decline of distinct ‘culture(s)’” (kohlke and gutleben 1). gothic fiction is currently a pervasive phenomenon in popular culture, as it holds a prominent influence in all sorts of cultural and artistic productions in the us, from literature, the movie industry, television series, music, (video) games, to fashion and subcultures. thus was this dossier born, in an attempt to trace the consistent evolution and presence of the gothic and its staples in contemporary us popular culture. with this aim in mind, the present volume compiles articles resulting from the 2020 conference series 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media in us popular culture, organized by the popmec association for us popular culture studies. sara gonzález and dina pedro | 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1532 2 first, in the article “guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales”, elizabeth abele examines guillermo del toro’s films hellboy ii: the golden army (2008) and the shape of water (2017) as gothic fairy tales charged with messages about contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender, and environmentalism. in these films, marginal characters challenge established patriarchal and racial boundaries, encouraging the audience to embrace new and groundbreaking paradigms. “the story of coraline(s): a gothic coming of age”, by javier torres fernández carries out a comparison between the journeys followed by coraline both in neil gaiman’s eponymous novel and its film adaptation, directed by henry selick. as the title implies, coraline’s adventure is read as a coming of age narrative that uses gothic tropes and elements to give shape to coraline’s anxieties, as well as convey her struggles with growing up. therefore, the gothic is shown to be intimately tied to the child’s personal development, and indeed to be an essential part of it. igor juricevic’s “the close-up eye asymmetry visual metaphor communicates the abject: evidence from batman and superman comics” analyzes the presence of this phenomenon, involving the depiction of characters’ faces with asymmetry in or around the eye area, in american comics. the author demonstrates how this is more frequent in comics where the hero presents gothic or gothic-like traits, and how such a phenomenon is used to communicate the abject, itself a key feature of gothic narratives. in “writing the grotesque in jesmyn ward’s salvage the bones”, katerina psilopoulou examines the depiction of black bodies in ward’s novel as related to the gothic trope of the grotesque. the article traces ward’s subversive use of grotesque elements against the hegemonic gothic tradition, examining how this author gives black characters agency and voice while resignifying and reclaiming the labels of grotesque and savage, that were so often used to stigmatize and discriminate against black southern communities. in his article, “ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror survival,” alberto andrés examines the american folk horror revival of the 2010s, focusing on screen texts such as ari aster’s midsommar (2019) or robert eggers’s the vvitch (2015), and the influence that 1960s and 1970s british cinema has had on them, particularly the so-called unholy trinity. these contemporary productions are set against the current debate on nostalgia and pastiche as the predominant cultural modes of production of late capitalism. the concept of hauntology, as defined and explored by jacques derrida, mark fisher, or katy shaw, provides the theoretical background of the article and guides the analysis of the abovementioned films. finally, kerry gorrill’s “schizoid masculinity and monstrous interiors in american haunted house narratives” explores how post-millennial productions of the american haunted house profoundly challenge traditional notions of masculine subjectivity. gorrill argues that american gothic has evolved to portray the current post-millennial social, political and financial collapse as a response against neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity. narratives sara gonzález and dina pedro | 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1532 3 such as steve rasnic tem’s deadfall hotel (2012), mark z. danielewski’s house of leaves (2000), thomas ligotti’s the town manager (2008), jac jemc’s the grip of it (2017), and shaun hamilll’s a cosmology of monsters (2020) portray a “schizoid” male subject (laing 17) that has to confront his existential crisis in the space of a monstrous and labyrinthine haunted house. works cited kohlke, marie-luise, and christian gutleben. “the (mis)shapes of neo-victorian gothic: continuations, adaptations, transformations”. neo-victorian gothic. horror, violence and degeneration in the re-imagined nineteenth century, edited by marie-luise kohlke and christian gutleben, rodopi/brill, 2012, pp. 1-48. sottilotta, elena emma. “re-imagining the gothic in contemporary serialised media: an intertextual and intermedial study of neo-victorian monstrous afterlives”. crossways journal, vol. 1, 2017, pp. 1-31. icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence on the us-mexico border anna marta marini instituto franklin-uah reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence on the us-mexico border anna marta marini instituto franklin-uah i ab st ra ct 50 anna marta marini is a phd fellow at the instituto franklin–uah. she obtained her ba and ma in linguistic and cultural mediation specializing in anglo american cultures and mexican studies, and a 2nd level postgraduate master’s in public history. her dissertation work (realized in collaboration with the cisan–unam) explores the film representation of reciprocate otherness bridging the us–mexico boundary. her main research interests are: discursive and cultural representation of the us borderlands and mexican american communities; cda related to violence (either direct, structural, or cultural) and discrimination; identity re/construction and narration through cinema and comics, especially in gothic, horror, and (weird)western genres. marini, anna marta. “icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence on the us-mexico border”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 49-58. recibido: 25 de octubre de 2019. n 2018, daniel sawka directed independent feature length movie icebox, which narrates the story of a 12-year old honduran boy whose parents push him to migrate northbound in order to escape forced gang recruitment. without giving way to ideological bias, sawka reproduces his journey, providing a useful tool for raising awareness on some of the key matters related to the ongoing debate on us immigration and border policies. the operation of immigration and customs enforcement (ice) facilities and the detention of central american children at the usmexico border represent a transnational gray area in the extension of sovereign power, turning the border itself in a kenotic space of exception legitimated by the construction of a specific public discourse on immigration and national boundaries. furthermore, the movie describes the existence of the evident normalization of inhumanity intrinsic to the detention process and praxis, leading to dehumanization of detainees and a suspension—both individual and public—of questioning the tasks performed by border enforcement agencies from an ethical or moral perspective. key words: borderlands; state of exception; film studies; border studies; central american immigration. in 2018, hbo acquired and presented the independent feature icebox (daniel sawka, 2018), produced by gracie films and co-financed by endeavor content. the movie represents a timely narrative and a useful tool for analysis on some of the key matters related to the ongoing debate on us immigration and border policies. starting in the mid-80s—with the immigration reform and control act (1986), among others—stricter measures and a structured border discourse have been implemented in the us institutional and public spheres. the militarization of the us-mexico boundary has been increased in several steps and tied to the construction of the border fence; since the government’s reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the measures have been strengthened and brought to a war level. in 2003, the customs and border protection (cbp) and immigration and custom enforcement (ice) agencies were created, respectively, to exert border control and fight against illegal cross-border activities; both federal law enforcement divisions are subject to the authority of the us department of homeland security. one of the cruxes of the national fight against illegal immigration has been the application of indefinite detention of migrants and the imposition of restrictions on asylum granting, as well as the limitation to opportunities of trial upon detention and obtainment of a provisional legal status. detention is indefinite both temporally and legally, as it falls out of strict legal control and is characterized by extrajudicial action; it is, in fact, the suspension of judicial order, in the context of a state of exception (agamben), dominating the border matter and redefining its legal limits. several reportages have been released on the conditions of detention and the chronic abuse of migrants in the related facilities; in fact, it has been a question periodically raised at least since the mid-90s. in the 2010s, security footage leaks and internal reports on the abusive handling of detainees in border facilities have emerged, often to be dismissed or minimized by ice and cbp officials. if a state of exception should be produced by a state of emergency which legitimates the extension of sovereign power, in the case of the us-mexico border the trans/national emergency has been constructed primarily through discourse. the border crossing statistics and studies show that illegal border crossing flux has depended mostly on socioeconomic cycles (massey et al.), and that the number of yearly apprehensions—especially on the southwest border—oscillates in the same range since the mid-70s (us cbp, u.s. border patrol apprehensions; u.s. border patrol fiscal year). migration from the norther triangle countries—guatemala, honduras, and el salvador—has often depended also on sociopolitical and institutional downturns, and it’s been increasing especially since the beginning of the 21st century. the steady increment and the numbers themselves, though, don’t seem justify the use of the term “emergency” nor the character of exceptionality. the movie represents a timely narrative and a useful tool for analysis on some of the key matters related to the ongoing debate on us immigration and border policies. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 51 icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence... anna marta marini if a state of exception should be produced by a state of emergency which legitimates the extension of sovereign power, in the case of the us-mexico border the trans/ national emergency has been constructed primarily through discourse. 52 moreover, the migrants’ illegal entrance in the us seems to pose a risk almost exclusively for the inhabitants of the immediate borderlands, as it inevitably intertwines with criminal activities such as human trafficking and narcotraffic. nonetheless, public discourse legitimates the existence of a state of exception and its consequent infrastructure. in institutional and media spheres, metaphors supporting the idea of an existing emergency draw on terminology related to medical scare (epidemic), hydraulics (tide, flood), war (invasion), natural calamity (swarm), and so on (santa ana, “empirical analysis of anti-immigrant metaphor in political discourse”; brown tide rising), helping the construction of a national discourse that justifies any measure the government is willing to take against immigration. to keep illegal immigrants in custody, several detention facilities have been built along the border over the years; the government can expand ice’s detection capacity, infrastructures, and logistics by redirecting funding from other federal agencies. in recent years, lawsuits have been filed by ex-detainees for medical neglect and lack of humane hygienic conditions, as well as physical and sexual abuse, during detention (cantor et al.). the title of the film, icebox, is the translation of hielera, the way migrants call these facilities in their recount of the experience. in several occasions the topic has been raised by independent media and yet, cbp officials have shunned the accusations and refused to acknowledge the testimonies on the matter, often collected by non-profit organizations and advocacy groups. detention spaces are subjected to the desert climate and—at least officially—heat regulation seems to depend on that; also, detainees customarily have to sleep on concrete floors, wrapping themselves in scanty heat sheets. the feature movie is the remake of a short film written and directed by daniel sawka himself in 2016. oscar (anthony gonzalez) is a honduran 12-year-old boy forced by local pandilla members to join them, under the threat of death and violent retaliation against his family. when his school is attacked by the gang chasing him, his family decides to pay a coyote to take the young boy to the us, where his maternal uncle manuel (omar leyva) has lived for years working as a peon in arizona. after the hardship of the travel through mexico and across borders, oscar is caught by the border patrol and brought to a facility where tens of migrant children are detained. eluding the guards’ control, he manages to talk with perla (genesis rodriguez), a journalist visiting the detention center, and later on to persuade her to look for his uncle. as manuel eventually takes responsibility for him, oscar is entitled to a trial to apply for asylum; his request will be rejected for his—albeit unwilling—activity within the pandilla. the story closes with a bittersweet ending when oscar travels to california in order to become an undocumented agricultural worker; notwithstanding his dream of pursuing education, he accepts the solution as it saves his life and protects his family. throughout the movie, hand-held camera shots add to the pathos and awkward realism in the sequences related to human interaction, contrasting with unsympathetic overhead and panning shots taken inside the detention facility. as icebox shows, violence against central american children begins in their local community, where they are—often unwillingly—chosen as future gang members by means of consolidated recruiting mechanisms. in the frantic opening sequence, three men are forcing a young boy on the floor, screaming over a buzzing sound in the background; they are shirtless and reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 53 their tattoos are exposed, letting the spectator understand that they belong to some criminal gang. marking youth with a pandilla’s symbolic tattoo is common practice to force them in the gang, as a visible mark of their alleged belonging will lead to isolation and rejection in the community of origin. oscar’s mother urges him to never show his chest tattoo to anyone; when the detained children are taken to shower, he gets abruptly forced by guards to undress leading to violent repercussions, isolation, and mistrust among the detainees. later on, he decides to show the tattoo to his uncle, who has been unaware of the real reason behind his nephew’s escape; his reaction is charged with fear and sorrow, as he immediately understands the implications of forced gang recruitment. in the 21st century, homicide rates and gang violence-related conflicts have been increasing in the northern triangle, seemingly due to an increased power of the organized crime groups operating in the region, paired with the ineffectiveness of state protection measures (cantor). it might be argued that an intrinsic colonial structuring of power sustains the us state of exception spaces (gregory), as us foreign politics related to the northern triangle countries have neglected—if not ineffectively intervened in—the political disruption their populations have been struggling with. the spatiality of border infrastructures and policies is thus complicated by its inevitable transnational character and implications. unlike other existing films on central american minor migrants—such as sin nombre (2009) or la jaula de oro (2013), among others—oscar doesn’t board the train known as la bestia, but he travels across mexico in the back of a truck, packed together with other migrants. the group crosses the border climbing ladders straddling the fence, mounts on bicycles prepared beforehand and cycles in the darkness through the arizonan desert. when oscar is abandoned by the coyote and the adult migrants, he’s tracked down by a drone, detained by the border patrol and brought to a detention facility populated by minors of all ages. the description of detention spaces corresponds with journalistic reportages on the topic, as well as leaked internal footage, and exdetainees’ testimony. the children are held in a huge shed, where different groups are divided in fenced spaces resembling roosts. each child is given a pad to sleep on the ground and a mylar heat sheet; as the movie shows, detainees live in the clothes they were wearing at the moment of detention until they’re occasionally allowed to rummage in boxes full of second-hand clothes donated by charities, frantically contending for garments with each other. lighting is key to depict when oscar is abandoned by the coyote and the adult migrants, he’s tracked down by a drone, detained by the border patrol and brought to a detention facility populated by minors of all ages. icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence... anna marta marini 54 cinematographically the children’s experience. night sequences are characterized by an almost total darkness in which the crumpled silver heat sheets crinkle and mark the mise-en-scène with an eerie, lunar mood; shadows dominate nighttime dialogues between oscar and rafael (matthew moreno), a younger kid he gets close to and whose future seems as indefinite as his time spent in detention. conversely, daytime sequences are characterized by neutral light falling flat on the scene and giving the mise-en-scène the feel of a non-place (augé), a space where relations are emptied of their anthropological meaning and existences reduced to the application of apparently lawful procedures. the treatment the children receive from the guards is quite detached— there isn’t any interaction but the bare necessary—and resolved within the realm of a space of exception. no useful information is given to them nor clear perspectives on what will happen to them; vagueness dominates the detention time in a blurred extra/judicial vacuum, where the detainees are apparently bereft of any value and consideration. despite their critical situation, in various scenes the children’s naivety emerges as they joke, flirt, and cry as they miss their family; the film plays with these moments, showing the contrast between their necessity to grow up before time and their inevitable childlike nature. contrastively, the character of felipe (johnny ortiz) embodies the disillusionment and consequent crazed desperation; he’s been detained three times in that same facility without being given the opportunity of a lawful trial. at first, felipe acts as a confident, shrewd older boy feared by younger minors in custody; in the last sequence he appears, he’s dragged away by guards while opposing resistance and screaming warnings to the other detainees on the illusory character of migrant-related bureaucracy. a pervasive sense of uncertainty and atemporality marks oscar’s stay in the facility, despite the check-in officers informing the children of alleged deadlines related to their detention process. actually, on august 21, 2019, the us department of homeland security announced that it would remove time limits on the detention of migrant children, thus legally extending the practice of indefinite detention to minors. in order to do so, the trump administration would repeal the flores settlement agreement (1997), a legal ruling which barred the government from holding migrant children in detention for more than 20 days. children can be released waiting for trial in the case a documented close relative guarantees for them. for oscar’s uncle, taking responsibility of the child in order to allow him to appear in court represents a rather complex choice. when he drives his nephew “home”, the spectator discovers that he lives in a shack he shares with other peons on the land he works; he has to lend oscar his spot in a bunk bed and sleep on the floor. after years spent as an undocumented worker, manuel was wildly beaten by three american citizens; he holds a regular residence permit thanks to a u visa, which is granted to victims of violence they suffered while in the us. such a permit can lead to the possibility of requesting a green card after a 3-year period of uninterrupted residence; the status it grants, though, is conditional and can be revoked for a wide range of reasons, while the requirements to fulfil during the stay are quite strict. thus, manuel’s fear derives from yet another state of uncertainty in which even legal immigrants can live by. the trial sequence is as short as these trials are in reality. the only category most of central american children could resort to in their attempt to be granted asylum is the belonging to a persecuted particular social group (psg), as they aren’t victims of persecution based on religious, racial, national, or political reasons reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 55 icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence... anna marta marini its reality invisiblized by a public discourse reduced to platitudes and superficial assertions, the border itself becomes a kenomatic space characterized by the absence of legality, a suspension of law permitted by a sovereign government blurring its limits, and where the migrants’ legal subjectivity is rather indefinite. 56 revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 57 reden (orlang). nonetheless, there isn’t a recognized status for youth escaping forced gang recruitment. the definition of psg has been ambiguous and open to interpretation; in 1985, the board of immigration appeals ruled as necessary for granting asylum the proven persecution against a social group sharing “immutable characteristics” (paz 1077), a requirement that’s evidently hard to fulfil. the narrative relative to the honduran protagonist is reminiscent of other central american personal stories told by means of other media forms. the honduran protagonist—also named oscar—of the comic barrier (vaughan et al.) doesn’t accede to be part of a local gang despite the consequent threats; when the same gang brutally murders his family, he escapes northbound and manages to cross the us border, only to be detained by aliens in a sci-fi turn brilliantly packed with metaphors on border politics and discourse. in her harrowing short essay los niños perdidos: un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas (2016), mexican author valeria luiselli recounts her experience as interpreter for central american minor migrants, especially during their trials to be granted asylum or—in the case of a negative outcome—deported. luiselli’s last novel lost children archive (2019) resumes the theme, pondering on it through a road-trip narrative. albeit less effective than the essay, the novel—possibly unconsciously—brings forth an extremely significative message: in the public sphere, the existence of these children holds, in many cases, the value of a piece of news caught on the radio, which can easily be turned off if it sounds too detailed or uneasy to linger onto. its reality invisiblized by a public discourse reduced to platitudes and superficial assertions, the border itself becomes a kenomatic space characterized by the absence of legality, a suspension of law permitted by a sovereign government blurring its limits, and where the migrants’ legal subjectivity is rather indefinite. aside from a state of legal exception, there’s an evident normalization of inhumanity intrinsic to the detention process and praxis. in the movie, the guards involved in the facility operation don’t come across as purposely bad or particularly ill-disposed; rather, their attitude evokes what arendt described as the banality of evil (1963), a suspension of questioning one’s own tasks from an ethical or moral perspective. the judge who turns down oscar’s asylum request as well doesn’t appear as mean or ideologically driven; he’s represented as a bureaucrat compliantly going through one case after the other, following a given procedure based on standardized questionnaires assessing the children’s supposed eligibility. all the officers and institutional characters oscar encounters throughout the movie aren’t markedly characterized as antagonist figures, but rather, they’re unreflective parts of the apparatus and act accordingly, in a space devoid of human compassion or questioning. a questioning that is left to individual conscience, as it is explored by francisco cantú in his autobiographical essay the line becomes a river: dispatches from the border (2018), in which he recounts his experience as a mexican-american border patrol officer; he eventually left the agency as he couldn’t cope with the efforts required to reconcile the imposed procedures and routines with his will to help migrants and borderlands inhabitants. without yielding to political bias, icebox certainly contributes to bare the dehumanizing mechanisms of the handling of immigration at the border, in a worthy attempt to raise timely and indispensable awareness in the audience. icebox and the exceptionality intrinsic to institutional violence... anna marta marini 58 agamben, giorgio. stato di eccezione. bollati boringhieri, 2003. arendt, hannah. eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. viking press, 1963. augé, marc. non-lieux: introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodemité. éditions du seuil, 1992. cantor, guillermo et al. no action taken: lack of cbp accountability in responding to complaints of abuse. american immigration council, 2014. cantor, david james. “as deadly as armed conflict? gang violence and forced displacement in the northern triangle of central america.” agenda internacional, vol. 23, no. 34, 2016, pp. 77-97. cantú, francisco. the line becomes a river: dispatches from the border. riverhead books, 2018. gregory, derek. “the black flag: guantánamo bay and the space of exception.” geografiska annaler, vol. 88, no. 4, 2006, pp. 405-427. luiselli, valeria. los niños perdidos: un ensayo en cuarenta preguntas. sexto piso, 2016. ---. lost children archive. knopf, 2019. massey, douglas s. et al. beyond smoke and mirrors: mexican immigration in an era of economic integration. russel sage foundation, 2003. orlang, adreanna. “clearly amorphous: finding a particular social group for children resisting gang recruitment.” catholic university law review, vol. 61, no. 2, 2014, pp. 621-650. paz, frank. “children seek refuge from gang-forced recruitment: how asylum law can protect the defenseless.” fordham urban law journal, vol. 42, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1063-1108. santa ana, otto. “empirical analysis of anti-immigrant metaphor in political discourse.” upenn working papers in linguistics, vol. 4, no. 1, 1997, pp. 317-330. ---. brown tide rising: metaphors of latinos in contemporary american public discourse. ut press, 2002. us cbp. u.s. border patrol apprehensions from mexico and other than mexico (fy 2000 fy 2018), 2018. ---. u.s. border patrol fiscal year southwest border sector apprehensions (fy 1960 fy 2018), 2018. vaughan, brian k. et al. barrier. panel syndicate, 2015. fukunaga, cary j. (2009). sin nombre / nameless [movie feature]. quemada-diez, diego. (2013). la jaula de oro / the golden dream [movie feature]. sawka, daniel. (2016). icebox [short film]. ---. (2018). icebox [movie feature]. references cinematographic references the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid t 40 ab st ra ct mónica fernández jiménez is a junior researcher in the english department at universidad of valladolid. there she works on her doctoral thesis exploring the possibilities of a hemispheric caribbean-american aesthetic. as such, she has published articles in national and international journals dealing with caribbean and caribbean-american works like those of claude mckay, junot díaz, jamaica kincaid or derek walcott. as part of the department she teaches courses on american literature and history and british contemporary literature. as a researcher she is part of a recognised research project on u.s. ethnic literature. fernández jiménez, mónica. “the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 39-48. recibido: 05 de noviembre de 2019. his article analyses three novels by julia alvarez–how the garcía girls lost their accents (1991), in the time of the butterflies (1994), and in the name of salomé (2000)– through the lenses of hemispheric american studies. inspired by the teachings of antonio benítez-rojo’s theoretical work the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective (1992), i contend that the categorisation of these novels as latino literature is not enough to describe all of their richness. these novels portray throughout their pages social, political, and artistic relations that tie all of the americas together, and their analysis benefits from the essays written by caribbean post-essentialist critics who developed, during the 1990s, a discourse based on the cultural supersyncretism of the islands that helps us to understand the postmodern globalised worlds as it stands. the novels by alvarez reflect these theories, as they portray the realities of a new world constricted by the workings of race and racism, capitalism, and postcolonialism. key words: julia alvarez; caribbean literature; caribbean discourse; hemispheric american studies; multiculturalism. the saint lucian nobel prize winner derek walcott claimed in his essay “the caribbean: culture or mimicry” (1974) that, despite the shadow of empire being inescapable, caribbeans “were american even while [they] were british” (3). furthermore, the insistence on national identification is a result of power intentions in an “archipelago […] broken up into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity” (ibid). this is absurd, according to walcott, since it cannot be denied that west indian culture is american “not because america owes me a living from historical guilt, not that is needs my presence, but because we share this part of the world, and have shared it for centuries now, even as conqueror and victim, as exploiter and exploited” (4). such approach to caribbean literature became popularised in the 1990s thanks to essays such as édouard glissant’s, edward kamau brathwaite’s, and antonio benítez-rojo’s. florencia bonfiglio explains that the irruption of these texts transcending linguistic and national barriers was the result of an effort on the part of the authors to create a discourse “independent from its ‘mother’ literatures/euro-north-american hegemonic paradigms” (149). the most clearly postmodern approach to is expressed in antonio benítez-rojo’s the repeating island (1992), where he explains that the caribbean way of being and acting serves to transcend the very colonial violence which gave birth to the region as we know nowadays: a culturally heterogeneous place (27-28). if caribbean cultural productions, as walcott explained, are indeed american, what about caribbean migrants in the united states? can we trace back the caribbean roots—or routes—of their works? that is what benítez-rojo indeed suggested, as he claims that mobility is a characteristic feature of “the peoples of the sea” (25). a postcolonial perspective has indeed been taken by some critics in their analyses of cultural productions written by minorities in the united states. jenny sharpe’s much quoted phrase from her article “is the united states postcolonial?” (1995) expresses that: “given its history of imported slave and contract labor, continental expansion, and overseas imperialism, an implication of american culture in the postcolonial study of empires is perhaps long overdue” (181). after the student protests of the 1960s third world movement in american campuses, the state of ethnic minorities in the united states started to be considered a postcolonial matter (114), which still serves to challenge the 1980s multicultural model that ultimately serves to portray a static image of cultures as endangered objects to protect but paradoxically enters into conflict with the country’s capitalist demands (piper 15-18). while such approaches are accurate, specially in dismantling the exoticist—in salman rushdie’s view (67)—notion of multiculturalism, this is not the desirable approach to julia alvarez’s works, since her literature is not relegated to a united states setting; it also includes many chapters dealing with the locus specific situation of the characters’ homeland: the dominican republic. …the insistence on national identification is a result of power intentions in an “archipelago […] broken up into nations, and in each nation we attempt to assert characteristics of the national identity.” (walcott 3) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 41 the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez if caribbean cultural productions, as walcott explained, are indeed american, what about caribbean migrants in the united states? can we trace back the caribbean roots–or routes–of their works? that is what benítez-rojo indeed suggested, as he claims that mobility is a characteristic feature of “the peoples of the sea” (25). 42 caribbean islands have always been a bastion of the economic powers at work because of their strategic geographical position. because of the popularity experienced by latino literature in the united states, one often forgets that places such as the dominican republic are caribbean nations with their own caribbean specificities such as the inescapable neo-colonial relationship with the united states. caribbean islands have always being a bastion of the economic powers at work because of their strategic geographical position. furthermore, such popularity has turned latino literature into an exotic desirable commodity (bost & aparicio 3). as suzanne bost and frances r. aparicio claim, while some novels adapt to the “fetishized traits” traditionally ascribed to latinos—“vibrant colored book covers, recipes for spicy food, or traditional spiritual practices”—and have thus turned into best sellers, others have been deemed to oblivion (3). even when the latino category considers “layers of conquest, colonialism, and cultural mixture” (boost & aparicio 2), it has also worked as an oppositional practice. in marta caminero-santangelo’s words: “‘latino’ as an ethnic label thus suggests a contrast with some ‘other’ people understood to be ‘non-latino’” (13). the heterogeneity of the locations, timelines, characters, and historical episodes present in the works of julia alvarez makes them quite aligned with benítez-rojo’s claim against the binary implications of mestizaje: “the literature of the caribbean can be read as a mestizo text, but also as a stream of texts in flight in intense differentiation among themselves and within whose complex coexistence there are vague regularities, usually paradoxical” (27). a clear example of this is alvarez’s 1994 novel in the time of the butterflies, which is completely set in the dominican republic. it narrates a fictionalised account of the mirabal sisters’ lives and their assassination by the trujillo dictatorship. but we will get to that later. to understand alvarez’s position as a caribbean writer let us retort to her 1998 collection something to declare. one of them, “doña aída, with your permission,” is an answer to an incident that took place at the caribbean studies association annual meeting, where alvarez was asked to deliver a plenary talk alongside the dominican poet aída cartagena portalatín. cartagena portalatín criticised alvarez for speaking english, and the latter’s answer—this essay—is deeply rooted in the previously mentioned 1990s caribbean discourse characterised by anti-essentialism. alvarez explains in the essay that: “doña aída embraced [her], but then in front of the mikes, she reamed [her] out. ‘eso parece mentira que una dominicana se ponga a escribir en inglés. vuelve a tu país, vuelve a tu idioma. tú eres dominicana’.” (“doña aída” 171) after explaining that she decided to write this essay because the moment did not seem adequate to offer an answer, she claims that the cultural situation she inhabits is “a world formed of contradictions, clashes, cominglings—the gringa and the dominican, and it is precisely that tension and richness that interests her].” (“doña aída” 173) whereas this reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 43 claim is quite specific of migration experiences to a country with a different language–and she mentions other migrant writers claiming that their belonging to several cultures has created very interesting literary works—she then continues to justify her language choice in this way: this final paragraph adds a caribbean perspective to her argument, as what she describes is characteristic of the history of postcolonial peoples, a history made up clashes, cominglings, and confluences, especially in the caribbean. alvarez’s claim that “we are islands, permeable countries” takes up the rhetoric on the aquatic worldview expressed by edward kamau brathwaite in his aethetic theory of tidalectics (as opposed to dialectics). the barbadian poet believes that western conceptualisation, epistemology, and philosophy do not work when defining the lives of the islanders and goes on to suggest alternative ways of reading and interpreting reality (hessler). in particular, brathwaite “is concerned with a sense of relation that is expressed in terms of connecting lines” (reckin 2). according to anna reckin, it is the layers which “[open] up the work to new contexts and to wider and deeper […] signification” (3) included in a narration that resemble the movement of the sea. the fragmented and multilayered, in terms of time and space, nature of alvarez’s novels embraces this philosophy. the 1991 novel how the garcía girls lost their accents has an inverse chronological order with time lapses between its chapters. it begins with the journey back to the dominican republic of one of the protagonist sisters, yolanda, who has the intention of staying there. then, as the novel progresses, we move on to the sisters’ previous time in the united states, their acculturation and identity struggles, such as racist attacks, and the political exile that made them leave their country. despite the title, this is not only a fiction of migration and acculturation in the united states, since the description of the girls’ typical second-generation struggles is only part of the book. it must be considered that the book opens and closes in the dominican republic and portrays the characteristic rhythms, colours, and aquatic lifestyle of the caribbean. during the narrative, mental health is also given big importance, stressing the double, triple, or quadruple consciousness experienced by the sisters living inbetween worlds, that which was described by alvarez in her essay as typical of the caribbean. this is also a narrative of return, not only of migration, as yolanda, the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 44 think of it, the caribbean… a string of islands, a sieve of the continents, north and south, a sponge, as most islands are, absorbing those who come and go, whether indios in canoas from the amazon, or conquistadores from spain, or african princes brought in chains in the holds of ships to be slaves, or refugees from china or central europe or other islands. we are not a big continental chunk, a forbidding expanse that takes forever to penetrate, which keeps groups solidly intact, for a while anyhow. our beaches welcome the stranger with their carpets of white sand. in an hour you reach the interior; in another hour you arrive at the other coast. we are islands, permeable countries. it’s in our genes to be a world made of many worlds. ¿no es así? (“doña aída” 175) who has multiple cultural identities according to ana mª manzanas—“yo, joe, yoyo, joey, as the occasion requires” (38)–finds living in this multiplicity only possible in the caribbean (also meaning in the aquatic epistemology): “this time, however, yolanda is not so sure she’ll be going back [to the united states]. but that is a secret” (alvarez, garcía girls 7). the narrative coming and going from the united states to the dominican republic and vice versa across the caribbean sea depicted in the garcía girls novel reminds contemporary readers that the hybrid nature of these characters does not start on the land but in the sea, reflecting the different waves of migration that have created america. in the time of buterfflies is in fact, as already mentioned, completely set in the dominican republic, and tells a fictionalised account of an important chapter of the history of this country which has made a big impact on the cultural identity of its inhabitants: the assassination of the mirabal sisters by the trujillo regime (recognised by the united states). the issue at stake is that the novel is completely written in english (using some words in spanish as is characteristic of latino literature in the united states) while its subject is certainly dominican: it tells anglophone readers of an important chapter of the history of a non-anglophone country. this inserts into the united states cultural scene a history of the country’s hegemony presented from another perspective, the perspective of those affected by the neo-colonial imperialist relations the united states establishes with the countries of the caribbean. in fact, the story of the mirabal sisters has had an influence worldwide: the date of their assassination has been chosen for the date of the international day for the elimination of violence against women, the 25th of november. in in the name of salomé (2000) there is also more than one setting: the united states, the dominican republic, and cuba. the main character of the dominican republic plot, which is set in the second half of the 19th century, is salomé ureña, the national poet who wrote patriotic verses in order to arouse nationalist sentiments for encouraging revolutions against corrupt, colonial, and institutional power. the american setting protagonist, her daughter camila, a 66 years old university professor, does not feel at home in the united states, like the garcía girls’ yolanda, and writes a pros and reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 45 alvarez’s claim that “we are islands, permeable countries” takes up the rhetoric on the aquatic worldview expressed by edward kamau brathwaite in his aesthetic theory of tidalectics (as opposed to dialectics). the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 46 cons list for any possible decision she will take once she retires. she feels only convinced by the idea of going to cuba to join the revolution. cuba is not her homeland but part of the caribbean archipelago which, according to benítez-rojo, is “a group of american nations whose colonial experiences and languages have been different, but which share certain undeniable features” (1). the protagonist also reflects this kind of thought when she recalls jose martí’s teachings: “why speak of cuba and santo domingo, when even the underwater cordillera that runs from island to island knows they belong together” (alvarez, salomé 164; emphasis mine). the word “even,” which i have emphasised, suggests that it is not only the cordillera which makes the islands belong together. camila’s decision to join the cuban revolution can be analysed through the lens of another caribbean discourse representative, édouard glissant, in terms of his poetics of relation, as he claims that this novel is characterised by the heterogeneity of the historical situations it relates, key moments in the story of the americas, in a hemispheric sense: the cuban revolution, the trujillo dictatorship, the ku klux klan attacks, and the colonial enterprises of spain in the caribbean, among others. it establishes the sometimes ignored notion that, as derek walcott has put it, that part of the world is shared and most of its culture comes from its past of “ghettos, its river-cultures, its plantations” (4). the metaphor of the archipelago, of a culture creating itself by the heterogeneous experiences of colonialism, is what can also be called the metaphor of america (walcott 5). glissant’s already mentioned theoretical book on a poetics of relation makes use of gilles deleuze and felix guattari’s concept of the narrative coming and going from the united states to the dominican republic and vice versa across the caribbean sea depicted in the garcía girls novel reminds contemporary readers that the hybrid nature of these characters does not start on the land but in the sea, reflecting the different waves of migration that have created america. errantry […] does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment. sometimes, by taking up the problems of the other, it is possible to find oneself […] that is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in relation. (18) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 47 the rhizome. as an image of multiplicity, the rhizome, “chang[ing] its nature as it expands its connections” (deleuze & guattari 8), is something characteristic of the caribbean since, unlike the mediterranean, it is “a sea that explodes the scattered lands into an arc. a sea that diffracts. without necessarily inferring any advantage whatsoever to their situation, the reality of archipelagos in the caribbean [...] provides a natural illustration of the thought of relation” (glissant 33). camila’s errantry is opposed to the idea of the monolingual root characteristic of the conquests that happened across the americas: “conquerors are the moving transient root of their people” (glissant 14). there are two kinds of nomadism, arrowlike (as in the conquerors example) and circular, endogamous and “overdetermined by the conditions of [its] existence” (glissant 12). errantry, standing not as an opposition but completely differing from these notions, is best understood when caribbean migrant writers in the united states like julia alvarez continue adopting an epistemology which is deeply postcolonial and caribbean. the errant, “prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in relation,” (glissant 18) transcends borders. conclusions while much has been written about the american perspective of caribbean texts and essays, such relationship has not been actively endorsed in order to look at caribbean latino novels in the united states even when considerations such as benítez rojo’s approach to chaos and multiplicity are reflected in the the fragmented nature of works like julia alvarez’s. the three novels analysed above deliberately and fluidly change settings between the unites states and the caribbean islands—often the dominican republic but also cuba–, emphasising the connections between the different nations of the americas. the transnationalism, rather than biculturalism, portrayed in julia alvarez’s novels is an attempt to recover josé martí’s approach to america—our america—as mentioned in in the name of salomé: “the america our poor, little countries are struggling to create” (121). as walcott points out when he claims that american culture is that of the plantations and ghettoes, this analysis of alvarez’s works brings back to mind the idea that identification according to nation-states is a mechanism which serves to ignore other socio-cultural realities that have led to shared historical injustices. in contrast, julia alvarez and the anti-essentialist caribbean essayists acknowledge the reality of specific landscapes, geographies, and migration routes which have been the real agents in shaping an american identity. the hemispheric approach of julia alvarez’s novels mónica fernández jiménez 48 alvarez, julia. “doña aída, with your permission”. something to declare. algonquin books of chapel hill, 2014. ---. how the garcía girls lost their accents. plume, 1991. ---. in the name of salomé. new york: plume, 2000. benítez-rojo, antonio. the repeating island: the caribbean and the postmodern perspective. duke up, 1992. bonfiglio, florencia. “notes on the caribbean essay from an archipelagic perspective (kamau brathwaite, édouard glissant and antonio benítez rojo).” caribbean studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2015, pp. 147-173. bost, suzanne & frances r. aparicio. editors. the routledge companion to latino/a literature. routledge, 2013. caminero-santangelo, marta. “latinidad.” the routledge companion to latino/a literature, edited by suzanne bost & frances r. aparicio. routledge, 2013, pp. 13-24. deleuze, gilles & felix guattari. a thousand plateaus, translated by brian massumi. u of minnesota p, 1987. glissant, édouard. poetics of relation, translated by betsy wing. the u of michigan p, 1997. hessler, stephanie. tidalectics. thyssen-bornemiza art contemporary academy, 2017. manzanas, ana mª. “ethnicity, mestizaje, and writing.” narratives of resistance: literature and ethnicity in the united states and the caribbean, edited by ana mª manzanas & jesús benito. ediciones de la universidad de castilla-la mancha, 1999, pp. 25-39. piper, karen. “post-colonialism in the united states: diversity or hybridity?” post colonial literatures: expanding the canon, edited by deborah l. madsen. pluto press, 1999, pp. 14-28. reckin, anna. “tidalectic lectures: kamau brathwaite’s prose/ poetry as sound space.” anthurium: a caribbean studies journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 1-16. rushdie, salman. imaginary homelands: essays and criticism, 1981-1991. granta books, 1991. sharpe, jenny. “is the united states postcolonial?: transnationalism, immigration, and race.” diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1995, pp. 181-199. walcott, derek. “the caribbean: culture or mimicry?” journal of interamerican studies and world affairs, vol. 1, no. 16, 1974, pp. 313. references the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills sofía martinicorena universidad complutense de madrid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills sofía martinicorena universidad complutense de madrid r 60 ab st ra ct sofía martinicorena is a research fellow (fpu-2019) at the department of english studies of the universidad complutense de madrid. after obtaining a master’s degree in united states literature at the university of edinburgh (2017-2018), she is currently writing her phd thesis on the national spatial imaginary in contemporary united states fiction. she has participated in conferences and seminaries relating to the field and has published articles on varied topics, including united states space and place, edgar allan poe or film studies. martinicorena, sofía. “the ideology of self-making and the white working class in rebecca harding davis’ life in the iron mills”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 59-68. recibido: 11 de diciembre de 2019; 2ª versión: 04 de junio de 2020. ebecca harding davis’ novella life in the iron mills, published in 1861 in the atlantic monthly, is now considered a landmark of early american realism. this paper analyses the text’s depiction of the white working class and the ideological consequences of the myth of upward mobility and self-making, which are presented as an impossibility to hugh wolfe, the story’s main character. i will argue that davis’ choice to offer a representation of the precarious lives of the workers of northern industrial capitalism implies a criticism of the quintessentially american narrative of upward mobility, and a subsequent reflection on how foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. more specifically, i will maintain that life in the iron mills operates as a contestation to the myth of the selfmade man, evinced by the comparison between hugh wolfe’s situation and that of the mill owners, who encourage his aspirations from an oblivious position of privilege. lastly, hugh’s tragic death will be taken as proof that the myth of self-making mystifies the actual social and economic dynamics of industrial capitalism. key words: realism; harding davis; self-made man; capitalism; ideology. 1 see schocket, tharp and grauke for an analysis on the relevance and implications of the atlantic monthly’s editorial political positioning of the time and its reading audience’s assumptions. 2 although it is hardly arguable that davis’ writings qualify as, indeed, realist and reformist literature, critics have challenged these labels claiming for a more complex understanding of her oeuvre (hughes 114). 3 the social advancement and “rags to riches” trope has been often taken to epitomise the so-called “american dream”, a ubiquitous expression whose “definition is virtually taken for granted” (cullen 5) and which as a result becomes problematic when used casually. because of its complex implications, this essay avoids such phrase, opting instead for the more precise “upward mobility.” see jim cullen’s the american dream. a short history of an idea that shaped a nation (2003) for a concise survey of all the myths and narratives that make up the american dream ideology, among which we can find the upward mobility trope. 4 hence the “tropes of blackness” and “orthographically denoted dialect” applied to white workers that we find in iron mills (schocket 46). see schocket’s vanishing moments for an appraisal of the intermingling of images of race and class oppression in davis’ text. 61 rebecca harding davis’ novella life in the iron mills is one of the first instances of nineteenthcentury american fiction that explicitly focuses on the white working class. a largely forgotten text until it was republished by the feminist press in 1971, iron mills was published in 1861 in the atlantic monthly, a magazine “committed to the ideals of american democracy.” (tharp 3)1 against the backdrop of a nation on the verge of disaster and a society that was experimenting deep economic and political change, davis decided to write about the deprived lives of the workers of industrial capitalism, managing to establish herself as one of the leading voices of reformist literature and american realism (long).2 the aim of this paper is to explore how her writing analyses the consequences of the myth of upward mobility for the working class. i will argue that iron mills is construed as a contestation to the pervasive—and quintessentially american—myth of the self-made man,3 which by promoting an ideology of effort and hard work as the means towards personal self-realisation, overlooks class differences and socioeconomic realities. an analysis of the tragic unfolding of hugh wolfe’s life will evince how this myth functions in an ideological way, obscuring the real social dynamics that operate under industrial capitalism. the liminal position of davis as a writer in a border state like virginia might have been useful in the exploration of conflicts in a way that was relevant both to the north and the south of the united states. as canada argues, people living in border states had a privileged position as they perceived the complexity of the conflict in a way that was uncommon. iron mills provides a glimpse of the worst of both worlds: slavery and exploitative industrial capitalism.4 the novella begins with an anonymous, ungendered and presumably middle-class narrator describing the industrial town where the story takes place—a town governed by thick, polluted grey smoke. the introduction rapidly situates the reader in a suffocating environment that mirrors the equally grey, unhealthy lives of the people that inhabit it. the wealth of adjectives can only help to immerse the reader in the stifling atmosphere of the story, as the narrator invites us into “the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.” (13) the deliberate association between an industrial setting and thick pollution must be read as a political critique on davis part, since as gatlin explains, “smoke symbolized manufacturing might and economic triumph” for industrial advocates (202). what davis sees as filth and unwholesomeness, industrial capitalists regarded as a means towards success. in a nation that was increasingly polarised, the northern capitalist economy was seen as modern and in tune with the fight for freedom, as compared to the southern plantation-based economy. the idealisation of the reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena 62 iron mills is construed as a contestation to the pervasive–and quintessentially american–myth of the self-made man, which by promoting an ideology of effort and hard work as the means towards personal self-realisation, overlooks class differences and socioeconomic realities. revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 63 reden north often had ideological consequences, as foner rightly puts: “glorifying northern society and […] isolating slavery as an unacceptable form of labor exploitation served to justify the emerging capitalist order of the north.” (qtd. in schocket 37) by associating successful capitalism with a lethal environment, davis begins to destabilise common assumptions about success and what they may entail for working-class individuals in a way that will resonate throughout the story. the workers of the iron furnaces are presented as a homogeneous mass of people with no names. their lives are uneventful and highly routinised, consisting of activities that contribute to the destruction of their bodies: “their lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking…” (iron mills 15) davis provides a careful description of the physical squalor that impregnates every movement of the workers’ existence. the destructive nature of their daily routine is tragically ironic if we consider that the workers’ only worth is as physical capital. the fact that workers are metonymically conceptualised as hands signals the commodification they are subjected to: they are valuable insofar as their impaired bodies can produce. for kirby, one of the mill owners, workers are no more than machines: “if i had the making of men, these men who do the lowest part of the world’s work should be machines,—nothing more,—hands.” (34) their physicality is their only value, but it is a physicality that is not only flawed but also alien to themselves. the “vast machinery of system by which the bodies of workmen are governed” (19) as presented in iron mills is a paradigmatic example of a dehumanising force that alienates the workers in a marxian sense, as labour is not an end in itself but a means for mere survival and “therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor”. (marx 655) because labour under the capitalist mode of production, is a matter “of self-sacrifice, of mortification,” (655) working means the ultimate dispossession. the worker’s labour, then, “belongs to another” and therefore “it is the loss of his self.” (655) davis’ effort in portraying the lives of the white working class suggests that her story is not merely an account of the life of an individual. although hugh wolfe is the main character in the novella, it seems that he is only an arbitrary example chosen from the many lives of the many white working-class industrial workers. the narrator confesses: “i cannot tell why i choose the half-forgotten story of this wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.” (14) the story about hugh’s wasted potential, read as a contingent example of what it is like to live as white labour, talks about the wasted potential of a whole class. hugh’s artistic endowment could defy this claim if we took it as evidence of his being a special case among his working peers. however, davis’ emphasis on the interchangeability of the workers’ lives points to the idea that if this potential the fact that workers are metonymically conceptualised as hands signals the commodification they are subjected to: they are valuable insofar as their impaired bodies can produce. does not show in other workers, it is because they are just too alienated to have any ambition beyond mere survival. furthermore, the very title of the story accentuates the non-individuality of characters. hugh’s is “only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost: thousands of them, massed, vile, slimy lives.” (13) in other words, what is at stake in davis’ novel is not the tragic story of a man, but rather the tragedy of a class. the working class presented in iron mills is defined in contrast to the mill owners. by introducing them into the story, davis elucidates the privilege differences between the workers and the capitalist owners. with bitter irony, the narrator tells us how the visitors to the mills stop by hugh’s furnace as they are tired from walking around the foundries. as soon as hugh sees them, he is invaded by curiosity: they represent the “mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being.” (27) hugh is painfully aware that he and the visitors belong to different worlds, and he cannot help but wonder: “what made the difference between them? that was the mystery of his life.” (27) the class abyss between them is an undecipherable secret for hugh. the problem is aggravated when the immutability of class hierarchy is combined with disembodied identity ideals that efface any reference to class, as those represented by mitchell. hugh begins to compare himself to him, whom he sees as the epitome of western civilization and refinement: “wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.” (30) mitchell’s nonchalant knowledge of science and philosophy, of kant, novalis and humboldt, and most importantly, his white hand symbolise for hugh the “the impossibility of an identity.” (dow 53) tellingly portrayed as an animal in this scene, hugh is projecting onto mitchell the ideals of class and manhood that he knows he will never attain: “he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. never!” (30) mitchell embodies the aspirational dream of whiteness constituted as “a signifying agent of class mobility” (schocket 60) that makes one of the pillars of american nationhood. according to miles, the nineteenth-century united states promoted an identity ideal of white disembodied masculinity that consolidated itself as the legitimate subject of american citizenship. such ideal was based on an exclusionary subject that did not include the white male worker, among others. because the dominance of the hegemonic white male subject in nineteenth64 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena tellingly portrayed as an animal in this scene, hugh is projecting onto mitchell the ideals of class and manhood that he knows he will never attain: “he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed. never!” 65 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 century america was more tacitly enacted than explicitly agreed upon, hugh cannot find a rational motive to think himself unfit for the same chances of middle-class success that mitchell embodies. the frustration that hugh feels on realising that he does not have access to those possibilities of self-realisation is especially acute in a land where it is a supposedly self-evident fact that “all men were created equal.” the declaration of independence, which marked the character of america as a self-made nation itself, offered the promise of a land of opportunities where all men who so desired could freely pursue a happy life. as berlant suggests, the foundational documents of america “implicitly defined a ‘natural’ legitimate subject” that was white and male (qtd. in miles 91). while america thought of itself as a welcoming nation where anyone could fulfil their dreams of upward mobility through individual effort, “americans simultaneously founded the nation and consolidated a powerful disquisition of disembodied white manhood that would equate nationhood with all white men.” (miles 91) the myth of upward mobility, then, albeit publicised as an opportunity for anyone who desired it, was in reality restricted to a very specific demographic, consisting of subjects that had a relevant degree of agency over their lives. the ideology of self-making relies on a modern conception of individuals as people endowed with freedom, who own themselves and who are able to accomplish their potential. considering the alienated lives of the workers in iron mills, it is highly problematic to accept that these people have any sort of control over their own existence. life does not seem to have much to offer to hugh besides work and the filth that will accompany him to the grave, where he will have “not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.” (13) the canary chirping in the first pages of the novella evokes a pastoral america that is just as desolate as the bird’s singing: “its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, i think.” (12) the promise of a fertile land brimming with opportunities for all those who may want to take them is revealed by davis as a tantalic dream that has been cruelly offered to hugh, who will discover that, in reality, it had been denied to him all along. ironically, the path towards such dream of self-making is hard work and diligence, an idea resonant with a protestant work ethic and most famously embodied by benjamin franklin’s autobiography. the fact that work is the main engine of self-making is painfully ironic since the only thing that hugh and his working-class fellows do is, indeed, work. this is why doctor may’s unwillingly perverse advice to hugh that he may become what he chooses becomes the catalyst of the frustration that hugh feels on realising that he does not have access to those possibilities of self-realisation is especially acute in a land where it is a supposedly self-evident fact that “all men were created equal.” the canary chirping in the first pages of the novella evokes a pastoral america that is just as desolate as the bird’s singing: “its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, i think.” (12) the promise of a fertile land brimming with opportunities for all those who may want to take them is revealed by davis as a tantalic dream that has been cruelly offered to hugh, who will discover that, in reality, it had been denied to him all along. 66 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena the tragedy in the story, as it represents the absolute clash between what culture is interpellating hugh to believe and his real, material possibilities as conditioned by an exploitative system: “do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do you understand?” […] a man may make himself anything he chooses (37). even if he might be trying to be sympathetic towards hugh, the truth is that his words have the most devastating effect upon him, since on making hugh believe that he has power over his own life, doctor may hampers hugh’s understanding of the mechanisms of capitalist society in a way that will prove fatal: “’it’s all wrong, […] all wrong! i dunnot understan.’” (41) when the idea that he can “make himself anything he chooses” is injected in his debilitated mind, hugh begins to assimilate the ideology behind the mill owners’ words and acquires a “false consciousness,” which terry eagleton defines as a set of ideas “functional for the maintenance of an oppressive power” while “those who hold them are ignorant of this fact” (24). similarly, adorno and horkheimer claim that “the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them” (134). hugh’s unaware participation in this ideology leads him to desperation for not really understanding the ways of the world he lives in. anxiously not knowing who is to blame for his desolation, hugh begins to blame himself, wondering whether it is his own fault that his life is so miserable: “what am i worth, deb? is it my fault that i am no better? my fault?” (41) because the ideology of self-making is essentially individualist, it makes all the weight of responsibility fall on the shoulders of individuals, thus obscuring the real reasons why hugh cannot, indeed, make himself what he chooses. the reasons are no other than the fact that hugh’s only function in the system he is inserted in is to be a hand; a system where the privilege of upward mobility is reserved for the aforementioned legitimate subject of rights. since capitalism “educates and selects the economic subjects which it needs through a process of economic survival of the fittest,” (weber 20) hugh is simply destined to accept his place in that system and perish as one of the weakest. this extreme individualism is accompanied by a negation of any type of collective responsibility, which allows privileged agents not to admit they have a share in other people’s misery. as kirby tells doctor may, “ce n’est pas mon affaire. i have no fancy for nursing infant geniuses.” (34) in an ideology in which everything depends on the alleged free agency of individuals, those who are “unsuccessful” are to blame for their own situation. hugh’s incomprehension of the logics of this “world-cancer,” (49) as he calls it, is so unbearable that the only way out for him is suicide. several critics have read hugh’s suicide as his final proclamation of self-making, as a way of “assert[ing] ownership over his body by erasing it.” (miles 99) likewise, schocket has argued that “davis assures us symbolically that hugh finds whiteness in his death,” a death which works as a parody of “the mill visitor’s desires for self-made men” and as “salvation by way of spiritual transfusion.” (61) while i agree that that hugh’s final suicide is an example of accomplished agency, i think it is a highly problematic instance of it since the transformational possibilities that his death offers are virtually non-existent. the ending of the novella renders an ironic presentation of art and religion by tacitly suggesting that they lack the redemptive potential that they are often presumed to have. the narrator’s final reverie about reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 67 68 the ideology of self-making and the white working class... sofía martinicorena “homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty,” (65, emphasis mine) situated in a middle-class environment, acts like a mockery of the tragedy we have just witnessed. in conclusion, davis’ novella can be read as a case study of the harmful consequences that a particularly pervasive ideology as that of self-making had upon a given sector of the population that had not received much attention in american literature heretofore. by addressing a target audience that consisted mainly of well-to-do bostonians, davis managed to introduce complex debates in the core of american middle class, critically reflecting upon how certain national foundational narratives operate in a society that is not homogeneous in terms of race or class. hugh’s tragic ending can only help to evince how subaltern identities that did not fit into national narratives deserved a recognition that took into consideration their equally american realities. adorno, theodor & max horkheimer. dialectic of enlightenment. verso, 2016. canada, mark. “rebecca harding davis’s human stories of the civil war.” southern cultures, vol. 19, no. 3, 2013, pp. 57-71. cullen, jim. the american dream. a short story of an idea that shaped a nation. oxford up, 2003. davis, rebecca harding. life in the iron mills and other stories. feminist press, 1985. dow, william. narrating class in american fiction. palgrave macmillan, 2009. eagleton, terry. ideology: an introduction. verso, 1991. gatlin, jill. “disturbing aesthetics: industrial pollution, moral discourse, and narrative form in rebecca harding davis’s ‘life in the iron mills.” nineteenth-century literature, vol. 68, no. 2, 2013, pp. 201–233. grauke, kevin. “suicide, social reform, and the elision of working-class resistance in rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” prospects, vol. 27, 2002, pp. 137-175. hughes, sheila hassell. “between bodies of knowledge there is a great gulf fixed: a liberationist reading of class and gender in life in the iron mills.” american quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1, 1997, pp. 113-137. long, lisa a. “the postbellum reform writings of rebecca harding davis and elizabeth stuart phelps.” the cambridge companion to nineteenth century american women’s writing, edited by dale m. bauer & philip gould. cambridge up, 2001, pp. 262-283. marx, karl. “from economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844.” the norton anthology of theory and criticism, edited by vincent b. leitch. w.w. norton & company, 2010, pp. 651-655. miles, caroline s. “representing and self-mutilating the laboring male body: re-examining rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” the american transcendental quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 2004, pp. 89-194. schocket, eric. vanishing moments. class and american literature. the university of michigan press, 2009. tharp, allison. “‘there is a secret down here’: physical containment and social instruction in rebecca harding davis’s life in the iron mills.” journal of narrative theory, vol. 47, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–25. weber, max. the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. routledge, 2005. references university and the humanities: current challenges1 fernando galván he institution of the university has been going through a process of intense change and evolution in its mission and objectives in these first decades of the twenty-first century, and even during the final decades of the twentieth century. six years ago, in australia, the firm ernst & young published a report titled university of the future: a thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change. the authors of this report identified three types of universities: 1) those maintaining the status quo, though updating their mission (“streamlined status quo”); 2) those filling a specific niche in the market (“niche dominators”); and 3) those which are transforming the university (“transformers”). the first group, those termed “streamlined status quo,” are the established universities, some of which boast hundreds of years of history. these preserve their pedagogical and research traditions, though they are gradually transforming and updating the service and administration models of their institution. this evolution naturally implies changes in the manner in which these universities interact with students, governments, key players in industry, secondary schools, and the community. t reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 1 this text, translated from spanish, was the inaugural lecture of the academic year 2018-19, delivered at the university of alcalá on september 10, 2018. even though a few stylistic changes have been made, and a brief list of works cited was added, i have preferred to keep its original oral style. the second group, the “niche dominators,” includes both established universities as well as new institutions. as their name suggests, the purpose of these institutions is fundamentally to reshape and refine their “portfolio of services” and the markets in which they operate. they focus their attention on specific “client groups” by offering a customized education and operating similarly with research and research-related services. this customization, in turn, leads these institutions to modify their business, organizational, and operational models. the terms “portfolio of services,” “market,” “client group,” and “business model” are significant. the third group of universities is that of the “transformers,” comprised of new, private institutions who are creating a position for themselves in the, shall we say, “traditional” sector and creating new market avenues. they are thus fusing aspects of the higher education sector with other sectors, such as the media, technology, innovation, and venture capital, among others. this 2 leads to the creation of new markets, new areas, and new sources of economic value, which in turn increases the benefit derived from investing in the central business: namely teaching and research that are internationally competitive. i believe that all of us here today are aware that this, to phrase it simply and in few words, is the current situation in which universities around the world find themselves. the emergence of new institutions, especially of this last group, the “transformers,” is changing the relationship between universities and society, both in the public and private spheres. this is what ultimately produces the changes that established universities, those that are historic and traditional, and even those with less than half a century of existence, are currently experiencing. the appearance in this same period of numerous university rankings and the importance they are given by the media, governments, and employers, is one more example of the wave of innovation which is affecting universities around the world and which is used to justify the launch of new educational businesses, each more closely linked to specific business sectors and industries. in addition to this phenomenon, we also observe the growing importance in the educational agenda of curricular innovations, including life-long learning and the new digital technologies, in higher education as well as at other educational levels. both life-long learning and the inclusion of digital technologies are clearly a response to the new challenges posed by the constantly changing conditions of the job market. national governments and supra-national the emergence of new institutions, especially of this last group, the “transformers,” is changing the relationship between universities and society, both in the public and private spheres. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván 3 life-long learning and the inclusion of digital technologies are clearly a response to the new challenges posed by the constantly changing conditions of the job market. entities, such as the european commission, foster this innovation and support it, as reflected in their calls for projects. on may 30, 2017, the renewed eu agenda for higher education, as a followup to the 2011 modernisation agenda, was presented. it falls within this framework, supporting the changes i have just described and facilitating a more direct relationship between universities and industry. one such example is the promotion of industrial doctorates within a new model for doctoral programs. these are modifications which, to my understanding, strengthen universities and contribute to their efficacy in providing the service they are expected to provide to society. thus, in my opinion, these changes should be welcomed. nonetheless, we cannot ignore the negative reactions to this innovating trend that are beginning to manifest within the university. the european university association (eua) published a statement in july 2017 titled “eua’s response to the renewed eu agenda for higher education,” in which the eua essentially welcomed these innovations, while also warning against the inherent risks involved in adopting some of them. among the topics discussed, for example, the eua was reticent as regards the transformation of stem to steam, by the simple addition of a (for “arts”) into the quartet of subjects considered to be fundamental in education (science, technology, engineering, and math). to quote, “eua is also convinced that steam…is not an adequate concept to include the unique contributions of arts, humanities, and social sciences. eua would prefer to see greater recognition of the value of a diverse disciplinary and interdisciplinary landscape, including small and rare disciplines” (p. 2). in another section discussing research, the eua also expressed its reservations as to the eu’s market orientation in its innovations: “translating research outcomes into marketable innovations is only one of the outcomes of research activity; the contribution of university research to innovation goes well beyond this, as it generates societal well-being of an economic, social, educational and cultural nature, with long-term benefits for social welfare” (p. 3). this declaration by the eua cannot go without notice as it reflects the common position held by the hundreds of european universities that this association represents. the underlying purpose of the eua is for european universities to acquire a dimension that will differentiate them from universities in other regions of the world, in particular north america and asia. if we consider the positions universities from these regions hold in international rankings, generally better than the vast majority of european universities, it becomes easy to understand the reticence displayed by some of the world’s oldest universities to assimilate to or directly replicate the north american and asian models. i could provide myriad examples of others who share this same perspective, though in the interest of time i will not do so in depth. allow me, however, to at least mention five books on this topic from the past twenty years. the first two are cultivating humanity. a classical defense of reform in liberal education (1997) and not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities (2010) by the american philosopher martha nussbaum. the next ones are la utilidad de lo inútil: manifiesto (2013) by the italian professor and philosopher nuccio ordine; and adiós a la universidad: el eclipse de las humanidades (2011), and la luz de los faros. una defensa apasionada de las humanidades (2017), authored by the spaniards jordi llovet and carlos garcía gual respectively. 4 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos nowadays we live in a technological society, or a “technologized” one, if you prefer. science and technology dominate our society more than ever before, and they have provided us with a level of well-being and comfort so far unknown in history. science is the source of knowledge, and knowledge today is more accessible than ever thanks to technological innovations. however, while this is true and is a great advantage with respect to our past, it is equally true that obscurantism and the manipulation of the truth has seized our present. we are all too familiar with the phenomenon of “fake news” and the concept of “post-truth” and the inherent risks these pose to understanding and democracy. the institution of the university should do something to combat this plague that has caused catastrophes in western democracies, catastrophes about which more evidence is revealed every day. yet in addition to the ease with which “fake news” is disseminated through the social and news media, leading to the manipulation of citizens’ wishes, we have also observed, for years, the advance of machines, which at times seem to threaten to replace humankind. with robots, cyborgs, androids, and other similar technological manifestations, some are already using the term “posthuman” to define our current technological civilization. and i am not referring to science fiction, i am referring to a reality that draws closer every day. the role that robots play in our society, for example, led the european parliament to approve an initiative last year urging the european commission to develop a proposal for a directive on robots and artificial intelligence. the impact that robots are having on our economy, scientific research, security, data protection, and, of course, on people is evident. there are questions that should be at the center of university debate: questions such as the ethical, legal, economic, social, and pedagogic consequences of robots and artificial intelligence systems in the production of goods and services, including preventative medical care. how should we regulate, for example, driverless cars or the employment of androids to care for the elderly, complete household tasks, or 5 nowadays we live in a technological society, or a “technologized” one, if you prefer. science and technology dominate our society university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván 6 provide company? do these androids have labor rights? how can we face up to the likely loss of human employment due to the progressive automation of myriad productive processes? should these non-human entities (or their owners) pay taxes and contribute to social security in order to contribute to social benefits policies such as unemployment and pensions? furthermore, we must define deontological questions within research and in the development of this sector. think of the impact that bioengineering or genetic engineering might have on our lives, which they already do, in fact. consider for a moment the ethical limitations of the “technologicalization,” if you will, of health and medical research… there are two novels from this century that i would like to mention in this respect, as they allow us to question, from a human perspective, these post-human phenomena. the first, published in 2005, is titled never let me go, by kazuo ishiguro, the japan-born british writer who was honored with the nobel prize in literature in 2017. the other, published in 2015, the heart goes last, is a work published by the canadian author margaret atwood, well-known for her the handmaid’s tale, published in 1985, which has recently been adapted into a television series. ishiguro’s novel examines the ethical dilemma of a group of human beings created by genetic engineering to serve as entities with therapeutic ends. this is to say they were created to serve as organ donors for transplants. these beings, which are completely human, have feelings and perceptions that do not appear to be compatible with the destiny that they face. the reader must eventually ask him or herself how far bioengineering may be allowed to go. is it ethical for these people to exist only to serve an ancillary purpose? analogously, in the more recent novel by margaret atwood, the protagonist couple faces existence in a society dominated by a group that controls – or pretends to control –creation and reproduction, and even human feelings. there are clones, there are injections to erase memories, to make lives disposable, etc. as in ishiguro’s novel, the heart goes last by margaret atwood presents us with the challenge of living in peace and prosperity, of having access to a world which is more reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos with robots, cyborgs, androids, and other similar technological manifestations, some are already using the term “post-human” to define our current technological civilization. 7 university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván the reader must eventually ask him or herself how far bioengineering may be allowed to go. is it ethical for these people to exist only to serve an ancillary purpose? i believe that the response to these challenges can be found in the humanities, the social sciences, political theory, mathematics, and physics; those subjects which aristotle believed should ultimately comprise the education of human beings. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 comfortable, supposedly happy, and technologically advanced. yet, in the end, the deep-seated issues that subsist in our societies arise in the novel, from global and globalized terror, to the catastrophe that is climate change, to the multiple effects of the technological era. above all else, however, it is necessary for the university to consider what it can do. which disciplines could contribute to the creation of a just post-human policy – a policy that responds appropriately to these challenges and that includes a global, multi-species perspective. it seems clear that the models of universities that i mentioned at the beginning (the “streamlined status quo,” the “niche dominators,” and the “transformers”) are not the answer due to their focus on markets, on industry and innovation, on the attainment of economic benefit, etcetera. i believe that the response to these challenges can be found in the humanities, the social sciences, political theory, mathematics, and physics; those subjects which aristotle believed should ultimately comprise the education of human beings. humanism, in this sense, is to view the world from the perspective of humankind, or “man” (ἄνθρωπος, in the greek sense of the word; let us remember protagoras’ famous dictum, πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἔστὶν ἄνθρωπος, “man is the measure of all things”). that is to say, these humanistic disciplines are those that can lead to scientific understanding and technical solutions, and do not pursue an economic or merely technological goal, which is why they may sometimes be called “useless” or “non-utilitarian.” let us agree that these disciplines, these humanities in the classical and wider sense of the word (which must include, as i said, the mathematical sciences and physics), are those which allow us to exercise our criticism of cultures and techno-scientific hegemonies, as well as address the sustainability and post-humanization problems of technological society. this is due to the fact that history, for example, has given us access to knowledge of the past, and with it humankind can develop a sense of roots, evolution, and foresight. philosophy and letters provide us with control of language and logic and with the accompanying ability to develop opinions and express them cogently, so as to be able to communicate with others. of mathematics, physics, and biology abraham flexner already wrote almost eighty years ago, in 1939, in an article titled “the usefulness of useless knowledge” (harper’s magazine, october 1939, pp. 544-552), which contains a passionate defense of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, beyond any application or practical benefit, and which has been incorporated as an appendix to nuccio ordine’s previously-cited book, la utilidad de lo inútil: manifiesto (2013). martha nussbaum, the american philosopher i mentioned earlier, winner of the 2012 prince of asturias award in social sciences, has been writing about these issues, especially as relates to democracy. nussbaum has worked closely with amartya sen, winner of the nobel prize in economics, on topics that involve development and ethics, in her case from what is generally described as an “aristotelian” perspective, as martha nussbaum places particular emphasis on humans’ social and political nature (the greek “ζῷον πολῑτῐκόν”). if i mention this now, it is to return to the argument i presented earlier about the risk to democracy and our civilization if we set aside the humanities. how can we fight and defeat “fake news,” populism, the manipulation of the truth, or the rampant insensibility of a society that is increasingly unsupportive and paralyzed in the face of humanity’s grave problems? university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván 9 from the beginning, this philosopher has sent a clear message against the economicism and utilitarianism of our society and our science. she writes, “thirsty for national profit, nations, and their systems of education, are heedlessly discarding skills that are needed to keep democracies alive. if this trend continues, nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines, rather than complete citizens who can think for themselves, criticize tradition, and understand the significance of another person’s sufferings and achievements. the future of the world’s democracies hangs in the balance” (p. 16). as you can see, nussbaum points to the ability to think critically and comprehend others’ achievements and suffering. this should be valued in our citizenry as the characteristics that make us truly humans and humanists. we cannot be unfeeling to the constant suffering we see repeated day after day in our news broadcasts, that of so many human beings who go hungry, who are persecuted for their ideas or ideological positions, or who simply are murdered in wars and other conflicts...if we do not cultivate that sensitivity and are incapable of putting ourselves in someone else’ shoes, to feel vicariously, we fail as a democratic citizenry but we also fail as human beings. this goal is achieved through education, as was already stated in the universal declaration of human rights of 1948. yet it is clear that an education exclusively dedicated to the training of technical teams, to economic and technological growth, is insufficient, even though it will produce competent professionals for social, economic, and productive development. and so it will be if the objective is to provide citizens with a combination of abilities essential to combatting the ills to which i referred before, such as obscurantism, post-truth, fake news, and an ethical insensibility in the face of the great moral dilemmas raised by bioengineering, genetic engineering, etc. to achieve this type of citizenry, we must cultivate the critical ability to evaluate historic processes, economic development, social justice, and the complexities of the principal world religions. it is not enough to know these things, like the knowledge in an encyclopedia or a simple accumulation of facts; rather one must be able to comprehend them, to distinguish between trustworthy evidence and that which is not, to distinguish between truth and falsehoods. this is achieved by philosophical training and through critical education, in the humanities, in the traditional vein of american liberal arts colleges. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos yet it is clear that an education exclusively dedicated to the training of technical teams, to economic and technological growth, is insufficient 10 university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván it is not enough to know these things, like the knowledge in an encyclopedia or a simple accumulation of facts; rather one must be able to comprehend them, to distinguish between trustworthy evidence and that which is not, to distinguish between truth and falsehoods. 11 this is the fundamental mission of the university. indeed, as drew faust, former president of harvard university, stated a few years ago: “higher learning can offer individuals and societies a depth and breadth of vision absent from the inevitably myopic present. human beings need meaning, understanding, and perspective as well as jobs. the question should not be whether we can afford to believe in such purposes in these times, but whether we can afford not to” (cited by nussbaum, p. 103). but teaching our students – both within the university and elsewhere – to think, to question, to exercise critical analysis, is neither easy nor cheap. it is not as easy as adding a simple “a” (for “arts”) to the concept of stem, as i discussed before in reference to the eua’s critique of the renewed agenda of the european union. no, educating within the school of socratic thought, which is fundamental to advancing in the comprehension of reality, requires a constant dialogue between the professor and his or her students. it also requires a low student/professor ratio, which allows the professor to read weekly the essays written by the students and to return them, annotated and corrected, in order to draw out of them the ability to think critically and question. a professor in a class of one or two hundred students delivering a lecture on aristotelian ethics, or on the modernist novel, or on baroque painting, does not accomplish much. that leads, as we know, to the accumulation of encyclopedic knowledge, not to a true education within the humanities. in the final conclusion of her book not for profit, nussbaum summarizes with these lines the challenge that are facing our democratic societies and our universities: “if we do not insist on the crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will drop away, because they do not make money. they only do what is much more precious than that, make a world that is worth living in, people who are able to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and empathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favor of sympathetic and reasoned debate” (p. 117). mario vargas llosa also said as much in his acceptance speech for the nobel prize in literature in 2010: “a world without literature would be a world without desires or ideals or irreverence, a world of automatons deprived of what makes the human being really human: the capacity to move out of oneself and into another, into others, modeled with the clay of our dreams” (in praise of reading and fiction, p. 12). this is the current great challenge for higher education, for research, reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos we must fight against post-humanism, post-truth, and the manipulation of science and technology, erroneously oriented toward economic benefit and a false expectation of social well-being. 12 atwood, margaret. the heart goes last. london: bloomsbury, 2015. eua [european university association]. eua’s response to the renewed eu agenda for higher education. brussels, july 2017. garcía gual. carlos. la luz de los faros. una defensa apasionada de las humanidades. barcelona: editorial planeta, 2017. ishiguro, kazuo. never let me go. london: faber & faber, 2005. llovet, jordi. adiós a la universidad: el eclipse de las humanidades. barcelona: galaxia gutenberg / círculo de lectores, 2011. nussbaum, martha. cultivating humanity. a classical defense of reform in liberal education. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1997. nussbaum, martha. not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. princeton and oxford: princeton university press, “the public square book series”, 2010. ordine, nuccio. la utilidad de lo inútil. manifiesto. barcelona: acantilado, quaderns crema, 2013 (tr. jordi bayod brau). ortega y gasset, josé. misión de la universidad y otros ensayos afines. madrid: ediciones de la revista de occidente, 1976 (6th ed.). salinas, pedro. el defensor. madrid: alianza editorial, 1967. vargas llosa, mario. in praise of reading and fiction. stockholm: the nobel foundation, 2010 (tr. edith grossman). works cited and for science. we must fight against post-humanism, post-truth, and the manipulation of science and technology, erroneously oriented toward economic benefit and a false expectation of social well-being. it has now been almost a century since ortega y gasset stated with great forcefulness in his well-known essay mission of the university (misión de la universidad): “let us not be the dupes of science. for if science is the grandest creation of man, it is made possible, after all, by human life.” (“no seamos paletos de la ciencia. la ciencia es el mayor portento humano; pero por encima de ella está la vida humana misma, que la hace posible”.) let us not forget either what pedro salinas, one of the greatest poets of the past century, said in his passionate defense of reading, of criticism, and of language in his book el defensor. salinas examined the humanist challenge in terms of the historical obligation towards the cultural legacy inherited from our parents, which we must transmit to our children. and so this is the greatest challenge which we face at this moment within the university: the preservation and sharing of our cultural heritage and inherited values, while also promoting the creation of new areas of knowledge, of art, of scientific discovery; in short, of all that which makes us truly advance as human beings. university and the humanities: current challenges fernando galván 13 indestructible pasts and paranoid presents: jonathan frazer against active forgetting in purity cristina garrigós uned orgetting and remembering are as inevitably linked as life and death. sometimes, forgetting is motivated by a biological disorder, brain damage, or it is the product of an unconscious desire derived from a traumatic event (psychological repression). but in some cases, we can motivate forgetting consciously (thought suppression). it is through the conscious repression of memories that we can find self-preservation and move forward, although this means that we create a fable of our lives, as nietzsche says in his essay “on the uses and disadvantages of history for life” (1997). in jonathan franzen’s novel, purity (2015), forgetting is an active and conscious process by which the characters choose to forget certain episodes of their lives to be able to construct new identities. the erased memories include murder, economical privileges derived from illegal or unethical commercial processes, or dark sexual episodes. the obsession with forgetting the past links the lives of the main characters, and structures the narrative of the novel. the motivated erasure of memories becomes, thus, a way that the characters have to survive and face the present according to a (fake) narrative that they have constructed. but is motivated forgetting possible? can one completely suppress facts in an active way? this paper analyses the role of forgetting in franzen’s novel in relation to the need in our contemporary society to deny, hide, or erase uncomfortable data from our historical or personal archives; the need to make disappear stories which we do not want to accept, recognize, and much less make known to the public. this is related to how we manage information in the age of technology, the “selection” of what is to be the official story, and how we rewrite our own history. f reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 ab st ra ct in his family memoir, nothing to be frightened of (2008), julian barnes states that “we talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult or logically impossible feat” (p. 38). with this statement, barnes points out to the aporetic condition of talking about events that we do not remember anymore: how can we discuss something that has been erased, something that no longer exists? that is, as the author proclaims, logically impossible. and certainly, we cannot talk about what we do not know. but can we, as human beings, completely erase memories in a conscious way? is there any way that we can recover those lost memories? are they hidden away, or simply destroyed? as we know, sometimes, forgetting is motivated by a neurological damage, or is the product of an unconscious desire (psychological repression). in other cases, we motivate forgetting consciously (thought suppression). for some 2 authors (among them, nietszche, 1997), the conscious repression of negative memories makes self-preservation possible. jonathan franzen’s novel purity, however, puts that into question. for him, active oblivion (thought suppression) is impossible and undesirable. what remains, therefore, is the acknowledgment that forgetting is a human activity, while at the same time considering it the force that destroys the very essence of that constitutes that humanity. for franzen, memories can only be covered for a while, never destroyed, unless, as said before, it is caused by a neurological disease, which would imply, according to the author, the inevitable obliteration of the human being, and the death of one’s identity. we are what we remember, once we lose that, we are nothing, the writer seems to think. this essay analyzes jonathan franzen’s approach to memory as related to identity and history, and the role of active forgetting in his last novel to this day, purity. memory occupies an unprecedented place in critical theory nowadays. remembering has become a crucial issue as evidenced by the proliferation of commemorative events, memorabilia, publications of memories, autobiographies and historical novels, revivals, remakes, etc. all this has reinforced a growing interest in cultural memory. however, although remembering the past is important in the construction of a (trans)national, cultural, generational or personal identity, the way to remembrance has many obstacles. some of these obstacles are external to the subject; for instance, political or socio-economical erasures of archival information, which destroy the access to the past. others are internal, such is the case of degenerative mental illnesses, like alzheimer’s, “we talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult or logically impossible feat” reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós 3 this essay analyzes jonathan franzen’s approach to memory as related to identity and history, and the role of active forgetting in his last novel to this day, purity. short time memory losses due to a traumatic event, and other times, they are provoked actively by a subject who wants to erase the past, forget event (s)he does not want to be inscribed in his or her life. the importance of recalling the past is unquestionable, but remembering is inevitably linked to its opposite: forgetting. the indissoluble connection between memory and forgetting was affirmed by sigmund freud (2017) in his psychoanalyst theories, as he argued for the need to recover the repressed (forgotten) in the unconscious. other interpretations of the connection between remembering and forgetting in relation to history are those by friedrich nietszche (1997), marc augé (2004) and paul ricoeur (2004), among others. also, cultural memory critic andreas huyssen perceptively points out the problem: “for the more we are asked to remember in the wake of the information explosion and the marketing of history, the more we seem to be in danger of forgetting and the stronger the need to forget. at issue is the distinction between usable pasts and disposable data” (2003, p. 18). memories are important not only for what they transmit, but for what is silenced, what is necessary and what is not. as such, amnesia, whether it is active or passive, challenges the presence of hegemonic narratives of the past. thus, forgetting is associated with destruction and death and, as a consequence, it provokes fear. one of the reasons for this is the implicit dissolution of the identity of the subject by the disappearance of memory. jonathan franzen’s father had alzheimer’s. in a brilliant and moving essay published in the new yorker in 2001, “my father’s brain: what alzheimer’s takes away,” the author discusses his reluctance to accept his father’s condition. the text is a reflection on memory and identity, and also on the family and the relationship among its members, subject that is central to all his books. memory is important for human beings in the sense that it keeps the past alive in the present, and provides an identity; stories to live by; it creates history. when you lose that history, the author seems to think, you become nothing. in franzen’s last novel, purity, all the characters, except the protagonist who gives title to the novel, try very actively to forget their pasts. the motivated erasure of memories becomes, thus, a strategy that the characters use to survive and face the present according to a (fake) narrative that they have constructed. but is motivated forgetting possible? how can memories be completely suppressed in an active way? i am interested in exploring how the role of forgetting in franzen’s novel represents the need in our contemporary society to deny, hide, or erase uncomfortable data from our historical or personal archives, stories which we do not want to accept, recognize, and much less make known to the public. this is also related to how we manage information in the age of technology, the “selection” of what is to be the official story, and how we rewrite our own history. in purity forgetting is not caused by aging or neurological damage. it is an active and conscious process by which the characters choose to forget certain episodes of their lives to be able to construct new identities. the erased memories include murder, economic privileges derived from illegal or unethical commercial processes, or dark sexual episodes. the obsession with forgetting the past links the lives of the main characters, and structures the narrative of the novel. it is a novel about erasures and rewritings where, as some reviewers have pointed, find autobiographical elements which franzen has covered in his non-fiction: a domineering mother, an eccentric artist ex-wife, and a seducer and womanizer friend (david foster wallace), as well as the experiences of the writer when he was young in germany (tanenhaus, 2015). there is even an 4 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos ironical implicit allusion to jonathan safran foer, jonathan savoir faire (franzen, 2015, p. 206), the author of eating animals, that is connected to the name of the author in a self-referential way: “so many jonathans. a plague of literary jonathans. if you read only the new york times book review, you’d think it was the most common male name in america. synonymous with talent, greatness. ambition, vitality” (franzen, 2015, p. 207). purity tells the story of purity, pip, tyler (the connections with dickens are obvious), a young girl whose mother refuses to tell her who is her father. she raises her on her own trying to keep her as pure as possible (hence the title of the novel). but pip comes in contact with a german woman (an activist), annagret, who in turn puts her in touch with andreas wolf, a hacker and seducer who works from his refuge in bolivia for his project (sunlight project) of unveiling secret information to the world on confidential, political and economic issues (there are many similarities with julian assange, who is mentioned several times in the novel, and who currently lives in the embassy of ecuador in london). the novel is, in diane johnson’s words, “a complex narrative of fates intertwined and twinned, international crimes, dark secrets, a whirl of events unfolding at fairy-tale or comic-book speed.” other protagonists of the novel are leila helou, a texan of lebanese origin, and tom aberant, both of them whom are journalists. they are lovers, but leila is married to a writer and former professor who had an accident and is secluded at home since then. in a strange 19th century dickensian turn of events, at the end of the novel, we discover that tom is pip’s father, and, coincidentally, also the young man who andreas met in berlin after the wall fell, and who knew his darkest secret: that he had killed a man when he was young. it was andreas, we learn, who used pip to find tom because he wanted to know if he was going to disclose his secret. the novel is about knowing and not knowing, forgetting and remembering, hiding and unveiling secrets, both private and public, and the role of the media and the internet in this. andreas and tom are two sides of the same coin: andreas, as a hacker, creates the sunlight project, while tom is the founder of the denver independent, an online independent journal. both are concerned with exposing the truth. but what is the truth exactly? do you tell everything, or do you select it by erasing what is not convenient? these are issues franzen explores in his work. 5 andreas, as a hacker, creates the sunlight project, while tom is the founder of the denver independent, an online independent journal. indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós 6 franzen’s previous novels had dealt with previous types of paranoia: “political skulduggery in  the twenty-seventh city,  mysterious earthquakes in  strong motion, mindnumbing pharmaceuticals in the corrections, and ecological and military malfeasance in freedom” (tanenhaus, 2015). in his novel, franzen unveils “the false idolatry of the digital age, its pretense of truth-telling and revelation, its ideological “purity” that reduces to monomania and fanaticism” (tanenhaus, 2015). the issues at stake are defining what the truth is, what we can reveal about ourselves and the world around us to be able to build a better future, and what we should try to forget or erase, if possible at all. purity demonstrates that the obsession of the characters with forgetting only shows that the past always ends up appearing, and that complete erasure is impossible. for him, even though active forgetting could be potentially liberating, it is not so. instead, it leads to destruction. this is a far cry from the idea of forgetting as beneficial proposed by friedrich nietzsche in his piece “on the uses and disadvantages of history” (1874). for the german philosopher, active forgetting is selective remembering, the recognition that not all past forms of knowledge, and not all experiences, are valuable for present and future life. history, for him, is useful as long as it serves living. animals (he gives the example of a cow) are happy because they live unhistorically. the human being has the burden of the past. happiness derives from sensing things unhistorically, living only the present moment. living historically, thinking in excess about the past, can bring destruction: a man who wanted to feel historically through and through would be like one forcibly deprived of sleep, or an animal that had to live only by rumination and ever repeated rumination. thus: it is possible to live almost without memory, and to live happily moreover, as the animal demonstrates; but it is altogether impossible to live at all without forgetting. or, to express my theme even more simply: there is a degree of sleeplessness, of rumination, of the historical sense, which is harmful and ultimately fatal to the living thin whether this living thing be a man or a people or a culture. (p. 62) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos purity demonstrates that the obsession of the characters with forgetting only shows that the past always ends up appearing, and that complete erasure is impossible. 7 indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós happiness derives from sensing things unhistorically, living only the present moment. living historically, thinking in excess about the past, can bring destruction while for plato forgetting marks the collapse at the very origin of thought, for nietzsche, forgetting is evoked for its potential to save humans from history, which is regarded, at least in part, as a disaster reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 so, remembering (living historically) and forgetting (living unhistorically) are both necessary, but the excess of any of these is bad: remembering too much causes destruction, oblivion turns, according to nietzsche, human beings into beasts, happy but unconscious. however, he assesses that the capacity of feeling unhistorically to a certain degree is more important, and more basic for the human, that living historically. that is, whereas forgetting everything is not desirable, selective memory, or active forgetting, is beneficial for human beings. nietzsche’s understanding of forgetting stands in marked contrast to that of plato. while for plato forgetting marks the collapse at the very origin of thought, for nietzsche, forgetting is evoked for its potential to save humans from history, which is regarded, at least in part, as a disaster (ramadanovic, 2001). in other words, nietzsche believes in the need for selective memory. that is to say, we should not avoid the past, but regard it critically. for the philosopher, there are three attitudes towards the past: historical, unhistorical, superhistorical, and three methods for history: monumental, antiquarian and critical (1874). the monumental method believes that the greatness of the past will be possible once againmagnifying the good deeds and erasing the bad moments this is deceitful; the antiquarian cultivates the past emphasizing the customary and traditional valuesbut this can lead to degeneration when the past no longer is “inspired by the fresh life of the present” (p. 75); the critical method implies being oppressed by a present moment, and having the desire to cast off the load of the past at any price (desire to erase it), and it passes judgement on history. like the monumental method, it implies forgetting, but not magnifying. the critical method is for nietzsche the best one: if he is to live, man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: he does this by bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it; every past, however, is worthy to be condemned for that is the nature of human things: human violence and weakness have always played a mighty role in them. (pp. 75-76). but destroying the past is dangerous, since it implies rejecting our negative side: “for since we are the outcome of earlier generations, we are also the outcome of their aberrations, passions and errors, and indeed of their crime” (p. 76). by forgetting, or trying to erase that past, we try to give ourselves “a past a posteriori.” this, according to nietzsche, is risky because it is difficult to find a borderline to the denial of the past and because the second nature is usually weaker than the first. every person, every society, and culture uses the past sometimes monumentally, sometimes as antiquarian history, and sometimes as critical history for the purpose of living: “this is the natural relationship to history of an age, a culture, and a people with its history” (p. 77). jonathan franzen’s novel addresses the relationship to history of individuals, people, and cultures. by locating the novel in the contemporary u.s. and in post-world war ii east germany, he addresses several issues, such as u.s. capitalism, communism, and the access to information through the media and the internet: “it seemed as if the internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten” (2015, p. 449). indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós 9 the one thing that all the characters, except pip, have in common is the desire to forget their pasts: pip’s mother, anabel, wants to forget who her father is (tom aberant), and who she really is (a rich heiress). she raised her daughter in the ignorance of the money she might have because for her that money was crooked. hers is a case of active forgetting, and the rejection of an identity she does not comply with. she did not approve of the methods her father used to earn money and therefore decided that the only way to get rid of this burden was to erase her identity, as she told tom before she married him: “the money is already ruining my brothers. i’m not going to let it ruin me. but that’s not even the reason. the reason is the money has blood on it. i can smell it in my checking account, the blood from a river of meat. that is what mccaskill is, a river of meat. they trade in grain, too, but even there a lot of it goes to feed the river” (2015, p. 357). andreas wolf also has many secrets he wants to forget: from the relationship with his mother, which can infer a possible oedipus complex which led to a life of sexual promiscuity, to a murder he committed to protect a woman, and which he confessed to tom because he needed his help to bury the body (a metaphor for keeping the past hidden). andreas’s parents are members of the communist party, and it was a big scandal when he was young and wrote an acrostic in a poem making fun of the socialist regime. later in the novel, he asks his father to locate the files that the stasi keeps on him to erase the traces of his crimes. by erasing the documentary proofs he hopes to be clear, and to be able to forget that it had ever happened. his father helps him, although he is not his biological father. his real father is a former student of his mother who appears after some years in prison for treason to the state, and writes a book about it unveiling the truth; a book which also has to be destroyed. when andreas leaves the stasi archives with a plastic bag containing his files and those about the disappearance of the man he had killed, he is faced with reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 10 when andreas leaves the stasi archives with a plastic bag containing his files and those about the disappearance of the man he had killed, he is faced with the tv cameras that are there recording the fall of the wall, and the citizens are aking over the official places of the regime. indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós andreas’s parents are members of the communist party, and it was a big scandal when he was young and wrote an acrostic in a poem making fun of the socialist regime. 11 the tv cameras that are there recording the fall of the wall, and the citizens are aking over the official places of the regime. trying to avoid being caught by the stasi which is following him, he pretends that he is there to monitor the work of the citizen’s committee of normannenstrasse. he accuses the stasi of whitewashing in the archives: “this is a country of festering secrets and toxic lies. only the strongest of sunlight can disinfect it” (2015, p. 167), as he tells the tv cameras. he suddenly becomes a media hero, and names his new project sunlight. however, while his job is to unveil everybody’s secrets, he keeps his own files under his mattress (again, another metaphor for active forgetting). when me meets with pip in bolivia, and tries to seduce her, he tells her about his theory of secrets: there’s the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. how do you know that you’re a person, distinct from other people? by keeping certain things to yourself. you guard them inside you, because, if you don’t, there’s no distinction between inside and outside. secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. a radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. but identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. otherwise you’re just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. to have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. you need closeness with other people. and how is closeness built? by sharing secrets. . . . your identity exists at the intersection of these lines of trust. (2015, p. 275) to this theory, pip responds by exposing his hypocrisy when he says that one has to trust a person to keep a secret, while at the same time his job consists of exposing everybody’s secrets. “it’s my identity” (2015, p. 275), he replies. the end of the novel, after everything is disclosed, suggests that no matter how hard one tries to forget and keep the past hidden, it always reappears. sometimes to destroy oneself, as it is the case of andreas, some other times to help you, as it is the case of the money pip finally inherits, and which allows her to pay her college debt. andreas has to die because tom was going to unveil the truth about him, which he had tried so hard to forget. also, the truth about pip’s real identity is finally made open. thus, the novel’s “happy” ending, with andreas’s death, tom and pip finally reunited, pip with her boyfriend, and tom and anabel “talking,” or rather fighting, seems to indicate that active forgetting is not liberating, but brings about madness and destruction instead. like plato, for franzen, forgetting is a predicament of human beings (ramadanovic, 2001), but complete forgetting is not possible because there is always something which cannot be erased. for nietzsche (1997), the best approach to history is based on forgetting certain things in order to be able to move on. this, for franzen (2015), is a disgrace. human beings should never forget. forgetting equals death. secrets always rise to the surface because active forgetting is an imposture. the fabulation that one creates, the faked life that anabel or andrea try to lead, by hiding their real selves, could not succeed because human beings cannot step outside of history, of our stories. for franzen (2015), whether we like it or not, even if we try to erase those parts of our lives that we dislike (as individual persons, as people, and as cultures), and we attempt very actively to forget, the past, history, can never be silenced. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 12 augé, m. (2004). oblivion. minneapolis, u.s.a.: u of minnesota. barnes, j. (2008). nothing to be frightened of. new york, u.s.a.: knopf. franzen, j. (2001). my father’s brain: what alzheimer’s takes away. the new yorker, september 10, 2001. 81-91. ---. (2001). the corrections. new york, u.s.a: farrar, straus and giroux. ---. (2015). purity. new york, u.s.a.: farrar, strauss and giroux. freud, s. (2017) three essays on the theory of sexuality. new york: verso. huyssen, a. (2003). t. present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. stanford, u.s.a.: stanford up. johnson, d. (2015). what do these people want?. the new yorker. retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/22/purity-what-do-thesepeople-want/ nietzsche, f. (1997). on the uses and disadvantages of history for life. untimely meditations, 57-124. cambridge, uk: cambridge up. ramadanovic, p. (2001). from haunting to trauma: nietzsche&#39;s active forgetting and blanchot’s writing of the disaster. in peter ramadanovic and linda belau (eds.). trauma: essays on the limits of knowledge and memory. ricoeur, p. (2004). memory, history, forgetting. chicago, u.s.a.: chicago up. tanenhaus, s. (2015). sex. lies, and the internet: jonathan franzen’s reckoning with his literary inheritance. new republic. august 4, 2015. retrieved from https://newrepublic.com/article/122443/sex-lies-and-internet works cited indestructible pasts and paranoid presents... cristina garrigós 13 strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández his article examines the sources of continuing competition between the u.s. and russia during the trump administration, on two different dimensions. first, at a structural or systemic level of analysis, we identify the main trends in the evolution of the post-cold war international system, where the relative decline of the u.s. prepared the ground for a new era of greatpower rivalry. secondly, we look at russian perceptions of the u.s. strategy and how images of the western “other” are still derived, to a great extent, from previous experiences of confrontation. in the third section, we present the uncertain future of nuclear disarmament as an example of how this climate of bilateral competition is affecting negotiations on the highly sensitive issue of strategic stability. the fourth section deals with the controversy over how much this confrontation resembles the cold war, as well as the inaccuracies of the concept of “hybrid war” to describe the russian strategy toward the west. finally, our conclusions will try to assess the prospects for u.s.-russia cooperation in an international and domestic environment that does not seem favorable for reaching constructive agreements. introduction with the inauguration of donald trump as president of the united states, rumors of a possible rapprochement—or even alliance—with russia became widespread in domestic and international media. his offhand remarks during the election campaign seemed to indicate a lower commitment to multilateral defense organizations like nato, as well as some personal admiration for vladimir putin’s “strong leadership”. t reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 universidad complutense de madrid according to the new president, it was the obama administration—not the kremlin—that was fully to blame for the current state of bilateral relations; however, all those past disagreements would be quickly resolved once he had a chance to establish a working relationship with his russian counterpart. despite this initial optimism, the reality of u.s.-russia cooperation since trump took office has not shown any concrete achievements, while the climate of mutual distrust is still apparent. both leaders have held much-publicized summit meetings that have produced few tangible results, apart from new opportunities for trump’s critics to renew their accusations of a secret “collusion” with moscow to discredit hillary clinton. although there was a visible relief among russia’s leaders when clinton finally lost the election, the truth is that having trump in the white house has not advanced the kremlin’s national interests in any meaningful way; unless, of course, those interests were limited to “wreaking havoc” and weakening nato’s internal cohesion, accelerating the end of the u.s. primacy as leader of a liberal, rules-based international order. 2 some of the trump administration’s policies have, in fact, openly contradicted or ignored the russian position on certain international issues that are of the utmost importance for moscow: economic sanctions have been renewed, the annexation of crimea is still considered to be illegal, and the u.s. has agreed to provide ukraine with weapons for their war against russiabacked separatist forces in the donbass. this has caused the kremlin to remain extremely wary of washington’s intentions, which are now much more contradictory and unpredictable than in the past. the logic of rivalry, not mutual trust or cooperation, is still clearly predominant in their bilateral relations. this article examines the sources of this continuing competition between the u.s. and russia during the trump administration, on two different dimensions. first, at a structural or systemic level of analysis, we identify the main trends in the evolution of the post-cold war international system, where the relative decline of the u.s.—both in terms of material capabilities and social standing—prepared the ground for a new era of great-power rivalry. secondly, we look at russian perceptions of the u.s. strategy and how images of the western “other” are still derived, despite this initial optimism, the reality of u.s.-russia cooperation since trump took office has not shown any concrete achievements, while the climate of mutual distrust is still apparent reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández 3 moscow’s role in this sinoamerican competition would be comparatively small: unable to aim for global dominance, it would either become a “junior partner” in china’s anti-western bloc or adopt a more neutral position, limited to preserving its own regional influence in the post-soviet space to a great extent, from previous experiences of confrontation. in the third section, we present the uncertain future of nuclear disarmament as an example of how this climate of bilateral competition is affecting negotiations on the highly sensitive issue of strategic stability. the fourth section deals with the controversy over how much this confrontation resembles the cold war, as well as the inaccuracies of the concept of “hybrid war” to describe russian the strategy toward the west. finally, our conclusions will try to assess the prospects for u.s.-russia cooperation in an international and domestic environment that does not seem favorable for reaching constructive agreements. u.s. hegemony in a changing international system while there is a widespread consensus that the international system can no longer be fully described in terms of american unipolarity—as in the first years after the collapse of the soviet bloc, when the u.s. enjoyed an undisputed global primacy—, this new environment has proven much more difficult to define. some experts, notably mearsheimer (2004), have argued that china’s rise as a “peer competitor” of the u.s. represents the gravest danger to the latter’s global hegemony, which will ultimately lead to an open confrontation in which washington will try at all costs to prevent beijing from becoming a superpower. according to allison (2017) and his well-known metaphor of the “thucydides trap”, history shows that war is the most likely outcome when a rising power challenges an established hegemon, as is the case with the u.s. and china today. all these authors—in the tradition of political realism—tend to emphasize material or “hard” power resources, especially military and economic capabilities, as a way to measure relative strength. therefore, we would be entering a hegemonic transition that could see the u.s. lose its current status as the world’s only superpower, being replaced by china; or, alternatively, a new bipolar equilibrium in which beijing would force washington to share its global leadership with them. in any case, moscow’s role in this sino-american competition would be comparatively small: unable to aim for global dominance, it would either become a “junior partner” in china’s anti-western bloc or adopt a more neutral position, limited to preserving its own regional influence in the post-soviet space. russia and china, on the other hand, have promoted the view of a multipolar world in which neither of them would aspire to become a superpower, but try to balance u.s. hegemony by consolidating themselves—individually and jointly with the other brics members—as an alternative to western-led alliances and institutions. while this multipolarity is not yet a reality in the military domain, where the u.s. remains clearly superior to any of its possible competitors, it is already present in the world economy (nye, 2010), in which china, japan or the eu should be regarded as centers of power in their own respect. this multipolar world would not necessarily lead to global conflict between russia and the u.s. if moscow’s ambitions were limited to adopting a more relevant international role. on the other hand, if moscow tried and managed to reestablish itself as a regional hegemon in eurasia—countering the growing influence of the u.s., the eu, and nato in the former soviet union—, it would effectively become a peer competitor for washington; which now enjoys the privilege of being the only regional hegemon in the world, due to its de 4 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos facto control of the western hemisphere. in that case, a resurgent russia would be perceived as a direct threat for u.s. primacy even if it were unable—or unwilling— to return to a global bipolar confrontation. however, all these possible scenarios are based on historical analogies that do not capture the profound changes in the nature of power in a globalized world, as well as the underlying causes of the perceived u.s. decline vis-à-vis its competitors. the increasing diffusion and fragmentation of global power into multiple actors—not just states, but also corporations, transnational networks, and other non-governmental entities—has been described as “age of nonpolarity” (haass, 2008), in which major powers are not able to exercise their influence as much as they did in the past, and also—being economically interdependent—are less inclined to engage in regional or global competition. this view is supported by buzan (2004), who argues that the idea of polarity is not just connected to a state’s material capabilities, but also to its social relations with others: in the near future, it is unlikely that china, russia, or any other possible competitors will acquire a social standing comparable to the extensive network of u.s. allies and partners around the world, as well as the influence of american “soft power”. in parallel, washington would tend to disengage from other continents and focus on its own domestic problems, renouncing its own superpower status and allowing regional powers to consolidate themselves in different parts of the world. as a result, conflicts over global hegemony would be replaced by rivalries between countries in the same geographical area, competing for regional leadership and—eventually—great power status. in some respects, the trump administration’s rhetoric seems to be walking the path toward “a world with no superpowers”: for example, by questioning long-standing commitments to defending its european allies, or damaging its own reputation as a “liberal hegemon” aimed at spreading democratic values. on the other hand, in spite of trump’s previous criticism of u.s. interventions, washington does not seem to be withdrawing or disengaging from other regions: rather, its confrontational posture toward iran, north korea, cuba, or venezuela—reminiscent of the bush administration’s “axis of evil”—has been combined with a growing emphasis on strengthening u.s. military capabilities in the face of “revisionist” china and russia (national security strategy, 2017, p. 25). this shows that the logic of interstate rivalry with moscow and other great powers is still present in the current u.s. strategy, both at the regional and global levels. 5 in some respects, the trump administration’s rhetoric seems to be walking the path toward “a world with no superpowers”: for example, by questioning longstanding commitments to defending its european allies, or damaging its own reputation as a “liberal hegemon” aimed at spreading democratic values strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández 6 russian perceptions of u.s. hegemony and prospects for bilateral cooperation the unipolar nature of the post-cold war international order and the aspirations to transform it into a multilateral system, where moscow could assert itself as an independent center of power, have received an overwhelming attention by russian scholars, experts, and policymakers. after a brief period of “liberal westernist” euphoria in the early years of the yeltsin presidency, “national-statism” (derzhavnichestvo) emerged in the mid-1990s as the official foreign policy doctrine (tsygankov, 2016, p. 97). this view, based on the defense of russia’s status as a great power (derzhava) in a multipolar world, perceived the u.s. as a unilateralist hegemon that—together with its allies—repeatedly imposed western interests and values on all other countries, through military intervention if necessary (primakov, 2008). therefore, russia’s recovery from its internal crisis and consolidation as an influential international actor during the 2000s were perceived by the foreign policy establishment as a limited and defensive move against a revisionist/aggressive u.s., not as preparation for any future attempt at establishing global—or even regional—hegemony. u.s. unilateralism, however, has also been used by russian leaders to justify their increased interventionism in the post-soviet space in the past few years; a strategy that has clearly exceeded any purely defensive purposes, with an unwarranted use of military force in the face of challenges that could have been solved by other means. although there is a great deal of victimhood in the self-serving argument that their military interventions in georgia or ukraine were simply “responding” to the threat of nato expansion, it is also true that moscow’s concerns in this regard are genuinely shared by most of its foreign policy experts and government officials. even today, traumatic memories of their country’s internal weakness and vulnerability after the soviet collapse are still influencing their assessment of the u.s. ability to preserve a hegemonic position in world politics, which—contrary to western perceptions of a declining, not growing, american influence—tends to be greatly exaggerated in russia. recent studies of bilateral relations with washington written by russian scholars indicate the prevalence of a pessimistic approach to the possibilities of mutual cooperation. for example, zhuravleva (2017) argues that both countries are still divided by their exceptionalist and messianic reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos recent studies of bilateral relations with washington written by russian scholars indicate the prevalence of a pessimistic approach to the possibilities of mutual cooperation. 7 strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández russia’s recovery from its internal crisis and consolidation as an influential international actor during the 2000s were perceived by the foreign policy establishment as a limited and defensive move against a revisionist/aggressive u.s., not as preparation for any future attempt at establishing global—or even regional— hegemony the collapse of the inf treaty is symptomatic of the dangerous turn to unilateralism and abandonment of legallybinding norms in both trump’s and putin’s foreign and security policies, although some differences remain reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 ideologies, as well as the historical construction of their respective identities in opposition to the “other”, considered an enemy. according to shakleina (2018), trump has largely maintained the same hegemonic foreign policies—exemplified by the slogan “america first”— as the previous administrations, including nato’s preservation as a useful instrument for u.s. leadership, despite his initial criticism of the unequal burden-sharing within the alliance. even from a liberal position, authors like kurilla (2017) have complained about the continuing demonization of russia by the american media and political class, which has caused a long-term damage to bilateral relations and resurrected some of the ghosts of the cold war. this skepticism about the possibility of meaningful cooperation is confirmed by bezrukov et al. (2017, p. 11), who—while being clearly sympathetic to trump’s opposition to the u.s. liberal establishment—also highlight the american president’s belief in “taking a firm approach and advancing his own interests” in order to gain respect from russia, which could lead to new tensions. the inf treaty as a source of strategic (in)stability nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties remain one of the key areas of u.s.-russia relations, at least from moscow’s point of view. the concept of “strategic stability”—often mentioned in the kremlin’s official statements after bilateral meetings with their american counterparts— refers to maintaining the balance of nuclear forces at a level that provides a sufficient deterrent for both sides, therefore eliminating temptations to launch a first strike. these agreements introduce an element of predictability, which contributes to avoiding misperceptions or miscalculations in case of crisis. however, cold war understandings of strategic stability are no longer sufficient: in the present day, the u.s. and russia should be able to jointly remove all incentives for any possible use of nuclear weapons—not only a first strike—, as well as to establish limits to other technologies that could have an equally destabilizing effect, such as space systems or conventional weapons with a destructive potential close to that of nuclear armaments (arbatov, 2018, p. 26; trenin, 2018). in this regard, trump’s plans to “terminate” the 1987 intermediate-range nuclear forces (inf) treaty has raised concerns about hypothetical future deployments of intermediate-range missiles in europe, a category that had been fully eliminated as a result of that agreement; as well as about the possible extension of the new start treaty on strategic—i.e. long-range—nuclear weapons, due to expire in 2021 (reif, 2018; pir center, 2018). the u.s. decision was formally based on their accusations of a violation of the treaty by the russian side: specifically, having tested a ground-launched cruise missile that would supposedly fall within the range forbidden by the inf. even if those accusations were true, some experts (podvig, 2018) have argued that the military significance of those missiles—compared to other new weapons in the russian arsenal—would not justify abandoning a disarmament treaty that has survived for so many years after the end of the cold war. in the current climate of mutual distrust, both sides have made few attempts to provide information about their respective arguments in a more transparent way, which could have helped them overcome this disagreement. the collapse of the inf treaty is symptomatic of the dangerous turn to unilateralism and abandonment of legally-binding norms in both trump’s and putin’s foreign and security policies, strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández 9 although some differences remain. the russian president has tried to present his actions—without much success—as fully compliant with international law; for example, comparing the annexation of crimea with nato’s intervention in kosovo, while refusing to acknowledge his covert military assistance to the rebel forces in donetsk and lugansk. with regard to the u.s., the appointment of john bolton as national security advisor has brought back the radical rejection of international law and multilateral institutions that characterized the neoconservative ideology of the bush administration; even a seemingly innocuous entity, the universal postal union—one of the oldest intergovernmental organizations in the world—has been abandoned by washington. in fact, it was probably bolton who convinced his president of pursuing a more interventionist and unilateralist foreign policy course. cold war, cold peace... or hybrid war? the present climate of rivalry and mutual accusations may only be categorized as a “new cold war” in the most literary and metaphorical sense: there are too many inaccuracies in this historical analogy to make it a useful conceptualization of the current state of u.s.-russia relations. according to walt (2018), the main differences are three: the cold war was only possible in a bipolar international system, in which there were two superpowers—not one, like today— that stood in rough parity compared to each other. secondly, the cold war was an ideological confrontation between two mutually-exclusive universalist projects; today, on the contrary, moscow and washington are both part of the same global capitalist system, with the former accepting the basic premises of integration into the world economy. and finally, the cold war was a global confrontation that expanded into the middle east, asia, africa, and latin america; now, these regions are comparatively much more determined by their own internal dynamics. however, once again russian views are more pessimistic: although a full return to bipolar confrontation would be impossible, there are some elements of it that could reemerge in the current scenario. an example of the military-geopolitical factors that have increased their threat perceptions has been nato’s missile defense system in european soil, which moscow considers to be oriented against russia; this has been used by the kremlin to justify an ambitious modernization of their armed forces, trying to reduce the gap with the u.s. technological superiority (oznobischev, 2016). all of which does not mean that russia is willing to—or capable of—achieving parity with american military power, engaging in a new nuclear and conventional arms race. on the contrary, moscow’s tactics are increasingly focused on exploiting its own comparative advantages and the adversary’s vulnerabilities in a cost-effective way: for example, using its state-owned media to spread propaganda and disinformation, in what some western commentators have termed a “hybrid war” strategy. this last concept is, sadly, another example of the increasing militarization of the language used to describe relations between the west and russia, in an attempt at connecting the kremlin’s actions with their soviet predecessors. as renz and smith (2016, p. 11) have clarified, “hybrid” warfare involves the use of military and non-military means in the same operation; for example, the occupation of crimea, which combined information and propaganda with the reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 10 strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández the present climate of rivalry and mutual accusations may only be categorized as a “new cold war” in the most literary and metaphorical sense: there are too many inaccuracies in this historical analogy to make it a useful conceptualization of the current state of u.s.russia relations. 11 12 the improvement of bilateral relations under trump has been much more limited than initially assumed, in part because of unrealistic expectations based on the u.s. president’s excessive selfconfidence reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 12 deployment of intelligence operatives and elite troops. but these tactics cannot be understood as a russian foreign policy doctrine, or even a national security strategy; they are just an operational approach in the framework of a military operation. in order to understand moscow’s actions in all their complexity, our analysis should encompass all of its other instruments—diplomatic, economic, cultural, and others—that do not necessarily follow a military logic. conclusion from a structural realist approach to international relations, the rise of u.s.-russian rivalry would be an unavoidable result of recent changes in the international distribution of power. the transition to a multipolar system, where china, russia and other states have reasserted themselves as independent centers of power at the regional or global level, has produced an opposite reaction in the u.s., which feels threatened by the emergence of possible peer competitors that could challenge its own hegemonic position. on the other hand, this purely materialist understanding of power ignores the social elements that limit moscow’s future aspirations: namely, the absence of a “russian model” that could be adopted by other societies as an alternative to western liberalism, or russia’s clear disadvantage in terms of “soft power” on a global scale, when compared with the widespread diffusion of american culture and values. the improvement of bilateral relations under trump has been much more limited than initially assumed, in part because of unrealistic expectations based on the u.s. president’s excessive self-confidence. the logic of competition has not completely disappeared with the arrival of a new american leader, nor is it likely to do so after putin’s eventual retirement. both countries have global aspirations, but few common interests and values; in the security realm, their main shared priority is the fight against daesh and other terrorist groups, which could provide the necessary incentive for establishing a closer cooperation. however, putin has probably not forgotten his own experiences with the bush administration after 9/11, when moscow’s initial support for the “global war on terror” did not stop washington from taking other decisions that directly challenged russia’s national interests, such as the invasion of iraq. any joint initiative in this regard will be cautious and limited in scope, far from a full-fledged alliance like the one between moscow and members of the collective security treaty organization (csto). domestic factors will also continue to affect the ability of both leaders to explore other possibilities for working together. with lower ratings and continuing accusations of russian interference in the u.s. presidential campaign, trump will probably not want to appear too close to putin; while russia’s president will not wish to risk his popularity in order to try a full rapprochement with washington, after two previous disillusionments with bush and obama. the normalization of u.s.-russian relations will have to be completed by their respective successors, given that the current leaders have grown too accustomed to unilaterally pursuing their own interests and regarding other world powers as competitors. strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández 13 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos allison, g. (2017). destined for war: can america and china escape thucydides’s trap? new york, usa: houghton mifflin harcourt. arbatov, a. g. (2018). ugrozy strategicheskoi stabil’nosti – mnimye i realnye [threats to strategic stability – imaginary and real]. polis. politicheskie issledovaniya (3), pp. 7-29. doi: https://doi.org/10.17976/ jpps/2018.03.02 bezrukov, a., rebro, o. and sushentsov, a. (2017). donald trump: a professional profile of the new u.s. president. valdai discussion club report. retrieved from http://valdaiclub.com/a/reports/report-donald trump-a-professional-profile/ buzan, b. (2004). the united states and the great powers: world politics in the twenty-first century. cambridge, united kingdom: polity press. haass, r. n. (2008). the age of nonpolarity: what will follow u.s. dominance. foreign affairs, 87(3). retrieved from https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/united-states/2008-05-03/age-nonpolarity kurilla, i. (2017). whenever america is in crisis, russia is its whipping boy. washington post (december 5). retrieved from https://www .washingtonpost.com/news/theworldpost/wp/2017/12/05/trump russia/?utm_term=.0b08132e2f34 mearsheimer, j. j. (2004). can china rise peacefully? the national interest. retrieved from https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/can-china-rise peacefully-10204 national security strategy of the united states of america (2017). retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ nss-final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf nye, jr., j. s. (2010). the future of american power: dominance and decline in perspective. foreign affairs 89(6). retrieved from https://www .foreignaffairs.com/articles/2010-11-01/future-american-power oznobischev, s. k. (2016). “novaya kholodnaya voina”: vospominaniya o budushchem [the “new cold war”: reminiscences about the future]. polis. politicheskie issledovaniya (1), pp. 60-73. doi: https://doi. org/10.17976/jpps/2016.01.05 pir center (2018). two minus one equals zero – us to withdraw from inf treaty (october 22). retrieved from http://www.pircenter.org/en/news/7008 4823564 podvig, p. (2018). who lost the inf treaty? bulletin of the atomic scientists (october 26). retrieved from https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/who lost-the-inf-treaty/ work cited strategic stability and great-power rivalry in u.s.-russia security relations javier morales hernández 15 primakov, e. (2008). vneshnyaya politika vo vse bol’shey stepeni napravlyayetsya na vosstanovleniye rossii v kachestve derzhavy mirovogo klassa [foreign policy is increasingly aimed at restoring russia as a world power]. mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’. retrieved from https://interaffairs. ru/jauthor/material/1268 reif, k. (2018). trump to withdraw u.s. from inf treaty. arms control today, 48 (november). retrieved from https://www.armscontrol.org/ act/2018-11/news/trump-withdraw-us-inf-treaty renz, b. and smith, h. (2016). russia and hybrid warfare – going beyond the label. aleksanteri papers 1/2016. retrieved from https://www.stratcomcoe. org/bettina-renz-and-hanna-smith-russia-and-hybrid-warfare-going beyond-label shakleina, t. (2018). kakaya amerika nuzhna miru? [what kind of u.s. does the world need?]. mezhdunarodnye protsessy, 16(1), pp. 40-52. retrieved from http://intertrends.ru/rubrics/realnost/journals/strategii miroupravleniya/articles/kakaya-amerika-nuzhna-miru trenin, d. (2018). mapping global strategic stability in the twenty-first century. retrieved from https://carnegie.ru/commentary/77625 tsygankov, a. p. (2016). russia’s foreign policy: change and continuity in national identity. 4th ed. lanham, united kingdom: rowman & littlefield. walt, s. m. (2018). i knew the cold war. this is no cold war. foreign policy. retrieved from https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/12/i-knew-the cold-war-this-is-no-cold-war/ zhuravleva, v. (2017). rossiya i ssha: razmyshlyaya nad konfliktom [russia and the u.s.: reflecting on the conflict]. mirovaya ekonomika i mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 61 (5), pp. 5-13. retrieved from https:// elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=29215328 american tourism to spain during the late francoism: a socioeconomic analysis* misael arturo lópez zapico 1. introduction the consolidation of spain as one of the world’s top tourist destinations explains the recent academic interest on the topic under many different approaches. thus, since the last decade, the number of researchers that study the origins and evolution of the tourism industry in the country had increased significantly (moreno, 2007; faraldo & rodríguez-lópez, 2013; vallejo, 2015a; larrinaga & vallejo, 2015). against this backdrop, it has been mass tourism (fernández fuster, 1991) which has received the most attention from current spanish historiography. it is a model whose takeoff in spain is intimately linked to the so-called second francoism being, in fact, one of the basis of the economic growth of the country during the sixties pack, 2009a). all of the works concur on the importance of mass tourism not only because of its purely economic aspect but as a crucial element for social dynamics. sometimes the changes are simply associated with superficial issues such as new trends and fashion. a clear example in this regard may be the popularization of the bikini on the spanish beaches during the sixties due to the arrival of french, german or swedish tourists in search of the sun (pavlovic, 2014). however, the mere presence of foreign visitors meant for the spanish population an opportunity to be contact with other ways of thinking, of seeing the world, and, even more important, to interact with people who lived in democracy. in other words, there is little doubt about the active role played by tourism as a powerful channel for all kinds of cultural transfers and as an asset that contributed to shape the spanish society during the francoist regime (pack, 2009b). t reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 universidad autónoma de madrid 1 this work was supported by the instituto franklin-uah [ayuda de investigación kenneth galbraith 2014 en temas económicos y políticos relacionados con estados unidos]. the dictatorship had, therefore, to reconcile their desire to make spain a preferred tourist destination for europeans and americans with their doubts about the moral degradation that could involve the massive arrival of foreign travelers. nevertheless, the new generation of politicians, who began to take governmental responsibilities after 1957’s cabinet reshuffle, soon realized that tourism could end up becoming a perfect resource towards the external legitimation of the regime, just as were the measures issued to attract foreign investors. actually, the so-called spanish economic miracle primarily rely on the inflows of foreign currency that arrived to spain through the expanding tourist industry, the remittances from spanish emigrants working abroad and foreign direct investment (balfour, 2000). we have to bear in mind that, during the sixties and until the 1973 oil crisis, the fast growth of the spanish tourism industry was essential to correct the rising trade balance deficit of the country, as shown in the following table. 2 as many of the mentioned authors have pointed out, it is necessary to go beyond a mere re-count of the foreign currencies that reached the spanish coasts in travelers’ pockets. there are other economic effects that should be addressed in order to disclose a less favorable view of the tourist boom experienced by franco’s spain (vallejo, 2015b). in the first place, the distortions generated in the spanish production model must be highlighted, leading to an excessive weight of an activity that is utterly dependent on exogenous factors. no less important was, in addition, the tremendous environmental impact derived from the need to rapidly convert small villages into tourist resorts with a high level of rotation. the excesses of this construction frenzy left a perpetual imprint in several areas of the spanish geography, propitiating long-lasting inconveniences that go from inadequate urban planning to speculative practices that soon engendered corruption scandals. one of the most famous corruption cases of this period was the sofico scandal, a perfect example of the illicit practices linked to real estate frenzy and multi-property. as many americans citizens were affected by this criminal ring the u.s. embassy in madrid was quick to inform the state department about the consequences derived from the suspension of payments declared by four of the eleven companies of the sofico group and the course to be followed by the investors: “embassy will continue follow this situation closely and report any further information. since there is little doubt about the active role played by tourism as a powerful channel for all kinds of cultural transfers and as an asset that contributed to shape the spanish society during the francoist regime reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 3 table 1 the contribution of tourism to spain’s balance of payments, 1959-76 year tourists (in thousands) receipts of foreign currency from tourism (in us$ millions) balance of trade deficit (in us$ millions) 1959 4.194 128,6 253 1960 6.113 297,0 57 1961 7.455 384,6 279 1962 8.668 512,6 634 1963 10.931 679,3 1.004 1964 14.102 918,6 1.056 1965 14.250 1.156,9 1.737 1966 17.251 1.292,5 1.964 1967 17.858 1.209,8 1.745 1968 19.183 1.212,7 1.548 1969 21.682 1.310,7 2.333 1970 24.105 1.680,8 2.360 1971 26.758 2.054,4 2.025 1972 32.506 2.486,3 2.911 1973 34.559 3.091,2 4.405 1974 30.343 3.187,9 8.340 1975 30.122 3.404,3 8.516 1976 30.014 3.083,3 8.723 source: harrison (1978, p. 156) although the number of american tourists arriving to spain during franco’s years was always lower than the amount of travelers that entered into the country with passports from the main countries of western europe, u.s. citizens were one of the groups that contributed the most to the annual total figures. in fact, during the sixties the united states, in close competence with portugal since 1964, occupied the forth place behind france, united kingdom and west germany in the international visitors arrival to spain ranking reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 4 there are number of american investors in sofico resident in western europe, embassy giving wide distribution to information […]” (department of state, 1974). at least seven more telegrams were issued during the following year on the same matter. the picture depicted above emphasizes the need to explore the tourist activity during the late francoism under new approaches. for example an analysis based on the from algeciras that night, we nationality of the tourists and the bilateral relations of the dictatorship with the respective governments would help to improve the overall image we already have about this phenomenon. in this paper we will then examine the american tourism to spain between 1969 and 1976 taking into account official sources along with press clippings of the time. a review that shall lead to a better understanding of the topic and would allow us to think beyond the clichés that often surround the period. 2. american mass tourism to spain during the desarrollismo years: economic implications although the number of american tourists arriving to spain during franco’s years was always lower than the amount of travelers that entered into the country with passports from the main countries of western europe, u.s. citizens were one of the groups that contributed the most to the annual total figures. in fact, during the sixties the united states, in close competence with portugal since 1964, occupied the forth place behind france, united kingdom and west germany in the international visitors arrival to spain ranking (instituto nacional de estadística, 1970). authors as neal m. rosendorf (2006) have revealed the interest shown by franco after world war ii to portray spain as a tourist destination highly attractive to americans, as well as washington’s actions to support the private initiative in their quest to expand its business in the iberian country. an avant la lettre version of the u.s. public diplomacy that, for the spanish case, came hand in hand with the bilateral agreements signed in madrid in 1953. to give an example, for the years prior to the tourist boom, sasha pack (2009a) has documented a notable increase in american tourists, going from 31.579 travelers in 1951 to 115.778 in 1956, a circumstance that is unsurprisingly linked to the signing of those u.s.-spain executive agreements. 5 the beneficial effects of the currencies provided by the american tourists –within the framework of an, in other terms, unbalanced economic relation between both nations– were always mentioned by u.s. official analysts in their reports. american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 6 if we move towards the sixties, we found that the u.s.-spain relations produced a positive balance from the american point of view by the end of the decade: spain is also important to the u.s. as an economic partner. the u.s. is the largest supplier of goods to spain ($590 million in 1968, largely agricultural products and capital goods) and is the largest market for spain’s exports ($270 million in 1968). u.s. investments in spain total $500 to $600 million, about 40 percent of total foreign investments in the country. these represent significant contributions to the industrial modernization of spain. spain attracts some 800.000 u.s. tourists annually and is considered by u.s. business to have a favorable investment climate. (department of state, 1969) as we mentioned before, the income derived from receptive tourism was vital for the spanish balance of payments, a constant that is equally verified for the economic relations between spain and the united states as shown in table 2. the beneficial effects of the currencies provided by the american tourists –within the framework of an, in other terms, unbalanced economic relation between both nations– were always mentioned by u.s. official analysts in their reports. a perfect example are the materials gathered to elaborate the national security study memorandum (nssm) 46, a document aimed to assess the future of the u.s.-spain bilateral relation in the short, medium and long term at a time when the main obstacle was the lack of agreement for the renewal of the military bases deal. a renewal that was finally signed in august of 1970 in the form of an agreement of friendship and cooperation (convenio de amistad y cooperación entre españa y los estados unidos de américa, 1970). besides the macroeconomic figures of the country, is especially revealing the positive image given about spain’s tourist potential in the paper drafted by the interdepartamental group for europe of the national security council: “a magnificent climate, a long coastline, a rich history and proximity to industrialized europe have now made spain one of the major tourist countries of the world. the number of tourists visiting spain now totals 18 million annually and is still growing. receipts from tourism totaled $1.2 billion in 1968 – almost a third of spain’s total foreign exchange earnings on current account” (national security council, 1969). it should be stressed that for the american tourist the attractiveness of spain was not only based on the aforementioned elements, but also on the affordable prices. thus, in an eminently tourist area like torremolinos, a room in the hotel pez espada –one of the most famous lodgings of reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos the number of tourists visiting spain now totals 18 million annually and is still growing. receipts from tourism totaled $1.2 billion in 1968 – almost a third of spain’s total foreign exchange earnings on current account” (national security council, 1969). 7 american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico table 2 balance of payments between spain & united states, 1964-75 (in us$ millions) 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 exports, fob 101 122 153 207 293 299 299 imports, fob 324 483 561 538 545 665 823 trade balance -223 -361 -408 -331 -252 -366 -473 tourism 89 98 101 86 81 97 130 us army 37 34 37 38 31 35 36 other services -16 -21 -35 -41 -39 -43 -43 net services 110 111 103 83 73 89 123 net transfers 8 6 7 16 13 13 19 current account balance -105 -244 -298 -232 -166 -264 -331 direct investment 35 54 109 70 106 20 118 portfolio investment 22 18 19 18 13 3 -4 real estate 4 6 5 5 9 11 14 exim bank loans 17 20 27 61 57 36 3 other long term capital 23 24 32 57 46 53 142 long term capital 101 122 192 211 231 123 273 balance -4 -122 -106 -21 65 -141 -58 source: own elaboration from memorandum, spanish balance of payment, june 1976; s 30 domestic money capital markets, banking, box 2, records relating to portugal, italy and spain (rrpis) 1976-1981, office of the assistant secretary for international affairs (oasia), office of the deputy assistant secretary for international monetary affairs (odasima). office of industrial nations and global analyses, general record group 56, records of the department of the treasury, 1789-1990 (rg 56), national archives at college park (nacp); y memorandum, terms of trade between spain and us, may 14, 1974; ft foreign trade -general 74, box 15, elf: bea, owea, records relating to spain, 1949-76, rg 59, nacp. commentary: current account balance = trade balance + net services + net transfers; balance; balance at the beginning of the seventies, the habits and products of the country were still very attractive for the thousands of american tourists who wanted to choose spain as their holiday destination. in fact, it had become one of the few countries in europe that continued to be cheap for americans due the oil crisis reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 the town– cost 720 pesetas per night in 1970. taking into account the exchange rate of the peseta for that year (martín aceña, p. & pons, m. a., 2005), 69.61 pesetas per dollar, and that the average annual income in the united states was then 6,186.24 dollars (u.s. social security administration, 2010), we find that the room had a daily cost of 10,33 dollars, a quite reasonable price for one of the most luxurious hotels on the andalusian coast. curiously, the case of torremolinos –a paradigm of the uncontrolled growth during the tourist housing construction frenzy– was mentioned in 1970 by the u.s. ambassador to spain, robert c. hill, in his intervention before the spanish-american chamber of commerce in new york, as an argument to exemplify to what extent the country had overcome underdevelopment by then: eight months ago on the tenth of june, i arrived at the mediterranean port of algeciras […]. from algeciras that night, we drove part way to madrid, stopping over in torremolinos, a bustling and prosperous sea-side resort for literally tens of thousands of tourists from all over the world each year. only fifteen years ago, torremolinos was a sleepy fishing village, with only a small enclave for tourists. in those far-off days for torremolinos and the rest of spain, some 750,000 tourists visited spain yearly. in 1969, […] a total of 21,678,494 foreign tourists visited spain, the highest number in spanish history and 13% above that of 1968. (hill, 1970) 3. the socio-economic transformations of spain associated with the tourist development those words of ambassador hill, who in another passage refers to the tourism dollars as the fuel that nourished this “industry without chimneys”, are a perfect sample of the socioeconomic changes associated with the massive arrival of tourists. to further explore the topic we can resort to another primary source: the new york times. the newspaper paid special attention to all the events related with the late francoism crisis and its correspondents made an outstanding job in their attempt to provide the readers with a complete view of the internal contradictions that characterized the period (lópez zapico, 2010). but even one of the world’s great newspapers could not avoid that these high quality chronicles also shared space with other kind of articles where the american clichés about spain were clearly present. in this way, by 1973 some of the elements that americans considered typical of the spanish idiosyncrasy, bullfighting and sangria –which had become a fashionable drink in the united states at that time– usually appeared in the pages of the new york times (ferreth, 1973; prial, 1973). although these kinds of articles may be categorized as trivial, they include useful information for a better understanding of the period. for example, a journalist stated that television, el cordobés and tourism had changed bullfighting for good. some spaniards said that the invasion of foreign travelers in the bull rings had turned thereby an art into a mere tourist attraction. a sign of this decline would be the existence of an american bullfighter, joseph robert stephens, a military officer stationed at the base of rota that delighted both tourists and u.s. soldiers (gonzalez jr., 1973). american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 9 at the beginning of the seventies, the habits and products of the country were still very attractive for the thousands of american tourists who wanted to choose spain as their holiday destination. in fact, it had become one of the few countries in europe that continued to be cheap for americans due the oil crisis (lindsey, 1973). by august 1973, henry giniger –who was the new york times correspondent in madrid at that time– wrote a detailed article in which he tried to addressed the impact of tourism for the country and its hidden costs. the text began reviewing the stratospheric figures reached by the tourist phenomenon: by the end of this year, it is estimated, relatively cheap prices and reliable weather will have brought some 32 million foreigners to spain, a figure close to that of the native population. last year some 29,5 million were counted. […] josé ramón alonso, chairman of the national association of hotels and tourist proudly announced recently that tourism had earned $20-billion in foreign currency in 20 years, covering the persistent trade deficit and paying for the import of capital equipment that has permitted rapid industrialization. «in the last few years the profit from tourism has financed the launching of spain’s development», he said. another industry leader said proudly, “we are the economic base of spain.” (giniger, 1973, p. 25) but there were some clouds that never appear in the shining and triumphalist discourses of the francoist government and the tourism sector authorities. on this sense, the ecological costs derived of the out of control constructions on the mediterranean coast was never publicized. from the pages of the new york times, giniger (1973) denounced the speculation in tourist areas like benidorm, which had passed in a few years of being calm seaside towns to authentic jungles of hotels and leisure resorts. the journalist reports how the mayors of the municipalities of the costa del sol and the costa brava complained bitterly of the little attention paid to speculation by the central government. it was not a problem that only affected the natives and, in fact, foreign investors soon consider spain as an ideal destination to do quickly profitable business based on, not very exemplary, speculative practices. what is more, these kinds of practices were encouraged, or at least tolerated, by the spanish authorities, providing a proper framework for corruption in connection with the real estate bubble as was documented by the american newspapers: mr. peroff [a former middleman in stolen securities] has also told senate investigators that a large amount of «hot stocks» from this country [united states] also have been used to finance the recent building construction boom in southern spain […] “i would say 80 per cent of the whole costa del sol and majorca – in fact the whole south of spain and the islands – were built on american stock” he said [mr. peroff]. (jensen, 1973, p. 65) nevertheless, behind those kind of complaints there was not just an ecological or environmental concern, but also certain feelings linked to the distrust of foreigners expressed by many spaniards. a xenophobic approach that we can’t ascribe to the editorial board of the times, which seemed fully aware of the problems that came with the construction frenzy. this is evident in the fierce criticism contained in an editorial entitled “costa concreto” (1973), where they point out the irony that involves for a dictatorial government such as the franco regime, which was not permissive reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 10 american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico from the pages of the new york times, giniger (1973) denounced the speculation in tourist areas like benidorm, which had passed in a few years of being calm seaside towns to authentic jungles of hotels and leisure resorts. the journalist reports how the mayors of the municipalities of the costa del sol and the costa brava complained bitterly of the little attention paid to speculation by the central government 11 12 flora lewis, excellent columnist and expert in international politics, moved to marbella at the beginning of 1976 to personally collect the opinion of the wealthy inhabitants of this gentle tourist town. they conveyed calm to the journalist, reassuring that after the death of franco things would more or less remain the same reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 12 in almost anything, to be so permissive in these matters. the complaints did not stop during the following years and, in 1975, we may found new critics to the excessive price that the spanish coast was paying for its adaptation to the requests of the powerful tourist industry. on this occasion, the complaint referred to the inconveniences generated as a result of the construction of a toll road in the alicante area (welles, 1975). 4. conclusions: the lasting imprints of tourism in spain the last months of general franco’s life were marked by repression, a clear indicator that the dictatorship was losing popularity as the opposition was gaining momentum. it is true that the spanish transition to democracy was a process full of uncertainties and critical moments, but the new york times was quite confident on the prospects for a peaceful democratization process. a review of what was published about spain during 1976 is useful not only to verify that statement but to find out a polyphonic narrative that perfectly depicts the economic and socio-cultural changes that took place in the country since the sixties. an account were the effects of tourism have great prominence. flora lewis, excellent columnist and expert in international politics, moved to marbella at the beginning of 1976 to personally collect the opinion of the wealthy inhabitants of this gentle tourist town. they conveyed calm to the journalist, reassuring that after the death of franco things would more or less remain the same. however, as lewis noted, some things had already changed. for example fast rising prices were harmful for the pockets of the foreign pensioners who visited the town, as they were losing purchasing power: the price of everything has gone up. it is still cheerful and hospitable and relaxing, but it is not cheap any more. “what has got to change”, a talkative, helpful driver said, “is that the government has to crack down on the gougers. they ought to have the heads of some of the hotelkeepers. some of them jack up prices shamelessly. of course the tourists find out they have been overcharged for their drinks or their car, and they tell each other afterward: ‘don’t go to the costa del sol –you will be cheated’. it is natural”. (lewis, 1976, p. 2) this kind of bad practices, which had become widespread as a result of the tourist boom, did not begin to be really annoying for foreign travelers until the outbreak of the oil crisis and the growing inflation that characterized both late francoism and the transition to democracy. the economic crisis dramatically hit coastal and seaside areas such as marbella, which had abandoned other productive activities to focus almost exclusively on the services sector: “tourism is the area’s only industry. ripe oranges burden the trees the way figs do in summer: they are being left to rot, for it costs too much to pick and ship them. tourist fever, building fever and supermarket fever have turned most local minds away from agriculture” (lewis, 1976, p. 2). american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 13 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos the massive construction of buildings on the spanish seaside, most of them without respecting any architectural criteria, appears again in the newspaper. david m. alpern, general editor of newsweek magazine, described in his own words the features of one of the most popular tourist destination in spain: the costa brava has a totally different atmosphere and style: slow-placed and unsophisticated on one and, marked by madcap overdevelopment on the other. the costa concrete. […] driving farther north, around the town of llansá, we found the sprawl of concrete along the coast even more depressingall that construction may well be a testimonial to franco’s striving for economic development, but counting condominiums is not our favorite pastime. (alpern, 1976) along with the above-mentioned construction boom, infrastructures designed to improve communications also underwent a remarkable development during the period. a good example was the construction of the highway between the costa brava and the french border that, by mid1976, was scheduled to reach alicante. benjamin welles, former correspondent of the new york times to madrid, share his impressions with the readers after using that route: the autopista was first conceived in 1962 following a world bank study. in 1965 a pilot project was begun near barcelona, and in 1966 the spanish government authorized a system of toll roads to be built by spanish consortiums, largely with american equipment, and financed both internationally and domestically. more than $1 billion has been raised to date. the consortiums have the toll rights for 23 years, after which the rights revert to the government. the road, which has cost between $2 million and $50 million per mile so far, combines the best in united states engineering with the finest in spanish scenery. (welles, 1976, p. 27) beyond the capital invested, and its obvious positive effects for the local economy, welles (1976) also accounted its human cost: “some 23,000 acres of agricultural land have been taken in a region where every almond, olive or orange tree, every square meter of rich earth, has been planted, irrigated, terraced and passed down through families for generations”. therefore, we can conclude that through the american sources we can have a better understanding of the impact that tourism had on spain in the sixties and seventies and, at the same time, shed some light on several topics still needed to be addressed. one is the role played by u.s. capital in the development of the modern tourist industry during franco’s dictatorship. the other is the ability of the u.s. media to witness the end of an era. the quotes selected reveal that somehow those journalists were worried not only about the social costs of the tourist activity but because they mean the death of the primitive spain. thus, it may be very interesting to continue with this kind of analysis in order to reflect to what extend the view the american people had of spain was real or just a construction. it seems that perceptions and misperceptions were equally important for the assessments of the socio-economic balance generated by the tourist boom in spain. american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 15 alpern, d. m. (1976, february 22). costa brava: a contrast of sleepy beaches and overdevelopment. the new york times, pp. int_l5. balfour, s. (2000). the desarrollo years, 1955-1975. in j. álvarez junco & a. shubert (eds), spanish history since 1808 (pp. 277-288). london, united kingdom: arnold. convenio de amistad y cooperación entre españa y los estados unidos de américa y anejo, firmado en washington el 6 de agosto de 1970 (1970, september 1970). boletín oficial del estado, 1039, pp. 15.915-15.918. costa concreto (1973, september, 24). the new york times, p. 32. department of state (1969, october 8). u.s. policy assessment. airgram from amembassy madrid to department of state. pol 1 sp-us 1/1/67. box 2493. cfpf. political & defense. record group (rg) 59. national archives at college park (nacp). department of state (1974, december 17). sofico companies suspend payments. telegram from american embassy (amembassy) madrid to secretary of state. retrieved from https://aad.archives.gov/ aad/createpdf?rid=286644&dt=2474&dl=1345. faraldo, j. m. & rodríguez-lópez, c. (2013). introducción a la historia del turismo. madrid. spain: alianza. fernández fuster, l. (1991). historia general del turismo de masas. madrid, spain: alianza. ferreth, f. (1973, may 6). a vacation with the bulls; an exhausting night. the new york times, p. 144. giniger, h. (1973, august 25). spaniards begin to lose their enthusiasm for that rising deluge of tourism. the new york times, pp 25 & 56. gonzalez jr., a. f. (1973, june 3). the bullfight in spain is mainly on the wane. the new york times, p. 480. harrison, j. (1978). an economic history of modern spain. manchester, united kingdom: manchester university press. hill, r. c. (1970, february). impressions of a new spain in a new europe. box 8, robert c. hill papers. rauner special collections library. dartmouth college. new hampshire. instituto nacional de estadística (1970). anuario estadístico de españa año xlv – 1970. madrid, spain: instituto nacional de estadística. jensen, m. c. (1973, november 29). role of banks in stolen stock is alleged. the new york times, pp. 65 & 68. work cited reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos larrinaga, c. & vallejo, r. (2015). españa como potencia turística. una visión a largo plazo. cuadernos de historia contemporánea, 37, pp. 19-22. lewis, f. (1976, january 3). the «important people» on spain’s costa del sol hope that any changes won’t be too extensive. the new york times, p. 2. lindsey, r. (1973, june 3). soaring prices in europe dissuading u.s. travellers. the new york times, p. 232. lópez zapico, m. a. (2010). el tardofranquismo contemplado a través del periódico the new york times. 1973-1975. gijón, spain: cicees. martín aceña, p. & pons, m. a. (2005). sistema monetario y financiero. in a. carreras & x. tafunell (coords.), estadísticas históricas de españa, siglos xix y xx (pp. 645-705). bilbao, spain: fundación bbva, 2005. moreno, a. (2007). historia del turismo en españa en el siglo xx. madrid, spain: síntesis. national security council (1969, december 31). u.s. policy toward spain (nssm 46). memorandum for mr. richard pedersen (state), mr. william i. cargo (state), mr. g. warren nutter (defense), mr. r. jack smith (cia), lt. gen. f t unger (joint staff) and mr. haakon lindjord (oep). nssm 46. box 6. rnsc. nssm. rg 273, nacp. pack, s. d. (2009a). la invasión pacífica. los turistas y la españa de franco. madrid. spain: turner. pack, s. d. (2009b). turismo y cambio político en la españa de franco. in n. townson (ed.), españa en cambio. el segundo franquismo 1959-1975 (pp. 23-47). madrid, spain: siglo xxi. pavlovic, t. (2014). the mobile nation. españa cambia de piel (1954-1964). bristol: united kingdom: intellect. prial, f. j. (1973, may 19). to love sangria, you don´t have to be spanish – or even a drinker. the new york times, p. 42. rosendorf, n. m. (2006). be el caudillo’s guest: the franco regime’s quest for rehabilitation and dollars after world war ii via the promotion of u.s. tourism to spain. diplomatic history, 30 (3), pp. 367-407. u.s. social security administration (2010). us average annual income for the years 1951-2010. retrieved from www.ssa.gov/oact/cola/awi.html. vallejo, r. (2015a). el gran viaje. sesenta años de turismo en españa (1955-2015). madrid, spain: escuela de organización industrial. vallejo, r. (2015b). ¿bendición del cielo o plaga? el turismo en la españa franquista, 1939-1975. cuadernos de historia contemporánea, 37, pp. 89-113. american tourism to spain during the late francoism... misael arturo lópez zapico 17 welles, b. (1975, april 6). «progress» intruding on spain. the new york times, p. 7. welles, b. (1976, march 14). the autopista: spain’s new superhighway beside the mediterranean. the new york times, pp. xx7 & xx16. continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute in spain, and resisting the assault on the humanities andrew bennett the international institute in spain reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute in spain, and resisting the assault on the humanities andrew bennett the international institute in spain his paper marks the relation between humanities education and democracy as one of mutual necessity, since the pragmatic value of each is dependent on the other to be recognizable and realizable. such an understanding is drawn from the ideas of the american philosopher and educator john dewey. dewey’s system clearly reveals the nature of the stakes of the assault on the humanities; it also indicates the educational measures democratic societies should take in response. by instantiating the “conjoint communicated experience” of democracy in a public, shared space in which differences are respected, human meanings are explored, and the expansion of knowledge and experience is valued as an end in itself, the humanities classroom emerges as a site of social renewal, as well as one of resistance to illiberalism. in order to present such a site in a manner befitting dewey’s pragmatism, a lesser-known, local example of the value of humanities education is examined in this paper: that of the international institute in spain, located in madrid. beginning with its founding as a school for girls by boston missionaries in 1892, and through its role at the center of t ab st ra ct 24 andrew bennett is the director of the american cultural studies program at the international institute in madrid, spain. he received his doctorate in comparative literature from the university of texas at austin (usa) in 2013. his dissertation, entitled “waiting for virgilio: reassessing cuba’s teatro del absurdo,” argues for the historical legitimacy of the theatre of the absurd in cuba due to its power as a medium of political dissent in the post-revolutionary era and beyond. he has published articles in journals like cuadernos americanos and journal of beckett studies, among others. he lives in madrid, where he teaches classes in u.s. cultural studies and literature at the international institute and the universidad carlos iii de madrid. bennett, andrew. “continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute in spain, and resisting the assault of the humanities”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 23-38. recibido: 10 de diciembre de 2019. a network of institutions invested in progressive educational reform in spain during the pre-civil war period, iie stands as a testament to the continuity through renewal that defines both liberal democracy and humanities education. key words: humanities; john dewey; democracy; education; international institute in spain; institución libre de enseñanza; multiculturalism; progressivism. a 2013 article published by the new york times entitled “humanities studies under strain around the globe” paints a bleak picture for those invested in the liberal arts: the article goes on to describe the logic employed by some of those responsible for these funding cuts by quoting the official language of their budget recommendations. rick scott, governor of the state of florida, proposed that “students majoring in liberal arts and social science subjects should pay higher tuition fees, arguing they were ‘nonstrategic disciplines’.” in its own report regarding the state of the humanities released in 2013, quoted in the article, the american academy of arts and sciences calls for humanities researchers and practitioners to be more vocal in defending their work, and more assertive in defining its value: the humanities, according to its critics, are useless. but who determines their utility? according to what system of value are they being judged? and what, if anything, is different about the stakes of the current debate? after all, jack kaminsky, writing in 1956, called attention to a similar value system at work in the academy: while the market is not generous with humanists, the current assault on the humanities, their devaluation in both material and moral terms, is not simply a product of brute economic forces, or of an entrenched utilitarianism. rather, it is another front in a larger war, not against the humanities in particular, but against liberal humanism in general. though it might at first seem as though the reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 25 in the global marketplace of higher education, the humanities are increasingly threatened by decreased funding and political attacks. financing for humanities research in the united states has fallen steadily since 2009, and in 2011 was less than half of one percent of the amount dedicated to science and engineering research and development. this trend is echoed globally: according to a report in research trends magazine, by gali halevi and judit bar-ilan, international arts and humanities funding ha been in constant decline since 2009. (delany) at a time when economic anxiety is driving the public toward a narrow concept of education focused on short-term payoffs, it is imperative that colleges, universities, and their supporters make a clear and convincing case for the value of liberal arts education. (delany) science is what a man must have if he is to better himself; art is what a man may have if he has the time. the arts, therefore, are to be regarded as no more than simple amusements that men might turn to in their spare moments. science is necessary; art is contingent. (66) continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett liberal democratic principles like equality, empathy, and freedom are only recognized and deemed valuable from a humanistic perspective. without the humanities, without humanists, democracy itself has no defenders. 26 conversation surrounding this topic has changed little over the past half-century, the truth is that reality has finally overtaken hyperbole. or, to put it another way: a conversation that was once largely academic is so no longer. the value of the humanities in a social sense has been made painfully evident in recent years, as the collective consensus by which the veracity of shared experience is confirmed has been shaken. the “post-truth,” “fake news” era is, if nothing else, a testament to the utility of critical interpretative and communicative skills, which form the foundation of humanities education. but it is also a testament to the power of the presuppositions that undergird those skills and the civic actions they are expected to guide, as well as to the need to affirm those presuppositions explicitly, as valuable in and of themselves. liberal democratic principles like equality, empathy, and freedom are only recognized and deemed valuable from a humanistic perspective. without the humanities, without humanists, democracy itself has no defenders. this paper marks the relation between humanities education and democracy as one of mutual necessity, since the pragmatic value of each is dependent on the other to be recognizable and realizable. such an understanding is drawn from the ideas of the american philosopher and educator john dewey, in particular those expressed in democracy and education. dewey’s system clearly reveals the nature of the stakes of this assault; it also indicates the educational measures democratic societies should take in response. by instantiating the “conjoint communicated experience” of democracy in a public, shared space in which differences are respected, human meanings are explored, and the expansion of knowledge and experience is valued as an end in itself, the humanities classroom emerges as a site of social renewal, as well as one of resistance to illiberalism. in order to present such a site in a manner befitting dewey’s pragmatism, a lesserknown example of the value of humanities education will be presented: that of the international institute in spain, located in madrid. beginning with its founding as a school for girls by boston missionaries in 1892, through its role at the center of a network of institutions invested in progressive educational reform in spain during the pre-civil war period, and continuing on to its present-day iteration as a site for transnational learning and public encounters with north american culture, iie stands as a testament to the continuity through renewal that defines both liberal democracy and humanities education. for dewey, a constructive, communicative exchange between individuals from different backgrounds, all of them invested in a common project that exceeds their own self-interest, is the primary condition for making democracy manifest. as ignacio pérez-ibáñez notes in his article “dewey’s thoughts on social change,” in democracy and education dewey makes the case that “a democracy is a progressive society that facilitates communication, co-operation, and respect between people of different groups” (pérez-ibáñez 25). the ability of individuals and groups to overcome differences and navigate towards shared objectives is, according to dewey, inculcated to a significant degree in the classroom, where these behaviors are modeled and their meanings are explicated. the recognition of meaning is a key point in dewey’s philosophy, since without some awareness of the reason these subjects are taught in the first place a student’s education is reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 27 degraded to simple imitation, to rote memorization without any discernible objective. for dewey, art and literature provide that necessary communicative meaning, since they: meaning and meaning creation are for dewey wholly humanistic endeavors. humanities education, then, can be understood as learning practices that synthesize and communicate the critical appreciation of human meaning at both a cultural and trans-cultural level with democratic norms of interaction, as group identities are registered, criticized, and compared. the benefit of the guided recognition and appreciation of human achievement from within one’s group, coupled with a simultaneous fostering of respect and identification with the achievements and meanings generated by other groups, is the instantiation of dewey’s democratic ideal, as expressed in democracy and education: for most of the 20th century, the democratic habits instantiated in humanities education in progressive schools in the united states subsequently informed a lifetime of public community engagement afterwards. however, the decline of american civic life in the latter half of the 20th century, coupled with the rise of the internet and the digital enclaves it has fostered, has severely weakened our ability to create “our sense of the ‘public’-the space where we address the problems that transcend our niches and narrow self-interests”; that is to say, the conditions for a functioning democracy (pariser 17). the above quote is taken from eli pariser’s the filter bubble (2011), which argues that one of the primary social impacts of the internet has been to deplete the “bridging capital” necessary to move between enclaves and overcome individual differences in the interest of common cause. the term “bridging capital “ comes from robert putnam’s bowling alone (2000), a seminal sociological work that diagnoses the disintegration of american social structures from the 1960s to the turn of the century. taken together, these two analyses of contemporary american society, both of which cite dewey’s influence extensively, reveal breakdowns in its communal foundation that retroactively prove the necessity of those principles proposed in democracy and education more than one hundred years ago. as dewey’s work claims, in order to repair that foundation we must recognize the heterogeneous and multicultural humanities teaching environment as the primary institutional force capable of ensuring that liberal democratic values are enacted and continually renewed. continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett 28 a democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. the extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity. (91) [d]o more than all else to determine the current direction of ideas and endeavors in the community. they supply the meanings in terms of which life is judged, esteemed, and criticized. for an outside spectator, they supply material for a critical evaluation of the life led by that community. (experience and nature 204) bowling alone interrogates the notion of social capital, generally understood to refer to the value of social networks, and seeks to add nuance to its usage. putnam distinguishes between bonding (or exclusive) capital and bridging (or inclusive) capital: both bonding and bridging social capital are crucial resources in the development of a functioning participatory democracy, as putnam makes clear. in order to develop and maintain civic engagement, civic platforms (churches, voluntary associations, etc.) for engagement must exist. putnam quotes dewey in support of this idea: “fraternity, liberty and equality isolated from communal life are hopeless abstractions… democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (337). bowling alone charts the fragmentation of this “neighborly community” through the erosion of social capital, and locates the value of bridging capital at the foundational level of democracy: while this common “moral foundation” is strengthened and stabilized through its employment via participatory democracy, it is continually renewed over the course of the individual’s educational development, both in and out of the classroom, throughout a lifetime. as putnam’s work makes abundantly clear, the depletion of america’s social capital was an entrenched reality well before the internet rose to prominence. however, the arrival of the digital age has accelerated the process, and added dimensions to its outcomes that few foresaw. pariser evokes “bridging capital” in particular in his text in order to describe the social costs of, not simply internet culture, but the structures that manage and control user interface online: pariser’s “filter bubble” is, crucially, a product of anticipatory marketing that guides interface, and is not exclusively of the internet user’s choosing. however, the digital tools that dictate interface are predicated on a psychological reality: given a choice between two social groups, an individual will be drawn to associate with that group whose identity and preferences mirror their own. this homophily is exponentially increased online, where users have the freedom to pursue niche reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 29 some forms of social capital are, by choice or necessity, inward looking and tend to reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups. examples of bonding social capital include ethnic fraternal organizations, church-based women’s reading groups, and fashionable country clubs. other networks are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages. examples of bridging social capital include the civil rights movement, many youth service groups, and ecumenical religious organizations. (22) where people know one another, interact with one another each week at choir practice or sports matches, and trust one another to behave honorably, they have a model and a moral foundation upon which to base further cooperative enterprises. (346) the basic code at the heart of the new internet is pretty simple. the new generation of internet filters looks at things you seem to like-the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you like-and tries to extrapolate. they are prediction engines, constantly creating and finding a theory of who you are and what you’ll do and want next. together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us-what i’ve come to call a filter bubble-which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information. (9) interests and develop relationships within subgroups in a virtual space that is neither fully public nor fully private. as pariser points out, the initial hope for the internet was that it would amplify, rather than drain, our bridging capital, and make a globalized world more neighborly: the fact that information flow itself has been weaponized in attacks on democratic institutions in the united states and beyond, and that many of these attacks have been successful to varying degrees, should come as little surprise given the confluence of factors presented here. atomized individuals have sealed themselves, intentionally or not, within homogenizing filter bubbles that determine their virtual communities. these communities are defined not by how they negotiate difference, but how they accentuate sameness. as such, the spaces between enclaves grow larger, and mutual suspicion and distrust is the result. as consumers of information guided by homophily in their choice of content, these individuals are operating outside of, to quote dewey, the “conjoint communicated experience” of democracy. continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett 30 it would require too great a digression to engage adequately with the facts of the “fake news” phenomenon and index the political machinations behind it, from all of the relevant perspectives. simply put, the extreme u.s. political polarization of the past thirty years has been amplified by the proliferation of online news content that is guided by market objectives, rather than liberal democratic ones. the need to generate clicks and user engagement means, to echo pariser, giving people what they want rather than what they need from a civic perspective. this directive has led to a profound divergence in the perception of political reality, as the partisan filter bubbles shape truths rather than the other way around. truth itself has become a product of intra-bubble consensus. those truths that depart from the narrative consensus of one’s respective bubble are marked as “fake news,” and are attacked as such. this “post-truth” discourse is perceived these communities are defined not by how they negotiate difference, but how they accentuate sameness. as such, the spaces between enclaves grow larger, and mutual suspicion and distrust is the result. as consumers of information guided by homophily in their choice of content, these individuals are operating outside of, to quote dewey, the “conjoint communicated experience” of democracy. but that’s not what’s happening. our virtual next-door neighbors look more and more like our real-world neighbors, and our real-world neighbors look more and more like us. we’re getting a lot of bonding but very little bridging. […] in a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues […] are less likely to come to our attention at all. as a consumer, it’s hard to argue with blotting out the irrelevant and unlikeable. but what is good for consumers is not necessarily good for citizens. what i seem to like may not be what i actually want, let alone what i need to know to be an informed member of my community or country. (17-18) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 31 nearly uniformly (at least by humanists) as an existential threat to both liberal and humanistic values. for a constellation of disciplines committed to pursuing and disseminating truth, the discreditation of that pursuit, or the rejection of its authority or any claim to expertise, certainly qualifies as an open declaration of hostilities. humanities education, and education in general, is for dewey a tool by which society can ensure the proper transfer of knowledge and meaning from one generation to the next. that is to say, it is a manifestation of social survival in an evolutionary sense. the disruption of that transfer, then, is tantamount to social suicide. dewey’s ideas help clarify the stakes in this debate, and to better understand how the current crisis has come to be. his pragmatism also serves to chart a path forward, since it obliges us to answer a simple question: how do we fix the problem for the future? how do we turn back the assault? a pragmatic question deserves a pragmatic answer, one consistent with its premises. rather than appeal to transcendent values, in dewey’s system the justification for championing a democratic society is equivalent to the recognition of that society’s defining features, which in turn are equivalent to the manner in which such a society’s wealth of knowledge is expanded and maintained. the worth of democracy as a social system is based on the fact that such a system allows for different social groups within the system to flourish. the members of those various groups have the freedom to interact, and thereby generate the possibility for more opportunities for stimulating experiences. the openness of this system fosters organic flourishing and growth, at an individual and social level. these ends are intrinsically worthwhile in an evolutionary sense. democracy then is defined by its consistent transformation and expansion. the growth at the heart of democracy is predicated on education as the means through which knowledge is gained rather than lost: the mission of education is continuity through renewal. this is accomplished thanks to the transfer of knowledge and meaning generated by the humanities. the shared heart of both humanities education and democracy is a commitment to individual and social growth, not for any utilitarian objective, but for its own end as an evolutionary necessity. the value of democracy and humanities education are the same. dewey’s commitment to educational innovation extended far beyond the written page. as can be inferred from his philosophy, generating lived experience according to the pedagogical principles he articulates is a necessary condition for the coherence of his system. there are three famous examples of dewey’s incursions into hands-on teaching practice directed towards specifically democratic, progressive purposes: hull house in chicago, the new school for social research in new york, and the university of chicago laboratory school. all three of these and to it, as well as to life in the bare physiological sense, the principle of continuity through renewal applies. […] education, in its broadest sense, is the means of this social continuity of life. every one of the constituent elements of a social group, in a modern city as in a savage tribe, is born immature, helpless, without language, beliefs, ideas, or social standards. each individual, each unit who is the carrier of the life-experience of his group, in time passes away. yet the life of the group goes on. (dewey, democracy and education 76) continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett humanities education, and education in general, is for dewey a tool by which society can ensure the proper transfer of knowledge and meaning from one generation to the next. that is to say, it is a manifestation of social survival in an evolutionary sense. the disruption of that transfer, then, is tantamount to social suicide. dewey’s ideas help clarify the stakes in this debate, and to better understand how the current crisis has come to be. his pragmatism also serves to chart a path forward, since it obliges us to answer a simple question: how do we fix the problem for the future? how do we turn back the assault? 32 institutions were guided from the start by a commitment to democracy as an ethical ideal, and education as a practical and multi-dimensional way to enact lasting social reform, specifically in combatting inequality, be it economic, racial, or gender-based. hull house, which was the us’s first settlement house (modeled after toynbee hall in london), was founded in 1889 by jane addams and ellen gates starr. dewey served on hull house’s first board of trustees and also taught classes there. hull house was primarily focused on providing education and recreational facilities for european immigrant women and children. as a settlement house, it housed resident social reformers from predominately middle-class backgrounds who were committed to the idea of shared space and public zones of interaction as a way to foster equality and, by extension, the expansion of democracy’s premises. it was particularly driven to promote and expand gender equality, and many of its residents became notable champions of the suffragette movement. in an effort to put forward a pragmatically rigorous answer to the challenge at hand, we will turn now to a real-world example of humanities education in action that is not as widely recognized as the three institutions just mentioned, and examine how it embodies the ideas expressed in democracy and education. in 1887 jane addams, one of the founders of hull house, visited a small school in san sebastián, in the north of spain. upon touring the school and becoming acquainted with its founders, she remarked: “the school has evoked and at the same time filled a wonderful opportunity in spain and should have the cooperation of all women interested in the higher education of women” (mount holyoke college). reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 33 while iie’s genesis predates the publication of democracy and education, it deserves to be recognized as an embodiment of the educative principles proposed there, perhaps to a greater degree than the institutions already mentioned that were designed by dewey. the school addams visited was the north american school, which in 1892 would be incorporated and renamed the international institute for girls in spain, commonly known as the international institute (iie). while iie’s genesis predates the publication of democracy and education, it deserves to be recognized as an embodiment of the educative principles proposed there, perhaps to a greater degree than the institutions already mentioned that were designed by dewey. this is because iie engaged and engages its students still at a trans-national level of interaction, outside of the direct oversight of the state’s educational bureaucracy, be it the u.s. or spain. even more importantly, the de facto multicultural nature of iie enhances the dynamics of the liberal humanities classroom envisioned by dewey. as leonard j. wak argues in his article “rereading democracy and education today: john dewey on globalization, multiculturalism, and democratic education,” the nature of democracy as defined by dewey, its fundamental drive for expansion as it incorporates heterogeneous groups within its praxis, necessarily implies that the model of the nation-state will eventually be superseded. this evolution is firmly rooted in education: “the democratic project of humanity must advance beyond the nation-state. but it must first search for educational means conducive to such a transnational democratic order within the existing (national) order” (wak 30). iie is, in many ways, a site of enactment of those means, since it operates as a space of shared experience across national, cultural, and institutional boundaries. william gulick and his wife, alice gordon gulick, were protestant missionaries from boston who came to san sebastián in 1871, two years after the spanish constitution of 1869 decriminalized the practice of religions other than catholicism. the gulicks were educators as well as missionaries. alice, a graduate of mount holyoke college in massachusetts, was committed to providing expanded access to education for spanish girls, who at the time were severely underserved by the state in that regard. gulick was a tireless worker and a relentless fundraiser for what was her chief aspiration: the construction of a mount holyoke in madrid, where girls could receive a superior education that included cohabitation, and benefit from the best of america’s educational methods, materials, and instructors. the women’s college model, most notably represented by the seven sisters colleges of the northeast, heavily guided the pedagogical approach of the gulicks. as carmen de zulueta notes in her book misioneras, feministas, educadoras: historia del instituto internacional (1984), the school in san sebastián utilized a methodology that was considered quite radical at the time: this kind of experiential learning represented a dramatic departure from orthodox spanish instruction; the fact that it was being offered to girls made it revolutionary. the other central force behind the pedagogical practice of the gulicks’ school in san sebastian was the primary role given to their faith, which they saw as an intrinsic feature of the education they provided. however, in order for the gulicks to procure the land on which their longsought-after institution would be built, they had to incorporate it as a secular corporation, since it was illegal for a religious community to own spanish property. this legal requirement would have a profound impact on the identity of the iie in the years to come. upon the iie’s relocation to the capital, and prior to the completion of what would become known as the alice gulick memorial hall in 1912, at miguel ángel, 8, in madrid, the gulicks began a relationship with institución libre de enseñanza, which was formed in 1876 following the spanish government’s curtailing of academic freedom for university professors in 1875. the group, led by giner de ríos, gumersindo de azcárate, and manuel bartolomé cossío, consisted of academics and instructors who had been marginalized for their refusal to submit to censorship. this organization became the fulcrum for progressive educational reform in spain over the coming decades, and the international institute maintained a close collaborative relationship with them throughout this time. continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett 34 las estudiantes no se aprenden los textos del curso de memoria, simplemente para pasar el examen, sino que se utiliza la enseñanza práctica en los cursos de ciencias naturales, con el uso del laboratorio o las excursiones al campo para conocer la naturaleza de primera mano. (111) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 35 the institución was from the start greatly sympathetic to the gulicks’ aspirations, and laid the groundwork for a fruitful partnership when the iie moved to madrid in 1903 by facilitating the purchase of properties for iie on calles miguel ángel and fortuny, only a short walk from the ile’s headquarters on what is now paseo del general martínez campos. the reason for their affinity was a shared commitment to liberal democratic ethics through education: the dual ideals of religious and gender equality in education, made manifest in practice through the boarding school model employed by the gulicks, provided a powerful example for the ile to follow. in 1907 the spanish state, now amenable to forward-thinking pedagogical innovation of the type pioneered by ile, formed the junta para ampliación de estudios e invesitgaciones científicas. the junta was directly inspired and shaped by the disciples of giner de ríos and the institucionistas: the impulse to look beyond the pre-existing (and largely sub-standard) spanish academic structures in search of more fertile ground for educational innovation meant an enhanced role for the iie in the junta’s reforms, since iie boasted high-quality facilities, materials, and instructors, all of which were made available in some fashion for spanish educators interested in improving spanish education. most importantly, there was recognition by key figures within the iie that the progressive initiatives proposed by the junta would result, if enacted, in a major step forward for spanish culture and society. the most noteworthy figure, and the one most crucial to the collaboration that would mark iie’s most socially significant period, was susan huntington vernon, director of the iie from 1910-1916. it was huntington who pushed the iie to accept a more secular identity, one in harmony with its legal status. and it was huntington who vociferously endorsed and argued for a partnership with the junta, in order to amplify iie’s impact on spanish educational policy, alleviate budget concerns, and make manifest the spirit of international cooperation that existed in the west during the period surrounding the first world war. this relationship was instrumental in the formation of two institutions whose legacies have had long-lasting effects on spanish society: the residencia de señoritas, formed in 1915, and the instituto-escuela, formed in 1918. the residencia de señoritas was formed five years after the residencia de estudiantes in 1910, another initiative of the junta. both were modeled on the british colleges oxford and cambridge; both had tremendous success in fomenting the expansion of higher education to a broad section para los institucionistas, defensores de la educación femenina y de la tolerancia religiosa, el instituto internacional representaba la realización de un sueño. nunca habían vivido en españa protestantes y católicas bajo un mismo techo y en complete armonía. (173) el propósito de la junta fue realizer en una escala nacional y con fondos del estado lo que giner y la institución se habían esforzado pos conseguir durante muchos años, dentro de un grupo limitado: la formación total del ser humano. la educación official, memorística y medieval en sus métodos, no la consigue. […] [l]a junta siguió la estrategia que en el siglo xix había seguido la école des hautes études de parís: “establecer la investigación fuera de las universidades como el mejor medio para reformarlas”. (191) of spanish society. the residencia de señoritas, directed by maría de maetzu, a former instructor at iie, rented its facilities from the international institute, and many of its instructors and students moved between the two institutions. the same was true for the instituto-escuela, which was also housed on iie grounds. both the residencia de señoritas and the instituto-escuela were examples of applied experimentation in both social and educational policy. the residencia, and the grupo de niñas formed in 1918 as its secondary school, had a profound impact on female education in spain, as girls received access, thanks in large part to the iie, to facilities like laboratories and libraries, materials, and instructors, all of which had previously been denied to them. the instituto-escuela was created in 1918 to absorb both the grupo de niñas as well as the grupo de niños, the corresponding school for the residencia de estudiantes. the instituto-escuela was co-educational, and highly experimental in its methodologies: there were no textbooks, no exams, and no grades of any kind. the students were required to compose reaction essays to the lessons taught in their notebooks, and participated in a wide array of practical, hands-on learning, including laboratory work and map-making. there was a heavy component of art instruction, with emphasis given to its execution rather than its contemplation, as well as folk music appreciation and sport. finally, students were sent on many diverse field trips throughout spain, for varying lengths of time. the residencia de señoritas and the instituto-escuela, both invested in promoting student habitation as a fundamentally important part of the educational experience, derived a great deal of inspiration from the iie. in the context of this paper, it must be emphasized that the iie’s dedication to cohabitation for girls of different nationalities and faiths represented a titanic achievement in education in spain. the space allocated for learning extended beyond the classroom to include the entire field of experience, all of which was recognized as part of a student’s development. the shift in iie’s identity from a protestant, american girls boarding school, to an integral partner in liberal spain’s push for educational reform, one that de-emphasized its religious mission for a mission guided by social improvement and equality, regardless of faith, did not go internally uncontested. many of the iie’s board of directors in boston felt that such a close association with the junta would be a disaster for iie, as the spanish state institution would absorb and erase the school alice gulick had worked so hard to create. susan huntington disagreed with this opinion. she appreciated the momentous opportunity available to iie in 1915. she recognized that the institution’s autonomy, even its integrity, were secondary considerations compared to the role it stood to assume in a more fluid dynamic with other institutions guided by similar, if not identical, aspirations. the pursuit of such an institutional network was motivated by the desire for expansion and evolution, for educational reform that flourished outside of the traditional classroom, protected from constrictive bureaucracy and free to pursue radical solutions to deep social problems. this was a definitively liberal, democratic, and humanistic phenomenon. the power of these interlocking networks operating in a practical space of communities flexible and innovative enough to react pragmatically to problems in real time represented and represents a bulwark against the forces that devalue the humanities, and democracy in turn. by working across institutions and institutional boundaries, this network of progressive educators was able to instantiate humanities education that defied entrenchment continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett 36 [susan huntington] appreciated the momentous opportunity available to iie in 1915. she recognized that the institution’s autonomy, even its integrity, were secondary considerations compared to the role it stood to assume in a more fluid dynamic with other institutions guided by similar, if not identical, aspirations. the pursuit of such an institutional network was motivated by the desire for expansion and evolution, for educational reform that flourished outside of the traditional classroom, protected from constrictive bureaucracy and free to pursue radical solutions to deep social problems. this was a definitively liberal, democratic, and humanistic phenomenon. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 37 continuity through renewal: john dewey, the international institute... andrew bennett 38 and restriction, while embracing heterogeneity, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. in this way, the history of the international institute in spain, and in particular its involvement in the spanish educational reforms of the early 20th century, serves as a compelling example of dewey’s principles in action. the assault on the humanities is not simply a hyperbolic reaction to market realities from within the modern academy. it is a statement of fact that reflects one of the defining educational and social challenges of our time. in order to resist this assault we must recover the shared space of participatory democracy and liberal humanism, and so circumvent the digital enclaves that have depleted our social capital. it is only through the recognition of the value of humanities education that society will be capable of renewing that bridging capital, and with it the continuity of our democratic foundations. delany, ella. “humanities studies under strain around the globe.” the new york times. 1 dec. 2013. dewey, john. democracy and education. penn state university, 2001. ---. experience and nature. allen & unwin, ltd. 1929. de zulueta, carmen. misioneras, feministas, educadores: historia del instituto internacional. madrid: editorial castalia, 1984. kaminsky, jack. “dewey’s defense of the humanities.” the journal of general education, vol. 9, no. 2, 1956, pp. 66-72. pariser, eli. the filter bubble: what the internet is hiding from you. penguin books, 2011. pérez-ibáñez, ignacio. “dewey’s thought on education and social change.” journal of thought, vol. 52, no. 3/4, 2018, pp. 19-31. piñón varela, pilar. “el instituto internacional y el instituto-escuela: una colaboración pionera en españa en el terreno de la educación internacional.” laboratorios de la nueva educación en el centenario del instituto-escuela. acción cultural española y la residencia de estudiantes, 2019. putnam, robert. bowling alone: the collapse and revival of american community. simon and schuster, 2000. waks, leonard j. “rereading democracy and education today: john dewey on globalization, multiculturalism, and democratic education.” e&c education and culture, vol. 23, no. 1, 2007, pp. 27-37. references microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 31 posthuman / cyber-gothic an interview with anya heise-von der lippe laura álvarez trigo universidad de alcalá anya heise-von der lippe is assistant lecturer with the chair of anglophone literatures and teaches english literature and culture at the university of tübingen, germany. after completing her phd with a dissertation on monstrous textualities (published by uwp in june 2021), she has recently started a new research project on romanticism and climate change. her publications include various chapters and articles on monsters, hypertext, zombies, dystopias and cyberpunk, as well as the edited collection posthuman gothic (2017), and co-edited collections literaturwissenschaften in der krise (2018) and kinship and collective action in literature and culture (2020). she is one of the series editors of the book series challenges for the humanities with narr, tübingen. keywords: american gothic, popular culture, cyber horror, posthumanism, interview. laura álvarez trigo: the objective of this section is to explore how the gothic and horror have technology and the digital at its center. you have done research on the discourse construction of monstrosity, and i want to open the interview by exploring how is it that technology has turned into something that we fear. a first noticeable parallel that i can think of with traditional monsters is that just like doctor frankenstein with his creature, we have created technology. in your work, you explore how the monster is perceived as such by virtue of being seen as the other. if it is the gaze of society that turns someone or something into the monster, how do you think that contemporary narratives have come to embody that monster, that other, in the technological and the digital given our dependency and blind trust on technology how has it come to be the other and the monster that we fear? anya heise-von der lippe: that’s a big question. first of all, thank you for inviting me to talk about these things, which are very close to my heart. you asked about definitions of the monstrous and how those also tend to extend to technology nowadays. i would take one step back anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 32 and say, to what purpose do we need to define the other as monstrous? and i would say that happens in processes of human identity construction. so, when humans say ‘this is the other’, this also creates a sense of unity—of a common ‘we’ that is opposed to this ‘other’. that kind of cements our identity as human beings—and when i say ‘we‘ and ‘our‘, those are already contested categories in many ways. in most western cultures, we would, for instance, exclude the animal from this ‘we’ and we see that in gothic texts around the turn of the 20th century where darwinian theory began to influence gothic texts that talk about the animal as other. we have the island of doctor moreau (wells 1896), the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde (stevenson 1886), and dracula (stoker 1897). those texts explore the boundaries between the human and the animal as other. we have a similar thing with technology, let’s say, from the mid 20th century onwards into contemporary time, or even earlier emergences if you look at e. m. forster’s the machine stops (1909), a short story from the early 20th century. it already explores this fear of dependency on the machine and what might happen if that machine doesn’t work any longer. but i think that, in forster‘s story, we still have a very clear sense of the machine and the human being presented as two separate things. there’s dependency, obviously, on emerging technology, but there’s no integration of human and technology. i think that what we see nowadays, in late 20th and early 21st century gothic and horror is a fear of an integration of human and technology. we have become so dependent on technology that it’s intruding into our bodies. there is no sense of a clear boundary between human and technology any longer. i think what gothic and horror texts do is to explore where that might lead us. so this is not just about the integration of human and technology but it’s also about the horror of what that might mean if the technology intrudes into the human body and what we might become if that happens. i think there’s the sense of horror that doesn’t stem from the technology itself but more from what it does to our sense of self as human beings, and i think that’s why we have started to also reject technology as the other in a way. lat: in this sense, i’m thinking about what you’ve mentioned about this self-identification and i'm trying to compare how we feel about technologies such as robots that are commonly related to this idea of the uncanny valley, because we see us reflected in them through our similarities, but sometimes in horror there’s also these machines that are very non-human-like in appearance. i’m thinking about classic movies such as 2001: a space odyssey (1968), but also more recent movies such as peripheral (2017) and sequence break (2018). this seems to move away from this uncanny type of horror, and i’m thinking from this perspective of the horror and the gothic element, do these fictions where the machine is completely something non human, like a computer for example, do they shy away from this idea of the uncanny or is the gothic and the horror present in some other form? ahvdl: i think the concept of the uncanny works pretty well as long as we have the sense that that technology is still separate from the human body. so then, we see gothic horror embodying the fear of the automaton becoming too like us that’s where we can apply the anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 33 uncanny and the uncanny valley. it goes back to freud and his article on the uncanny, but obviously it’s also the uncanny valley in terms of robotics when it becomes too like the human, it causes fear, or even a sense of disgust in many ways. the texts you mention, where technology isn’t anything like the human, i think that’s more a sense of intrusion and a sense of loss of boundaries that is at stake, no longer the uncanny. we’re no longer afraid that the technology might become too like us or that we might no longer be able to tell apart a human individual and a separate robot. it’s more a sense of technology intruding into the body, that we might be becoming something posthuman, something completely different by the integration with technology. there’s an article that is called “monstrous machinery“ by micheal sean bolton (see bolton), which is one of the first attempts at defining the posthuman gothic. he differentiates between those texts that are postmodern—where we have a fear of machinery— and the posthuman gothic where we have a fear of becoming technology in a way or of the integration of the human with the technology. we lose a sense of the self when that happens, we can no longer tell inside and outside, human and technology apart. so i think the uncanny is often kind of still there in, let’s say, texts that are focused more on a kind of traditional creation of horror of the machine, where you don‘t have this sense of becoming machine ourselves. not every text is necessarily at the same level in terms of exploring the posthuman gothic. where it is about shock effects, we often still have a sense of the uncanny, i think. but where it explores the edge of what we might become, we get gothic horror texts that are about the blurring of those boundaries. the example that micheal sean bolton talks about is house of leaves (see danielewski) where we get this complete blurring of boundaries between inside and outside, where the house is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. it’s constantly shifting around, you no longer can tell which level of the text you’re on. so this kind of blurring of boundaries is, i think, essential to the posthuman gothic that moves away from those fears of the postmodern gothic. lat: this blurring of the limits between the human and the machine that you speak about also makes me think about the direct relationship we sometimes establish with the machines in these fictions. it is common for cyber horror and sci-fi horror narratives, those that deal with automaton, to deal with sexuality and sexual relationships and affirm and direct forms of attraction from these machines. so sometimes it is the machine that looks for this relationship when other times it is the human owner who imposes that relationship on the machine or on the robot. so we can find narratives where the sexual encounter is desired or maybe a facto established relationship, other times is forced, or it is a struggle between the human and the machine that tries to liberate itself. the representation of this sexuality, however, is rarely beneficial. it’s rarely portrayed as something good so either it’s the machine who is suppressed and we, as audiences, we often see men who establish this relationship with female robots as the ‘weirdos’ so to speak, like we know there’s kind of something wrong there. so is it a form where the gothic surfaces? is it a necessity within the logic of the gothic narrative for anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 34 this connection to become a threat or something that we find uncanny, again? and is this physical otherness that we confront in the machine a form of abjection maybe? ahvdl: i would say that the question is from whose perspective are we seeing those narratives; and it’s often i think, in a sense, a way of trying to explore what becomes of a heteronormative model of sexuality. if you have a male creator enforcing their will onto a female robot that’s very, i think, to a certain viewer, that may even be interesting or titillating or a story that they might like to explore. but for me it’s often very cringe-worthy, and i’m not sure if this is in the narrative or if this is something that i, as a viewer, bring to that story. overall, i think this kind of story often is about the questioning of certain boundaries and the question of what happens to things that we take for granted in terms of what human nature is, how do humans reproduce, what happens if humans try to reproduce with something that doesn't do reproduction in the same manner that humanity does? so, how do we think through those things? to frame this exploration of boundaries theoretically—from a feminist perspective, we could, for instance think of donna haraway’s “a cyborg manifesto” (see haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”). and i think this exploration of boundaries, that’s what, at least some of these texts try to do too, from various perspectives. so it might be a very heteronormative perspective that looks at how uncanny it is to imagine a coupling with a robotic other, or it may be a text that looks at this in terms of, let’s say, more interesting explorations of new ways of relating to each other, like forms of kinship. for instance, there’s the music video for björk‘s, all is full of love. it’s visually a very interesting video about two robots who are kind of, i guess i would say, performing sex acts but it’s not very clear what they’re doing. it’s very much about making love in a way, but it’s between two machines, so it kind of explores something that, from a certain perspective, might look very uncanny but it also is a very interesting way of raising that question. as humans, do we find that interesting? do we find that strange, perhaps? is that a performance of love? can robots express human attraction or love? what is going on there? so i think what some gothic texts do is also—i mean, the björk video is obviously not gothic or maybe we can read it as gothic but it’s more about posthumanist becomings i would say—but gothic and horror texts often like to play around with those ideas as well, either in a manner that is supposed to create horror or in a manner that is supposed to explore those possibilities, i would say. lat: that’s very interesting. i really like the björk example. so, thinking about this also from the perspective of the machine. so gothic fiction formats often are a format through which marginalized voices emerge. the genre has often been interpreted as a space for those without a voice to acquire one. this is interesting to me regarding the object of this thematic session due to the fear of autonomous or technology as a whole acquiring self-awareness and maybe rebelling against their owners or oppressors that they find in the humans. so, do you agree that this is a way in which the gothic is present in this technology, automata, cyber horror anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 35 narratives? are these the voiceless that want to acquire a voice and what are those voices emerging in what form, and is it also a way of us losing our own voice? ahvdl: in a way yes and in a way no. so let me try to unpack that. first of all, if we go back to frankenstein (see shelley), for instance, which i would read as a kind of proto cyber-gothic text, it's all there. the monster embodies a hybrid creature between animal, human and also a sense of technology coming in there in the act of creation—the spark of being, that is perhaps more present in later film versions. we have this very interesting construction of narrative perspectives where the monster is also allowed to speak, so in a sense it does exactly that, we're voicing the voiceless. we have this shift in perspective where the narrative perspective shifts from victor frankenstein, we've seen the monster from the outside as the devil a demon, and suddenly it shifts and we also get to understand the motivations of the monstrous creature, which is surprisingly eloquent—almost shockingly so—as if to draw the reader’s attention to this new angle. and unfortunately, most of the early adaptations take this eloquence away. so, even this early in the history of the gothic we already get the sense that the gothic creates a possibility to voice people who've had no voice, marginalized people, the nonor perhaps not fully human. also the monster is kind of shown as incredibly adaptable and while it's very artificial in its creation it's also a very natural perspective in many ways, it's a very sustainable creature. so even if it's a murderer, it's also a very interesting figure in terms of voicing marginalized perspectives and asking what it means to be human. and i think that also accounts for part of its continuing attractiveness for critics of various schools and backgrounds. in a sense, the gothic offers a platform for people to explore these marginalized perspective, but not all gothic texts necessarily do that. we have a lot of gothic texts that are very much focused on reinforcing order, reinforcing hierarchies at the end of the text, so while they explore all kinds of horrors throughout the text, they will go back to ‘this is the structure the universe should go in’ and ‘this is the conclusion that we offer‘ in the end. in a way frankenstein also kind of does that by resolving the plot through death in the end. however, i would say there are texts that take that further and one of them is a much more recent frankenstein adaptation by victor lavalle, a graphic novel called destroyer (2017), which picks up this frankenstein narrative but also combines it with an exploration of anti-blackness and police violence against black people in the us. it takes up this idea of the monster being able to voice otherness. it’s also very much about technology, i don’t want to talk too much about the plot—it’s fascinating you absolutely all need to read it—but the main character is this black boy, who’s also a cyborg, who is also kind of zombified because he’s dead, so it’s a very othered perspective in many ways. what the graphic novel does is exactly give marginalized voices a space and use this idea of technology to explore how it could create a narrative of resistance against this very standardized narrative of how societies work and who’s left out of those constructions. anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 36 to maybe bring this back to posthumanist theory as well, this is also where donna haraway goes with the figure of the cyborg and the idea of all of these mergings of the organic and the technological, that could also be read as a form of liberation (see haraway, “a cyborg manifesto”). i mean, it’s an ironic myth, obviously, and she toys around with those ideas, and that’s perhaps not a utopian vision that could be achieved for various reasons, but it’s good that those ideas are out there and some gothic texts at least play around with those ideas and create a space for those to be explored a bit more. to come back to your question of voicing otherness, i would say gothic texts can do that but not all gothic texts try to do that, it depends on the perspective people are working from. lat: in terms of this idea of the organic and how the gothic emerged through a contrast with its precedent romanticism, is there a place for cyber terror where the resistance to this other monster can be situated in nature? maybe through the calmness or slowness of nature as opposed to the fast-paced aggressive menacing idea and aspects of technology. ahvdl: in a way, again, kind of yes and no. if you look at frankenstein again, which is my basic textual example for many of these things, you get a sense that nature is this very restful place. whenever victor frankenstein is disturbed by anything and mostly, he creates those disturbances himself, obviously, but whenever he’s emotionally upset, he would go on a hike in the mountains, look at the nature, and then that calms him; that kind of takes him back to his own sense of humanity in a way. we get similar glimpses of nature being restorative in many of the texts that are based in this romantic sense of nature as this idyllic and positive place. in the same way frankenstein also blurs the boundaries between nature and culture, even in the very creation of the monster, so it draws attention to the fact that those boundaries between the human and the natural world are very much artificial boundaries. what the gothic often does by undermining these boundaries is also break up this sense that nature is this completely separate place. so, when we talk about the boundaries between the human and technology breaking up, we also, on the other end, talk about the boundaries between the human and the animal, the human and nature breaking up. so often in the same text we get a sense of a blurring between technology, nature, and the human so that, in that sense, it’s no longer a refuge but it’s something that can also become very threatening. if you look at annihilation (2018) for instance. i’m talking about the film because the visuals are very interesting. in that film, we get a sense that it’s no longer clear where this intrusive technology ends and where nature has become integrated with a very unfamiliar, very alien technology. all of these boundaries have been completely annihilated (in a way). so, if you take that to posthuman theory, obviously donna haraway also talks about “natureculture”: there’s no strict distinction between nature and human culture in those theories—nor should there be—because that’s very much also a construct that is erected by humans to uphold our dominant position on the planet. if you look at climate change, we see where that kind of position, this assumption of a hierarchy between humanity and the rest of anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 37 the planet, gets us, so i don’t think we, to be very harsh, i don’t think we deserve this resting place that nature is for many people. we should think about how to preserve that, and i think what texts often can do is draw attention to this necessity to think about those things. lat: you’ve hinted several times in your answers at this idea of moving toward the technological or the idea of the cyber. many sci-fi narratives these days, and from decades before really, are exploring these possibilities of technological advances and, i guess this is something that’s somehow present in annihilation as well, how does it take us into the future, or farther in a sense, and other cyborg narratives and medical advances like criogenization and all these things. this could mean that we could find a way of moving beyond the anthropocentric perspective through the cybernetic, which is what donna harway and some other researchers maybe are hinting at or grounds that they’re exploring. do you think that cyber terror in this sense can be used as a tool to imagine a posthuman future and can we reconcile with the other in the monster and, in this way, get closer to it? ahvdl: so, in a way i think what posthuman theory already does is question those strict distinctions between subject and object that we’ve built there and point a finger to where those are not helpful in terms of describing realities. because, as you said, we’re kind of already exploring those technologies. so it’s not a question of whether we want to confront them— we’re already doing that in many ways. if we look at technologies that we are already using— you don’t have to go to cryotechnics, which people are apparently also exploring—but look at all the day-to-day technology that we're using. posthuman theory says we need new paradigms because we’re already so enmeshed with technology that there’s no way we can ignore that (see wolfe). so, in a way, what gothic horror narratives do is explore the flip side of that, they’re not necessarily looking at technology as this huge utopian thing, where we might become better posthumans—or transhumans –, but i think they look very much at what can go wrong, what might happen if we adopt technologies too quickly, or unthinkingly, if we adopt the wrong technologies, what might get lost if we take the wrong pathways. i think part of what technology does in contemporary society is, it doesn’t have a will of its own, but it has a snowball effect. we develop something and then we can’t stop it at some point. if we look at it, someone sits down and creates a platform where you can rate your fellow female students based on their ‘hotness‘ or their looks, which is a dubious project in itself, but may, at first glance seem harmless, containable. and a few years later that tool influences elections all over the world, and we didn’t see that coming. so what gothic texts can do, if you look at things like black mirror (2011-2019) for instance, is think technologies into the future and decide or point out where this might be going, point out the worst case scenarios that might happen if we pursue those technologies further. it’s more of a compass pointing in all of the bad, dystopian directions, so that we can, presumably, think about those things and change our ways and do things differently. that‘s not necessarily a completely new effect. if you look at things like james tiptree jr.’s novella the girl who was plucked in (1973), that's anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 38 very early proto-cyberpunk text, fairly gothic too, and it already kind of goes in this direction and explores many of these questions. if you create almost human beings and then send them out into the world—avatars steered by other human beings—this is what might happen and this is what this would do to the people involved, emotionally but also quite physically. so it’s not a completely new idea, but i think it’s an interesting effect of this kind of gothic text. and again, i would say it depends on perspective because there are obviously also gothic texts that are very much focused on simply the creation of shock effects and horror or surface horror but, for instance, things like black mirror, i would say that those are more theory-conscious and trying to create a dystopian effect where people actually start to think about their use of technology and what this might do to us. so, does this create a possibility for a dystopian or for a utopian view of the future? i would say probably not, but maybe it creates a possibility of reflection and i think that’s probably worth more than a strict sense of utopia—of all the bright futures that we could have. the gothic is very much a “negative aesthetic“ (botting 1), so it doesn’t explore the shiny and beautiful things that we might have in the future rather, from its start as a genre, it tries to point out the fault lines in enlightenment rationalism; and our exploration of technology also ties into that. we are so enamored with our own minds that sometimes we need the gothic to show us where the body, and the other, and things like that come in to clash with this idea of rationalism and the impressive things that human brains can do. lat: do you want to add some closing remarks about where you think the cyber-gothic might be going? if it’s going to expand, if it’s going to continue to serve us to create this dystopian space you were talking about to reflect on the problems with technology that we have? ahvdl: yes, i think some of the questions you raised today already point in very interesting directions. for instance, to give those explorations more space to explore minority voices. if you have creators from various kinds of minorities that engage with those topics, you get, i think, very interesting stories, because those are often the kinds of voices who are aware of all of those problems, because they already face them in day-to-day life in contemporary culture, and have done so for centuries. so i think that’s one of the spaces that the cyber-gothic could explore further or it’s already exploring further. there are very interesting pairings of black, indigenous and poc perspectives and gothic / horror, for instance, there’s a horror anthology by a collective of arctic gothic writers called taaqtumi (2019) and there’s a very interesting cyber-gothic arctic horror story, i would say if i had to put a genre to it, that combines those ideas of indigenous horror and very advanced cyborg technology. the story is “lounge” by sean qitsualik-tinsley and rachael qitsualik-tinsley in the anthology taaqtumi, which means ‘in the dark‘ in inuktitut, and i am especially interested in what happens to this kind of human-technology interaction scenario if you shift the perspective and take it out of the context of settler colonialist hierarchies. so those are the spaces where i think there’s room for development and which are also, i think, very interesting to gothic criticism because in many ways anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 39 monsters have become this staple of contemporary mainstream culture where everything is in a way filled with monsters, and monsters have started to lose meaning. so in a sense, if everything is monstrous there’s no space for the monster to be this warning of otherness or this kind of harbinger of category crisis that jeffrey jerome cohen talks about (see cohen), because it’s just a part of everyday life—it means everything and nothing. so to take the monster or the other or also the cyborg figure to new spaces and to combine it with other genres— i think that’s probably the places or those are the things that are the most interesting to take gothic criticism right now. open q&a session mónica fernánez jiménez: i wanted to ask if you could develop a bit more on the topic of kinship because you’ve mentioned some things and i’ve also seen that you’ve edited if i’m not wrong a volume titled kinship and collective action (2020). it really caught my eye because i’m very interested in the idea of kinship, i’ve worked with it, the idea of kinship in the post era, let’s call it the post-something because i’ve studied it in relation to postcolonialism and what i do, or some colleagues whose work i find interesting do, is thinking of kinship as separated from reproduction or linear reproduction in order to transcend notions of racial purity and things like that. i was surprised to see it in a completely, maybe not completely different context, because talking about the post era you’ve been talking a big deal about posthuman. so i was just thinking, although you’ve said some things, how kinship in its most strict linear terms challenged by technology or by cyber horror? does cyber horror do something similar to what i’ve said in postcolonial narratives? ahvdl: let me say two things first, i co-edited that volume with three of my colleagues from tübingen, who i’d like to mention briefly: gero bauer, katharina luther, and nicole hirschfelder. the interesting thing about the volume is that it arose from an interdisciplinary conference and the contributors take different approaches to kinship, so it’s not just about the posthuman or literature, there are also sociological, art-based and education-focused approaches to kinship from various cultural backgrounds in that volume, and it’s also not focused on gothic or horror. i think i’m the only person in that volume who actually works on gothic horror, and also the chapter i wrote is not necessarily from a gothic perspective but from a dystopian perspective. my chapter focuses on the marrow thieves (2017) by cherie dimaline and what i was interested in is kinship as a form of resistance narrative. it kind of works with what you talked about in terms of postcolonialism, so it’s a resistance narrative against white settler colonialism and its exploitation of indigenous people’s bodies—and not just in the way that white settlers have done over centuries—but a direct exploitation of their bodies, their bone marrow because they—the white people—can no longer dream and the indigenous people can still dream and that ability to dream is located in the bone marrow (which, is a very interesting metaphorical construction too, i think). so that’s the the basic setup and what i look at in terms of kinship is the question of how the indigenous people in anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 40 that novel build kinships beyond family relations, also kinship with nature, kinship with other beings in nature, and how kinship is also a form of narrative in a way because what they do is pass on knowledge through narrative and that is also something that native american criticism explores (see for instance daniel heath justice’s work). so this idea of passing on knowledge not through kind of top-down history, the patriarchal line, but through learning from narratives that people from with whom you form a kinship group and practice kinship can tell you. also, the idea, still present in many indigenous teachings, that you're not supposed to just learn, acquire knowledge, you’re supposed to understand it, act on it, and grow from it in a way. so if we take that to the question of how technology comes into that, and i think mostly in dystopian fiction, maybe if you look at more speculative fiction, margaret atwood's maddaddam trilogy for instance, oryx and crake (2003), where she develops this idea of a highly evolved, or not evolved, but technologically created posthuman species and explores this idea of where they might take forms of kinship that, still in that context, rely on biological reproduction but it’s changed very much from what we understand human reproduction to be. the novel and the trilogy raise the question how a really sustainable species might explore ideas of kinship with other sustainable species. so the underlying question is obviously how could kinship help as a tool against what humanism does in terms of propagating hierarchies, propagating family structures that go top-down—patriarchal structure in families. and, in a way, that is not necessarily tied to technology, but you can take that to technology via posthuman theory. haraway not only in the cyborg figure but also exploring ideas of creating together— “sympoeiesis” (staying with the trouble, 2016)—creating together with other species, becoming together with other species, and in that way creating a new, more sustainable way of existing on the planet. she explores these ideas of kinship with animal species, but i don’t think haraway would be opposed to adding in technology because the cyborg figure also kind of explores those basic ideas and might even come into that as a form of solution. mfj: i’m looking forward to reading the article because i think it’s a positive approach to technology and if we’re talking about kinship, it usually is. it’s very interesting i’ll definitely read more about that because i just only got to a very small side of the whole issue which is kind of big so i was just really looking forward to hearing your answer it’s been very interesting thank you very much. anna marta marini: as you mentioned annihilation the movie, i really liked it and i do share your take that the visuals are very interesting. it really gives you a feeling that nature is blending with some technology or with something uncanny, somthing we cannot quite put our fingers on and we don’t know if it’s an alien, if it’s something that comes out of a technology indeed, or if it’s some alien technology, or if it’s something that came out of our planet in some mysterious ways. i think they really nailed that sensation of ‘i’m not quite sure what’s going on’, and it has these colors, very beautiful unicorn colors, it’s very nice and so i was anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 41 wondering, do you think this maybe, using the same word that mónica was using, this postsomething gothic, this is kind of new contemporary use of gothic modes, do you think it does have new aesthetics? does it bring something new on the visuals? do you think that this gothic is evolving from what we are mostly used to see in horror and gothic narratives? is it evolving somehow and it’s giving us something new to look at in a way? ahvdl: i would hesitate to call annihilation a gothic narrative, although it has some gothic elements, especially in its relentlessness and in how it repurposes ideas of nature as monstrous. and i think that’s part of the whole “post-“ thing—that now we also have all kinds of hybrids and blends and texts that borrow from narrative traditions like the gothic, but also borrow from science fiction, and also borrow from other narrative genres in a way. i think where this new aesthetic comes from is a blend of different genres where we have science fiction blending with dystopian speculative fiction blending with an underlying sense of horror or the uncanny that i can also place into that. so that’s maybe one way of answering it. the other would be that the gothic is very adaptable from the beginning. we’re not looking at the same kind of gothic that we have in the late 1800s with walpole, radcliffe and “monk” lewis—where we have medieval castles and crumbling architecture and the ”virgin in distress“. we’ve moved far beyond that, i think in terms of aesthetics, even mary shelley moved beyond that already in 1818. so i think what the gothic does very well is adapt to new threats, to new fears, to new cultural ideas to engage with, and to derive explorations of horror from. in a way this renewal of aesthetic is something that comes around again and again and again and i think often the most interesting gothic texts are those that also play around with new aesthetics on a narrative level, that also do something completely different with the gothic text—like house of leaves plays around with the idea of doing hypertext in a printed book which is like a super weird idea but it works as a kind of staging of the gothic. also on a metanarrative level it’s not just a story about the gothic but it’s a gothic monstrous text in itself, and maybe that’s also a way of looking at what happens with the aesthetics in films like annihilation, which again, i’m not fully sure that i would call it a gothic text. amm: i wouldn’t call it a gothic narrative per se but i do think there’s a lot of this underlying anxieties and it’s very actual, it’s really contemporary and i think it’s one of these cases that we have discussed even in other keynotes and it’s a bit the basis of our conferences is this pervasiveness of gothic elements and modes in genres that you wouldn’t really say ‘this series is gothic’ or ‘this movie is gothic’, but there is still this anxiety and this kind of way to cope with it. ahvdl: maybe also those are the more interesting places for the gothic to crop up rather than those, let’s say, standardized shock gothic texts that are really much about aesthetics. jeffrey weinstock talked about penny dreadful, which… it’s very beautiful but it rarely explores a critical edge, it just replicates lots of very beautiful gothic aesthetics—which is also something interesting to do but it’s not explorative or critical in terms of being theory-conscious or being anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 42 conscious of changes that are going on in contemporary society. i think there’s places where the gothic kind of pops up in unexpected ways or in genres where we don’t expect gothic narrative modes, where it’s also exploring critical edges. amm: yes, maybe a little bit more stimulating to see how it can pop up as you say in some places where you wouldn’t expect it really and with such beautiful visuals because it’s really very nice that kind of color palette that doesn't really feel like a gothic narrative in the standard mainstream idea that people have for gothic really. ahvdl: it’s not dark but it’s very uncanny, we talked about this fear of meeting someone or the figure of the doppelganger, so being afraid that something that is not you that is very alien could take over your role in a way and that’s exactly what we have in annihilation, so i’d say it’s not visually dark but it’s very dark in terms of where it takes the human imagination. works cited atwood, margaret. oryx and crake. bloomsbury, 2003. bauer, gero, anya heise-von der lippe, nicole hirschfelder and katharina luther (eds.). kinship and collective action in literature and culture. narr, 2020. bolton, micheal sean. “monstrous machinery: defining posthuman gothic.” aeternum, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-14. botting, fred. the gothic. routledge, 2014. cohen, jeffrey jerome. monster theory. university of minnesota press, 1996. danielewski, mark z. house of leaves. pantheon, 2000. dimaline, cherie. the marrow thieves. dcb, 2018. forster, e.m. the machine stops. penguin, 2011. haraway, donna. “a cyborg manifesto.” the cybercultures reader, edited by david bell and barbara m. kennedy, routledge, 2000, pp. 291–324. haraway, donna. staying with the trouble. duke university press, 2016. heath justice, daniel. “’go away, water!’: kinship criticism and the decolonization imperative.” reasoning together, edited by the native critics collective, university of oklahoma press, 2008, pp. 147–168. heise-von der lippe, anya, and russell west-pavlov, editors. literaturwissenschaften in der krise. narr 2018. heise-von der lippe, anya, editor. posthuman gothic. university of wales press, 2017. anya heise-von der lippe | posthuman / cyber-gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1813 43 heise-von der lippe, anya. monstrous textualities. university of wales press. 2021. lavalle, victor. destroyer. boom, 2018. qitsualik-tinsley, sean and rachel qitsualik-tinsley. “lounge.” taaqtumi—an anthology of arctic horror stories, compiled by neil christopher, inhabit media, 2019, pp. 53–103. shelley, mary. frankenstein. norton, 2012. stevenson, robert louis. the strange case of dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. norton, 2020. stoker, bram. dracula. bedford/st. martins, 2002. tiptree jr., james. “the girl who was plugged in.” her smoke rose up forever.,orion, 2004, pp. 43–78. wells, h.g. the island of dr. moreau. tor, 1996. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? university of minnesota press, 2010. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 3 the american gothic an interview with jeffrey andrew weinstock anna marta marini universidad de alcalá jeffrey andrew weinstock is currently professor of english at central michigan university, where he has been teaching a variety of courses on american literature and popular culture since 2001. he is a scholar of the gothic with a vast academic production, in particular on supernatural fiction, film and television. his research interests span topics related to, among many, monsters, ghosts, vampires, and the female gothic. he is also an associate editor for the journal of the fantastic in the arts and, besides a long list of published essays, he edited three collections of tales by h.p. lovecraft and has published over 20 books, among which spectral america: phantoms and the national imagination (2004), the vampire film: undead (2012), and the monster theory reader (2020). he was as well the editor of the cambridge companion to the american gothic in 2018. keywords: american gothic, popular culture, goth music, horror, interview. anna marta marini: this is our introductory interview and i’m thankful to have jeffrey andrew weinstock for it. your work evidently spans across different disciplines and subjects and yet, most of it to some extent revolves around the gothic and the ways gothic texts tackle old and new anxieties. but how was your interest in the gothic born and how has it developed? and why do you think it is worth exploring the gothic from an academic standpoint? jeffrey andrew weinstock: as far as my developing interest in the gothic, it was an early predilection for ghost stories that i increasingly channeled into an academic pursuit. i place a lot of the blame on the doorstep of disney. i was obsessed with the disney’s haunted mansion at disneyworld, which i went to when i was around eight or nine years old. it was the ride i kept wanting to go back on again and again. at about the same time, there was a sunday night weekly program called the wonderful world of disney, and i remember vividly a story about the ghost of a little creole girl called child of glass. i remember to this day being mesmerized jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 4 by the story of a ghostly little girl who needed the help of a living boy to recover a lost sachet of diamonds to avoid being doomed for eternity. also, around the same time, i found in my elementary school library a collection of stories called alfred hitchcock’s haunted houseful. it was a collection of ghost stories, and i checked it out so many times that i almost memorized those stories. somewhat later, toby hooper’s poltergeist in 1983 then sealed the deal for me, because it was one of the first horror movies that i saw in the theater, and i remember being on the edge of my seat for that. from there, it was a gradual process of exploring the gothic and horror stories. i recall the lurid covers done by artist michael whalen for the h.p. lovecraft del rey editions, that you could see when they used to have bookstores in malls. i would stare at the covers until i actually started to read h.p. lovecraft. from there, my interests developed further. i got into literary ghost stories, so edgar allan poe, stephen king at some point, shirley jackson’s the haunting of hill house (1959). so, it was a natural fit then in graduate school that the focus of my doctoral dissertation became ghost stories and the hauntedness—or the ghostly qualities—of language. the linchpin that i used was the idea of the dead letter, the letter from the living that goes astray but also the letter from the dead that reaches its destination. for that, i was looking at edgar allan poe and henry james, and it went all the way up to tony morrison’s beloved (1987). out of the dissertation came my first monograph, which is a book called scare tactics: supernatural fiction by american women. in the process of researching for the doctoral dissertation, i discovered hundreds of ghost stories published by women in the 19th century in the american periodical press. it became clear to me that in many cases they were using the ghost strategically as a kind of metaphor for the displaced or disempowered situation of women in 19th century america—who were essentially the ghosts in the room, not seen, recognized, appreciated fully. the case that i make in that first book is there has been an unacknowledged feminist tradition of supernatural writing in american fiction. i was also working at that point on the spectral america collection, which was an edited collection of essays, and i’ve graduated outwards from ghost stories, as you mentioned, to focusing on vampires, and then monsters in general. but i do think my first love remains the ghost story. i keep coming back to ghosts and ghost stories. as for why i think the gothic is worth exploring: it is to me this dense site of the cultural imaginary where very specific anxieties and desires come together: what we fear and what we hope for. sometimes it wears its politics on its sleeve, other times you have to dig more deeply to excavate what’s underlying there. but gothic tales, i would argue, always tell us a lot about ourselves. in our present moment, there’s definitely been a mainstreaming of speculative fiction in general and the gothic in particular, and it’s interesting to consider what kinds of cultural forces might be propelling its center stage. jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 5 amm: as you say, the gothic is culturally charged and you have worked mostly on the american gothic. what do you think characterizes it? what are its peculiarities that you find strictly related to the american context? jaw: i should start by saying that i’m a little wary of speaking in generalities about the american gothic. sometimes, it’s more productive to think in terms of regional character as well as different temporal moments. that said, in the introduction to the cambridge companion to the american gothic, i included a rudimentary venn diagram showing four locations or emphases of the american gothic: religion, geography, otherness, and rationality. for religion, i was making the case that it’s hard to think about the american gothic without going back to the puritan roots of the american experience, and there is an intensely gothic quality to puritan writings of the 16th to 17th and the 18th centuries in which you have a stern and angry god, who causes things to happen in the world for inscrutable reasons. figure 1 themes of the american gothic (weinstock companion 7). jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 6 i argue there the roots of the american gothic can be traced back to this puritan religious imaginary, which then dovetails quite closely with the role of the frontier in developing the american gothic. you see that, in puritan writings and into the 19th century, the wilderness is the place where one leaves behind civilization and encounters danger. so, when in charles brockden brown—who is an american gothic author who wrote at the very end of the 18th century and in the early part of the 19th century—or in james fenimore cooper it’s about going off into the forest. in herman melville, it’s about going out onto the ocean. it’s always about leaving behind the domestic circle and going off on these adventures into some kind of uncharted territory. edgar allan poe’s the narrative of arthur gordon pym (1838) falls into that category as well. you leave behind all the trappings of civilization and confront that dark side, the dangerous side of existence. this then segues quickly into the idea of the american gothic as preoccupied with the encounter with the other, notably the native american presence that resides within the wilderness or slavery and its legacy. the fourth quadrant of that venn diagram has to do with rationality—the concern that the enlightenment principles upon which the united states of america was founded do not in fact hold true or consistently, that, in fact, human beings are not fundamentally rational or able to govern themselves, but instead are compelled or motivated by other forces. you see a lot of that in the movement from the 18th century to the 19th century, and authors like poe and charles brockden brown—who give us characters compelled by unconscious forces, madness that results in atrocious acts, or acting in ways which the characters are not consciously aware of. so, those are the four poles of the american gothic. i might add now to the category of “rationality”—which i didn’t do in the cambridge companion to the american gothic—something about the rapaciousness of capitalist exploitation. amm: gothic modes have been used in cross genre popular culture products. they have become ubiquitous, sometimes just as little hints but, still, they are there. thinking of the production of pop culture in recent years—let’s say from the turn of the century up to the present—what do you think has been the relationship between the gothic and popular culture? can you trace these elements you described in popular culture products? jaw: i would say that, from the late 18th and early 19th century up through the present, the gothic has always been very firmly entrenched within the sphere of the popular. from penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers to the horror pulp magazines of the 1930s and the 1940s, up to the present with horror games and podcasts, novels, films, fan fiction, creepypasta, and so forth. the gothic has been aligned more fully with popular culture than elite or high culture. i think there are a number of reasons for that. some of it has to do with the sensationalistic aspect of the gothic, its transgressions of decorum, its eliciting of a bodily response. all of this is antithetical to conventional notions of good taste and elite culture. i think the bodily nature of the gothic here is particularly important. linda williams has written that there are three categories of literature, or of media, that fall into the category of body genre: horror, jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 7 melodrama, and pornography. and it isn’t just a coincidence that all three of those are ones that traditional academic appraisal has kept at arm’s length. anything that targets the body has been seen as less worthy of analysis than those that seem to be more intensely cerebral. i would also add that i think there has been a populist orientation to the gothic from its beginnings, which disdains a corrupt aristocracy and a debased self-serving clergy. it’s there in matthew lewis’s the monk (1796) and anne radcliffe’s predatory aristocrats. it’s there in hawthorne’s “young goodman brown” (1835), when brown questions his faith and the goodness of the people of his town. you see it really clearly in something like charlotte perkins gilman’s “the yellow wallpaper” (1892) in which a woman is being controlled by her husband, who is simultaneously her doctor. she’s doubly disempowered and the gothic mode is used as a way to express the fact that no one is listening to her, no one is hearing her. this voice of critique travels all the way up to something like jordan peele’s film get out (2017), which calls into question the idea that the united states is some kind of post-racial society, making clear that it is anything but. so, i would respond to the question by just suggesting that the gothic has always been closely aligned with popular culture, because all of its emphases are antithetical to conventional notions of good taste and decorum and elite culture and so on. it’s fred botting who refers to the gothic as being the literature of transgression. it is an interesting question as to whether most gothic narratives end up as being conservative retrenchments of the status quo or whether there’s something actually radical about them. because what happens in most gothic narratives is that you have the messy middle part, in which things get thrown into disarray, but in most cases everything is conveniently put back in place at the end. i tend to think of the ending as a kind of alibi that allows us to enjoy the messy middle part. amm: speaking of popular culture, you worked on a book was published in october 2021, pop culture for beginners. it is meant to be, and i quote: “an introductory textbook for undergraduate course adoption, introducing students to the history of the study of popular culture, outlining various theoretical approaches.” besides writing about it, you have been teaching courses on both the gothic and popular culture. according to you, what are the challenges and benefits of teaching and learning about these topics? jaw: thank you for mentioning the book, it’s my second foray into doing a textbook. i start it with what i call the “pop culture paradox”: the idea that our popular culture pursuits are at the same time incredibly important to us, but also meaningless. i’m fascinated with the tendency to disavow the importance or the complexity or the meaningfulness of things that we actually love—which is the kind of resistance that i typically see when i start to teach a popular culture course. i think there are a lot of reasons for this knee-jerk dismissal of the value and the complexity of the things that we do for enjoyment. part of it clusters around the ideas of labor and utility. we tend to associate value with things that are difficult, the harder something is to jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 8 master the more its mastery seems to matter. you can think of james joyce versus harry potter, or joyce versus stephen king. joyce is slow going while rowling or king read quickly, and our tendency is to equate work with value and to dismiss as less meaningful or important the thing that lots of people can access and enjoy. however, you could reasonably turn that on its head. which one is more valuable or important: the book that’s been read by millions, or the book that you need a semester-long college class to appreciate? i also think there’s a tendency to mistake the familiar for the simple. because something is familiar to us, because we have frameworks in place to make sense of it, we don’t even realize we’re engaged in a process of interpretation. thus, we think that there isn’t much there to interpret. the irony at the core of the book is that there seems to be an inverse correlation between enjoyment and perception of value. the more we enjoy it, the less it seems like work, the less important or meaningful we perceive it as being. what i do with the textbook then is to ask students to bracket off those value judgments, and to consider how meaning is created and conveyed in different media. the framework that i privilege for the book is therefore a semiotic approach to popular culture. we look at different forms of popular culture as rule-governed systems of communication. we start by asking “okay, so what is this thing?” and how is it constructed, what kinds of associations attach itself to it, and where we end up is always with the question of ideology: how does this object or practice reinforce or challenge particular understandings of the world? the classroom itself is a great space literally to explore those issues. consider how the conventional classroom is oriented: you have these little desks where students have to sit, the instructor has the privilege of moving about and standing up. it’s usually a relatively sterile space without much decoration to it, all of which is intended to convey particular understandings about what education is and how it takes place. and the traditional model is that students sit passively while the instructor unscrews their head and pours in knowledge, and shakes them up and asks them to regurgitate it. there’s a whole world view that we can extrapolate from just the classroom space itself! back to the gothic. inasmuch as i consider the gothic to fall under the umbrella of popular culture, we can employ the same approach. i would say we can start by saying “okay, so what is this thing?” and what does it say, how does it say it, what cultural work does it do in terms of reinforcing or undermining established understandings of the world. and ultimately, is this a progressive challenge to conventional wisdom? is it a conservative reaffirmation of existing power structures? this goes back to what we were talking about a minute ago—usually the status quo ante is restored at the end of the gothic work. this is particularly true of monster movies. the monster is this eruption of chaos that needs to be dealt with and then we watch as the protagonists try to figure out “okay, what is this thing? how do we address it?” and, typically, at the end, the threat is resolved and things more or less go back to normal. of course, we know now, in the era of the franchise, that the monster is never totally gone. it jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 9 will always be back in the sequel. but, for a moment, things have returned to the way that they were, which may well be the alibi that lets us enjoy the mayhem of the middle. amm: do you think this dismissive approach could have something to do with how academia—perhaps the academic status quo or the academic notion that the epistemic authority needs to focus on “serious stuff,” topics that are deemed “respectable” and thus more worthy of research? jaw: the range of responses is really interesting. i do think there’s a tendency to make a division between things that are fun and things that matter or are important, and the popular culture activities that they pursue tend to fall on the side of fun—so students dismiss them as not being as meaningful as the things that they have to work hard in order to master or to achieve. i try to point out that some of the reasons that the pop culture pursuits seem simple is that—because they’re so well versed in it and understand how it functions—they don’t consider themselves as engaged in a process of interpretation. there’s also the strange sense that to interpret something is to dispel its magic—that if we look at it too carefully and consider how it works, it won’t function in the same way for them as an escape or a form of enjoyment. in some cases when you start to look at the politics of the thing that may well be the case. you look at the gender politics of a particular horror film in the way that sex equals death in the slasher films of the 1980s, and they start to see that there are these messages there. it’s true in some cases that if you look closely, you may see something you don’t like! so, the concern that looking too closely may spoil something has some merit, although remaining willfully blind to the pernicious politics of something is problematic. i also try to point out to them that if you truly esteem something, then scrutinizing it carefully is an active homage. if you value the thing enough to consider how it works, you’re demonstrating that you really do have affection for this thing. this is often the way i think we, as academics, tend to function, right? we focus our scholarship often on things that we enjoy. this is henry jenkins’s idea of the “aca” academic or acafan, who takes as the focus of their research things that they enjoy in general. some students do also resist what they presume to be “over reading” or over-interpretation of something. there’s a comic or meme that circulates in which someone is interpreting the blue color of the drapes in the room in a book as reflecting the melancholy of the protagonist, and the author says “no, they’re just blue curtains.” but unconscious elements can find their way in. there’s also the inherent ambiguity of language itself, which is always subject to multiple—and sometimes competing—interpretations. authorial intent does not necessarily control the interpretation that a reader arrives at. i tell my students that if you can support the interpretation that you’re making by showing moments in the text, there’s nothing to say it’s wrong—even if the author should say “no, i just meant the drapes to be blue.” jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 10 amm: i know that in 2016 you published a book, goth music: from sound to subculture, coauthored with musicologist isabella van elferen. goth music and its scene have been a longlasting part of your life and you’ve been dj’ing goth music for 20 years. can you tell us something about the goth subculture itself and your own experience with it? jaw: i have had a long affiliation with goth music—and alternative music in general—going back to new wave music of the 1980s, which is really what i grew up with. that was my moment, so it was a kind of slippery slope for me from bands like depeche mode and gary newman and new order, to bands like the mission uk and siouxsie & the banshees, and bauhaus on the one hand, and then bands like ministry and skinny puppy and front 242 on the other. i had the privilege in college in the late 1980s and early 1990s of working in the first music store in philadelphia that was dedicated entirely to compact discs, which were still quite new at the time. it was on the campus of the university of pennsylvania and was definitely a great place to work, very relaxed, and we would play whatever we wanted when we were working in the store, so we had the opportunity to explore various different bands or styles that weren’t necessarily getting play on the radio. i made the jump to actually dj’ing in graduate school, in washington dc, and i’ve held a number of club residencies as a dj. there was a goth industrial fetish event in dc called bound, and i became a resident dj for it around 1996. when i moved to hartford in 1999, my wife and i ran a goth night there ourselves, while i also had a dj residency for an event in new york city called contempt. it took place in in the most goth industrial space that you could possibly imagine: a permanently moored, rusting hulk of a boat in the chelsea piers area of new york that had been converted into a club space, and you were kind of in the bowels of this rusting boat... it was crazy! around this time i was teaching as a visiting assistant professor at the university of connecticut, which has its own community radio station. i began to do a radio show called dark nation radio because i was looking for an opportunity to play tracks beyond what would be acceptable for dance floor play—and there’s lots of material that’s not suitable for the dance floor! when we relocated to michigan in 2001, i continued the radio show on the central michigan university student station and then migrated it online. currently, i do dark nation radio—now in its 22nd year—live once a week on sundays and then make shows available on my mixcloud page (mixcloud.com/cypheractive). so, i’ve had a long association with goth and industrial music. where the goth music book is concerned, isabella van elferen and i used to attend the same conference annually— the international conference for the fantastic in the arts in florida—and we naturally began talking about our shared affection for goth music. one of the interesting things that we focused on was how goth has a very distinct aesthetic, but in terms of the music it’s a very broad umbrella that accommodates a range of different musical styles, from down tempo mopey music to much harsher electronic material. if you attend a goth event, you’re likely to hear everything from bauhaus or the sisters of mercy or christian death to something like the jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 11 electronic music that’s associated with front 242 or even something that’s much more abrasive like combichrist for example, with distorted vocals and a very harsh sound. what we were trying to investigate with the book was how it is that goth music functions as an umbrella category, bringing together different subgenres that are quite distinct. how can one event accommodate all of these different styles? we wanted to go beyond thinking about goth as merely an aesthetic—or, where music is concerned, just focusing on or privileging lyrics—and to focus instead on the qualities of the music itself, which is where it was really helpful to be working with the musicologist! one of the things that i quickly discovered starting to think about music is that there’s a very specialized vocabulary for the conversation about music, which at that point i lacked, so i had to educate myself about how you actually talk about the distinctive qualities of timbre for example, or duration, and so on. our approach in the book was to bring in the work of mikhail bakhtin and his notion of the chronotope—time spaces that literature constructs that give the characteristic flavor to different types of novels—and we were trying to use that as a way to think about different time spaces, if you will, for the types of music that get played at goth clubs. the kinds of narratives of the heroic past or the future that are developed through a combination of the qualities of the sound and through lyrical content. it was a departure for me in terms of the research i had done before, but it remained close to my heart because this was music i was so familiar with and it was quite enjoyable to go in that direction. it’s just as we were saying: when you get to analyze in detail and examine something that you really love or something that you really enjoy, it should be an enjoyable process. it doesn’t spoil it. in my case, i got to know the music and the culture that is related to it even better. open q&a session laura álvarez trigo: my question traces back to your very first answer, when you mentioned that your interest in the gothic began with watching disney movies. how do you think the gothic is present in children’s fiction? and i’m thinking specifically about cartoons and television shows, how is it—if it is—different from the way the gothic manifests in fiction that’s directed to adults? do you think there’s been an evolution in the way that the gothic is present in children’s products, from several decades ago to how it is now in mainstream cartoons? i am thinking specifically about shows such as gravity falls and over the garden wall, which are two shows that i really like and both of them are wonderful. jaw: actually, my first thought while you were asking the question had to do with fairy tales and the fact that if you were to read grimm’s fairy tales—or fairy tales from the 18th and the 19th century—they’re far more violent and much darker than the more sanitized version of fairy tales that children receive today. this seems to me to suggest a significant change in the way that we think about childhood, and the necessity of protecting children from darker messages or imagery. on the one hand, i think it’s interesting to consider those shifts and forms jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 12 of representation from the 19th century to the 21st, in the way that fairy tales have been altered so that they’re far less disturbing than something like struwwelpeter for example. on the other hand, with your reference points—gravity falls and over the garden wall— we need to think carefully about audience, because one of the evolutions in the production of animation is the attempt to broaden the audience to include both adult and children. so, i think both of them—and particularly over the garden wall—are attempting to walk a kind of fine line where the story is not too scary for children but at the same time is appealing for adults. the films of pixar are even a better example of that, where you can find nods and winks towards the adults who are viewing at the same time that the narrative can be consumed by children—who don’t get all the allusions or the reference points. beyond this, the big shift that i see in cartoons—i have two boys who are ages six and ten, so we do a lot of cartoon watching—and what has been so amazing to me is the emphasis on diversity and inclusion in children’s media that from my perspective seems astounding and wonderful, while from my kids’ perspective is just normal. it’s part of a kind of general inversion of gothic narratives where the traditional monster isn’t the monster: those who pursue the monster are the monster. those who demonize difference are the true monsters. so, i would say that there’s an inversion of conventional ideas of monstrosity, where looking different or being different is not a marker of monstrosity; it’s those who insult or demean those who look or act differently. do you know kipo and the age of wonderbeasts? it’s about getting rid of “mutants” so that the world goes back to the way that it once was. in terms of the gothic, the storyline has been turned on its head, where it’s no longer about the eruption of strangeness or monstrosity that needs to be tamped down. instead, it’s about appreciating difference, and those who attempt to constrain people to specific courses are, in fact, the true monsters of children’s narrative. sofía martinicorena: in 2016 you co-edited a volume, return to twin peaks, where you sort of assess twin peaks (1990-1991) as gothic due to its weird, uncanny, defamiliarized presentation of matter and objects. thinking of the film twin peaks: fire walk with me (1992), do you think that it somehow intensifies this gothic system that we find in the tv show? or does it feed on the country’s fears drawing on other genres, like slasher or thriller? jaw: twin peaks is something that’s near and dear to my heart, so i appreciate the question very much! that said, i’m trying to remember the specific details of the film, which i haven’t seen in a long time. what i mainly have is in my brain—and i think this is from the film—is just the incredibly horrific vision in the train car, right? my tendency is to consider the film in the way you put it: as a kind of intensification of the series. i don’t see it veering into the slasher category particularly. in keeping with david lynch’s work in general, there’s a kind of absurdist element that he interweaves throughout that sometimes is there to evoke humor, but often is just to raise questions or to ask us to think more deeply. my answer therefore is that i see it as just being twin peaks but more so. jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 13 did you see twin peaks: the return (2017)? it’s an 18-hour movie experience of twin peaks in which he really refuses to gratify the viewer, who is the fan of twin peaks, for almost the entire thing. all of us are waiting for kyle maclachlan’s agent cooper to return in the return. we don’t get that until near the very end and then everything is called into question. he pulls the rug out from beneath your feet when cooper says, “what year is this?” and then we get the scream again that was sheryl lee’s scream from the original twin peaks and then it ends. but back to the movie: it feels more bleak, more violent, more horrible in every possible way—and many people rejected it when it came out. i think it was even booed at cannes and so, yeah, to me it feels as you say: more of twin peaks, an intensification of twin peaks. i would note in relation to our earlier discussion that twin peaks offers an example the role of the frontier in the american gothic. the woods are haunted. and, in place of puritanism is a kind of displaced religiosity, with the white lodge and the black lodge, and the spirit world that seems to coexist with the material world and occasionally interact with it in various ways—which to me is a hallmark of the gothic. what the gothic insists is that the world of our senses—that we can see, feel, and touch—is only a small part of some larger experience of reality, that includes these other kinds of powers and forces in the universe. trang dang: my question touches on your mention of how kind of the gothic portrays something that is beyond us, and portrays the unconscious, the madness, and the horrors, the monsters that we don’t know about. that reminds me of the genre of the new weird as well, or just the weird in general. do you think that the gothic—and by extension the new weird or the weird in general—is a better way of portraying accurately the ecological reality in which we live today? more accurately than the realist fiction, for example. jaw: i think your supposition is a good one. i’m inclined to think that part of the mainstreaming of gothic today, as well as the new weird, is a response to the challenges of our contemporary moment. the weird famously is associated with lovecraft, who is problematic in a lot of ways, but who developed the notion of cosmic dread or what he calls “indifferentism,” cosmic indifferentism, in which he depicts a vision of the universe in which human beings are not the center. and we’re not even close to the center; we’re somewhere on the periphery in this vision of the universe. we’re not special; there are powers and forces that exist in the universe that outstrip our capacity to contend with and even to understand them, and we’re always in a precarious position of being effaced. in some of lovecraft’s fiction, he even presents the idea that all civilizations naturally rise and fall; human beings will be displaced by something after us. we find ourselves in a situation in the 21st century confronting things like climate change—things timothy morton calls hyperobjects—that are so extended in scale and scope that it becomes very difficult for us to comprehend them, much less to grapple with them. so that notion of the weird, of human beings as being very tiny when compared with the sort of the spans of deep time, interstellar distance, and so on, seems to be finding its jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 14 expression. our situation—climate change and pandemics and nuclear weapons and so on— finds its corollary in weird fiction, which has a gothic edge to it, i would say. the difference between the new weird and the conventional gothic is in the religious roots of the american gothic: a stern and angry god who can cause things to happen for reasons that human beings can’t figure out necessarily, but nevertheless is singling us out. in the new weird, we don’t matter enough to even be singled out. there’s a kind of self-aggrandizement that comes with thinking that you matter enough for god to actually kill your cow, or something like that. but where the new weird is concerned, it’s just human beings existing in a mechanical universe of cold, impersonal forces, without anybody really caring about us too much or who would even mourn us if we weren’t here. i think part of what we’re confronting is a decentering of humanist pretentions that we really matter. we like to think that we do, and we spend all this time creating great works of architecture and art, and discussing them, but i think weird fiction at its heart asks “how much does any of that really matter?” mónica fernández jiménez: my question is about the fact that the gothic is not always transgressive, but at times it is reaffirming the status quo. as a scholar of the gothic, do you make any difference between aesthetics and politics when categorizing certain works as gothic? how do you feel about the classic debate around aesthetics versus politics, concerning the gothic? jaw: that is a wonderful question actually. my colleague xavier aldana reyes’s book on gothic cinema makes the case that it’s all about aesthetics—that in fact the fundamental criterion that you use to designate something as gothic is the way it looks—and i think that it’s not a bad argument to make, that “we know gothic when we see it.” one of the interesting things that i’ve been thinking about myself is what i’ve been calling “prestige gothic,” gothic programs with very high production values that seek to engage our attention with ravishingly beautiful images of horrific things. shows like penny dreadful (2014–2016) come to mind, or hannibal (2013–2015), that are just gorgeous to look at. and then you step back and realize what you’re looking at. there’s often a kind of gorgeous grotesquery to the contemporary gothic. where narrative is concerned, i take the broadest possible approach to thinking about the gothic. i define it as tales of transgression tending towards tragedy, which encompasses a lot. it’s hard to pigeonhole the politics of the gothic in any specific way because it depends upon narrative situation. in many cases, the gothic ultimately is conservative in reaffirming the status quo at the end, by expunging whatever the threat is that intervenes in the middle, but not always, so it may well be that the defining criterion of the contemporary gothic is how it looks, more so than any specific political orientation. jeffrey andrew weinstock | the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1811 15 works cited aldana reyes, xavier. gothic cinema. routledge, 2020. botting, fred. gothic. psychology press, 1996. hawthorne, nathaniel. “young goodman brown.” the new-england magazine, 1835. jackson, shirley. the haunting of hill house. penguin, 1984 (1959). lewis, matthew. the monk. oxford university press, 2016 (1796). morrison, tony. beloved. alfred a. knopf, 1987. perkins gilman, charlotte. “the yellow wall-paper. a story.” the new-england magazine, 1892. poe, edgar allan. the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket. oxford university press, 2008 (1838). van elferen, isabella, and jeffrey andrew weinstock. goth music: from sound to subculture. routledge, 2016. weinstock, jeffrey andrew. spectral america: phantoms and the national imagination. university of wisconsin press, 2004. —. scare tactics: supernatural fiction by american women. fordham university press, 2008. —. the vampire film: undead. wallflower press, 2012. —, editor. return to twin peaks: new approaches to materiality, theory, and genre on television. palgrave macmillan, 2016. —, editor. cambridge companion to the american gothic. cambridge university press, 2018. —. the monster theory reader. university of minnesota press, 2020. —. pop culture for beginners. broadview, 2021. williams, linda. screening sex. duke university press, 2008 films and tv series get out. directed by jordan peele, universal pictures, 2017. gravity falls. created by alex hirsch, 40 episodes, disney channel, 2012–2016. hannibal. developed by bryan fuller, nbc, 2013–2015. kipo and the age of wonderbeasts. created by radford sechrist and developed by bill wolkoff, dreamworks animation television, 2020. over the garden wall. created by patrick mchale, cartoon network, 2014. penny dreadful. created by john logan, showtime and sky, 2014–2016. twin peaks. created by mark frost and david lynch, abc, 1990–1991. twin peaks: fire walk with me. created by mark frost and david lynch, cybi pictures, 1992. twin peaks: the return. created by mark frost and david lynch, showtime, 2017. black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice in the hate u give, dear white people, and on the other side of freedom francesco bacci gsnas freie universität reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice in the hate u give, dear white people, and on the other side of freedom francesco bacci gsnas freie universität t 8 ab st ra ct francesco bacci is a second year phd candidate in american studies at the graduate school of north american studies at the freie universität, berlin. his research interests are grounded in black studies, african american literature, and cinema. bacci, francesco. “black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice in the hate u give, dear white people, and on the other side of freedom”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 7-22. recibido: 11 de diciembre de 2019; 2ª versión: 16 de abril de 2020. his paper aims to explore the connection between activism and the use of social media in contemporary stories, belonging to different genres. the study scrutinizes two literary works, angie thomas’ novel the hate u give (2017), deray mckesson’s memoir on the other side of freedom (2018), and a tv series directed and written by justin simien–dear white people (2017). with a methodological approach constituted by works of sociology, history, and cultural studies, this text-focused analysis exposes the intersection of activism, literature, and television. different genres address the same issues with a common ground: with the support and filter of social media, these stories reveal incidents of police brutality, and episodes traceable to the rise of #blacklivesmatter. moreover, the protagonists of these narratives find in activism a way to accomplish personal realization. all in all, the results of this investigation illustrate how social media are not the primary focus in the narration of moments of crisis or change, but slowly acquire a 9 introduction the rise of the #blacklivesmatter movement has influenced and changed many narratives and the way in which media portray activism and forms of protests. this paper aims to scrutinize the connection between activism, literature, and television with the purpose of exposing the ways in which different genres and media, such as literature and television, novels, and memoirs, address and represent social issues connected with racial discrimination, and the dynamics behind protest movements. in doing that, this study is focused on the analysis of three primary sources: the novel the hate u give, the memoir on the other side of freedom, and the tv series dear white people; and also examines how social media are an essential part of the characters’ development, and their personal realization. in the hate u give, angie thomas narrates the struggles of a young african american student. in this story, the role of media is essential in leading the protagonist to her future as an activist. in investigating the novel’s main themes, this essay points out how contemporary television and social networks discuss activism, cases of police brutality, and racism. in dear white people, the protagonist samantha white uses a radio podcast as an instrument of social discussion to share her critical perspective of discrimination inside winchester university. the scrutiny explores how the characters are affected by an incident in which the campus police are involved, and highlights how this netflix tv series is commenting on contemporary american race relations. with on the other side of freedom, the civil rights activist and twitter celebrity, deray mckesson, creates a memoir in which he explores the complicated reality of black people in contemporary america. in his personal storytelling, he illustrates the relevant role of new social media. the methodological approach through which the analysis is structured consists of a close reading of the primary sources with the support of critical, historical, and political studies such as the making of black lives matter, why are all black students sitting together in the cafeteria, and articles by literary critics and scholars such as bernard beck, vincenzo bavaro, and jay shelat. in doing that, this study is focused on the analysis of three primary sources: the novel the hate u give, the memoir on the other side of freedom, and the tv series dear white people. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 central role in the characters’ interactions and in the dynamics connected with forms of protests. mckesson’s memoir differs in its personal and specific representation of the use of social networks as an essential instrument for activism in the twenty-first century. key words: activism; black lives matter; police brutality; social media. black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci in dear white people, the protagonist samantha white uses a radio podcast as an instrument of social discussion to share her critical perspective of discrimination inside winchester university. […] with on the other side of freedom, the civil rights activist and twitter celebrity, deray mckesson, creates a memoir in which he explores the complicated reality of black people in contemporary america. 10 indeed, in examining how these stories represent racist incidents and forms of protest, this study aims to compare how the tv show dear white people, thomas’ the hate u give, and the memoir on the other side of freedom present protagonists are all activists, and victims of social injustices and they respond to stressful circumstances with the use of different media: a radio program, tv, and social networks. they are set in the same period, the early and late 2000s. besides the aforementioned relevant role of online forms of communication in all these narratives, the choice of thomas’s novel, mckesson’s memoir, and simien’s tv series highlights how embracing the civil struggle can lead to a personal realization. 1. a study of police brutality and social response to have a better understanding of the fictional representation of these themes, we have to be grounded in the reality of police brutality of the latest decades. the starting point of the investigation centers on the numbers concerning police violence that have been reported. in his book when police kill, professor franklin e. zimring presents a statistical study, the rti analysis of the number of police killings between 2003 and 2011. a closer look at the data indicates that it is possible to create an overview by adding a fundamental element: a lot of legal intervention killings in the two decades before 2000 were not considered in the official vital statistics reports (26). reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 11 studies by colin loftin and his associates demonstrated that the totals for legal intervention killings were consistently lower in the years of 1976-1998 than the volume of killings reported by the fbi(...) they estimate that a total of 7,427 killings actually occurred during the period (2003 2011), an average of 929 each year when the aggregate is divided by eight years covered. (27) the data gathered by the case study developed by zimring and loftin also reveal how, in the time frame of thirty years, the situation has not changed for the better. indeed, the volume of people killed by legal interventions is exorbitant, and especially in the case of black people, zimring clarifies that in 1,100 killings, the death rates for african americans and native americans were incredibly more massive than the white population. in on the other side of freedom, mckesson discusses aspects of these sets of findings, and he praises and illustrates the work of the collective database of killings by police, mappingpolice. com. he explains that “mapping police violence sought to build on the work of fatal encounters and killed by police, the two major databases on police violence that attempted to do what the government could, but seemed not to want to, do. they pioneered a methodology for finding cases online without having to go through the police department themselves” (51). indeed, the mapping police violence website includes details and a clear overview of the contemporary situation: on 1,111 known police killings in 2013, 1,059 killings in 2014, 1,103 killings in 2015, 1,071 killings in 2016, 1,095 killings in 2017, 1,143 killings in 2018 and 1,099 killings in 2019, ninety-five percent of the killings in their database occurred while a police officer was acting in a law enforcement capacity, black people were 25% of those killed, despite being only 13% of the population, and that there were only twenty-three days in 2018 where police did not kill someone. in line with their analysis, black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. the movement #blacklivesmatter has gained traction in social media and the cultural discourse, especially after the ferguson unrest and all the other protests that have been arising in the last decade. with the change of media and the rise of social networks, #blm is a movement that started in 2013 as a hashtag, #blacklivesmatter, on twitter. patrisse cullers originated this online conversation in response to outrage amongst the black community caused by trayvon martin’s death. garza created a facebook post, and then along with opal tometi, the three decided to set up social media accounts for the movement, also making their presence tangible in the offline community, by organizing a march. their presence on the streets, along with a large number of people rioting, led to the use of this slogan by politicians. trayvon was a seventeen-year-old african american teenager, and george zimmerman shot him in sanford in florida, causing his tragic death. zimmerman was the neighborhood watch coordinator, and he claimed that he acted in self-defense. he had not been arrested or charged. the movement’s manifesto illustrates that their purpose is to fight for all the victims of social crimes, police misconduct, or direct episodes of racism that were ignored by society and by the appropriate authorities. furthermore, on the movement’s website, founders declare that this “is an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. it is an affirmation of black folks’ humanity, our contributions to society, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.”1 in his the making of black lives matter, christopher j. lebron points out that the essential common factor in all these african americans’ police-related killings, is that in almost every case, the tragedy seemed unnecessary, in each case, it is clear that another resolution was possible (96). in examining its impact, it is relevant to emphasize how black lives matter wants to do more than correct for a deep history of oppression, and their primary aim is to create a community based on the values of resilience and resistance. black lives matter has caught the attention of generations of activists and has set in motion a popular mobilization in reaching a wide group of people. as amanda d. clark argues in “black lives matter: (re)framing the next wave of black liberation,” the movement’s use of social media amplified its message: “blm has been a significant factor in drawing attention to black identity in the united states and mobilizing action against police brutality through social media platforms” (142). in his memoir, mckesson emphasizes the relevance of social media in the change that protesters attend: “in uncertain terms, twitter saved our lives” (155). the salvific role of a platform derives from an increasing sense of frustration and hopelessness caused by these recurring injustices. inevitably, there are also significant problems due to controversies and contentions among users. in her analysis, barbara ransby draws attention to the controversies 12 1 https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/what-we-believe/ black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci emerging on social networks: “while twitter and facebook have been tools for movement building, they have also been sites for some nasty exchanges, for accusations, for name-calling, and for shaming” (102). in this complicated social situation, how thomas’s and simien’s stories, along with mckesson’s memoir, depict activism and the presence of social media in this discourse? these three narratives represent the consequences of police brutality and institutionalized racism on the lives of their black protagonists, and at the same time, with the filter of social media, how activism is crucial in their response. 2. the hate u give: a bildungsroman of a young activist firstly, this paper examines angie thomas’ novel, the hate u give. the story focuses on a teenager, starr carter, and her path towards activism after she experiences the traumatic loss of her best friend, khalil, who is an innocent victim of a police shooting that happens in front of the protagonist’s eyes. the novel is a bildungsroman set in the 2010s, but it differs from the canonical tropes of the coming-of-age journey, in order to expose the protagonist’s experience with institutionalized racism in today’s america. the hate u give also represents how starr, who has lost any trace of naïveté in her early childhood, gets to her personal realization through activism. starr’s losses are many: khalil and her best friend natasha were shot, and she is a witness to these tragic events. as a consequence of all the violence, the acronym thug acquires an exceptional value for both khalil and starr, as it hints at all the suffering that african american teenagers, like them, are enduring. it also refers to a broken system, which starr gradually gets to know: reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 13 the hate u give little infants fucks everybody [...] khalil said it’s about what society feeds us as youth and how it comes back and bites them later. when the khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry or they have a hard time getting a real job and probably start selling drugs again. that’s the hate they’re giving us, baby, a system designed against us. that’s thug life. (2017:167-169) at its core, this narrative has the process of circulation of hatred and the consequences of this phenomenon on starr’s identity. thomas portrays a character who lives in a dual dimension. indeed, starr feels that she has gained self-confidence within a white community by creating an alter-ego, and at the same time, she feels a sense of racial anxiety in dividing her life between two groups of people, her black family, and her white classmates. angie thomas uses the teenager’s point of view to discuss and criticize social dynamics that constitute phenomenons of discrimination. as the scholar jay shelat highlights, “thomas confronts the racist institutions that determine color lines and implements specifically black cultural symbols and capital to serve as foils to the racist ideologies and hierarchies at the heart of starr’s community”(70). her coming-of-age journey as a young african-american is filtered through traditional and new media, which affect her self-discovery throughout the story. 14 black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci indeed, among the other social networks, twitter helps starr to have a more consistent awareness of her friends’ hypocrisy and the several racist incidents happening in her country. instead, the news affects her privacy and exposes starr’s past. in the first part of the novel, the media are an obstacle in her attempt to live a normal life. they contribute to the aforementioned circulation of hatred, from which starr must find a way to escape. thomas represents the protagonist’s response to the difficulties created by internal and societal turmoils, and consequently, creates an outlook of the teenagers’ problems in overcoming violent systems. discussing how young adult fiction, like the hate u give, explores racism and discrimination with an unconventional lens, the scholar zara rix explains that “the female narrators push the stories toward nuanced depictions of multiple types of violence, both systemic and personal” (53). the prominent role of social networks in the hate u give emerges in connection with the psychological forms of violence, she is enduring and indicates to the protagonist a possible escape: activism. in the first part of the novel, the fictional representation of the use of social media as an instrument of aggregation and solidarity clearly reflects the #blacklivesmatter, and from a narrative point of view, it exposes starr’s doubts about her classmates who are showing solidarity. in her high school, students are aware of these episodes of racism, but they stage a demonstration that is utterly inauthentic in the protagonist’s point of view. as shelat highlights, starr is associated with a social cause: “to her white classmates he’s an easy hashtag and a pretext to get out of class on a drummed-up protest; her white best friend’s clueless at best response to the situation makes starr realize that she’s been deliberately letting some offensive behavior slide” (72). the protagonist does not give credit to this form of support because she recognizes how privileged classmates do not understand the gravity of these issues. the discussion of racism on social media becomes a way to create or maintain a specific appearance or ideology, not the real manifestation of a possible change. social networks are supporting starr’s enlightenment about her status within the two communities she belongs to. in the second part of the novel, twitter and facebook change the protagonist’s attitude towards the difficulties she struggles with: social networks become instruments of support in her journey towards activism. the question of authenticity can also be considered as an autobiographical element projected within the novel. as an african american teenager, starr feels a sense of alienation and isolation from her friends and classmates. as a consequence of this condition, she is ready to embrace stereotypes in order not to feel this burdensome label. in connection with toni morrison’s remarks2 about the decision to write for black readers, angie thomas explains how she was writing white characters instead of creating authentic african americans teenagers: “when i first started writing in that program, i was writing white characters. i was whitewashing my own stories. it wasn’t until i started writing “the hate u give” short story that i realized, wow, i could use my art as my activism.”3 thomas wants her fiction to work as a source of creative activism. 2 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/25/toni-morrison-books-interview-god-help-the-child 3 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/movies/microaggressions-hate-u-give.html the discussion of racism on social media becomes a way to create or maintain a specific appearance or ideology, not the real manifestation of a possible change. social networks are supporting starr’s enlightenment about her status within the two communities she belongs to. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 15 4 ibidem. black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci 16 in her book why are all black students sitting together in the cafeteria?, the psychologist beverly daniel tatum illustrates what the psychological mechanisms that guide black students in high schools are: in a situation of stress, young african americans look for support in other black students but in doing that, they also “are operating with very limited definitions of what means to be black, based largely on cultural stereotypes.” (62) these stereotypes are also contributing to the creation of discrimination and the racial divide between students. the start of starr’s empowerment and self-realization is the loss of her best friend, which ultimately pushes her to become an active member of the online protest movement. the hate u give’s core is constituted by its representation of contemporary forms of protests, but its origins as well derive from angie thomas’ will to contribute to the general discussion around police brutality. indeed, in various interviews, angie thomas has stated that her primary inspiration was the shooting death of oscar grant iii, who was killed by a white transit police officer in 2009. oscar was a twenty-two-year-old african american young man who died in the early morning of new year’s day 2009. he was unarmed and was forced to lie face down on the platform. johannes mehserle was the police officer who shot him in the back. everything was captured on cell phone cameras, and the images went viral. regarding this tragedy, angie thomas states to robert ito from the new york times: “many of thomas’ classmates either weren’t aware of the shooting, or didn’t care about it, or wrote it off. they were like, ‘well, maybe he deserved it. he was an ex-con, why are people so upset’ i was so angry.”4 in her decision to write this story, thomas wanted to attempt to advocate the rights of young african americans, often not protected by the system of justice. the hate u give exposes the writer’s ideology but also represents how social media can serve as a platform in which young african american students can approach activism and embrace it. with this young narrator, the novel exposes a nuanced view of coming to terms with racism, and with the fight against it. 3. dear white people’s point of view on campus police in its representation of the conjunction between contemporary activism and african american identity, justin simien’s tv series, dear white people, also addresses amongst the many, the same poignant issues: systemic racism and police brutality. the tv series explores these socially relevant issues with the specific use of radio programs as the main instrument to convey social messages. the story is set at winchester university, and one of the main protagonists is samantha white. with her witty radio show, she tries to raise awareness amongst students about the social issues still at play at their university. the program is often used as an instrument of social critique, but it is not the only medium that acquires an important value. all the students are discussing and arguing on twitter, and their use of this social network exposes the hypocrisy and secrecy that characterize the right-wing sympathizers. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 17 moreover, as in the case of the hate u give, social media are employed to facilitate moments of aggregation and discussion concerning forms of protest. all the battles, wins, losses are part of an online conversation that affects characters’ development. in “chapter v,” there is a critical police incident: the campus officers arrive at a campus party and identify reggie as a source of violence. they ask for his id, but he replies, “guck these pigs, man.” a few seconds later, a cop pulls out his gun and points it at him. reggie is harmless, and a false move could possibly end his life. this crucial moment changes all the characters. as in the hate u give, dear white people focuses on the relevance and the importance of creating a social debate about relevant injustices in educational spaces. the creator justin simien was talking about “chapter v” months before its release. it was considered a pivotal episode. in an interview with mashable, he declares, “it’s a turning-point episode. the show is i think very lighthearted, and then we get to episode 5.”5 barry jenkins directs the episode, and the mise-en-scène highlights the gravity of the moment: the camera cuts to reggie’s fear and then switches on the shock and tears of his friends. they are all aware that he could have died at that party, and as a black man in adverse circumstances, he is utterly helpless. this specific set of events is an explicit reminder to the viewer of many recent episodes in which african american citizens were killed. in his article “taking back one’s narrative,” vincenzo bavaro illustrates that reggie’s sense of helplessness is a reflection of every day’s episodes of discrimination within american campuses: “the tangible perception that to some officers a black life “does not matter,” the belief that had reggie been a white student he would never have elicited the drawing of a gun by the officer, is clearly reminiscent of the various smartphone-videos recording police brutality.” (32-33) it is essential to analyze what the consequences of this event are: reggie starts to question his activism, and also, his identity. as simien states: “every black person, every person of color is at an intersection, cause no one’s just their race.”6 the aftermath of this situation exposes the connection of the two main aspects that this scrutiny investigates: reggie and sam are affected by rage and terror, and they start questioning the value of activism and the echo of their presence on social networks. simien describes reggie living “at certain intersections that make his life difficult and make it harder for him to know who he is, and harder for him to know what identity to put forward.”7 his personal realization is dismantled: he is in a difficult state of disillusionment. sam lives in the same limbo, but she decides to give voice to her feelings and ideals through the radio show, which is a liberating instrument of social critique. using baldwin’s quote that opens episode five, “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed if it is not faced,” sam has a fervent need to change the social dimension in which she lives.8 the importance of her radio shows, or of her tweets and posts, which are central in season two, highlights how characters try to build a change by sharing their message and creating any form of response. 5 https://mashable.com/2017/05/01/dear-white-people-episode-5/?europe=true 6 ibidem. 7 ibidem. 8 http://theculture.forharriet.com/2014/03/revolutionary-hope-conversation-between.html barry jenkins directs the episode, and the mise-en-scène highlights the gravity of the moment: the camera cuts to reggie’s fear and then switches on the shock and tears of his friends. they are all aware that he could have died at that party, and as a black man in adverse circumstances, he is utterly helpless. this specific set of events is an explicit reminder to the viewer of many recent episodes in which african american citizens were killed. 18 black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 19 our analysis of this tv series can also decipher what the long-term consequences of the characters’ abuse of social media are. especially during the first season finale, in which a backlash explodes, sam is absorbed by the situation, and the viewer realizes how her role as a leading activist and her online presence are dismantling her life. in describing the dialogue between samantha and joelle just after the march on campus, which is organized to fight against the abuse of power by campus police, bavaro argues that the wave of hate speech and threats to samantha is changing her personally: “joelle realizes that sam has lost herself in the reaction to this backlash and has in turn fallen into a state of silence, overwhelmed by the racist non-sense and by a bundle of accusations entangled in various types of logical flaws and prejudices.” (34) samantha is at a crossroads, and she is staying in an in-between state because social networks opened up a harsher and more difficult reality that clashes with her expectations and her previous view. in losing herself, samantha lives in an academic environment characterized by divisions, and she ends up realizing how this polarization affected her identity as an activist. discussing simien’s film by the same name, bernard beck explains the complex mechanisms that set in motion this system: “the cultures created by social divisions reinforce the rules that preserve those divisions. […] subcultures used by the divided groups also have a great deal of content about the other divisions and their members. they also have a great deal of content about the entire system of divisions and what justifies it.” (141) at the end of season one, samantha is finally aware of the complexity of american race relations present in her college. all in all, reggie’s major incident exemplifies the representation of oppression caused by hidden forms of institutional and structural racism at winchester university. the characters are forced to react, but also decide how to develop their own future as activists, consciously being in the constant social media’s spotlight of the whole community of students. to expose a clear view of the ambiguities and the difficulties that the protagonists have to endure, dear white people do not represent activism without problematizing some aspects of it. as mentioned by bavaro, “with all its nuances, ambiguities, and unanswered questions, this is certainly not a simple piece of activist propaganda: the big issues coexist and collide with the intimate ones, the personal and the political are intertwined.” (34) online and offline, dear white people’s protagonists-protesters struggle with inequality and discrimination in college, and their problems are a direct consequence of hidden forces that preserve institutional racism. in losing herself, samantha lives in an academic environment characterized by divisions, and she ends up realizing how this polarization affected her identity as an activist. 20 black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci 4. on the other side of freedom: a memoir based on social media activism mckesson’s on the other side of freedom is a memoir that explores the amplification of activism through social media. after being an active member of the #blacklivesmatter movement, mckesson’s activity on twitter was essential for getting social recognition. mckesson illustrates how twitter played a significant role in interrupting the media silence about ferguson and missouri: “if it were not for twitter, the elected leaders in ferguson and missouri would have tried to convince you that we did not exist, that there were not thousands of us in the street night after night, refusing to be silent.” (2018a: 155) he was working in a school administration when in 2014, he decided to join a protest against police brutality in ferguson and won national prominence. he used social media to share his four hundred days of being “pepper sprayed, smoked bombed and shot at with rubber bullets.” (40) this last part of this analysis wants to conclude with this “technology-powered protest”: mckesson is the last step in our exploration of protest movements and social media.9 in mckesson’s case, social media are essential in his personal realization as a protester: with his exposure, he accomplished many important social objectives. in discussing how he got to become a national leader of civil rights, mckesson illustrates how rapidly things changed because of the use of twitter: “i had to figure out how to tell the story of what was happening to us because it was happening so quickly. it was the strength of twitter that helped me find the words in a way that made sense, and the book was a recognition that i just needed more space to tell these stories.” (45) mckesson uses his memories and his personal battles as mirrors of society. with his insights into social justice, he explores how movements are deeply affected by social networks, because these platforms amplify engagement and mobilize marginalized or unaware people. in his view, twitter undeniably changed the conversation about racial justice in the country: “in our generation, it was the first time that we saw this type of activism on the streets that was widespread and caught on. there were certainly other demonstrations across the country that happened way before the death of mike brown, but this one was the phenomenon.”10 this memoir is also a reflection on identity, considering how protest formed mckesson’s determination in his pursuit of hope, freedom, and justice. as henry louis gates, jr. has stated about mckesson’s non-fiction work, this book reveals “the mind and motivations of a young man who has risen to the fore of millennial activism.” (1) his motivation and belief are the guiding lines of this narrative, along with the presence of online media. the increasing support of technology has created a change in the protesters’ motivation. as mckesson argues, “technology lined up at the time. the police were so wild in a way that was so concentrated. the community was ready to engage. the media was present. […] it changed the country. it opened up a wave of activism across a host of areas and focused citizens in a way that 9 https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/deray-mckesson/on-the-other-side-of-freedom/ 10 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/dec/30/deray-mckesson-black-lives-matter-interview reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 21 is truly special.” the contemporary technological changes have given rise to new forms of activism, but also a new consciousness and realization among american people. with his memoir, mckesson has been able to give his readers an insight into what means to be an activist and what the consequences of his dedication are. indeed, in discussing race and violence in america, mckesson also analyzes the moment in which blm emerged: “we took the streets as a matter of life and death. [...] in each generation, there is a moment when young and old, inspired and disillusioned, come together around a shared hope, imagine the world as it can be, and have the opportunity to bring that world into existence. our moment is now.”(123) without fictional elements, on the other side of freedom fully explores the history and implications of contemporary activism and its connection with social media, which are central. to have precise data concerning the prominence of the online participation, with “social media participation in an activist movement,” a group of scholars examined the connection between the black lives matter movement ant twitter, getting to the conclusion that: by analyzing how the media can influence, activate, or create strong fervency in relation to activism and protests, this paper exposes the inextricable link between twitter, forms of protests, and activists. the hate u give, dear white people, and the other side of freedom all convey how powerful the connection between social media and the #blacklivesmatter can be, and consequently, how this union becomes part of a discussion about black identity and contemporary forms of racism in the united states. in the specific, it is essential to highlight how, in the fictional cases, the protagonists seem to find solace not on social media, but on personal realization and expression. the conjunction between activism, social media in these three cases of study propounds the view that the incredible amount of social pressure, deriving from both discrimination and need of being recognized as a member of a community, leads to alienation. starr, sam, and reggie are not consoled by external agents; instead, they overcome the trauma by rediscovering their activism and also by becoming aware of the hidden forces that guide systemic racism. these key components help to have a more accurate view of the presence and role played by activism in african american students’ contemporary fiction. this study advances the claim that social media, when employed in order to aggregate a large group of people for a cause, have the power to create solidarity and mobilize a large group of people. still, they also can affect one’s own personality and amplify hate speech and personal attacks. their presence in these three narratives set in motion a series of changes, moments of turmoil, and reflection, but at the core remains a nuanced vision of institutional racism and the consequences that this phenomenon has on young african americans. over 28m twitter posts show continued participation in the conversation around this movement. [...]another important finding of our work is that activism on social media predicted future protests and demonstrations that commenced on the streets throughout the country. [...] we observed blm participation on social media to indicate an emergent collective identity. (100-101) 22 black lives matter: police brutality, media and injustice... francesco bacci baldwin, james. “a report from occupied territory”. the nation. 11 jul. 1966. bavaro, vicenzo. “dear white people, cultural appropriation, and the challenge of anti-essentialism”. rsa/journal, vol. 29. 2018. beck, bernard. “black like who?: the class of 2014 considers race in dear white people”. multicultural perspectives, vol. 17, no. 3, 2015, pp. 141-144. bhatia, monish, et al. media, crime and racism. palgrave macmillan, 2018. clark, amanda, et al. “black lives matter: (re)framing the next wave of black liberation”. research in social movements, conflicts and change, edited by lisa leitz. emerald publishing 2018, pp. 145-172. de choudhury munmun, et al. “social media participation, and local politics: a case study of the enschede council in the netherlands”. proceedings of the international aaai conference on weblogs and social media, 2016, pp. 92-101. ito, robert. “microaggressions at school? the ‘hate u give’ team has been there”. the new york times. 17 oct. 2018. khosla, proma. “‘dear white people’ confronts police brutality in the episode everyone needs to see”. mashable. 1 may 2017. lebron, christopher j. the making of black lives matter. oxford university press, 2017. mapping police violence. 10 dec. 2019. mckesson, deray. on the other side of freedom: race and justice in a divided america. vikings, 2018a. ---.“the credo of black lives activist”. kirkus review. 30 jul. 2018b. morrison, toni. playing in the dark. harvard university press, 1992. ransby, barbara. making all black lives matter: reimagining freedom in the twenty-first century. university of california press, 2018. rix, zara. “how ya books reflect the black lives matter movement”. booklist, vol. 113, no. 21. july 2017. shelar, jay. “‘i swear those things are so fresh’: sneakers, race, and mobility in the hate u give”. cea critic, vol. 81, no. 1, 2019, pp. 70-74. sentas, vicki. “beyond media discourse: locating race and racism in criminal justice systems”. media, crime, and racism, edited by monish bhatia et al. palgrave mcmillan, 2018, pp. 359-379. simien, justin. dear white people. netflix, 2017. tv series. smith, david. “deray mckesson on black lives matter: ‘it changed the country’”. the guardian. 29 dec. 2019. tatum, beverly daniel. why are all black students sitting together in the cafeteria?. basicbooks, 1997. thomas, angie. the hate u give. walker books, 2017. zimring, franklin e. when police kill. harvard university press, 2017. “what we believe”. 2013. references come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain and the united states patricia fernández lorenzo universidad complutense de madrid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain and the united states patricia fernández lorenzo universidad complutense de madrid rcher m. huntington (1870-1955), the museum-builder and founder of the hispanic society of america in new york, had a lesser known complementary dimension as a cultural bridges-builder between spain and the united states in moments of conflict and diplomatic tension. with an approach based on his social relations rather than on his artistic collections, this article offers an alternative reading in which huntington emerges as a friendly figure in bilateral relations who did not passively accept the status quo and who, from the standpoint of culture, contributed to modifying the image of spain that prevailed in the united states. key words: hispanism, hispanic society of america, archer huntington, spanish culture, cultural diplomacy, bilateral relations a 8 ab st ra ct *fernández lorenzo, p. “come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain and the united states”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 8-26. web. recibido: 15 de septiembre de 2019 introduction: to face the climate as it is hard to see the forest for the trees, it seems particularly hard to envisage more than an exquisite art collector in archer milton huntington (1870-1955), the founder of the hispanic society of america. the collections he amassed in the museum he founded in new york in 1904 are unparalleled in their scope and quality: holding more than 30.000 objects including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, ironworks, textiles, jewellery; 175.000 photographs of spain and latin america and a library with more than 250.000 books and newspapers, including 15.000 volumes printed before 1701 (codding). works by velázquez, el greco, goya and sorolla hang on its walls today while a copy of el quijote, unique in the world, is kept on its shelves. it is a collection of incalculable value that covers almost twenty centuries of iberian history and addresses nearly every aspect of culture in spain, as well as a large part in portugal and latin america. thanks to huntington’s diaries (1898), we know today that he took on this project guided by the romantic aspiration of condensing the soul of spain in a museum: “it must condense the soul of spain into meanings, through works of the hand and spirit”1. with deep determination and commitment, he advanced hispanic studies in the united states more than any other individual during the first half of the twentieth century. under his own supervision, exhibitions of spanish artists such as joaquin sorolla and ignacio zuloaga were presented and more than 200 monographs of hispanic issues from international scholars were 9 published by the hispanic society of america as well as through other international magazines he financed. although he preferred anonymity, it was known that he was also the benefactor of many other cultural institutions and museums through gifts of land and endowments (mitchell & goodrich). the editors of the hispanic review summarized his life’s work: “there is a massive uniqueness about his long, creative life. it constitutes a single, shining act of unselfish devotion to the civilization of another country and perhaps no other country has been so honoured” (proske 27). nevertheless, apart from the cultural legacy he left, his remarkable accomplishments to improve the relationships between his own country and spain far exceeded his expert-eye in art collecting. with deep determination and commitment, he advanced hispanic studies in the united states more than any other individual during the first half of the twentieth century. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 1 huntington diaries, 1898. hispanic society of america: new york. the diaries are located in the huntington archive at the hispanic society of america and archived chronologically so date citations are the only form of reference made to these sources. come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo apart from the cultural legacy he left, his remarkable accomplishments to improve the relationships between his own country and spain far exceeded his expert-eye in art collecting. 10 there are two relevant dates to frame this analysis: • 1898: the year in which spain and the united states confronted each other in the spanish-american war. a young archer huntington, aged 28 years, finds himself travelling in spain doing archaeological excavations in seville. • 1953: the year of the signing of the pact of madrid to restore relations between spain and the united states after the period of diplomatic tension that followed the end of world war ii. despite being eighty-three years old and in poor health, archer huntington remains a symbol for spanish culture in the united states and spanish institutions attempt to regain the american friendship for the spanish public sphere. figure 1. huntington’s time-line between the two dates there are almost 60 years of encounters and misunderstandings, of admiration and rejection between the two countries; a period that covers the entire adult life of huntington. at certain times he stepped forward while, at others, he maintained a more withdrawn stance. his way of dealing with circumstances or, symbolically speaking, to face the climate, is crucial in defining both the character of his hispanic legacy and its significance in spanish cultural history. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 11 1955 the torch bearers hispanic reading room el cid statue hispanic division commercial agreement hispanic society of america spanish-american war spanish craze world war i spanish caze crack 1929 spanish war world war cold war pact of madrid 195519391904 1918 1927 1929 1870 19531898 black clouds the spanish-american war of 1898 archer huntington, the only son of one of the richest men in america, collis potter huntington -builder of the central pacific railroad and the newsport news shipbuilding and drydock company-, had already concluded at the age of twenty that he had little interest in the family business, so he dedicated his life to hispanic studies and to his project of a spanish museum instead. the influence of his devoted mother, arabella, was decisive on developing his artistic interests. figure 2. huntington in spain, 1892. source: courtesy hispanic society of america with this idea in mind, he made his first journey to spain in 1892; he wanted to see the country and meet its people first-hand, following the steps of the medieval hero el cid campeador, whose poema del cid he translated into english (huntington 1897). coming back to spain in 1896, he became aware of the emerging climate of tension between spain and his own country, due to the dissident movements in cuba and the sympathy the cuban cause had aroused in the united 12 come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo states. at such a time, in the midst of the confusion created by the united states’ offer of mediation for the negotiation of independence, statements by huntington from spain appeared in the new york herald of april 6th, 1896. in the words of the journalist, huntington was positive in his belief that spain was right and that her course was perfectly justifiable in the cuban affair. in case of war, huntington said, his sympathies would be with his native land but he earnestly believed that the united states was entirely wrong and had no right to interfere in the cuban rebellion. he was convinced that the united states would ultimately win, but that spain would put up a good fight (new york herald). his controversial statements to the press were not well received either in his country, where a powerful patriotic feeling was emerging, or by his family. however, they have great documentary value in bringing to light the process of growing hispanophilia that he was experiencing while the us press launched a smear campaign against everything that had to do with spanish history and the represented culture. in spite of the circumstances, huntington returned to spain in 1898 to carry out archaeological excavations in seville (tesoros arqueológicos de la hispanic society). four months later he was forced to leave the peninsula by the declaration of war between the united states and spain. in the telegrams he exchanged with his mother, he conveyed the climate of concern that, after the explosion of the maine, many people felt in spain, although the spanish press, encouraged by the patriotic outburst, irresponsibly defended the idea that the war could be won with relative ease (arranz notario). huntington went back home, utterly frustrated with the situation as the war, understandably, put an end to his archaeological plans. nevertheless, vivid impressions of some of the places he had seen on his trips went into a note-book in northern spain. published in 1898, the book offered an image of spain that was very different from the one spread by american newspapers, which was mainly based on the anti-spanish sentiment known as the “black legend” (roca barea).2 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 published in 1898, his book a note-book in northern spain offered an image of spain that was very different from the one spread by american newspapers, which was mainly based on the anti-spanish sentiment known as the “black legend 13 2 the black legend is a term indicating an unfavourable image of spain and spaniards accusing them of inhumanity, cruelty, intolerance, backwardness and other failings of the spanish nation as a whole, formerly prevalent in the works of many non-spanish historians. the term was popularized by the spanish historian julián de juderías in his book la leyenda negra, in 1914. with his book, huntington proved that he promoted an erudite appreciation and a serious approach to spanish history and culture. but he also showed concern for the weak national consciousness that existed in spain due to identity differences between its regions3, which could negatively influence an unstable policy of national unity: “she [spain] is in more than one sense a composite nation, and such is the more difficult to see and know as a whole. cataluña, aragon, castile, andalucía, are not mere geographical terms. each presents its distinct national character” (huntington 1898: 3). the year 1898 became a symbol of the decline of spain and of the rise of the united states as a superpower in the international scene, but it was also a crucial moment in huntington’s career as a hispanist. by that time huntington knew and loved spain. sunny weather – the hispanic society of america and the spanish craze although it seems paradoxical, the height of spain’s cultural influence in the united states took place few years after the brief 1898 war, during the so-called spanish craze (kagan). art, music, architecture, films and literature from spain fascinated america between 1898 and the beginning of the spanish civil war. for the majority of the american collectors of the gilded age, to possess the treasures of spain was a symbolic way to confirm the rise of the new american empire and the decline of the old spanish one (jiménez-blanco). this was not the case for huntington. the large inheritance he received after his father’s death in 1900 allowed him to fulfill his dream: to found the hispanic society of america, an institution dedicated to advancing the study of spanish and portuguese languages, literature, and history in order to make the patrimony known to the american audience. as it is known that he toiled over the precise wording of constitution and bay-laws (proske), a deep study of the text of the founding deed reveals that his aim was more ambitious: “this instrument provides for the establishment in the city of new york of a public spanish and portuguese library and museum, to be in some measure a link between the english and the spanish-speaking peoples”. while the hispanic society helped to increase american society’s interest in hispanic culture with sorolla’s or zuloaga’s exhibitions and the publication of books, huntington established friendly relations with illustrious spaniards during his trips to europe. aristocrats, artists, writers, academics and politicians formed a part of his spanish friendships. after reading his epistolary testimonies, it is evident that huntington moved with ease in both court and intellectual circles; if with the former he shared social status and philanthropic aspirations, then with the latter he 14 3 huntington’s concern nailed down when he commissioned joaquín sorolla to decorate the library of the hispanic society with fourteen panels representing the different regions of spain. this mural decoration is entitled vision of spain. come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo his high level of interlocution with spanish elites explains the fact that, at the request of his country´s ambassador to spain, joseph e. willard, huntington participated in the us government delegation to negotiate the trade agreement with spain of march 7th, 1918, in the middle of world war i. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 15 shared the interests of the scholar of the arts, literature, archaeology or spanish history. huntington as patron and huntington as scholar both had their place in spain. his financing of the casa-museo del greco in toledo, the casa-museo de velázquez in valladolid, the museo del romanticismo in madrid, his donations to the archaeological museum of seville or his participation as patron in the valencia de don juan foundation were the result of these close friendly relations with the marquis de la vega-inclán, sorolla, the duke of alba, guillermo de osma, gregorio marañón or menéndez pidal, amongst many others. his friendship with the king alfonso xiii, with whom he had the opportunity to meet on several occasions and from whom he received numerous honours for his services to spanish culture, is of special interest (fernández lorenzo). his high level of interlocution with spanish elites explains the fact that, at the request of his country’s ambassador to spain, joseph e. willard, huntington participated in the us government delegation -together with army general august belmontto negotiate the trade agreement with spain of march 7th, 1918, in the middle of world war i. by virtue of this agreement, the spanish government, neutral in the conflict, agreed to grant export licences for various articles in order to cover the needs of the american expeditionary force during the war, and allowed unrestricted exportation of certain minerals to the united states. in return, the united states authorized the sale of cotton and oil to spain, which were essential to supply the spanish industry (montero jiménez). huntington was an illustrious scholar with no political ambitions, but they turned to him to facilitate trade agreements in times of war as much as possible. perhaps this is the best demonstration of the value his own government placed on the “cultural ambassador” work that huntington had been doing from the hispanic society in the early decades of the century. the great war resulted in a decrease of interest in studying german, which directly benefitted the increase in the study of spanish in the united states. huntington supported the creation of the american association of teachers of spanish (aats) in 1916, whose new york delegates held their meetings precisely in the halls of the hispanic society. the new demand of teachers for so many students was so unexpected that the junta de ampliación de estudios and its delegate in new york, federico de onís, also managed to capitalize on part of the language teaching in the united states with teachers from spain. however, the rapid popularization of with the hispanic division in the congress library, in washington, huntington added a note of excellence to hispanic studies at a time when they were being questioned if not directly attacked. one again, he lobbied to defend hispanicism with the weapons he knew best, the academic institutionalization of culture. come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo 16 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 17 spanish among the american population made it difficult to combine its populist and functional aspect as a vehicular language for latin america with the prestige of hispanic studies that, at a more elitist level, huntington and other american hispanists had been cultivating (fernández)5. this double approach was also reflected in some public demonstrations in which spanish was described as a practical and easy to learn language to serve business in latin america but without a cultural value comparable to french, german or italian. the teacher of spanish henry grattan doyle wrote to huntington in 1926 asking for help to respond to these attacks but in his correspondence huntington explained which, in his opinion, was the best way to respond to such offenses: “it seems the time for those interested in spanish to stand together and by example more than advice or resistance to present the cultural and other advantages of the hispanic field in america”6. the reference to unity of action was symptomatic of the growing division among american hispanists between those who favored pan americanism and those who did not. however, huntington decided to promote a new project for the institutionalization of hispanicism in the united states at the highest level by creating the hispanic division at the library of congress in washington in 1927. in 1926 herbert putman, librarian of the congress, published a desiderata list with the bibliographical documents that should be represented in the library of the congress of the united states. the list, which included, among others, the diary of christopher columbus’ first trip to america in 1493, served to focus on the collection of portuguese-spanish publications that the library of congress wanted to acquire by means of donations and gifts. in 1927, archer huntington was the first to make an endowment for the creation of a hispanic division for fifty thousand dollars -equivalent to seven hundred thousand dollars today-, to acquire books of art, literature, history and hispanic culture in general. a year later, in 1928, he made another endowment of fifty thousand dollars to hire a consultant to be in charge of the selection of books in the new chair of during the spanish civil war huntington assumed a neutral position as he wrote to his friend the duke of alba: “as you know, i am forced to be entirely neutral as to spainwhich i am not. but the hispanic society is representative of both sides”. 5 referring to this subject, the historian james fernández has coined the expression “ley de longfellow”. 6 letter of archer huntington to henry grattan doyle, march 2nd, 1926. anna hyatt huntington papers. special collections research center. syracuse university library. box 31. the numerous projects he conducted for the internationalization of spanish culture in the united states and for the revaluation of spanish cultural heritage made him an unofficial ambassador for cultural diplomacy. 18 come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 19 the literature of spain and portugal in the library of congress. huntington offered the position to his friend, the former spanish ambassador to the united states, juan de riaño (dorn). book purchases for the hispanic division were initially restricted to the iberian peninsula. this fact was confirmed by the declarations of riaño’s replacement in office, father david rubio -librarian between 1931 and 1943 and curator of the portuguese-spanish collections between 1939 and 1943-. speaking of the generous amount donated by huntington to buy books on art, literature, history and culture of the iberian peninsula, he stated that “the other spanish and portuguese speaking communities were not included in the original donation clause”. in fact, he described how after five years of work in the library of congress they managed to amass a collection of one hundred thousand titles by 1935, among which “of hispanic america there was not even a single volume of rubén darío” (rubio 1957: 35-36). having the hispanic division within one of the most prestigious institutions in the united states, huntington added a note of excellence to hispanic studies at a time when they were being questioned if not directly attacked. once again, he lobbied to defend hispanicism with the weapons he knew best, the academic institutionalization of culture. while this was happening in the united states, an authoritarian regime, led by general primo de rivera, had been in place in spain since 1923, and the position of the monarchy was being questioned by political and intellectual circles. the friendship and respect he professed for the king led huntington to expressly support two of alfonso xiii’s most important cultural initiatives: exhibition of the project “ciudad universitaria de madrid”. sorolla room, hispanic society of america, 1928. source: courtesy blanca pons-sorolla on the one hand, the works of the new ciudad universitaria of madrid. huntington became one of his patrons by creating an endowment worth one hundred thousand dollarsequivalent to almost one and a half million dollars today to finance the works and by setting up an american poetry chair at the central university of madrid. in addition, the sorolla room of the hispanic society in new york, where the panels of the regions painted by sorolla were exhibited, hosted the exhibition of plans and models taken to the united states by the university’s construction board to make the project known to experts from american universities and foundations. el cid campeador by anna hyatt. sevilla a year later, on the occasion of the 1929 ibero-american exhibition in seville, he also gave clear evidence of his support for the monarch’s initiative by giving the city the sculpture of the horseback cid campeador, created by his wife anna hyatt, which was placed in the square that welcomed those attending the exhibition. the american and his wife attended the inauguration, met alfonso xiii, donated two paintings by valdés leal to the city museum and were named honorary citizens of seville7. two years later, after the 1931 local elections, the second republic was established in spain and the king left the country on his way to exile. 20 7 marquis de la vega-inclán to alfonso xiii (note). april 15th, 1927. archivo general de palacio. reinados. alfonso xiii. expediente 12422/8. come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 21 a perfect storm the spanish civil war the outbreak of the spanish civil war posed difficult dilemmas for the scholars who dedicated their lives to the study and dissemination of spanish culture (faber). huntington’s case was no different from that of many other american hispanists who found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being compelled to stand for or against one of the two warring sides: the nationalists or the republicans. taking sides in the spanish conflict went against the government’s official stance of neutrality even though the spanish civil war polarized american society very quickly. in fact, the reluctance of american hispanists to participate in public discussions about spain was a common behaviour during the war and, as a result, many of them embraced pan americanism and focused their new subjects of study in latin america. huntington assumed a neutral position as he wrote to his friend the duke of alba: “as you know, i am forced to be entirely neutral as to spainwhich i am not. but the society is representative of both sides”. he was aware that the hispanic society was a cultural institution that could easily be compromised by the propaganda appeals of the two opposing sides. therefore, from the highest political correctness -and perhaps also from his own convictionhuntington publicly aligned himself with the majority of american hispanism that opted for public silence. during the three years of war he exchanged letters with his spanish friends who, for different reasons, had been aligned on one side or the other; some remained in spain and told him about the destruction of the artistic historical heritage such as the writer concha espina or the painter josé lópez mezquita; others announced their exit into exile, such as the painter miguel viladrich. under the new circumstances, the hispanic society closed its doors to the public. but after the end of the spanish war, and on the eve of world war ii, huntington stepped forward and showed that his commitment to the erudite hispanicism he had cultivated remained alive despite the disastrous circumstances. in 1939 he made the decision to fund the construction of the hispanic reading room in the library of congress, a special reading and study room for hispanists who were not going to find many options for research in post-war spain. the hispanic reading room, designed by the architect paul philippe cret in spanish colonial style, opened on october 12th, 1939. huntington commissioned a mural with christopher columbus’ coat of arms for the south wall of the room. however, the room became, through the intermediation of the u.s. secretary of state, the main iconographic exponent of the u.s. government to symbolize the pan americanist spirit. nelson rockefeller, director of the office for the coordination of inter-american affairs, commissioned brazilian artist candido portinari to decorate the room with murals. his designs plastically constructed a multicultural hemispheric identity and a common past that united all american communities (serviddio). although huntington did not participate directly in these decisions, this circumstance allowed him to demonstrate his patriotism at the beginning of world war ii but also allowed him to maintain his independence for the spanish legacy at the hispanic society of america in new york. hispanic reading room, library of congress, washington huntington accepted the secretary of state’s proposal that the hispanic reading room focus its bibliographical and editorial interests on the latin american republics, while the hispanic society would focus on spain and its empire before independence10. by doing so, he isolated his collection and his new york institution from possible political interference at a time when washington was not looking favourably on the franco regime for its ideological approach to the axis forces. given these circumstances, and despite of his disappointment, huntington’s promotion of spanish studies did not stop. the staff of the hispanic society, composed of professional women who were to become experts in their fields, went on with their job under his personal supervision. the news about the outbreak of the world war ii depressed him and he decided to move to a country house in connecticut. from his new emplacement huntington kept in touch with the many institutions he supported and devoted his time to writing poetry. some of the titles he published such as spain and africa (huntington 1943), recuerdos (huntington 1949), or versos (huntington 1952), reveal his constant though on spain10. 22 9 archer huntington to archibald mcleish (letter). june 10th, 1940. anna hyatt huntington papers. special collections research center. syracuse university library. box 43. 10 archer huntington published twenty eight books of poetry between 1936 and 1954. he gathered together many of them and reprinted a volume entitled collected verse in 1953. come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 23 a ray of sunshine pact of madrid of 1953 relations between spain and the united states were weakened after the end of world war ii and spain was consigned to international ostracism. however, the cold war and the desire to stop the spread of communism encouraged the interest of the united states to collaborate militarily with the franco regime. the signing of the pact of madrid in 1953 for the establishment of military bases on the peninsula allowed for new diplomatic channels to be opened. at that moment, an unexpected interest arose among the franco authorities to regain contact with the elderly hispanist and to bring him closer to spain. references to spain’s beloved american friend began to appear in the spanish press (abc; espina). it seems important to point out that, since 1948, huntington had been awarding the hispanic society medals to spanish intellectuals, some of whom were in exile in america, such as rafael altamira, juan ramón jiménez, ramón pérez de ayala and pau casals. he had also rewarded intellectuals who had remained in franco’s spain, such as francisco sánchez cantón, manuel gómez-moreno, gregorio marañón, and others without the deserved recognition, as it was the case of josé ortega y gasset (hispanic society of america). several exiled intellectuals, professors at american universities, wanted to respond to this gesture by paying tribute to him at wellesley college, a women’s university of which huntington was one of its most discreet patrons. a volume of estudios hispánicos dedicated to archer huntington on his eightieth birthday was published in mexico with the contribution of international hispanists, among them ramón ménedez pidal, pedro salinas and homero serís (wellesley college). the spanish authorities wanted to prevent him from being portrayed as an icon by moderate groups in exile, and the instituto de cultura hispánica and the ministry of foreign affairs took steps in order to get closer to the hispanist11. huntington was then eighty-three years old, sick and isolated from cultural life in connecticut, but he had not forgotten spain. as a result, recognitions and tributes were paid to the huntington marriage. in barcelona, a monument in their honour was inaugurated in the pedralbes gardens (socias batet). shortly afterwards, the university of salamanca named them both doctor honoris causa, and anna hyatt was granted the additional title of corresponding member of the academia de bellas artes de san jorge. the universidad central of madrid inaugurated the huntington chair of american poetry at the faculty of philosophy and literature in 1954. in gratitude, huntington decided to donate the sculpture of los portadores de la antorcha, sculpted by his wife anna, to the ciudad universitaria of madrid, as a symbol of friendship between the united states and spain. some verses he wrote were engraved on the base of the sculpture. the u.s. ambassador to spain participated in the presentation of los portadores de la antorcha in madrid on may 15th, 1955, along with the ministers of education and foreign affairs, the university dean and carmen polo, franco’s wife. in this act, the ambassador declared that archer 11 román de la presilla, cónsul of spain in new york, to juan de bárcenas, general director of foreign affairs (report). february 2nd, 1954. amaec r. 3585, expediente 28. huntington had been an unofficial ambassador for years, dedicated to strengthening ties between the two countries. if the non-presence of foreign ambassadors in spain had been one of the most obvious evidence of his international isolationism, to evoke the stamp of an ambassador referring to huntington was to grant him publicity and express recognition by the highest representative of us diplomacy of having been a valuable link between the two countries. los portadores de la antorcha by anna hyatt. ciudad universitaria de madrid, 1955. source: agencia española de cooperación internacional para el desarrollo: aecid. biblioteca (mh-68/47) after huntington’s death on december 11th, 1955, the spanish authorities promoted the establishment of the huntington foundation in the ciudad universitaria of madrid as a postgraduate center in north american studies, hoping to get funding from his widow, anna hyatt. despite the interest of the project, unfortunately it did not get off the ground. the erection of a monument in honour of the huntingtons was another project undertaken in the 1960s. an interministerial commission was created at the highest level, chaired by the head of the instituto de cultura hispánica, gregorio marañón moyá, son of the prestigious physician gregorio marañón. the sculptor juan de ávalos was even commissioned to design the monument. due to different circumstances, this project did not succeed either. 1960s spain, wrapped up in its own affairs, was forgetting the philanthropist archer m. huntington, the hispanic millionaire who never sought public recognition but worked to build bridges between spain and the united states. conclusions come rain or come shine archer huntington was the great american patron of spanish culture. the numerous projects he conducted for the internationalization of spanish culture in the united states and 24 come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 25 arranz notario, l. “el estallido patriótico”. in: españa fin de siglo, 1898 [catalogue of exhibition]. barcelona: fundación la caixa, 1987: 334-342. print. codding, m. a. “the soul of spain in a museum: archer milton huntington’s vision of the hispanic society of america”. in: the hispanic society of america. tesoros. new york: the hispanic society of america, 2000. print. dorn, g. “hispanic division celebrates 65 years”. library of congress information bulletin. december 2004. print. espina, c. “deudas de honor y amor”. abc, 9 january 1954. print. faber, s. anglo-american hispanist and the spanish civil war. hispanophilia, commitment and discipline. nueva york: palgrave macmillan, 2005. print. fernández, j. d. “la ley de longfellow. el lugar de hispanoamérica y españa en el hispanismo estadounidense de principios de siglo”. españa y estados unidos en el siglo xx. delgado gómez-escalonilla, l. & m. d. elizalde pérez-grueso. coords. madrid: csic, 2005: 95-112. print. fernández lorenzo, p. archer m. huntington. el fundador de la hispanic society of america en españa. madrid: marcial pons, 2018. print. hispanic society of america. a history of the hispanic society of america. museum and library, 1904-1954. nueva york: hispanic society of america, 1954. print. huntington, a. m. el cid campeador. poem of the cid. 1897-1903. 3rd ed. new york: de vinne press, 1897. print. _. a note-book in northern spain. new york: g. p. putman’s sons, 1898. print. _. spain and africa. new york: hispanic society of america, 1943. print. _. recuerdos. new york: hispanic society of america, 1949. print. _. versos. new york: hispanic society of america, 1952. print. “huntigton ausente”. abc [andalucía], 9 january 1954, 24. abc de sevilla hemeroteca. web. jiménez-blanco, m. d. “spanish art and american collections”. i. suárez-zuloaga. dir. when spain fascinated america. madrid: fundación zuloaga; ministerio de cultura del gobierno de españa, 2010: 61-80. print. references for the revaluation of spanish cultural heritage made him an unofficial ambassador for cultural diplomacy. the personal relationships that he established and the way that he imprinted his work kept him apart from other collectors and hispanists who, after a period of great attraction, left behind their love for spain and chose to embark on other journeys. unlike them, huntington maintained his devotion to spain and its culture despite the circumstances or, as the title come rain or come shine suggests. in his eighty-five years of life, he launched numerous initiatives to bring the united states and spain closer culturally, two different worlds that went through moments of closeness and separation, of collaboration and confrontation due to political and cultural circumstances that had a direct impact on the place that huntington could hold in the changing spanish scenario. with his actions and omissions, huntington stands out as a cordial figure in bilateral relations, but also as a personality who did not passively accept the status quo and, from the point of view of friendship and culture, contributed to breaking down walls and linking cultures, seeking to modify the image of spain that prevailed in the united states. 26 kagan, r. l. “the spanish craze: the discovery of spanish art and culture in united states”. i. suárez-zuloaga. dir. when spain fascinated. madrid: fundación zuloaga; ministerio de cultura del gobierno de españa, 2010: 25-46. print. mitchell, m. & a. goodrich. the remarkable huntingtons. archer and anna. chronicle of a marriage. pawleys island: litchfield books, 2008. print. montero jiménez, j. c. el despertar de la gran potencia: las relaciones entre españa y los estados unidos (1898-1939). madrid: biblioteca nueva, 2011. print. hispanic society of new york. “a. m. huntington’s view”. new york herald. 6 april 1896. print. proske, b. g. archer m. huntington. new york: the hispanic society of america, 1963. print. roca barea, e. imperiofobia y leyenda negra. roma, rusia, estados unidos y el imperio español. madrid: siruela, 2019. print. rubio, d. “mementos”. huntington 1870-1955. washington: organización de estados americanos-comité interamericano de bibliografía. pan american union, 1957: 34-37. print. serviddio, f. “los murales de portinari en la sala hispánica del congreso de estados unidos: construcción plástica de una identidad panamericana”. cuadernos del cilha, 12:14. (2011): 121-150. print. socias batet, i. el memorial de barcelona a archer milton huntington, el fundador de la hispanic society of america, y a su esposa, la escultora anna hyatt huntington. barcelona: publicacions i edicions de la universitat de barcelona, 2009. print. tesoros arqueológicos de la hispanic society [catalogue of exhibition]. madrid: museo arqueológico regional, 2008. print. wellesley college. estudios hispánicos. homenaje a archer m. huntington. mexico: wellesley college, 1952. print. huntington diaries, 1898. hispanic society of america: new york. the diaries are located in the huntington archive at the hispanic society of america and archived chronologically so date citations are the only form of reference made to these sources. letter from archer huntington to the duke of alba, 18 april 1938. anna hyatt huntington papers. special collections research center. syracuse university library. box 7. letter of archer huntington to archibald mcleish, 10 june 1940. anna hyatt huntington papers. special collections research center. syracuse university library. box 43. letter of archer huntington to henry grattan doyle, 2 march 1926. anna hyatt huntington papers. special collections research center. syracuse university library. box 31. note of marquis de la vega-inclán to alfonso xiii, 15 april 1927. archivo general de palacio. reinados. alfonso xiii. expediente 12422/8. report of román de la presilla, cónsul of spain in new york, to juan de bárcenas, general director of foreign affairs, 2 february 1954. amaec r. 3585, expediente 28. the hispanic society of america. foundation deed, p. 2. personal correspondence come rain or come shine: archer m. huntington between spain... patricia fernández lorenzo aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics: here by richard mcguire and twin peaks, the return ivan pintor iranzo n the original version of richard mcguire’s comic here, published in the magazine raw in 1989, an initial panel depicting the empty corner of a living room at an unspecified point in time introduces a journey in time over a fixed space, in a to-and-fro of temporal leaps ranging from the age of the dinosaurs to the year 2030. the first panel is an almost abstract image, just a few lines converging on a point, verging on an illusion of space and perspective, depicting one corner of a living room next to a window. this article begins with this first image of an empty space, stripped bare, that underpins the whole development of here, to venture a hypothesis of a negative aesthetic, a visual logic of emptying out and tearing in contemporary us television fiction series and comics. in some of the most significant practices in the context of recent innovations in comics and television, there appears to be a clear continuity with earlier explorations in the realm of visual arts, particularly in painting, based on the premise of a negative approach, whose expression can be analyzed using philosophical and even theological theoretical sources. to study the presence of the logic of emptying out, opening up and tearing in works like here, or in season 3 of david lynch’s twin peaks: the return (showtime networks, 2017), or even in the works of the cartoonist chris ware, it is necessary to turn to methodological and theoretical tools similar to those needed for an analysis of the paintings of mark rothko or the work of the anglo-indian artist anish kapoor. through a contextualization, a comparative analysis and finally a hermeneutic approach, it is the aim of this paper to attempt a broader explanation of the experimental logic emerging within contemporary popular culture in the english-speaking world, and particularly in the united states. i reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 1. a short history of america the key feature of the first version of here, which constituted a milestone in innovative comics, was mcguire’s ability to use secondary narrative elements to draw out a tension that has been implicit in the comic strip since its origins: the status of the comic strip panel as an open window on the concatenation between past, present and future, on the one hand, and the reader’s freedom to travel through all the moments in time laid out in the panoply on the page (pintor, 2017a). in the six pages of here, the accessibility of all the different moments in time on the page was related to the use of a technique of insets or overlapping panels. in this way, different points in time open onto others, in a journey towards the origins constructed firstly out of ordinary family moments, and then out of historical events, all of which occurred in the same space. 2 the journey through time articulated in the cut between images and the pantheist tone that permeates here aligns with the editing techniques used in the movies of jonas mekas, or particularly in terrence malick movies like the tree of life (2011) and voyage of time (2016). all these works exhibit a poetics associated with the american transcendentalism of emerson and walt whitman, which mcguire expresses in a context as open to experimentation as the magazine raw (1980-1986; 1989-1991), directed by art spiegelman and françoise mouly, as an intellectual counterpoint to the rough underground style of the magazine weirdo (1981-1993) created by robert crumb. however, what for malick is a journey through vital moments, in search of divine grace or a kind of transcendence, in mcguire becomes, through the strategy of inset comic panels, a negative voyage, an exploration of ellipsis, and the threat of infinite openness. as in the case of filmmakers with a close affinity with painting, such as peter greenaway, who in the same era released movies like the cook, the thief, his wife & her lover (1989) and prospero’s books (1991), the fact that here happened to be published around the same time as the appearance of windows software could be cited to explain the logic of windows and different points in time opening up in constant overlaps. however, it is the expression of tearing and opening that makes the first version of here so unique, with its constant allusion to the possibility of the primordial void behind all moments in time. in contrast to the movie the tree of life, there is no the status of the comic strip panel as an open window on the concatenation between past, present and future, on the one hand, and the reader’s freedom to travel through all the moments in time laid out in the panoply on the page reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo 3 the journey through time articulated in the cut between images and the pantheist tone that permeates here aligns with the editing techniques used in the movies of jonas mekas, or particularly in terrence malick movies like the tree of life (2011) and voyage of time (2016) voice-over, no text that guides the journey; instead, the boldness of the work lies in the act of the montage itself, in the juxtaposed articulation of discrete temporal frames where the narrative hierarchization is left up to the reader. the visual beauty of mcguire’s more extensive development of the first version of the comic strip in the album here (2014) gives the journey through time a more pictorial dimension, again in tune with the spectacular use of the 70mm format by mallick. the use of color and the absence of the reticular structure of traditional comic panels intensify the sensation of a unique space. from the living room in a house, the different games, conversations, births and absences of a family saga respond to and link in with one another, in a multiplicity of parallel moments in the planet’s distant past and foggy future. the first panel in the original 1989 version of the strip, only a few angled lines, is expanded now into a series of fourteen pages by way of prologue. on the first of these pages, a window that maintains the page white background also reproduces a corner of the house, enveloped in a gloom of grey tones very similar to those used by the danish painter vilhelm hammershøi. on the second page, almost as if it was a musical movement, the shades of grey are once again organized around the whiteness of the light that enters through the window and is silhouetted against the fireplace. in the pages that follow, in a kind of dance, shot and reverse shot, window and fireplace exchange different lights. these pages evoke different moments, but always as a huge mass of color around a central blank hole, until the series of rhythms comes to life with the abrupt appearance of the year and a human figure, a woman appearing in 1957, without knowing why she came to the window. the image of the woman, always with the page dominated by these internal empty spaces, is followed by the figure of a cat in 1999, of a virgin landscape in 1623 and, once again, the female figure in 1957. from this moment and throughout most of the album (except for the moments before and after the existence of the house), both the window and the fireplace continue being two blank spaces. these spaces appear to reveal a deeper dimension beyond the cadence of the windows that capture different moments, linking together actions that are nearly always mundane, lacking in any obvious pathos. “life has a flair for rhyming events,” says one of the characters much later, in a panel marked 1775. far from appearing like ghosts, all the human figures peopling here manage to make the real specter the reader, the wandering owner of a gaze which, as in the movies of terence davies, constantly loses what it longs to hold onto. however, the basic emotion that dominates this work is not, as in terence davies’ movies, tied up so much with family memory, a bitter melancholy, or the tragic reality of irreversibility. here evokes the shimmering gleam of moments that act like buoys against the rushing flow of time. but behind the hymn to the forests, cultures, births, and deaths that parade through the space of the house in here, in an echo of robert crumb’s a short history of america (1979) is clearly discernible, mcguire displays a keen attention to the gaps, the intervals. at the end of the road that begins in american poetry with whitman is always the negative approach of emily dickinson’s blank spaces, their extraordinary revelation of what is lost between the images. 4 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos “we grow accustomed to the dark,”1 she declares in one of her poems, while in another she concludes what could be the defense of another way of writing poetry, drawing comics or making movies: “until the cheated eye / shuts arrogantly —in the grave / another way —to see—.”2 it is not so much a case of evoking a journey or a direct tension towards abstraction—in this sense there are much more obvious examples of abstraction in comics, from manfred sommer to renato calligaro3 —as of elaborating a constellation of negatives and gaps around a central void, while maintaining the precision of the figuration. in certain ways, the way mcguire works with time is analogous to what the canadian cartoonist martin vaughn-james does with space in the cage (1975) or to the mechanisms that underpin certain works by marc-antoine mathieu, such as juliuscorentin acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves (1991) and 3” (2011). in 3”, the story of a murder in a sports stadium is explained through a concatenation of reflections in glasses, screens and mirrors, to which one more panel could always be added. similarly, among the panels of here a new opening could always be inserted, but it would never have a clarifying purpose, as in the case of 3”, since there is no generic plot that underpins the album; instead it would point to that “other way to see” alluded to by dickinson. in the final panel of here, when the woman in 1957 remembers that she has come to the living room window to retrieve a book, the work is revealed to be a kind of proustian unfolding through recognition, like an accordion which, once all the layers of time have been exposed, returns to the same spot. it is in fact a strategy similar to that employed by david lynch in twin peaks: the return. just as the idea of the central blank hole graphically dominates the whole work, narratively, there is also a central, inexplicable opaqueness behind the passage of time. 5 these pages evoke different moments, but always as a huge mass of color around a central blank hole aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo 1 emily dickinson, “the tint i cannot take – is best –”, in emily dickinson, the poems of emily dickinson, 1998), p. 666. 2 emily dickinson, “we grow accustomed to the dark”, in emily dickinson, op. cit. p. 452-453. 3 notable in sommer’s case is the series titled secuencia nº1, 2, 3, 4 y 5 (1981). see also molotiu, a. (ed.) abstract comics: the anthology (2009) and anderson, kimball et al., comics as poetry (2012), as well as the work of tamryn bennett (2014). 6 2. the fruit of nothing in contrast with the shakespearean approach that has dominated the golden age of drama beginning in television fiction after 9/11, twin peaks: the return establishes a pact with the spectator that is not based on the premise of a self-contained story and does not invoke the resources of elizabethan drama. each episode appears to be conceived as a visit to the studio, to the workshop of the artist, as a navigation through the different dimensional thresholds and windows that open up around the original location of the town of twin peaks. in this sense, its approach bears a closer relationship to the non-narrative strategies of here or the cage than the standard forms of television fiction, even if the end of the series deliberately aspires to a closure of the story, a return to the starting point. in this context, the development of recurring motifs in twin peaks results in scenes understood as paintings, experiments, and possibilities of a multiple universe resounding, first of all, with the history of the united states since world war ii, and, secondly, with the intuition of a much older temporal dimension rooted in nature. in the arc of the twenty-seven years separating the first season (abc: 1990-91) from the last season of twin peaks, there is a dialogue with time and an intention to identify the negative flipsides of a sinister eternity. as in here, there is a return to the starting point, but expressed in an image filled with pathos: the blood-curdling scream of the actress sheryl lee, a laura whom agent cooper (kyle mclachlan) believes he has resurrected and returned to her home. while the basic approach that characterizes both lynch’s painting and filming style involves zooming in on a detail that betrays the apparent tranquility of the whole, exploring the imbalance between the wide shot and the fragment, between the exquisitely cut grass and the decayed ear in blue velvet (1986), both the last and the first episodes of the third season of twin peaks emerge onto a non-existent outside world, flattened after an absence of almost three decades, both for the characters and for the spectators. the peaceful whispering of the douglas firs swaying in the wind, the hum of the packard sawmill and the music of badalamenti accompanying each of audrey’s light steps through her father’s hotel or the rr café in the first two seasons are replaced now by the silence of an open world. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos the development of recurring motifs in twin peaks results in scenes understood as paintings, experiments, and possibilities of a multiple universe resounding 7 aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo in his book catching the big fish (2006), david lynch suggests that for something to be able to appear, it is first necessary to create the void this initial empty space acts as a catalyst, in the same way as the initial empty panel in here in consonance with lynch’s and mcguire’s sources, ware uses formulas for emptying the central space of the page reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 in his book catching the big fish (2006), david lynch suggests that for something to be able to appear, it is first necessary to create the void. twin peaks opens by establishing in that world of the open (das offene, rilke called it in the eighth of his duíno elegies4) the maximum embodiment of power: a huge, empty glass cube. resembling a faraday cage, the cube is located in an attic in manhattan, which along with philadelphia, las vegas, and buenos aires, forms part of a new geography for the series. in a meticulous ritual of invocation, several surveillance cameras record the emptiness of the cube, which is watched over by a young man who is unable to foresee the appearance, first, of a maleficent presence, and later, of agent cooper. this initial empty space acts as a catalyst, in the same way as the initial empty panel in here and just like chris ware’s central panels of empty and torn spaces in both jimmy corrigan, the smartest kid on earth (2000), and (especially) the big book (i just want to fall asleep) (acme novelty library 18), one of the parts of building stories (2012). this work of ware is not so much a comic book as a box, like the boxed assemblages of the artist joseph cornell, with fourteen different pieces—tabloids, notebooks, strip cartoons, an album bound in cloth and even a screen or game board—whose stories are organized around the everyday trials and solitudes of a woman with an amputated leg. the strategy of keeping the center of the page empty is expressed in the big book in the image of an empty notebook (pp. 23-24), the lintel of a door (pp. 32-33 and 34-35), an open orchid (pp. 46-47), and even a woman’s vulva (pp. 42,45). in consonance with lynch’s and mcguire’s sources, ware uses formulas for emptying the central space of the page developed previously by classical illustrators in the american press, like george herriman, the author of krazy kat (1913-1944), and frank king, the creator of gasoline alley (1918-). a gradual emptying, like that advocated by the artist jorge oteiza (2003) when reflecting on his sculptural works, produces an effect of liberation, of asceticism or, in terms of the negative topology of the german mystic meister eckhart, a way of giving birth to the “fruit of nothing” in the empty space of the soul. to this end, the detachment (abgeschiedenheit) that makes possible the incarnation of god in man, the process of kenosis, is as important as the breakthrough (durchbruch) that reveals the ground (grûnt) on which the transcendental encounter can occur. the breakthrough and the opening of the threshold between worlds is not only the symbol that characterizes all david lynch’s work (pintor, 2017b), but also the unique quality of the actors’ gestures in the third season of twin peaks. the ritual precision of the gestures in the first two seasons of the series becomes, in the final episodes, an intention to tear at the darkness of the image, to gain access to the transcendence that lies beyond the murder of laura palmer. both laura and her mother withdraw their own faces in respective symmetrical scenes to reveal an abyss (abgrûnt) of light in the first case and of darkness in the second. similarly, there are numerous vortexes that open up to that other space explored by the filmmaker in the heterotopia of the black lodge, the club silencio in mulholland drive (david lynch, 2001), or the radiator in eraserhead (david lynch, 1977). aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo 9 4 upon which only an animal could gaze, since the human gaze is always on the world and far from that nowhere without no (nirgends ohne nicht). 3. an apophatic aesthetic what is portrayed as a containment of the abyss of the real in lynch’s work up until to inland empire (2006) in twin peaks: the return foreshadows a negative return of the sacred that emerges out of the liminal void. not only does the slapstick, inherited from the filmmaker jacques tati, that characterizes dougie, an ill-fated, childlike, inarticulate cooper (both played by mclachlan), constitute a prodigious figuration of the holy madman, but it is also in this third season, beneath the torn surface, that the light emerges most. just as in lynch’s most recent paintings, the canvas often reveals a bright world beyond compared to the dark and abject experience of the home in the black canvases of his early period, a kind of exercise that comic strip authors like frank miller and bill sienkiewicz had already experimented with in elektra assassin (1986-87) or grant morrison and dave mckean in arkham asylum (1989). in this respect, there does not seem to be a substantial difference between the visual attitude of breakdown and deepening sometimes found in sienkewicz, mckean or lynch and which characterizes works by anish kapoor like place (1985) and the healing of st. thomas (1989-1990), or in the ultimate purpose of the tears in lucio fontana’s concetti spaziali in the 1960s. in his study of the apophatic aesthetic (“apophatic” from the greek word ἀποφάναι, meaning “to say no”, “to negate”) based on kapoor’s work, the theorist amador vega (2004) points out how the void of the space inside the wound, the tear, offers a new language that emerges from sacrifice and contemplation to posit itself as a pronouncement or an “opening up to others”. however, the sacrificial device, which is central to the series by j. j. abrams and to the infiltration of superheroes from the marvel series—daredevil (netflix, 2015-), jessica jones (netflix: 2015-) or luke cage (netflix: 2017-)—is reduced in lynch’s case to the distance of a death that occurred in the pilot episode and of a quest that is more visual than strictly narrative. the excerpt from eckhart’s sermon on the conversion of st. paul on the road to damascus highlighted by vega in his discussion of kapoor, “[…] when he rose up from the ground with his eyes open, he saw nothing” (vega, 2004, p. 155), not only alludes to an inner vision, but also evokes its opposite: the impossibility of finding a response to the outward gaze that we find at the beginning of kafka’s the castle (das schloß, 1926), when it is the very negation of the image that acquires a gaze of its own and contemplates the character, the reader. just where the castle in kafka’s story ought to be, all that is revealed is a thick, dark fog. prior to any word or definition, the abyss of that void with intended as a way out was also the ultimate endeavor of artists like rothko, who, like fontana, worked on series, variations, and open processes. lynch has never been satisfied with a single figure to construct a character, and from lost highway (1997) to inland empire (2006) he repeatedly juxtaposed two narratives around a central hole, around which the symbolic order of a single, split character collapses. like the black hole which, in the last years of his life, began making its presence felt in rothko’s paintings despite his efforts to contain it with reality, the symbolic dimension of color, for lynch, sex and murder form the core of a trauma that traps its characters in a loop between reality and flight into a fantasy that is even more horrific. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 10 aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo how the void of the space inside the wound, the tear, offers a new language that emerges from sacrifice and contemplation to posit itself as a pronouncement or an “opening up to others” 11 12 this overflowing of the abyss in this case acquires a historical, godardian dimension, with its embodiment of the origins of contemporary evil in the explosion of the first atomic test in new mexico in 1945 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 12 this overflowing of the abyss in this case acquires a historical, godardian dimension, with its embodiment of the origins of contemporary evil in the explosion of the first atomic test in new mexico in 1945. the eighth episode functions with the autonomous, self-contained dimension of an episode of the twilight zone, (cbs: 1959-1964) or black mirror (channel 4: 2011-2014; netflix: 2016-), but at the same time it opens at a precise historical location. the domination of certain images on the limits of the abstract to the sound of krzysztof penderecki’s music not only constitutes a re-reading of the experimental movies of stan brakhage, jordan belson or bruce conner, but also the foundation of a negativity whose ultimate meaning, capable of transcending the representational, collides with a nihilist mode of negativity prone to expression in forms and figures of horror. the mushroom cloud, the hobos, cooper’s evil doppelgänger, the portrait of kafka that looms over gordon cole’s office, the images of cooper appearing in the glass cube and through the electrical power outlet, the decapitated body, and the mutant animal resulting from the explosion are examples of a rich figuration around which the concept of negativity can no longer be read as synonymous with a negative approach, serving instead as the seed of a dramatic temporality, of a plurality of images and idols. when it slips into the mouth of a young girl, the strange insect-frog hybrid born a decade after the atomic explosion contaminates the edenic purity of the 1950s in the united states, an idea lynch has narrated so many times, recreating the aesthetic of norman rockwell or even the ingenuous iconographic repertoire of the etiquette manual good times in our streets. the imaginary that feeds lynch’s poetics is the same one that gave rise to american comic strip classics like chester gould’s dick tracy (1931-1977) or the post-war strips of ec comics, a dark, b-grade universe perpetuated by illustrators like daniel clowes in like a velvet glove cast in iron (1989-1993) or charles burns in black hole (1995-2005), and which, in a subtler way, is palpable in the pages of david mazzucchelli’s asteros polyp (2009). each of its chapters is headed by a panel that acts as an abyss, in the middle of the page, leading to the lost highway in the header in the last chapter. in twin peaks, whether the girl is killer bob’s mother or laura palmer’s grandmother is less important than the depiction of an evil conceived as a distortion or perversion of a pre-established ritual. aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo the imaginary that feeds lynch’s poetics is the same one that gave rise to american comic strip classics like chester gould’s dick tracy (19311977) or the post-war strips of ec comics, 13 “this is the water, and this is the well. drink full and descend. the horse is the white of the eyes, and dark within.” this mantra, used by judy’s archangels of evil to silence the music of the platters in the eighth episode, expresses a form of darkness present in all of lynch’s work, from his black paintings to the final scream in twin peaks: the return. lynch tunes into a nihilist imaginary of evil understood as an intrusion, or as an absence of good and eudaimonia—εὐδαιμονία, wellbeing, happiness (nussbaum, 2001). to the presence of a negative aesthetic in a subtractive and theological sense, twin peaks: the return adds an invocation of figurations of evil that are simply responses to the need to represent the site of negativity in contemporary society. 4. in praise of negativity “we live in a time that is poor in negativity,” argues the philosopher byung-chul han (2012, p. 17), echoing heidegger; an era where the disciplinary society described by foucault (1976), still governed by the “no” and the prohibition, has been giving rise to a performance society. in such a society, the lamentation of the depressed individual that “nothing is possible” can only be explained because the central value cultivated is the opposite: “nothing is impossible.” the need to sustain one’s own identity (ehrenberg, 2008) in a context characterized by the positive promise that one can be anything ultimately proves exhausting. the gloom that pervades television series like mad men (amc, 2007-2015), breaking bad (amc, 2008-2013) or the leftovers (hbo, 20142017) appear as a response to the excess of positivity of societies based on the american dream (pintor, 2015). like gloom, evil also appears in very different incarnations in the series of the last twenty years only as a way of channeling the tension caused by an excess of positivity. the realist evil of the wire (hbo, 2002-2009), treme (hbo, 2010-2013) and show me a hero (hbo, 2015); the evil incorporated in the genre’s discourse of the sopranos (hbo, 1999-2007), boardwalk empire (hbo, 2010-2014), true detective (hbo, 2014-) and the handmaid’s tale, (hulu, 2017); the fantasy universe of walking dead (amc, 2010-) or game of thrones (hbo, 2011-); and the documentary horror of the jinx: the life and deaths of robert durst (hbo, 2015) are all manifestations of a need to create stories based on a negativity understood, following heidegger, as nichtheit, i.e., as a tragic vector of time and the essential condition of being.5 all of mcguire’s and ware’s work, as well as the work of others of their generation like daniel clowes, charles burns, seth (gregory gallant), chester brown, joe matt, or even some of the young “underground” illustrators on the american scene, like simon hanselmann, is based on a desire to portray the cracks in an excess of positivity behind which dwell the great, negated phantoms of american fiction and society: solitude, alienation, the protection and pressure of the reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 5 based on a critical re-reading of hegel, and on phenomenology, heidegger points out in being and time (1927) § 82: “thus hegel can define the essence of spirit formally and apophantically as the negation of a negation. this ‘absolute negativity’ gives a logically formalized interpretation of descartes’ cogito me cogitare rem wherein he sees the essence of conscientia.” and he adds: “time is ‘abstract’ negativity. as ‘intuited becoming’, it is the differentiated self-differentiation that ‘is there’, that is, objectively present. 14 aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo desire to portray the cracks in an excess of positivity behind which dwell the great, negated phantoms of american fiction and society 15 identical and the standardized, the violence of consensus. at least since the 1950s, the house with a yard and pool has been the incentive that the “american way of life” offers the performance society, but it is also its greatest hoax. like any other house in the paintings of hopper and hockney or in the stories of john updike and john cheever, the home portrayed, through a negative approach adopted by these artists, is the emblem of the space of sameness and the excess of normalcy. in the same way, for lynch, all these cases are characterized by the desire to turn the void into a compensatory space for the depictions of the home that promise a preconceived happiness. it is only in this way that the image of the empty, abandoned house at the end of john cheever’s short story “the swimmer” (1964) can be understood. in the end, the tearing and subtraction referred to above are meaningless if they are not accompanied by their opposite, the ascent, the anabasis. indeed, in one of his last works, the entrance to the monte sant’angelo metro station in naples, italy, anish kapoor has designed two complementary structures: one externalized and the other gaping inwards. in his works, like fontana’s, the tear and the cut would be meaningless if they didn’t expose the abyss (abgrûnt). negativity entails both the reversibility and the dissimilarity of the image itself, the emergence of what medieval theologians called the vestigium. it is significant that movements outside the “underground” belonging to other, more commercial spheres of the comic strip industry, such as the revival of superheroes since the 1980s, have engaged in similar operations in narratives with codes that are genre expressive. it is interesting to note that in the work of authors like grant morrison, neil gaiman and dave mckean, or frank miller, universes of visual saturation that transcribe an obsessive depiction of evil coexist with openings into the void and empty space. these openings are associated with narrative instances of violence, sacrifice, redemption or transcendental experiences of the protagonists. this is the meaning that can be ascribed to the central empty spaces on certain pages of arkham asylum (pp. 6-7), violent cases (1987, pp. 26-27, 38-39) by neil gaiman and dave mckean or ronin (vol. 3; p. 24) by frank miller. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos from the perspective of the construction of us identity, there is an image of contemporary television fiction that clearly expresses the link between negativity, emptiness and negative forms of evil and gloom as something objectively present and thus external to spirit, time has no power over the concept, but the concept is rather ‘the power of time’.” 16 in light of such operations and of the above exploration of here and twin peaks, it would seem appropriate to define the space representative of evil not as a violent release of passions but precisely as a consequence of its opposite: a-pathy, the absence of pathos and passion. “when humans are not moved by passion, which launches them into action, they fold in on themselves, and depraved feelings are born,” suggests kierkegaard (marina, 2011, p. 57). twin peaks, which plays with the narrative baggage of the first two seasons, uses negativity to establish a productive link between the “void of escape”, on the one hand, and a set of forms of evil arising from the a-pathy or stagnation of eccentric characters, some of whom are clearly inspired by icons created by authors like chester gould in dick tracy. here, which does not address evil but does take on heidegger’s idea of negativity, bases its journey on a succession of layers of time in an exploration dependent on a lack of pathos. from the perspective of the construction of us identity, there is an image of contemporary television fiction that clearly expresses the link between negativity, emptiness and negative forms of evil and gloom: the final scene showing don draper (jon hamm), the protagonist in the series mad men, doing yoga in the final episode (“waterloo”, 7.7), which is followed by the coca-cola “hilltop” ad (1971), the perfect definition of positivity in the performance society. it could be viewed as a response to the carousel of family images in here, the empty glass cube in twin peaks or the poetics of chris ware. “it’s the real thing” sings a group of young people of different ethnic backgrounds on a hilltop; different, close, but able in their convergence to flatten, in an unsettling manner, any difference between them. compared to the “can-do” attitude based on the negation of difference and individual pathos that the character don draper repress during the series mad men, the negative approach, like the mystic dimension in the case of the apophatic aesthetic, is precisely the opposite: a desperate vindication of passion made through the topology of silence, of subtractive forms. aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo a desperate vindication of passion made through the topology of silence, of subtractive forms 17 burns, ch. (1995). black hole. princeton-: kitchen sink press. cheever, j. (1964). the swimmer. the new yorker, july 18, 1964. clowes, d. (1993). like a velvet glove cast in iron. washington: fantagraphic books. crumb, r. (ed.). (1981-1993). weirdo. san francisco: last grasp. gaiman, n. and d. mckean. (1987). violent cases. birmingham: escape books. gould, ch. (1931-1977). dick tracy. chicago: chicago tribune. han, b. ch. (2012). la sociedad del cansancio. barcelona: herder. heidegger, m. (1927). sein und zeit. halle: max niemeyer. [being and time, state university of new york press, 1996] herriman, g. (1913-1944). krazy kat. usa: king features syndicate. kafka, f. (1926). das schloß. munich: k. wolff. king, f. (1918-). gasoline alley. chicago: tribune content agency. lynch, d. (2006). catching the big fish: meditation, consciousness, and creativity. jeremy p. tarcher/ putnam. marina, j. a. (2011). pequeño tratado de los grandes vicios. barcelona: anagrama mathieu, m. a. (1991). julius-corentin acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves. paris: delcourt. mathieu, m. a. (2011). 3”. paris: delcourt. mazzucchelli, d. (2009). asteros polyp. new york: pantheon books. miller, f. (1983-1984). ronin. dc comics. miller, f., sienkewicz, b. (1986-1987). elektra assassin. marvel comics. molotiu, a. (ed.). (2009). abstract comics: the anthology. seattle: fantagraphics. morrison, g. and d. mckean. (1989). arkham asylum. dc comics. nussbaum, m. (2001). the fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. cambridge: cambridge university press. oteiza, j. (2003). quousque tandem…! pamplona: pamiela. references reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos aesthetics of negativity in us television fiction and comics... ivan pintor iranzo 19 gilligan, v. (2008-2013). breaking bad. amc. goddard, d. (2015). daredevil. netflix. hodari, ch. (2017). luke cage. lynch, d. (1986). blue velvet. de laurentiis entartainment group. lynch, d. (1997). lost highway. ciby-asymmetrical productions. lynch, d. (2006). inland empire. absurda-studio canal-fundacja kulturycamerimage festival. lynch, d. (2017). twin peaks: the return. showtime networks. perrotta, t., lindelof, d. (2014-2017). the leftovers, hbo. rosenberg, m. (2015). jessica jones. netflix. weiner, m. (2007-2015). mad men. amc. cinematographic references pintor, i. (2015). nunca volveremos a casa: la figuración del hogar en mad men. in r. crisóstomo and e. ros (eds.), mad men o la frágil belleza de los sueños en madison avenue (pp. 107-133). madrid: errata naturae . pintor, i. (2017a). figuras del cómic. forma, tiempo y narración secuencial. bellaterra: universidad autònoma, etc. col. aldea global. pintor, i. (2017b). el morador del umbral. un espectador para twin peaks. in e. ros and r. crisóstomo (eds.), regreso a twin peaks (pp. 203-228).. madrid: errata naturae. spiegelman, a. and f. mouly. (eds.) (1980-1991). raw. new york: penguin books. vaughn-james, m. (1975). the cage. toronto: coach house books. vega, a. (2004). arte y santidad. cuatro lecciones de estética apofática. navarra: universidad de navarra. ware, ch. (2012). building stories. washington: fantagraphic books. ware, ch. (2000). jimmy corrigan, the smartest kid on earth. washington: fantagraphic books. hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada universidad internacional de la rioja reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 75 hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada universidad internacional de la rioja he prestigious american art deco artist hildreth meière provided humanitarian assistance to the victims of the spanish civil war and in the second world war. acting as the vice-president of the american spanish relief fund created in 1937 and run by p. francis x. talbot, s. j. with the goal of helping people affected by the war in the franco zone, and to also deliver medicine and medical supplies from the united states through diplomatic channels. she visited spain in 1925, 1938 and 1961. on the first trip she came to see the works of spanish painters and made contact with important aristocratic families of the time (the duke of sotomayor, the marquises of la romana and arcos, the duchess of vistahermosa, etc.). in 1938 she started humanitarian aid, collecting money and donations from new york society for orphans of the civil war and acted as a propaganda distributor for the francoist cause in the united states. on this occasion she met with people familiar with the situation in spain to solve the problems of humanitarian aid: luis bolín, pablo merry del val, cardenal gomá, carmen de icaza, and mercedes sanz bachiller. meière actively participated in providing humanitarian aid in the franco zone during the years of the civil war while also acting as a staunch supporter of the francoist cause. after the civil war she continued her collaboration to alleviate aid deficiencies in spain by facilitating the transport of anesthetics, medicines, surgical materials, etc, but her t ab st ra ct 76 * orduña prada, m. “hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 75-94. web. recibido: 29 de julio de 2019; 2ª versión: 15 de octubre de 2019. perspective towards francoism was changing and gradually her ties to spain weakened. it was only three years before her death in 1961 that she made one last trip to spain. key words: meière, spanish civil war, humanitarian assistance, second world war introduction hildreth meière was one of the most prolific american artists of the art deco period, with a career that lasted nearly up until her death in 1961. born in new york, she had a studio in manhattan. she was trained as an artist in italy and in the art schools of new york, san francisco, and chicago. besides being a pioneer in the application of different artistic techniques (especially murals) throughout her life, she won various prizes and awards and was the first woman admitted to the new york city art commission. among her numerous art projects, she was commissioned eight projects for the nebraska state capitol and various church decorations, such as the mosaics in st. bartholomew’s church on park avenue in new york city, the ceramic in the ceiling of the university of chicago’s chapel, the reredos in st. paul’s chapel of cranbrook, michigan, and the mosaics in the temple emanu-el in new york city. she also designed or painted decorations for various banks and theaters, the radio city hall in manhattan and the rockefeller center promenade café1. on her first trip to spain in the 1920’s, not only did she establish family contacts, her artistic side led her to discover some of the artistic landmarks in spain such as the prado museum or the monastery of el escorial. she also visited some private collections of portraits of spanish aristocracy. as she did throughout her life on numerous trips around the world in search of new artistic skills, learning new painting techniques and discovering new artists were all reasons for her travels to spain. apart from her artistic life which was studied in detail by coleman and murphy, from 1936-1945 meière was deeply devoted to organizations that benefited civilian victims of the spanish civil war and the second world war. her dedication to such organizations had important links, especially in the case of the spanish conflict, to her identity as a practicing catholic. she was involved (often with a role such as a vice president or treasurer) with many humanitarian aid groups, one of them being the american spanish relief fund, the committee to send medicines and anesthetics to spain, and the french civilian relief. hildreth meière was one of the most prolific american artists of the art deco period. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 77 hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada she was involved with many humanitarian aid groups, one of them being the american spanish relief fund, the committee to send medicines and anesthesics to spain, and the french civilian relief. 78 it will be necessary for this study to explain what the american spanish relief fund was. it was founded in may of 1937 with the idea of giving aid to the people most affected by the war in the franco’s zone and was run by a jesuit priest named francis x talbot. the goals were to “collect funds to be used for medical aid and assistance in spain or for food or clothing” (talbot, letter to secretary of state cordell: 2)2.this assistance was primarily destined for franco’s spain because, as father talbot himself pointed out in a request for funds “the proceeds will be applied to the american spanish… while the leftists and communists are sending over hundreds of thousands of dollars to red spain, we catholics have contributed only a few thousands of dollars for our people in white spain” (talbot, letter: n. p.)3. this organization was established after the creation of the american committee for spanish relief which had emerged in the shadow of the american catholic bishops and whose donations were sent to the red cross for later distribution in spain. however, donations made to the american spanish relief fund were both used and distributed by the spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy (gonzález gullón 322). reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 79 and the committee to send medicines and anesthetics to spain was founded in june of 1940 during the spanish post-war period “to send medicines, drugs, anesthesics, vitamins, etc., to mr. and mrs. alexander weddell for distribution through the american embassy in madrid” (meière 1942: 2)4. the idea was that the united states would obtain medicine and send it to spain through diplomatic channels. taking into account the dramatic situation and the shortages in spain, it was logical that supplies were asked for instead of money. having the funds did not guarantee that spain could buy medicine. the goals were to “collect funds to be used for medical aid and assistance in spain or for food or clothing”. 2 rev. francis x. talbot, s.j. letter to secretary of state cordell (may 11, 1937), georgetown university library. america magazines archives. spain material-america spanish relief fund (1936-1937), box 20, folder 16. 3 rev. francis x. talbot, s.j. letter (november, 10, 1937), georgetown university library. america magazines archives. spain material-america spanish relief fund (1936-1937), box 20, folder 18 4 dissolution of the committee to send anesthetics and medicines to spain, december 8, 1942. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution. box 5, folder 5.35, (2 of 2). civilian war service records. spanish civil war. committee to send anesthetics and medicines to spain, (1940-1943). the official position of american catholics in relation to the spanish civil war and the parties to the conflict was formed during the national catholic welfare conference (ncwc) with us bishops. however, it was catholic newspapers and magazines, with some exceptions, who carried out propaganda tasks for the franco regime among catholics (gonzález gullón 21). one of the best examples was america magazine which, during the years of the spanish civil war, was not only a platform for the transmission of anti-communist slogans and texts in favor of franco’s spain, but also published editorials, announcements, or letters from the editor with requests for donations and funds to help spanish catholics. meière was a tireless traveler who toured nearly the whole world during her life. she made three trips to spain, the first being largely related to a relationship she had established with a part of spanish society, namely her family. her visits to spain took place during three distinct moments: under the dictatorship of primo de rivera in 1925, during the civil war in 1938, and finally under the franco regime in 19615. this paper examines what meière perceived regarding the reality of spanish society during the two significant periods in spanish history in which she visited spain, specifically her the first two visits in 1925 and 1938. it also examines the family connections she established which were fundamental in her decision to become involved with humanitarian aid during the civil war. first contact with spain in 1925, with the approval of king alfonso xiii, the first stage of the dictatorship of primo de rivera (a military directorate) gave way to a civil directorate in an attempt by the dictator to institutionalize the regime. this same year the regime also started to take measures to boost the political and economic life of spain (jover zamora, gómez-ferrer & fusi 563). meière was a tireless traveler who toured nearly the whole world during her life. hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada 80 5 regarding her third visit, in the hildreth meière archives there is no written documentation of this trip, only photographs and slides of her visits to cities such as granada or sevilla. the first objective of hildreth meière in her visit to spain in april of 1925 was to see firsthand some of the primary spanish monuments and the works of great spanish painters so as to continue her artistic training in different techniques. meière also wished to establish contact with members of the spanish aristocracy she was related to. her visit to spain was preceded by a letter addressed from her uncle thomas mckean meière to the duke of sotomayor, pedro martínez de irujo. this letter not only announced the visit of meière and communicated her interest in the portraits of gilbert stuart which the duke owned, but it also let them discover their family connections. in fact, they were kin of thomas mckean, one of the signers of the declaration of independence of the united states, represented by the count of delaware and later the governor of pennsylvania. in addition to detailing issues about the branches of the family tree that they had in common, mckean invite the duke to visit the united states mentioning, “and if you should do so, i, and your many cousins here, would certainly like the pleasure of seeing you in baltimore” (mckean 2)6. meière and louise hamilton (her friend which accompanied her on the trip) were received by the duke of sotomayor and with him they called on various family members and visited the prado museum, the royal site of san lorenzo de el escorial, the monasterio de guadalupe, and toledo. besides her visit to the prado museum which made an impact on her as an artist, another activity that interested her greatly was attending a polo match at the club de campo villa de madrid. there she had the opportunity to meet, thanks to the duke, members of the royal family7. specifically, she met infanta isabella, the prince of asturias, and the queen which she described in letters as, “looking as smart and young and pretty as possible” (meière 1925: 1)8. in those years, despite the fact that alfonso xiii as king was not exempt from controversy or difficulties (seco serrano), the presence of the royal family in madrid’s social life was something quite habitual though it was still very surprising to the american artist. the correspondence that meière maintained with her family in the united states during her visit mainly consisted of descriptions of new family members she met in spain, along with some mentions of places she had visited such as segovia or burgos. apart from mentioning the duke, his wife, and some of his children, she also met other family members such as the marquesses of romana, the maquis of aros, the marques of lamberty, and the duchess of vistahermosa. the latter, reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 81 6 letter from thomas mckean to the duke de sotomayor, march 23, 1925. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.35. hm correspondence with spanish relatives, 19251939. 7 she had previously expressed her interest to the duke, “i said i was very anxious to see the king, and the duke said he would take us to the polo on saturday”. letter from hildreth meière to thomas mckean, april 10, 1925. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.35. hm correspondence with spanish relatives, 1925-1939. 8 she had previously expressed her interest to the duke, “i said i was very anxious to see the king, and the duke said he would take us to the polo on saturday”. letter from hildreth meière to thomas mckean, april 10, 1925. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.35. hm correspondence with spanish relatives, 1925-1939. 9 letter from hildreth meière to thomas mckean, april 10, 1925. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.35. hm correspondence with spanish relatives, 1925-1939. hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada the first objective of hildreth meière in her visit to spain in april of 1925 was to see firsthand some of the primary spanish monuments and the works of great spanish painters. 82 in the same way the relationships forged during this initial foray were crucial in converting meière into an active defender of the francoist cause during the spanish civil war. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 83 sister of the duke of sotomayor, was described by meière as someone, “who is a lady-in-waiting to the queen mother, and she would try to get all the mckean descendents to meet me” (meière 1925: 2)9. for an american in the 1920’s, the experience of meeting members of the spanish aristocracy, some of which she was related to, suddenly became more important than the artistic pursuits that had originally inspired her trip. in fact, the documents surrounding meière includes numerous letters where she describes her various trips around the world, the countries she visited, and the economic, social, and political10 climate of each as well as various works of art that she felt could serve as a reference for her artistic techniques. however, in her first visit to spain are no such references. in reality this first contact with spain permitted her to establish a connection which resulted in a rich correspondence with some members of the martínez de irujo family, especially pedro de sotomayor and isabel de vistahermosa, with which whom she exchanged information about the situations in both spain and the united states starting in the year 1925. in the united states they referenced the economic crisis which gave rise to the great depression and in the case of spain they mentioned the supposed arrival of the republic and some of the key events surrounding it such as the revolution of october 193411. in the same way the relationships forged during this initial foray were crucial in converting meière into an active defender of the francoist cause during the spanish civil war and was also the impetus for her second visit to spain. meière and spanish civil war meière’s second visit to spain took place during the war, in august of 1938. she was acting as a representative of the american spanish relief fund. this trip, in addition to allowing her to reunite with her family, was fundamental to her humanitarian activities. up until this visit, meière had carried out an important role in collecting funds and donations among new york society with the aim of assisting orphaned children by the spanish civil war and as a promoter of the francoist cause in the united states. it was usual for her that during that period to have gatherings in her hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada 84 9 letter from hildreth meière to thomas mckean, april 10, 1925. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.35. hm correspondence with spanish relatives, 1925-1939. 10 for example in 1934 while she was doing some paintings in baviera (germany), she wrote to some friends in the united states relating with detail the sensation that she noted in the germans who were anticipating a visit from hitler. apart from being a complete physical description, meière indicated “i suppose i have the average american attitude and antagonism and prejudice about him, but i admit i was rather impressed by him […] it´s as though lindberg at his greatest popularity and babe ruth were combined and had been elected president at home”. letter from hildreth meière to ellie lloyd, august 13, 1934. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.65. correspondence business. 11 isabel de vistahermosa wrote “we had a very bad time all over the country since october last”. letter from isabel de vistahermosa to hildreth meière, january 27, 1935. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.41. correspondence with spanish contacts. studio, which were attended by architects, other artists, and members of new york high society. at times father talbot attended himself and made fierce defenses of the francoist cause, influenced by his catholic formation with anti-communist influences12. it must be taken into account that the news that arrived in the united states about the spanish civil war and its effects on civilians gave rise to an important mobilization between different sectors of society. the position of the roosevelt administration was largely responsible, as pointed out by several scholars13 because not only did they maintain an embargo on the sale of arms (thomàs), they also made it difficult to provide any sort of humanitarian aid to spain. the neutrality policy which the roosevelt administration had maintained since the beginning of the civil war was questioned a year later, and there was an intense debate between pro-loyalists and american catholics who supported franco. in the case of catholics, it was especially evident from the national catholic welfare conference, the body responsible for official positions and in relation to the conflict. the roosevelt administration’s defense in the maintenance of neutrality was reflected in the publication of a memorandum which reached a wide audience14. thus mobilization took place around associations and organizations of a humanitarian nature. some groups refused to take sides and provided humanitarian aid from a neutral stance, such as the quakers. the lack of public funds and government support from the united states to finance humanitarian aid destined for spain were deciding factors for these associations and organizations to carry out the important tasks of collecting donations and delivering food, clothing and humanitarian material in general (smith). meière was able to enter spain during a moment in which the state department was especially especially selective when granting passports and permits to travel to spain because she was traveling as a representative of the american spanish relief fund. the passport request was submitted by father talbot as the head of the humanitarian organization15. francis x talbot was editor of american magazine between 1936 and 1944 and during years of spanish conflict he was a strong defender of the francoist cause, publishing numerous articles in which he mixed his francoist sympathies with anti-communist americanism (chapman). talbot’s close relationship with the diplomat juan f. de cárdenas should also be taken into account. cárdenas acted as the official agent of franco’s government in the united states and was a supporter of america reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 85 12 although in 1934 during a stay in germany she traveled to oberammergau specifically to see hitler’s entrance at a rally, there is no record that possible fascist influences were decisive in her support for the francoist cause. although she acknowledged that she was impressed by the paraphernalia and the environment in which people were waiting for the führer, she indicated that “i suppose i have the average american attitude and antagonism and prejudice about him.” letter from hildred meière to ellie lloyd, august 13, 1934. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.65. correspondence business. 13 this can be verified in bosch (2012) o merino (2017). 14 memorandum in support of the retention of the spanish embargo”. washington, the catholic university of america. 1939. library of congress, washington d.c fondo harvard library college, spanish civil war, microform 84/3771 15 this is stated in the letter addressed to the state department with the request. letter from francis talbot to r. b. shipley. june 11, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5. 31. civilian war service records. spanish civil war. correspondence, 1938 hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada she was traveling as a representative of the american spanish relief fund. 86 87 since meière was a supporter of franco she considered it a very important trip because it would allow her to return to the united states to offer firsthand information about franco’s spain after touring different cities. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 87 magazine. he even suggested that father talbot and his colleagues travel to the francoist zone of spain “by explaining how franco was simply attempting to rid spaniards of a videous soviet-direct government” (chapman 20). traveling to spain from certain countries during the war was complicated. because the united states had declared a moral embargo, britain and france had taken positions of nonintervention, and the spanish embargo act had been signed in early 1937 (lópez zapico 88), the state department required that all travelers to spain register themselves (del rey 119). meière’s passport stated she was “[…] a relief worker on assignment to spain, and this passport is therefore valid for travel in that country”16. the organization of the trip, the journey through franco’s spain, and the contacts in the united states were obtained via the official agent of franco’s government in the united states: juan francisco de cárdenas17. meière had three goals on this trip. the first was personal in nature; she wanted to find her spanish relatives and see how they were doing in the midst of the conflict. “i heard that pedro was a hostage at bilbao for months; that maria and christine were in embassies as refugees; and that one of the vistahermosa sons was in hiding in madrid. they’ve all gotten out now—except the boy who is an embassy; but pedro’s oldest son has been killed” (meiére 1938: 7)18. in regards to her other goal on the journey, since meière was a supporter of franco she considered it a very important trip because it would allow her to return to the united states to offer first-hand information about franco’s spain after touring different cities. she considered this crucial in order to get americans to support franco. in fact, during her visit even the duke of sotomayor supported her in disseminating propaganda: “i am delighted that after your visit to spain, you are able to give conferences about our real situation” (sotomayor 1)19. her last goal was what truly linked her work to providing humanitarian aid through the american spanish relief fund. meiére interviewed cardinal gomá and discussed with him the use of the different funds that were being sent from the united states and how the association was carrying out humanitarian aid. the journey of meiére into franco’s spain took place between august 8th and 20th, 1938. during this time she visited places such as irún, san sebastián, burgos, valladolid, ávila, leganés, hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada 88 16 passport, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 17 as she wrote to a friend in france, “he gave me a letter to give to the officer in charge of the frontier at irún”. in a letter from hildreth meière to marina hoffman. june 27, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.44. correspondence travels. 1938. and as she explained to her daughter, “cárdenas has written to burgos about me and has given me several letters of introduction”. travel diary, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 18 travel diary, august 9, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 19 letter from the duke of sotomayor to hildreth meière, december 14, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 19111960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 3, folder 3.41. correspondence travels. 1938. toledo, salamanca, bilbao, durango and guernica. she entered spain through hendaye and faced one final difficulty in her trip: she needed permission from the then united states ambassador to spain, claude bowers20, who had installed the us embassy in saint-jean-de-luz for a visa granting special to access to spain from france. after passing through irún, she went to san sebastián where she met the duke of sotomayor after three years apart. besides inquiring about the welfare of the different members of the martínez de irujo family, she explained to him the goals of her trip and “the sort of information i wanted to gather about welfare work and what i needed by way of help” (meière 1938: 43)21. the duke of sotomayor, through means of a diplomat, was able to obtain meière an interivew with luis bolín who was then the head of the national tourism service. she also conveyed her interest in interviewing cardinal gomá to obtain statistics on the number of orphaned children in the franco zone and her desire to learn about the needs of children in that area. she also indicated that “i wanted to see, not war horrors but the constructive side of national spain and to meet people who were directing the social work” (meière 1938: 44)22. with the help of luis bolín she obtained a pass from the office of press and propaganda and made the first visit to a humanitarian aid institution in franco’s spain, specifically, an auxilio social organization known as the brotherhood kitchen. they distributed take-home meals in special containers for the financially needy or sick people (orduña). meière described it as “a combination of social service, relief and war-time canteening” (meière 1938:46)23. meière established a friendly relationship with the diplomat’s wife and together they carried out a welfare visit that, although it cannot be confirmed from her account, was most likely through the delegación nacional de frentes y hospitales since they went to the general mola military hospital where they distributed tobacco among wounded soldiers and wounded prisoners. this hospital was a leader in the field of surgery and anesthesia and had on its team one of the most prestigious american surgeons who collaborated with the francoist troops in the rearguard, specifically dr. joseph eastman sheehan, who organized what was the first plastic surgery service in spain in this hospital24. to get a better idea of the depth of auxilio social, meière also visited valladolid where it was founded october 1936, where she had meetings with then general secretary carmen de icaza and with the founder of auxilio social mercedes sanz bachiller. before leaving spain she also visited a residence for girls taken in by auxilio social in lekeitio. this allowed meière to approach reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 89 20 in 2019 the memories of ambassador bowers have been reissued in which his mission during the spanish civil war from saint-jean-de-luz is detailed (bowers 2019). 21 travel diary, august 9, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 22 travel diary, august 9, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 23 travel diary, august 9, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 24 sheehan studied at yale, completing his training in cities such as bern, paris, london and heidelberg. (expósito& rubio& solórzano 2012). hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada to get a better idea of the depth of auxilio social, meière also visited valladolid where it was founded october 1936, where she had meetings with then general secretary carmen de icaza and with the founder of auxilio social mercedes sanz bachiller. 90 different institutions where humanitarian aid was being provided in the franco zone and enabled her to acquire information to allow the united states to spread propaganda of the regime. by way of pablo merry del val, chief of correspondents in the national press service with whom she had a meeting in burgos, helped get a meeting with cardinal gomá in toledo. through pablo merry del val, chief of correspondents in the national press service with whom she had met with his burgos, meiére was able to obtain a meeting with cardinal gomá in toledo. in writing about this meeting, meiére, who did not normally record minute details, recorded that with the money sent to him, the cardinal “divides it into three parts: one for children, one for the priests and nuns, and the third for those who are in desperate need and appeal to him”25. however, there are documents sent by cardinal gomá to father talbot specifying the amounts sent to different zones of spain divided into three groups. according to the dioceses their purpose was to alleviate the needs of children orphaned by war and needy people in general. during her stay in toledo meière was able to visit and film the ruins of the alcázar from both the inside and outside thanks to the permits and safe passages that merry del val had facilitated as both a photographic and cinematographic foreign journalist. the visit made a deep impression on her and she describes in her diary practically everything she saw, from the statue of carlos v, the empty swimming pool they used to bury the dead, the areas that they took refuge from bombs in, or for example indicated that “here and there were crude crosses, marking spots where different men were killed” (meière 1938: 46)26. meière continued her journey through different cities such as ávila and salamanca with the intention of visiting the different members of the martínez de irujo family, such as maría martínez de irujo, the viscount of manzanera or isabel de vistahermosa. ever a fan of art, she visited the cathedral of salamanca and the cartuja de burgos. she also met the painter ignacio de zuloaga and admired his sculptural and paintings. during her stay in spain she took numerous photographs and also filmed footage in addition to the materials she requested from the photography department of the delegation of press and propaganda28. all of this she sent to the united states along with propaganda posters that she could not take with her to the france because french officials at the border called them “fascist propaganda” (meière 1938: 184)29. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 91 25 travel diary, august 14, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 26 travel diary, august 15, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 27 travel diary, august 9, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 28 meière was very clear in the face of her propaganda action in the united states regarding the subjects of the photographs that would help her cause “red murders, martyrs and personalities, ruined churches, leaders, hospitals, auxilio social and falange”. travel diary, august 17, 1938 p.141. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. 29 writings. prose, spanish civil war. travel diary, august 20, 1938. hildreth meière papers, 1901, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution, box 5, folder 5.14. writings. prose, spanish civil war. although not addressed in this article, she later used the photographs and footage gathered in spain to aid her in the telling of her experiences in meetings with members of the american spanish relief fund, on radio broadcasts, or in conferences with the goal of praising the virtues of the new regime that arose from the war and to obtain funds for the provision of humanitarian aid. conclusions a prolific artist such as hildreth meière, with a manifest interest in travel and cosmopolitan in almost every way, offers several perspectives for studying and analyzing her different activities. one of the most interesting aspects of her life was the relationship she maintained with spain and the links she established with the united states. those links were, during the late twenties, of a strictly family and personal nature and broadened considerably during the spanish civil war. from the beginning of the conflict in spain, meière quickly decided to support franco’s cause and to collaborate from a humanitarian standpoint. this, combined with the news she received from her relatives and her practicing catholicism, could also have influenced her intense participation with father talbot not only with the american spanish relief fund but also in an organization called the american union for nationalist. merwin k. hart, the founder of the new york state economic council, was president of both organizations and was also the founder of the american union for nationalist. he also traveled to spain after meière in october 1938 and published a book about his experience. meière was a staunch advocate for the francoist cause and during her visit to spain she demonstrated great interest in constructing a story of what she saw in order to later spread francoist propaganda throughout the united states and acquire american allegiance to the new regime that was dramatically being imposed in spain. in fact, although her trip was permitted by us authorities because of the humanitarian factor, the only humanitarian aspect to the trip was her visit with cardinal goma who was the recipient and distributor of the aid from the american spanish relief fund. meière met with the highest spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy in order to learn more about the fate of the funds from american catholics in franco’s spain. the visits she made to institutions such as social assistance or the women’s section, rather than verifying the proper use of money from the american spanish relief fund, were, according to her own diary and notes, to praise the work of franco and exalt figures like pilar primo de rivera or mercedes sanz bachiller. furthermore, when she arrived in franco’s spain, the safe-passage was given to her as a foreign photographic and cinematographic journalist. additionally, a large part of the places visited by the artist played important roles in francoist propaganda. for example, she visited alcázar de toledo, the story of which was one key forms propaganda and one of the most important sociological myths of francoism. also the images she solicited from the delegation of press and propaganda combined her interest of what she saw as achievements of the regime with the destruction on the part of the republicans. this is why she hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada 92 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 was especially interested in pictures of churches destroyed by republicans and pictures of dead priests in order to generate ill-will in american catholics towards the republic, combining it with the anti-communism that formed part of the ideology of most american catholics at the time. although her collaboration through humanitarian aid to spain didn’t end with the war as she continued facilitate the acquisition of anesthesia, medicines, different surgical materials and clothing to the spanish population through the united states embassy in spain, her perspective on francoism did change. in 1942 when the united states had entered into the second world war she acknowledged in a letter to javier gaitán de ayala, representative of the united states spanish library of information, that despite her initial support for the francoist cause at start of the spanish civil war and her humanitarian relief efforts, she strongly opposed the presence of falange and the regime because of the similarities she saw with the nazi party. after the end of the civil war and her subsequent change of opinion regarding the franco regime, her ties to spain were gradually diminished and she only made one more trip to spain in 1961 before her death in 1964. testimonies of individuals disengaged from violent extremism are important to prevent the process of radicalization, testimonies of victims of terrorist attacks. interreligious activities, fomenting interculturality, involve students’ families, working at community-local and municipal level, promote the role of women in the prevention of extremism, control radical speeches and collaborating in projects with mosques, preventing radicalization in prisons with specific programs. advice through campaigns of the danger of the false online profiles and chats of extreme right, left and religious individuals and organizations. work in the deconstruction of islamist radical discourses through islamic law. keep working on counter-narratives through the internet and in educational centers (jalloul, 2017). putting in force a proper guideline for the prevention of radicalization that leads to violence within governments’ policies would mean that we understand the needs of our societies in a successful way, that we fight against violent extremism and terrorism, that we simply fight against the fear of the unknown. 93 bosch, a. miedo a la democracia. estados unidos ante la segunda república y la guerra civil española. barcelona: crítica, 2012. print. bowers, c. mi misión en españa. en el umbral de la segunda guerra mundial prólogo de ángel viñas. madrid: arzalia ediciones, 2019. print. chapman, m. arguing americanism. franco lobbysts, roosevelt’s foreign policy and the spanish civil war. kent: the kent state university press, 2011. print. coleman, c. & k. murphy. the art deco murals of hildreth meière. new york: andrea monfried editions, 2014. print. del rey, m. “los españoles de los estados unidos y la guerra civil (1936-1939)”. reden. revista española de estudios norteamericanos 7. (1994): 107-120. web. expósito, r., j. rubio & m. solórzano. “historia de una escuela que se convirtió en hospital”. enfermería avanza. january 2012. web. gonzález gullón, j. l. “la guerra civil española y la conferencia de obispos norteamericana”. hispania sacra 64:1. (2012): 315-341. print. references jover zamora, j. mª, g. gómez ferrer & j. p. fusi. españa: sociedad, política y civilización (siglos xix-xx). barcelona: random house mondadori, 2001. print. lópez zapico, m. las relaciones entre estados unidos y españa durante la guerra civil y el primer franquismo (1936-1945). gijón: trea, 2008. print. meière, h. hildreth meière papers, 1901-2011, bulk 1911-1960. archives of american art, smithsonian institution. memorandum in support of the retention of the spanish embargo. washington, the catholic university of america. 1939. library of congress, washington d.c archive of the harvard library college, spanish civil war, microform 84/3771 merino, j. c. “the first months of the spanish civil war in the united states of america”. historia actual on line 42. (2017): 35-43. web. orduña prada, m. el auxilio social (1936-1940). la etapa fundacional y los primeros años. madrid: escuela libre editorial/fundación once, 1996. print. seco serrano, c. alfonso xiii. madrid: arlanza, 2001. print. smith, e. american relief aid and the spanish civil war. st loius: university of missouri, 2013. print. thomàs, j. mª. roosevelt y franco. de la guerra civil española a pearl harbour. barcelona: edhasa, 2007. print. hildreth meière: connections to spain before and during the spanish civil war mónica orduña prada 94 microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 44 pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses an interview with evert jan van leeuwen mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid evert jan van leeuwen is a lecturer in english-language literature at leiden university, in the netherlands. he researches fantastic fictions and counter cultures from the eighteenth century to the present. he is also interested in the international, intertextual dimensions of genres like gothic, horror and science fiction, and explores how they manifest in the british isles, the low countries, and north america. he has recently co-edited the volume haunted europe: continental connections in english language gothic writing, film and new media (2019) with michael newton and has written articles and chapters about american gothic authors nathaniel hawthorne and edgar allan poe, amongst others. in relation to this, he has also published house of usher (2019) a book analyzing poe’s famous story “the fall of the house of usher” (1839), richard matheson’s related film script and the cinematic adaptation by roger corman in the context of the 1960s counter-culture. keywords: american gothic, popular culture, haunted house, horror, interview. mónica fernández jiménez: in an article published in the journal studies in gothic fiction titled “from hell house to homecoming: modern haunted-house fictions as allegories of personality growth” (2015), you claim that “since the publication of horace walpole’s the castle of otranto in 1764 almost every writer of gothic, horror, and supernatural fiction has published a haunted house story” (42). it is not surprising that sigmund freud’s concept of “the uncanny”—described as “a class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220)—comes to mind when talking about haunted houses, as they are familiar spaces. or, for example, rosemary jackson’s idea that with the emergence of gothic fiction in the eighteenth century we move from the purely marvelous to the uncanny, which she defines as “fears generated by the self” (14). however, there is another definition of the gothic as the rejection of enlightened rationalism, as per david punter’s famous study (5). the aesthetics of the houses that appeared in eighteenth-century european gothic fictions, evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 45 which in walpole’s case was a castle, point to the medieval past. these are very different from the houses that appear in american settings, which have no medieval past. the castle aesthetics is based on the medieval romances that inspired the first manifestations of the gothic in the eighteenth century. how do you then approach the haunted house formula translated into the american setting? evert jan van leeuwen: that’s a good question. i think i agree with how you present the history of the haunted house and the haunted castle in gothic fiction. david punter, who you just mentioned, and who is probably the most influential, pioneering scholar of the gothic, also explores the uncanny and talks about the uncanny as having to do with the ancient, with the secret, ultimately with the return of the repressed, which is a particular theoretical framework for approaching the gothic. my interest in both that article and the book i am working on right now (an extended study for which that article laid the foundations) has to do more with the present and the function of houses and haunted houses, or horror houses as i call them, in the present. i think you are right to say that it is difficult to simply translate the classic british or euro haunted castles into american culture because there is no medieval past. i also, to some extent, take a different route to other scholars like dale bailey, where i see the house not so much as a place where all sorts of things are hidden, where the house becomes a space where repressed desires and instincts are hidden away to then jump out at the protagonists in the story. i see the house from a different perspective as a space for discovery, in a positive sense. i base my work not on a freudian psychoanalytical tradition but on the humanistic psychological tradition, specifically kirk schneider, who wrote a book called horror and the holy (1993), the subtitle of which is wisdom-teachings of the monster tale. it is basically an application of humanistic psychology to the classic gothic—dracula (1897), frankenstein (181) and those kinds of texts. his point is that horror, rather than being about the return of the repressed, he says, “slashes through life’s surfaces… it cuts through all of our comforts” (2). that is the key aspect that i focus on, this idea that what horror actually does has not always to do with the repressed aspects of the individual psyche, but with more social, political, and economic facades through which we live our lives. and what horror does is basically break down those facades and to show us the world that we live in, as it really is. and that is based more on the humanistic psychological perspective, where the focus is not so much on characters going into their past and acknowledging and encountering repressed desires and instincts; it is about raising awareness in individuals about where they are, what their own personal ideas and ideals about their own life are, what they want to achieve, what kind of a person they want to be, what drives them as human beings. in that sense horror makes them aware of the tensions between social norms, social demands, and the constrictions that political, legal, and social institutions enforce on the individual. it drives them to ask questions about whether that individual is in fact in the right place. so rather than thinking about someone who is struggling, who is encountering feelings of anxiety or guilt, thinking about them evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 46 as neurotic or struggling with repressed desires and instincts that are coming into consciousness, it is more about how that individual, as an individual, as a self, struggles with the outside world. how the individual struggles with ideology and how they have to confront ideological aspects in their life and learn to become critical and independent from the hegemonic culture. that inspired me to take a new look at haunted houses as spaces in which characters go on a voyage of discovery, where what is behind the closed doors and in the basements and in the attics is not something inherently violent or destructive but something that can lead to growth, to insight, to awareness, and to the development of a stronger personality. i looked at that specifically in the context of haunted house fictions in which there are always characters who are the “effective protagonist” (see dawson). they might not be the main character in the film or novel, but they are the character who actually grows throughout the story. even though they may start out as more of a sidekick or marginal character, they end up surviving the house and, in a way, taking the central position. in that sense, rather than thinking about the gothic being all about the fragmentation of the self and especially haunted houses being a space in which the self collapses, as in “house of usher,” it is about the building of the self, about searching for wholeness. that is the theoretical basis i am coming from. the kind of texts that i have been analyzing are texts like rose red (2002) by stephen king. he wrote the screenplay for the tv series. another example is the house next door (1978) was a popular american novel, in its time. it is about a house that has no past; it is brand new. in his introduction to the novel, king writes that it is a traditional gothic text; he talks about the bad place, and its history, and its past, which is really weird because the whole point of that house in the novel is that it is brand new. it is built in an affluent suburb of atlanta, and the characters who live there say things like “we like our lives and our possessions to run smoothly” (19). that is one of the phrases. i think that novel does exactly what schneider says the classic gothic does, which is to slash through the surfaces of life. the characters in that novel are confronted with the ultimate spiritual emptiness of their lives, that are lived obsessed with material possessions and social status, making sure that their little suburban enclave is an in-crowd of people who go to the same club, play tennis with each other, have drinks at the club, lunch at the club, and visit each other and create an in-crowd based on economic prosperity and social status. in that sense political power is also involved; they basically create a closed community of the powerful. the house in the novel is built on those foundations. the land on which it is built is said to be too small and the wrong shape, not meant to be built on. but the architect sees that as a challenge. he wants to make his name, and wants to be known as this great architect who builds houses where no one else can. the theme of hubris comes into play, as the architect uses that challenge to make his name and become famous, rich, powerful, and influential. and so he builds the house where it should not be built. that is why everything goes wrong. the characters who move into that pernicious property move into the house for the wrong reasons. they are unmasked as people who aspire to wealth, social status, power, and influence rather than a good evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 47 life, ethically speaking. they are entirely focused and obsessed with the materialist consumer culture of the late 1970s. they see their value and the value of their lives in being the most successful consumers, being the most successful participants in that culture. they are what herbert marcuse describes in one-dimensional man (1964). it is a book about a one-dimensional suburban community in which people strive to be as one-dimensional as they can be because for them that is actually the epitome of life. and that gives the novel a very clear satirical bent. it suggests that if those are your goals, the houses that you live in are really prisons and that houses as the ultimate symbol of material prosperity will be destructive. that is what happens to these characters, they are literally gobbled up, they are first possessed by their property and then consumed by the consumer culture they uphold, so it doubles back on them. that is one clear example of my approach. mfj: that is fascinating. george saunders’ short story, published in the new yorker in 2012, “the semplica-girl diaries,” contains the same idea about perfect lives; but i would have never approached it as a gothic text because it is so postmodern in its style; so that is a lot of food for thought. i think your approach to the gothic is a route that needs to be taken. even though it is impossible to translate these medieval castles into the american setting, the house for some reason keeps appearing so we need to explore different roads. regarding the formula in the specific context of the united states and in popular culture, how has it changed through time? i am thinking of the works of hawthorne and poe, but then of what bernice m. murphy has called “the suburban gothic” (2) arising from the anxieties of the mass suburbanisation of america starting in the 1950s, where the aesthetic of the house completely changes. the latter are plainer, if you will. but then we have contemporary horror films like rob minkoff’s the haunted mansion (2003) where houses go back to the obviously not medieval but aristocratic decaying mansion model, which of course exists in the united states, but is different from the suburban gothic tradition. we could conclude that we also have a tradition within the united states, and i would like you to develop a little bit on that. ejvl: if you take poe’s “house of usher” (1839) as the big bang of american haunted house stories, we still have an allegory where the house becomes roderick’s head; it is his mind. the narrator is roderick, he is journeying into his own mind. and he is nameless, that is important. one of the most significant things about poe’s story, and why it has become a story that is so often reinterpreted, reimagined, retold in all sorts of different settings, is that it has become a template: the architecture of the house becomes a way of describing a spiritual journey. i think that is really important for the american haunted house genre. owning a house, especially in modern american culture, but in the nineteenth century as well, i think, was already a sign of being successful. it meant to have, not just a place to live, but a place in society, to be visible and meaningful. one of the things roderick says in the story, when he has a sort of premonition, is “i must perish in this deplorable folly!” (403). the word folly has many meanings, one of which is a miniaturised house in a garden, a fake ruin that is there for aesthetic reasons, evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 48 that has absolutely no purpose apart from just being picturesque. i think there is an irony there. poe was too much of a stylist not to realise that there is a pun in roderick’s phrase. what he realises is that he and his family are basically of the past. you could say it is a pastiche of the gothic, in which poe suggests that roderick is living in his own mind, that he has completely enclosed himself, and that he is no longer living in the real world. in that sense there is no real world in that story, there is no world outside of the house. roderick has basically disappeared from being. he has disappeared from lived experience. it is a very solipsistic story. i think hawthorne responded to that with the house of the seven gables (1851), where he clearly, on the one hand, followed the tradition in which the house has a past. there is a legend, there are rumours of mysterious supernatural happenings going on. but what i like about seven gables is that it is actually set in the present; it is not about the past. the house has been there for generations, but it is all about the pyncheon family, specifically clifford pyncheon, coming to terms with the present. critics have dismissed seven gables as a gothic story because of its happy ending. in traditional gothic and horror novels haunted houses either gobble up their inhabitants or they fall to ruins, and in this particular story what turns out to be the real horror is really the villains’ drive for power, affluence, social status and ownership of property and people. they want to have both legal control and material control of the assets, and that is really what is causing the ruin in the story. in his work on self-actualization, abraham maslow, the psychologist, said that what he calls self-actualizing people “live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mess of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world” (xii). and i think most of the pyncheons in the story live that kind of a life. they are too obsessed with the man-made mess of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that they think is what life is. the reason why it ends happily is that there are protagonists who grow out of that perception. the characters who die and the characters who come to a bad end clearly fail to do that, they hold on to the drive for power and control over others and use the house, its history, its status as a way of controlling others. whereas the characters who leave, you can be critical of them because of going back to their land but i do not think it is about that. i do not think it is about hawthorne having a go at his characters for leaving that house only to embrace an even more gothic mansion. it is about the fact that they have rejected the need to conform to the demands of their culture, and they are following their own wishes and their own desires. phoebe and holgrave marry because they want to marry not because they have to marry, not because other people expect them to marry; they do not have any vested interests in marriage. it is about the characters becoming much more independent and following their own particular desires and what is good for them. that makes it an important novel; maybe its happy ending was a bit avant-garde for the time. it did not fit within the american gothic genre, even though it dovetails with radcliffe’s endings. hawthorne liked it; he felt that was his better novel and i tend to agree with him. seven gables for me is his most complete novel. i do not have issues evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 49 with it ending happily because i have seen the characters grow and i have seen the characters haunt the house and search through the house, open the doors, break down the boundaries, come together and grow as characters. i think that is important for holgrave and phoebe specifically, the younger characters in the text. they find each other through the house. i think that is an important moment where, in american culture specifically, the house becomes about the present and about looking forward into the future. this is true for rose red as well. i love stephen king; i love his writing. i am a big fan. at the same time, i realise that almost nothing that he does is in any way original. most of his stories are adaptations of existing texts; but maybe that is his power, to make his sources his own. and i think in rose red he makes the haunting of hill house (1959) his own. for me rose red is all about characters learning and becoming aware of what their goals in life are, what they really want to do. the house becomes simply a playground for them to go on that journey of discovery. those who fail are those who remain egotistical, who remain interested purely in status and power. the parapsychologist is quite mad from the beginning; but she goes drunk on power and the idea that she is going to finally prove to the rest of the world that her theories are true and that other people’s theories are not true. she just wants to outdo everyone in her department; that is her goal in life. and so she suffers and eventually, of course, fails to achieve her goal. emery waterman, by contrast, starts off very much down in the doldrums. in the course of the story he learns to turn his face towards the future. he is a retro cognitive psychic, so in that sense he has got his face very much aimed at the past. there is a really important moment at the end of rose red where his dead mother comes out of the mirror and tries to grab him and pull him into the world of the dead and kathy says “for once in your miserable life, fight her!!!” while he is screaming for help. so initially he still cannot do it on his own and then eventually manages to expel her back into the mirror and that is a really important moment for emery, when he finally realizes that he has to take control of his own life and cannot constantly be looking towards the past. he has to acknowledge his own wishes, his own desires, and create his own path in life. and that is of course where king turns around the haunting of hill house. in jackson’s novel, poor eleanor eventually drives into a tree. that is the negative exemplar entirely. she is ostracized and stunted in her growth by everyone else around her. the external forces around her stop her from being herself, from trying to achieve her own goals. and she has that moment in the novel where she realizes that she too “wants her cup of stars” (21), which i think is wonderful, when instead she acknowledges what she wants, but everyone else in the novel does not allow her to achieve her goal. they all want to control her; they all want to project an identity onto her, and that eventually leads her to commit suicide. at least that is how i read the novel. she is driven to despair. but king creates emery, who manages to escape, who manages to defeat the house and start life anew with greater awareness of who he is, of where he is, and of what he wants to achieve in life. i think that is an important aspect of american haunted house movies that you really do evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 50 not see much in the classic gothic. the idea that they are labyrinths that the characters navigate but then come out of rather than get stuck in. i think that is important. mfj: i totally agree. it made me think of these templates and metaphors about the body and the house. you mention in your article that the formula of poe’s short story implies that the house equals the head (42), which actually is how you have started your answer, talking about bodies. for me it is impossible not to think about the film the invasion of the body snatchers (1956). many would say that this is not a gothic film. i am thinking again of jackson and her attempt to establish clear-bounded categories for which she invokes, as i said, the notion of “the uncanny” (14). i am wondering what you have to say about the boundaries, or lack of which, of the gothic genre with regards to other categories such as supernatural horror or science fiction products that deal with body horror or house settings. is this film gothic or not? you were talking about the present, the past, the body, the metaphors… and there is not one single template. ejvl: you are right. it is unavoidable to have these genre debates; how we categorize a book or a film says much about how we understand the text. maybe it says more about the viewer/reader than the text itself. over the past decades, there has been broad agreement that ann radcliffe is a gothic author. many of our definitions and understandings of what gothic conventions are were developed from late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century texts. but what do we do with frankenstein (1818)? is it gothic? is it science fiction? is it horror? that really depends on what the reader focuses on. if you are obsessed with the speculative science in the text, then it becomes science fiction. if you are fascinated with the trope of doubling and see frankenstein and his creature as alter egos, then you can link it to poe, dr. jekyll and mr. hyde (1886), or the picture of dorian gray (1890) and it becomes a gothic text. whether a text belongs to the gothic, sf, speculative fiction, or fantasy has much to do with how the particular reader would understand those genres, but also what the interest of the reader in those genres is. if you take the body snatchers, the most recent edition of which was published in the science fiction masterwork series, then it must be an sf text, but of course that is not true! it really depends on how you approach it, on how you read it because in many ways that text is a classic paranoid gothic text. it can be read in the context of robert miles’ argument about the gothic being about “the subject in a state of deracination, of the self finding itself dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation” (3). the text is probably one of the most uncanny texts that you could think of, where identity becomes such an ungraspable notion that you can no longer tell the difference between your real neighbor or the invaded neighbor, and you yourself start questioning whether you also may be invaded. have you been taken? it is the ultimate paranoid gothic text about the boundaries between self and other disappearing, and people in that sense becoming almost clones of each other. you can read it in the historical context of the 1950s and relate it to the cold war and evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 51 the red scare, and then maybe it becomes more of an sf invasion text. but if you focus on its gothic tropes of erasing and fragmenting identity, and dissolving the boundaries between self and other, then it becomes a classic gothic text. i think most texts in the fantastic genres are hybrid in this way. it is all a matter of degree: how much does one particular genre trope dominate and how much does another. i guess it is most often taught as an sf text because its publisher branded it as such, and the original film version is typical 1950s sf. but the 1978 film version has a definite gothic vibe, even if it stars leonard nimoy (from star trek). i have also seen j.g. ballard taught on gothic courses. ballard is the master of inner-space fiction. you could say that the gothic and inner space fiction are very closely aligned. “house of usher” is, if anything, an inner space fiction. so, it is very difficult to come to some kind of a definitive answer about whether the text is x or y, sf, gothic horror or fantasy. but it is a really important debate to have because it teaches us much about how we categorize and thus understand these texts, and about what our interests in these texts are. if you incorporate the body snatchers into a gothic course, it would work perfect with stephen king’s dreamcatcher (2001). what happens in dreamcatchers is that aliens invade the earth; it is very 1950s. but they do not do it in ufos or weird shuttles. they invade the minds of people. they are like clouds, not little green men. there is a wonderful moment in which the main character, jonesy, has been invaded by an alien and king writes at length how jonesy’s self, his core identity, hides away in his own mind. king then creates an inner mind as if it is an office space. he hides away finally because the alien is taking over his brain. he has to run and he closes his office door and he is in a tiny little office with a desk and things and he is hiding, looking out of the window, and the alien is right outside. and this is where king’s sf novel turns into a gothic text; he clearly turns to “house of usher,” this whole idea of the head being a house. he literalizes it in the context of the story, where he simply constructs a mind as if it is a house with rooms and offices… there is a library with lots of files. and the challenge for jonesy is to dare to step outside where the alien is so he can find the right files, which of course are metaphors for his memories and his knowledge, in order to defeat it because initially he is cowering away and hiding away in the secret corner of his own mind. by actually turning that into a space with doors, windows, walls, furniture, things to hide behind, filing cabinets to find things… he allows the story to become an allegory of someone who has to overcome his fears and confront his greatest anxieties—although in this case it is an alien called mr. gray (think of grey matter, the brain). i think that is what poe does. i think that is what he does in dreamcatcher, a novel that really starts out as a classic 1950s alien invasion novel and then slowly transforms into a gothic thriller because jonesy’s head becomes the house of usher. the haunted palace. i think that is where the two really overlap. open q&a session sofía martinicorena: i really love your vision of the gothic as a way of raising critical awareness about our positions in the world and i think that can really allow us to see the gothic as evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 52 something contemporary and relevant for us and not as something having to do with castles and monsters. you have said at the beginning that you are interested in the present and in the function of haunted houses in the present. considering this, i have a question about poe’s “house of usher” which deals with the fact that we cannot seem to stop reading it despite being really old. you already explained that this text is a a template for many american obsessions like owning a house, and that explains a bit of its relevance. it has had so many adaptations like the silent movies of the 1930s, the roger corman adaptation about which you wrote a book, or even a 2020 film entitled the bloodhound. there are musicals and theatre adaptations, lots of graphic novels… you can think of hundreds of different examples. what is there in this text that makes it so compelling? not only for contemporary audiences but for audiences all throughout the years. i think your analysis of roger corman’s movie is about how roderick usher is a symbol for the counter cultural 1960s. that is an example of the translatability of poe’s text into the present and a myriad different contexts. so, what is it in the text that makes it so compelling, so relevant, so thought-provoking for us and for us to think about our present and our past and the relationship between them, which is often expressed in gothic terms? ejvl: i was obsessed with that film and with vincent price as a teenager. i never thought about it that way at the time but i thought price in the role of roderick was most fascinating; i was completely in awe. when i watched rebel without a cause (1955), there is that famous shot of james dean going “aaaaghh, you’re tearing me apart.” i was like “i’ve seen that before!” price does exactly the same thing; he is like “aaaaghh!” then i realized that what makes him so fascinating is not that he is a disturbed old man; it is his experience, it is what he has experienced, it is the complete angst of a meaningless existence. that is what attracted me to it. you know, i actually am a big fan of disney’s the haunted mansion (2003). i watched that thinking it was going to just be a piece of fluff. a film based on a theme park ride? i mean what is that? and it has eddie murphy, not a famous horror actor. i do like murphy a lot; i grew up with him and love films like beverly hills cop and the golden child; so murphy’s presence got me interested. i think the film is really subtle, i think there are many little jokes and ironies there. the prophetic lady in the glass, madame leota, draws jim evers towards her and says “whom do you seek?!” and he says “i am seeking a way out of here!” which is all he is interested in. and then she says “then you must look within.” that is straight from “house of usher”; that is what you have to do. you have to journey into your own mind and look deep within your soul. david elkins, who is a humanistic psychologist, has said that outside organized religion the concept of the soul is extremely meaningful still. even people who do not believe in god and the afterlife or anything like that still talk about “soul.” he says, when we talk about soul, “we must go down into the depths of our being” (44). in his work, elkins explains that when we talk about soulful experiences, or soul music, this is not about the vibrant, easy, happy-golucky, the things that come without any effort. it is about the things we struggle for; it is about the things we work hard at, the things we doubt, and about overcoming that struggle, evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 53 overcoming that doubt (see part 1; chapter 3). that is what haunted mansion is all about, despite its silly facade, because the film begins with jim evers saying “it’s love isn’t it,” and at that moment it is just an advertising slogan, he is trying to sell a house. he is using love and these really important words and phrases in a human’s life as advertising slogans. initially he talks in advertising slogans. when they arrive in the house, he sees the graveyard and he says “this [is a] historical sprawling manner with spacious grounds” and his wife says “hey, that’s a good! put that on the listing” and of course it is the daughter who says “and leave out all the dead people!” and so, what jim evers and his wife need to do, of course, is learn to look into their hearts, to find a spiritual meaning to life rather than just making lots of money by selling big houses, which is initially what they are obsessed with. he is late for his own anniversary because he is too busy selling a house; even when he talks to his wife initially in the film, he is pretending to sell a house. so even that film, which is a disney comedy based on a theme park ride, reproduces the kind of tropes that you find in so many haunted house films and novels in america. in many ways it has to do with rejecting materialist ideology by trying to find a spiritual path and spiritual fulfilment. it is about well-being rather than welfare. that is what makes it such an important text because poe’s story is about that angst, the angst of a meaningless existence. sm: i agree, that is what makes it universal in a way, its capacity to reach out of its context and to speak to people from all ages. laura álvarez trigo: i was wondering if you had any comment regarding the aesthetics of the house because you were speaking about the different adaptations of “house of usher” and that got me thinking about the houses, which look very different. if we think about the gothic mansion as compared to the aristocratic decayed mansion, how does that affect the horror? ejvl: when i think of american haunted houses, and i am limiting myself to the twentieth century, they are not castles, they are nothing like the classic gothic. but most of the time they are also not your brand spanking new condominiums; they are the ultimate suburban villa where you have the broad road, and some nice grass, and the sidewalk for the pedestrians, and then wonderful lawns… when i think of the house in the house next door or rose red, they are a kind of industrialist’s dream. it is mock gothic. it is still just a big sprawling mansion in a very urban environment. and the house in the people under the stairs (1991) is that kind of a house, or the house in halloween (1978). it is not a haunted house but it is a horror house. and what fascinates me about many of those modern houses, which are freestanding with a lot of grounds around—therefore, isolated—is that people are living together but there is so much space around them, and their houses are so large and roomy that they are still isolated because they can simply ignore the rest of the world. evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 54 in the people under the stairs, which i think is a fascinating film, the house does not have locks to keep people out, it actually has locks on the outside to keep people in. i thought that was a really important symbol. the family who lives there are not only trying to keep the evil world out, they are trying to keep whoever is in from going out, from meeting others. their daughter has never been outside and when the kid who infiltrates the house says “don’t be scared, you never seen a brother before… i mean a black dude… there’s black folks in this neighborhood,” she is like “neighborhood?” she has never heard that word. and fool explains: “a neighborhood, you know, outside.” this is really important in the film that in that suburban area, where everyone lives in these big, huge, beautiful, sprawling kind of suburban homes, they are all living alone, they are all isolated, they are alienated from each other, whereas the kid who infiltrates the house, who comes from the ghetto, constantly lives with other people. he actually is living in a community. one of the wonderful things about that film is that his community eventually ends up at the house to literally strip away all the things that these two people who live there have built up in defense against the real world. they are literally showing these people that they exist and cannot be ignored. the mantra of the two people who live in that house is “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.” basically, ignore the world. if you ignore the world, if you pretend it is not there, if you lock yourself in, then life seems grand. but, of course, they are real estate brokers and they own half the ghetto and they are exploiting the people there for their own welfare. that is part of the theme of that particular film. but they can only do that if they ignore the reality of those people’s lives. they can only keep exploiting them if they are blind to the misery of their lives. and so the small kid who manages to infiltrate manages to unmask it, and in the end his entire community comes to his aid as well. i think that is a really important aspect. so, for me that is when i think of the aesthetics of the american haunted house, its isolation, through what john de graaf has called “affluenza.” these families and the families who live in these houses have become so materially prosperous that they are able to build castles for themselves, isolate themselves, and ignore the rest of the world. and so these houses look beautiful, they are new, they have wonderful gardens, huge garages and they look like everyone’s dream house, but actually they are a hell house. they are prisons and people have imprisoned themselves in them. and i think that is key to the aesthetics of many modern american houses, that they actually look so much like the home we all want to own. they are not ruined castles and some of them do not even look creepy. they actually look really inviting and you think “wow, if only i could live there!” but then the films tell you the drawback of that, the dangers of becoming completely isolated and self-imprisoned inside a gilded cage. heather lukins: i want to revisit what you were saying about the house as the site of trauma and the house as body. i was thinking about how the house has developed through the gothic into the horror genres. you were saying that the house is a place for discovery rather than about things that are already hidden, that sort of reversal of the frontier narrative that happens evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 55 within the american house. why is it do you think that trauma has to come into the house, why is it never out there already? i was thinking about the film poltergeist (1982) and particularly how the house demolishes itself at the end. and then how that relates to the breaking down of boundaries of families, as in pet sematary (1983), where originally the trauma is out there and then it just sort of collapses in on the house and the family, particularly with the kid who is running around with a knife. why do you think that is that there is such a focus on the trauma invading the house and the family? ejvl: i think there is an important historical context which goes back to charles brockden brown’s edgar huntly (1799), where the protagonist suddenly wakes up and he is in the middle of the wilderness and then he ends up under a pile of corpses. that is a really horrific text. when i watched poltergeist as a teenager all i could think about was the kid with the braces, because i had braces and all i thought about was whether my braces were going to grow like that. then when i watched it later on, i suddenly realised that the film, despite all its sensational aspects, is really about an estate that has been built on an indian burial ground, which is a classic gothic trope. if you think of pet sematary, that joins those two well together. i would think of another film like the fog (1980) by john carpenter, which is about a town being built with stolen money. i think, ideologically, this is the underbelly of manifest destiny. if you think of american civilization historically as beginning on the east coast and then slowly sprawling west, i guess that is quite accurate. they went out west. so clearly, that is part of it. you can think of it as progress in the sense that the wilderness was paved and tarmacked and cities and houses were built but at the same time, of course, it is about a complete rejection of the actual landscape, and the actual people, and the actual animals that live there. so in many ways it is not just a psychological aspect; narratives like edgar huntly, or poltergeist can be read as revenge narratives. they are like those eco-horrors where you have nature’s revenge on mankind. they are powerful horror films at the moment. i think the idea of these external threats attacking the so-called nuclear family in their wonderfully comfortable home are a revenge of the original authentic landscape and its peoples and its animals who say “look, we didn’t move where you are, you moved where we are! we’re here! we’re living here! you can… you know, you can displace us violently but then we will seek revenge!” and i think that is a narrative that you find in frontier gothic. james fenimore cooper is important. but there is a tradition, of course, of gothic westerns that is rather underexplored. i looked into gothic spaghetti westerns, which are actually italian of course, but there are also some gothic american westerns that pick up on that idea, that there was actually a real kind of dark unrecognized aspect moving american civilization out west. and americans are still being confronted with it, i think. many of those films are very much about that. that is maybe where haunted houses and more of an ecological kind of angle would work well together if you want to explore that. it literally is the western wilderness striking back at artificial society. evert jan van leeuwen | pernicious properties: from haunted to horror houses reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1814 56 works cited brown, charles brockden. edgar huntly. penguin, 1988. dawson, terence. the effective protagonist in the nineteenth-century british novel. routledge, 2004. elkins, david. beyond religion. quest books, 1998. freud, sigmund. “the uncanny.” the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, translated by james strachey, the hogarth press, 1925, pp. 219-252. graaf, john de, et.al. affluenza: the all consuming epidemic. bk, 2002. jackson, rosemary. fantasy: the literature of subversion. routledge, 1981. jackson, shirley. the haunting of hill house. penguin, 1999. maslow, abraham. toward a psychology of being. third edition, whiley & sons, 1999. miles, robert. gothic writing, 1750-1820. second edition, manchester up, 2002. murphy, bernice m. the suburban gothic in american popular culture. palgrave macmillan, 2009. poe, edgar allan. “the fall of the house of usher.” tales & sketches, volume 1, edited by thomas ollive mabbott, university of illinois press, 2000. punter, david. the literature of terror: a history of gothic fictions from 1765 to the present day. 2 volumes. routledge, 1996. rivers siddons, anne. the house next door. bookspan, 2004. schneider, kirk j. horror and the holy. open court, 1993. van leeuwen, evert jan. “from hell house to homecoming: modern haunted-house fictions as allegories of personality growth.” studies in gothic fiction, vol. 4, no. 1/2. 2015, pp. 42-56. films and tv series the fog. dr. john carpenter, debra hill productions, 1980. the haunted mansion. directed by rob minkoff, walt disney pictures, 2003. house of usher. directed by roger corman, alta vista productions, 1960. the invasion of the body snatchers. directed by don siegel, walter wanger productions, 1956. the invasion of the body snatchers. directed by philip kaufman, solofilm, 1978. the people under the stairs. directed by wes craven, alive films, 1991. pet sematary. directed by kevin kölsch, di bonaventura pictures and room 101, inc., 2019. poltergeist. directed by tobe hooper, metro-goldwyn-mayer, slm production group, mist entertainment, amblin productions, 1982. stephen king’s rose red. directed by craig r. baxley, warner bros., 2001. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 110 the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world kworweinski lafontant university of south florida abstract with american society being dominated and shaped by white men, black masculinity takes on new shapes and forms as black men seek survival within their surroundings. through the boondocks, a comic strip that has been syndicated into a tv show, five different archetypes of black masculinity take the spotlight through the main characters in a satirical world virtually void of black women in emphasis of the dynamics of black men. huey is a revolutionary, riley is a hip-hop culturist, granddad is a conformist, tom is a traitor, and uncle ruckus is self-hating. no two methods to survival in white suburbia are the same, but what is shared is the collective need for the survival of the black community, in that the characters never stop looking out for each other regardless of the stark differences in how they express their black masculinity. keywords: blackness, tv series, animation, race, masculinity, comics, black culture. dominant cultures exist in any given society. these cultures hold systemic power and benefit from the society they exist within being molded and shaped to fit their needs best. in the context of social identity theory (sit), a dominant culture can be considered synonymous with an “ingroup,” whose members hold asymmetric power over those in the “outgroup,” (tajfel 98–99). consequently, members of the outgroup are subject to different kinds of discrimination exerted by the ingroup to maintain such power (tajfel 98–99). american society is no exception to this. from being right-handed to being able to see, american inventions, policies, and norms are largely shaped for those belonging to the dominant cultures. of america’s dominant cultures, two arguably reign supreme above the rest in terms of the benefits conferred: being white; and being a man. the intersection of these two main racial and gender ingroup identities results in white men holding the highest systemic power in the united states, and many american inventions, policies, and norms are shaped by and oriented toward white men. consequently, the lives of those existing outside of either (or both) of the aforementioned dominant cultures can be marred with the struggle to find alternative spaces kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 111 to survive within. black men embody a prime example of this struggle, being racially excluded from cultural dominance. mainstream masculinity in the united states is a set of qualities that is shaped by and for white men, going back as early as the founding of the country itself by an ingroup of white men. thus, black masculinity has continually been challenged to find ways to survive in a society that was not made for it. this paper argues that there is no one way for black masculinity to counter the whiteness of contemporary american society, and for every way that succeeds in doing so, an archetype of black masculinity is born. the framework for these archetypes is based on the self-categorization theory (sct) and its relationship with sit (trepte and loy 1). each archetype embodies a social category, specific to black masculinity; in response to the struggles inherent to outgroup membership in the united states, black men further differentiate in their approach to social life and survival. this paper labels and highlights five of these archetypes: revolutionary; hip-hop culturist; conformist; traitor; and self-hating. these five archetypes can be examined best through the lens of aaron mcgruder’s comic strip-turned-tv show, the boondocks, focusing in particular on the first season of the animated show. by drawing on existing scholarship and analyzing each main character through the archetype of black masculinity that they embody, and then analyzing how the archetypes interact with each other for survival, i will employ the boondocks to show how black masculinity survives in an american society and gender roles based on whiteness. i. background on the boondocks created by african american cartoonist aaron mcgruder in 1996, the boondocks was initially a syndicated comic strip published online, as well as in american newspapers up until 2006. it was adapted as an animated series of the same name, of which the first season aired in 2005 on adult swim, the adult programming section of cartoon network. as a tv series, the boondocks also later found airtime on black entertainment network (bet), and ultimately ran for four seasons concluding in 2014. both the comic strip and the tv series serve as prominent mediums for mcgruder’s commentary and criticisms on black popular culture, which—during the run of both the strip and the show—were oftentimes considered controversial. several episodes were revised or cancelled altogether, and the comic strip was relocated within a newspaper publication to reduce visibility or withheld altogether due to controversial topics discussed (krueger 313). the transition from comic strip to tv series thrusted the boondocks into an even greater spotlight for its nuanced takes of black popular culture in america, allowing it to spark conversation and debate amongst the masses. the tv series references notable moments in american history as well as current events, making it the perfect lens through which black masculinity in the united states could be analyzed; the boondocks bridges the roots of black history in america with the state of black masculinity in the early 21st century. this bridge is evident in the satire and clear references to popular culture and world events that are constantly kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 112 disseminated throughout the series. the show employs an entirely black and entirely male main cast set in a wealthy white suburb. such context can be read as an allegory for the position that the black community often represents in america as an outgroup existing in tandem with the dominant white society. through its main cast, the boondocks details the variety of self-categorizations/archetypes that black men may chose in response to their environment. ii. huey freeman—revolutionary named and modeled after the revolutionary leader of the black panther party, huey p. newton (1942–1989), 10-year-old huey freeman is the primary protagonist and often the narrator of the boondocks (tyree and krishnasamy 320). he is “the founder of 23 radical leftist organizations, including the africans fighting racism and oppression, or a.f.r.o” (tyree and krishnasamy 32). modeled after a black nationalist, huey is always looking out for the advancement of black people and “[he] is very critical of many aspects of modern african american culture, politics, racism, elitism, socioeconomics, and other societal ills” (tyree and krishnasamy 32). in the very first episode of the first season, “the garden party,” huey continuously experiences a prophetic dream of himself informing privileged white people of the oppression set upon the black community. he is often alone in these pursuits, as his grandfather (granddad) warns huey to not even dream of upsetting “white folks.” regardless, seeking revolutionary change through activism is the only way that huey knows in order to survive daily life as a young black man. sct proposes that an individual’s personal and social identity work together to guide behavior (trepte and loy 1), and such theoretical interpretation of social behavior is well manifested in huey’s attitude. huey recognizes his place as belonging to the society’s outgroup represented by black men and rather than searching for a way to continue existence in the outgroup, the revolutionary youth looks for ways to restructure the power dynamics and bring the black community into a social status as the dominant ingroup. this desire to elevate the status of black men in society grants huey a notable sense of awareness regarding his community’s actions. in manliness & civilization, gail bederman postulates that any interaction between a black person and a white person can be taken as a representation of the black community and its ideals against the white community and its ideals, as did the famous boxing match between jack johnson and jim jeffries (1–3). this refers to the principle of salience, which is a foundational component of sct (trepte and loy 2). this principle suggests that certain contexts and situations can make one increasingly aware of a single social category above all others (trepte and loy 2). this is the lens through which huey sees the world, and no other boondocks character does the same. the many things that his fellow black men overlook in the boondocks, such as the opening of a stereotypically popular fastfood chicken restaurant (“the itis”) or the lack of accountability from the black community kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 113 towards r. kelly’s actions1 (“the trial of r. kelly”), huey fails to brush aside as just another happening in the world. minimizing such events would not fit his nature as a revolutionary that seeks advancement for his people through awareness. rather, huey recognizes those aforementioned events as salient moments for black people, through which their lack of membership in the dominant white ingroup is increasingly apparent; the black stereotypes that those events purport pose a threat to any positive distinctiveness inherent to being a member of the black outgroup. positive distinctiveness is the combination of ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation (trepte and loy 4). the separation of the ingroup and the outgroup relies on greater positive distinctiveness within the ingroup than the outgroup, so that the power is held by the ingroup (islam 1782). stereotypes and controversies feed the derogation of the outgroup and further divide the two groups (trepte and loy 9–10). this is why the stereotypes of fastfood chicken consumption and the controversy of r. kelly’s sexual misconduct are pressingly salient moments for huey. such threats dampen the revolutionary efforts that seek to transform the black community into the dominant ingroup, which makes combatting these stereotypes and increasing positive distinctiveness a priority for huey. there is perhaps no greater manifestation of huey as a revolutionary figure than in “a huey freeman christmas.” in this episode, huey is redirecting his school’s christmas play to counter the white-washed christmas narrative that is supposed to be staged. he hires quincy jones as the music producer for the play, fires all his classmates and replaces them with professional actors, and portrays jesus as a black man, much to the dismay of his school’s white administration. even when faced with something as routine and blasé as an elementary school play, “huey ponders how to bring consciousness to people” (tyree and krishnasamy 35). in the end, the play is well received by a small audience of critics but boycotted by the rest of town due to the firing of their children. however, the people that attended the play were deeply moved, and the play even inspired huey’s teacher to become a professor of african american studies. huey views the need “to bring truth to the ‘ignorant masses’ [as] a heavy and complicated burden” but a necessary one (tyree and krishnasamy 35). increasing awareness among the black community is huey’s way of increasing positive distinctiveness, leveraging the spreading of information through mediums such as plays and the media that can largely impact the degree of salience by which members of a group ascribe to events and issues (trepte and loy 7-10). huey’s ultimate aim is to educate his own people and inspire them to arise from their current social position by avoiding derogation and increasing their own value. through the quest for advancement within his community, huey stays afloat in his white surroundings as a black man. 1 since 1996, r. kelly has been repeatedly sued and criminally charged for sexual misconduct with minors and child pornography, with most of the cases ending in settlement or acquittance, and he was also at one point married to a 15-year-old while he was 27 years old at the time. in june 2022, he was finally sentenced to 30 years in prison. kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 114 iii. riley freeman—hip-hop culturist riley is the juxtaposed, younger brother of huey. he is considered quite the opposite of huey, as riley has an “excessive identification with [mainstream] popular culture” and “rebels against anything he thinks is outside of hip-hop culture of being ‘cool’” (howard 160). despite living an upper-middle class lifestyle in a wealthy white suburb, riley truly “believes he is struggling in the streets to overcome ‘the man’” (timmerman et al. 172). in his performance of masculinity as a black man, riley embodies “cool pose,” which feminist scholar linsay cramer defines as “a performance of individuality integral in black culture” and “functions as a strategy for men and women who occupy black positionality to both cope with white domination and white patriarchy and resist it concurrently” (cramer 58). cool pose is engrained in hip-hop culture as an emphasis on style and individual expression through music, dance, fashion, language, and more (cramer 68). the need for performing the cool pose arises from centuries of “mistrust that the black male feels toward the dominant society” (howard 152). in the context of sct, the performance of cool pose feeds positive distinctiveness, where ascribing ingroup favoritism to the black-created hip-hop culture gives membership in the black outgroup credence that is not afforded to the white ingroup. riley recognizes the societal and political power that the dominant white culture holds, but he also recognizes the immense societal power that the black outgroup holds through hip-hop and defining what is “cool.” this gives distinctness to riley’s approach to survival compared to huey, as they both self-identify greatly with the black outgroup and fundamentally would not stray from it. however, huey seeks to transform the black community into society’s dominant ingroup, while riley labels the black outgroup as cool and rejects the notion of being a part of anything other than his marginalized cultural community. as a black man surrounded by the whiteness of his spatial community represented by the upper-middle class suburb, riley relies on the cool pose to survive this environment while also maintaining his black identity and avoid assimilation into white culture. in a similar manner to huey, riley heavily advocates for the success of the black community, but through the attitudes connected to cool pose aesthetics rather than societal advancement. in “the trial of r. kelly,” riley helps lead a protest in defense of r. kelly that vastly surpasses the support of the prosecution. the young man sees more fault in the legal system itself and the victim rather than r. kelly and asks the prosecutor, tom dubois, why “[he] should have to miss out on the next r. kelly album for that” (“the trial of r. kelly”). through his stance intrinsic to the performance of cool pose, the value of r. kelly’s contributions to hip-hop outweighs the value of legality, which is purported by a system that is known to be systemically oppressive (solomon 44; pew center 3). the value of an artist’s contributions to the ingroup favoritism of black hip-hop culture is so high for riley, that he even risks his life in “the story of gangstalicious” to protect rapper gangstalicious when hitmen attempt to assassinate him multiple times. protecting hip-hop culture and its members fosters a kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 115 community within black culture that sees value in its products of music, fashion, and art which ultimately increases the positive distinctiveness of being black. it is through that community that riley employs his cool pose masculinity to survive the pressures of white culture and represents all other black men who do the same. iv. granddad—conformist while his grandsons each seek to resist the forces of white culture assimilation in their own ways, robert jebediah “granddad” freeman puts up little resistance to the systems of oppression. the man is a former activist from the civil rights era and played a role in nearly every major event of the civil rights movement, as seen in “return of the king,” although many of those roles were minimal and even counterproductive, such as sitting next to rosa parks during the bus boycott and attempting to shift the public attention onto himself. yet despite his past, he no longer fights “the white power structure, [but] is known to work with and manipulate it for his own advantage” (timmerman et al. 172). it is through his flexibility in assimilating and conforming to the white mainstream culture and power structures that granddad has managed to survive this long unscathed, and even prosper as he is now living his dream to leave a poverty-stricken life in the south side of chicago for an accommodated life in white suburbia. for example, in “the real,” granddad poses as a blind man that is running a homeless shelter out of his home in order to receive expensive makeovers from tv shows such as pimp my ride and extreme makeover: home edition2 at no cost, simultaneously taking advantage of the dominant ingroup’s pity for the marginalized and living amongst the ingroup in their suburbia. while huey is morally opposed to the plan (to avoid controversy) and riley is overly enthusiastic about it (to increase the social value of their home and car), granddad remains a true conformist in the middle, going along with the plan until it eventually backfires, upon which he reverts back to the next thing that will prolong his survival: parenting riley and huey. granddad’s archetype can be considered an example of what trepte and loy describe as “social creativity,” which is a strategic approach to taking advantage of the benefits of membership in a certain group without being an actual member of the group (5). granddad takes advantage of whichever group will provide him the most benefit, but he crucially never denies his membership in the black outgroup. rather, he assimilates into white culture whenever convenient through his superficial behaviors. for his approach and stance, granddad could be considered a cultural code-switcher. code-switching is the use of multiple communicative styles in the same instance (koch et al. 31). such practice is often examined in the realm of linguistics, but it is traceable in behavioral tendencies as well. granddad’s understanding of the positive distinctiveness held by both the dominant white ingroup and the 2 these are real tv shows, which represent one of the many real-life references to pop culture in the boondocks. kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 116 black outgroup leads him to play on each group’s strengths when possible and code-switch back and forth in order to remain on the side that offers the most to gain in any situation and avoid derogation. throughout the series, granddad’s conformity/code-switching is also manifested through his linguistic patterns—his functional deployment of african american vernacular english (aave) or black english, as well as standard english (koch et al. 30)—and it can also be seen through his very clear decision to move his black family to white suburbia in the first place. granddad’s manipulation of the white power structure can perhaps be best seen through the very first episode, “the garden party,” in which he sets out fancy cheese because “white people love cheese” and attempts to wine and dine with the upper echelons of white society at mr. wuncler’s garden party to prove that he is sophisticated and worthy of living in the white suburbs—and thus avoid eviction. yet, a few episodes later, granddad showcases his ability to conform to black culture when it is necessary as well. in “granddad’s fight,” the man fully leans into a “n*gga moment,” (defined by huey in the episode as an abandonment of rational thinking that leads to self-destructive actions) despite several warnings from huey not to, in order to physically protect himself and his masculine pride and even goes as far as to tell huey that he “doesn’t have a choice” when determining whether or not to fight col. stinkmeaner, another elderly man who publicly berated granddad. granddad manipulates and conforms into whichever culture/group will provide him with the biggest benefit at any given moment. by being a conformer that constantly codeswitches to whichever side is at the advantage, granddad manages to thrive in a white society that has held back so many of his fellow black men. v. tom dubois—traitor named after both w.e.b dubois and uncle tom, tom dubois is an intellectual black man that almost completely lacks what most people would consider to be a connection to black culture. tom is black by appearance but “has assimilated to the dominant white culture of woodcrest, married a white woman, prides himself on his irish heritage, and speaks with an exaggerated white accent,” marking his traitor-ship into whiteness and white masculinity (timmerman et al. 173). his assimilation into white culture has come with nearly all of the ingroup benefits, as he “is the most educated character in the show and the only regular character with a ‘white’collar job as district attorney of woodcrest” (timmerman et al. 173). tom and granddad both employ social creativity to take advantage of the benefits that come with membership in the white ingroup despite being members of the black outgroup. however, unlike granddad’s temporary assimilations in and out of white culture, tom’s near-permanent residence in white culture leaves him unprepared for the realities that he faces when his identity as a black man is foregrounded. for example, in “a date with the health inspector,” tom is falsely accused of a crime because he “fit the [generic] description” of the perpetrator as a black man. tom is faced with his greatest fear of being sent to prison kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 117 and anally raped (on top of it, for a crime that he didn’t commit), which is a reality that many black men are aware of and experience (rowell-cunsolo et al. 59). his fear of “[being] made ‘somebody's b*tch’ by means of anal rape” leaves tom in tears while huey is unfazed and riley even finds humor in tom’s predicament, reminding him not to “drop the soap” (cooper 1186). tom is a representation of the black men that make it out of the confines of white society’s oppression of black people and try to never look back. in order to survive, he aligned himself with the societal group with the most power and stayed put, abiding by the dominant culture values and expectations. any momentary regression back into his blackness—which serves as a stark reminder that he and other black men can never entirely be a part of white culture—shakes up tom’s white world. drawing on the parameters defined by sct, tom exhibits a degree of depersonalization, which is a redefinition of one’s self-concept to fit within a certain group (trepte and loy 7). his very character is a reference to the embodiment of black depersonalization and the main character of harriet beecher-stowe’s uncle tom’s cabin: uncle tom. however, tom only exhibits a partial degree of depersonalization, which is alluded to in the inclusion of w.e.b dubois, a well-educated black author and sociologist, as the other half of his character reference. riley and huey lived the majority their lives in the predominantly black south side of chicago (before being forcibly moved to woodcrest) and never seek to leave black culture. granddad code-switches back and forth between black and white culture for his own advantages, but any time he spends in white culture is as an assimilating poser as he is always deep down rooted in his black identity. tom resides in white culture and rarely strays into black culture, making his assimilation nearly complete and rather permanent. yet, there is one final character that takes this progression into white culture even further and gives contrast to the degree of depersonalization that tom exhibits. vi. uncle ruckus—self-hating with a name alluding to both uncle tom and uncle remus (a fictional southern black man within black culture that tells folktales about life for black people on plantations3), uncle ruckus is a white supremacist that worships the very existence of white people (timmerman et al. 172). he is a self-proclaimed white man living with “revitaligo…it’s the opposite of what michael jackson got” (“the trial of r. kelly”), leveraging once again a renowned popular culture reference. uncle ruckus has a profound belief in the white supremacist notion that african americans are an inferior race. his views on black people align with the “black buck and jezebel” stereotype that is outlined in feminist scholarly literature (edgar 152). when it 3 stories of uncle remus date back to the late 1700s and most of the stories were first documented by joel chandler harris in the 1880s. prior to their documentation, the stories were passed down verbally throughout the black community in the southern us. kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 118 comes to black people “[uncle ruckus] wouldn’t exactly call them people, but yeah…[he] has a deep distaste for negros” (collier 174). from the very first episode, uncle ruckus shows his disdain towards black people by harassing granddad, huey, and riley at the garden party and singing an original song titled “don’t trust them new n*ggas over there” for the white partygoers in an attempt to ostracize the new black family in town (“the garden party”). differing from a traitor such as tom, who recognizes his origins in an outgroup and consciously tries to assimilate into the ingroup—albeit without being a proper member of it— uncle ruckus finds survival by denying ever being a part of the black outgroup in the first place. this phenomenon, in the context of sct, is an advanced form of depersonalization and is considered “individual mobility” (trepte and loy 7). whereas someone exhibiting depersonalization such as tom places a large emphasis on their connection to their preferred social group and attempts to gloss over existing roots in their own culture, someone exhibiting individual mobility is choosing to completely transfer over and exist in a different social group, disowning any claims to their previous home (trepte and loy 7). by rooting himself in white culture for the entirety of his existence, uncle ruckus attempts to escape the plights of black people. it is important to note, however, that this approach does not work flawlessly for uncle ruckus, as he still finds himself in a black man’s place from time to time. for example, in “the story of gangstalicious” he is held at gunpoint by a rival rapper and his entourage, and in “the garden party” all of the white party guests withhold their outrage over his racist song, “don’t trust them new n*ggas over there,” because they view uncle ruckus as a black man who can say the n-word. uncle ruckus is the only main character that views himself as a white man, and those few moments of being treated like a black man would serve as a reminder of his inability to wholly detach from his black identity, but uncle ruckus is so entrenched in his white identity that those potential reminders do not faze him, whether they come from black or white people alike. for uncle ruckus, it is not enough to distance himself from blackness and place favoritism in white culture, but he must also put black culture down through hate and insults performing overt social derogation. no character in the boondocks achieves the range in their racial slur vocabulary like uncle ruckus does, and his insults are all directed towards black people, whereas he places white people (and especially men) on a pedestal. in “the passion of reverend ruckus,” he goes around preaching about white jesus and how president ronald regan is the literal savior that welcomed him to “white heaven” in a prophetic dream, conflating religious, racial, and conservative ideologies. uncle ruckus is very specific about race in his prophecies, because “every time uncle ruckus opens his mouth, he preaches publicly or visits a talk show to express his views on blonde haired, blue-eyed jesus, he reaffirms the power associated with hegemony” (collier 173). despite uncle ruckus’s claims, all the other characters still see him as a black male, and that may be the only reason why they still interact with him throughout the boondocks. regardless of uncle ruckus’s actions and hatred, he is kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 119 still considered a black man by the rest of the main cast and thus his survival is important to the black community around him. vii. archetype interplay huey, riley, granddad, tom, and uncle ruckus each possess a different style of survival for black men in a white society and yet they interact and rely on each other often throughout the boondocks. however, before one can dive into how they interplay with each other, it is important to note a fundamental factor missing from the equation: women. there are no female main characters in the boondocks; the only recurring female roles are tom’s wife and his daughter, jazmine. the absence of female characters in the boondocks creates a fictional society with a shortage in female leaders, role-models, and mother-figures, which is a satirical reverse to not only the reality that black culture exists in today, but to the longstanding concept of the black matriarch. the black matriarch could be considered one of the archetypes that black women take on in response to being part of an outgroup much like back men (and as women even moreso than black men due to the intersectional discrimination they are subjected to as women and members of the black outgroup). as early as 1965, the black matriarch has been explored in academic literature, with daniel patrick moynihan’s the negro family: the case for national action (1965) (also known as the moynihan report) often being the source of discussion. the black matriarch is a category of black women that spearhead and keep together a family unit and oftentimes an entire community as sources of leadership and authority (moynihan 20). this archetype is pervasive in black popular culture, as evident with references in movies such as the big mama series starring martin lawrence and tyler perry’s slew of films starting the fictional character “madea simmons4,” and in music through artists’ monikers such as big momma thornton and ma rainey. questionably, the moynihan report proposes that the black matriarch is the root of the struggles that the black community faces, that a family unit ought to be led by a man with a woman as the secondary authority figure, and that a black womanled household is deviant (moynihan 18–19). critics of moynihan’s work cite the lack of control that black female slaves had over their own families and procreation as evidence that the black matriarch is not where black oppression is rooted (davis 4). others criticize the lack of inclusivity inherent to the concept of the black matriarch, acknowledging that it is possible to for a variety of successful leadership structures to exist in a family, as well as a black woman’s existence outside of a family unit altogether (king 40). the boondocks creates a world in which both criticisms are explored. black men are shown living outside of normative family units (uncle ruckus being the only example in the main cast) and voiding the cast of any female 4 “madea simmons” is a fictional female character and main character in a series of films that are popular amongst african american audiences. madea is a black matriarch and is played by male actor/comedian, tyler perry. kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 120 leadership eliminates any arguments that the black matriarch is the root of black oppression. rather than expound on the black matriarch being a deviant power structure in the black community, the boondocks satirically creates a power structure that is truly deviant with regard to how black communities in america are typically shaped today. fathers, male leaders, and male role-models are the groups that are often in short supply in black communities today, perpetuated by the stereotype of absent fathers and the high incarceration rate of black men in america, among other factors. according to a 2018 new york times article by david brady et al., single parenthood is one of the four indicators of poverty (together with forming households at a young age, lack of education, and unemployment), a reality that has characterized many black households for centuries. furthermore, according to 2016 us census data, approximately 5,000 black households have both parents present, whereas approximately 6,000 black households are composed by a single mother and her children (us census bureau). the statistics suggests that it is more common for a black household to have just a mother rather than both parents, and yet the boondocks portrays a world bereft of black mothers, and in doing so highlights how black men can support each other subverting stereotypes and normative configurations. with the role of mother/matriarch absent, the men find themselves covering affective positions usually connected to mother figures when needed. for example, in “granddad’s fight,” when granddad is feeling sad about himself it is the revolutionary huey that steps in and fills the motherly role of comforter (jenkins 94). this is a deviation from his usual revolutionary survival strategy, as “traditionally, the mother figure comforts… huey continues to show his maternal instincts by providing [riley and granddad] support, even if they are troubled by an obstacle he warned them about” because their survival is linked to his own survival within their white environment (jenkins 94). in times when parental figures such as granddad or tom occupy a needy or distressed position, huey and riley step into a parental role to counter and help them survive despite their differences. in “a date with the health inspector,” tom is given one phone call in jail and in his time of need, he turns to huey, the black revolutionary character that is anything but assimilated into white culture like tom. in “guess hoe’s coming to dinner,” riley and huey are the ones that must prevent granddad from losing everything they own to a pimp named slickback and cristal. even uncle ruckus helps out; in “the real,” he poses as a homeless man to help riley and granddad in their scheme to scam mainstream tv shows for free rewards. from the black revolutionary all the way to the white supremacist, the black archetypes are flexible in their positions within society in order to help each other survive. they embody their individual strategies for survival, but in the end seek for the survival of each other as part of the black community as well. a unifying thread throughout each of the five main characters is the pursuit of positive distinctiveness. huey seeks to attain it by decreasing the derogation of the black community. riley seeks to attain it by focusing on the favoritism that black culture holds. granddad combines both huey and riley’s approaches but applies it to only himself to achieve consistent kworweinski lafontant | the boondocks: archetypes of black masculinity in a white world reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1691 121 positive distinctiveness no matter which social group holds it. tom seeks to align himself with the group in possession of the most positive distinctiveness, and uncle ruckus completely rejects the notion that he was ever apart of black culture, finding positive distinctiveness by both derogating the black community and displaying great favoritism for the white community. each archetype chases positive distinctiveness because the group or individual that wields it also wields the societal power that comes with ingroup membership. the adaptation towards survival by these five archetypes is to seek and obtain increased sociocultural power. throughout the boondocks, the archetypes of black masculinity manifest themselves through the five main characters. focusing on each character highlights their take on personal survival and power struggle through a society that is dominated and controlled by white culture. and while not all five characters reside inside the freeman family unit, they all rely on each other from time-to-time to fill in the gaps within the community’s support structure to keep their community afloat, even with little to no women present. in the end, their personal survival is essential, but they comprise virtually all the black males that reside in their white society, so supporting each other is also essential. archetypes manifest at the individual level, but the survival of the community is 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dead (1968) benjamin brown university of edinburgh abstract george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) is considered a landmark film in the horror genre as well as being an example of a twentieth century gothic text. this paper explores the film’s construction of the gothic heroine. whilst night of the living dead is the product of predominantly male creators, most notably romero who co-wrote and directed the film, it utilises several conventions of the female gothic genre. barbara, the film’s female protagonist, initially appears as a potential twentieth century equivalent to the female gothic heroines of the past, but as the film goes on, she becomes more and more marginalised by the patriarchal confines of her own society. the film suggests that if barbara were allowed more freedom to make her own decisions with regard to the terrifying situation in which she is placed, the likelihood of her survival would be increased drastically. however, the overbearing male characters refuse to relinquish their patriarchal urges and this leads to barbara’s inability to realise her own salvation. the paper argues that barbara is unable to vanquish the creatures that attack her because she does not have the support structure, both physically and psychologically, to do so. she is not only a victim of the ghouls that exist at the boundaries of society, but also of the patriarchal structures that claims to be able to protect her. keywords: female gothic, george a. romero, patriarchy, domesticity, horror cinema. the gothic heroine has been fighting off monsters, ghosts, vampires, and ghouls from the genre’s inception in the late eighteenth century right through to the contemporary examples being produced today. despite the changing time-periods and cultural concerns, the gothic remains as popular a genre today as it was directly after its initial inception. in fact, the genre has expanded its prevalence in contemporary culture. no longer is it simply confined to literature but pervades a wide variety of popular cultural forms such as cinema, television, and video games. despite these evolutions in form, the genre is still remains populated with benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 78 heroines who all seek to escape the dangers of the real and supernatural world. the prevalence of these heroines is so apparent that a whole genre, the female gothic, has grown out of the texts that priorities female characters. a notable example of a contemporary work that engage with the female gothic is george a. romero’s film night of the living dead (1968). the events that befall its female protagonist, barbara, establish her as a heroine who structured according to traditional female gothic tropes. she finds herself trapped both physically and psychologically within the confines of a patriarchal structure that ultimately leads to a level of danger she is unable to comprehend. with that said, the film also enacts a subversion of gothic tropes in order to create its own distinct form of gothic text. in past examples of the female gothic genre the pursuer would often have been characterised by gender. the heroine is usually pursued by an antagonistic male figure. although ghosts and supernatural apparition are often present, they do not present the greatest danger to the protagonist and are often explained away by the end of the narrative. the same is also partially true in night of the living dead. during the course of the film, barbara finds herself pursued by the undead—referred to by romero himself as ghouls—and is forced to seek safety in an abandoned farmhouse that serves as the setting for the majority of the narrative. although the ghouls are initially presented as the greatest threat to barbara’s safety, and are never explained through rational means, it is still ultimately the human male characters inside the farmhouse who are responsible for the events that lead barbara into the greatest amount of danger. i. evolutions in the female gothic in order to better understand how evolutions of the gothic heroine took place in the texts that precede night of the living dead, it is important to understand what is meant by the term female gothic. critics such as ellen moers, who coined the term “female gothic,” argued that it constituted “the work that women have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the gothic” (77). moers reading of the female gothic encapsulates any text that has been produced by a female writer working within the gothic genre. several critics have sought to build on this initial reading of the female gothic including kate ferguson ellis in the contested castle (1989); diana wallace and andrew smith in their essay collection the female gothic: new directions (2004); and, more recently, avril hoerner and sue zlosnik produced an edinburgh companion on women and the gothic (2016). in the introduction their collection, wallace and smith expound upon moers’ initial reading of the genre by arguing that “the female gothic plot, exemplified by ann radcliffe, centralised the imprisoned and pursued heroine threatened by a tyrannical male figure, it explained the supernatural, and ended in the closure of marriage” (3). in these female gothic works, women are centralised and become a vehicle through which the events of the narrative are presented. this placement of women as central figures represents a departure from earlier male gothic which present a “masculine transgression of social taboos, characterised by violent rape and/or murder, which tends to resist closure, frequently leaving the supernatural unexplained” (wallace and smith benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 79 3). in these earlier male gothic texts then, women are presented as object upon which men exercise their own transgressive nature, as opposed to the female gothic in which the heroine’s own thoughts and motives have the greatest significance in the text. as the gothic genre shifted into the twentieth century so too did the concerns and locations of these narratives. texts such as shirley jackson’s the haunting of hill house (1959) transport the female gothic from the earlier settings of crumbling castles and places the genre within a more contemporary setting. the narrative takes place in a large manor house within contemporary america. however, the focus on the female protagonist, eleanor valance, remains central to the novel’s plot. as clair kahane notes, “jackson dislocates me in typical gothic fashion by locating me in eleanor's point of view, confusing outside and inside, reality and illusion” (341). the novel centralises eleanor’s point of view and she becomes the character through which the narrative is reflected. jackson’s novel adheres to anne williams’ definition of the female gothic which “generates suspense through the limitations imposed by the chosen point of view; we share both the heroine’s often mistaken perceptions and her ignorance” (102). the text uses eleanor’s perspective to present gothic elements within its narrative, and the reader experience these gothic tropes through the female protagonist. in contrast, stephen king’s novel carrie (1974) utilises a narrator who “observes carrie rather than allowing us to share her perspective” (a. williams 103). king’s novel encourages the reader to relish in the events that carrie is responsible for whilst offering little insight into her true motivations or feelings. the reader is directed to the external consequences of the transgressive action, as is the case in earlier male gothic works, rather than the internal psychological motivations of the woman, which serves as the generic basis for the female gothic. the proliferation of the gothic into other mediums allowed for new forms of the genre to establish themselves. the influence of the gothic is certainly visible in the horror cinema being produced in the late 1960s and early 1970s. these films often focused on the principle that “there is no escape from the encroaching violence in american society because the violence is in us” (towlson, subversive horror, 12). towlson goes on to note that as a country america was founded upon the killing of native americans and this violent past has remained a defining characteristic in american society. he also cites the horror of the vietnam war as another source of american violence that served as a stimulus for these horror films. the images of vietnam acted as a reminder of the human capacity for barbarism that still exists in contemporary society. for the filmmakers who witnessed these events, the horror genre served as a means to demonstrate their larger social concerns in a fictional genre, just as the gothic was able to do in the late eighteenth century. horror films, like the gothic beforehand, played upon the social fears of an individual indulging violent urges within american society itself, rather than in the seemingly chaotic and primitive environments that exist outside of western culture. the distinctions between the male and female gothic genres can be found within contemporary horror cinema as well. the films that towlson cites, specifically wes craven’s the benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 80 last house on the left (1972) often present violence predicated by men against helpless women. marie mulvey-roberts indication that the gothic genre “mirrors in myriad ways the violations perpetrated against the female body which continue unabated today” (subversive horror cinema 117) is certainly applicable to craven’s film. mulvey-roberts reading of the genre is indicative of the ways in which gothic texts reflect specific issues of misogyny and patriarchy within the society in which they were produced. the stimulus for the plot of the last house on the left is also marked by violation of women’s bodies, specifically the rape and murder of two teenage girls by a group of criminals. the film takes great pains to show the details of this attack through the lens of a voyeuristic outside perspective, in much the same way wallace and smith indicate that the male gothic focuses on male transgressions against women in its own narratives. the viewer is voyeuristically encouraged to take pleasure in watching this act of brutality. these women’s experiences are used to entertain rather than encourage a condemnation of the physical and psychological trauma that they are being forced to endure, just as was the case in the earlier male gothic texts. ii. night of the living dead and the female gothic genre night of the living dead refuses to engage with the trope of having the strongest acts of violence be predicated purely towards women. the film centralises barbara (judith o’dea) as the character through which the narrative premise is introduced. from the film’s outset, there is a focalisation of the female perspective which is essential to the female gothic. the plot itself concerns a small mixed-gender group of survivors who all take refuge in the abandoned farmhouse after the recent uprising of the undead. throughout the course of the film, neither the men or the women are presented as being in any less or more danger from these creatures. as night of the living dead progresses, the survivors’ options become fewer and fewer as the number of ghouls increases throughout the narrative. it is this collective danger that ultimately causes the greatest level of threat from within the house as well. in this sense, the film actually engages the suburban gothic sub-genre that emerged in the twentieth century. as well as establishing an outside danger, the ever-approaching ghouls, the film also employs the suburban gothic idea that “one is always in more danger from the people in the house next door, or one’s own family, than from external threats” (murphy 2). bernice murphy goes on to posit that in these texts, danger “invariably begins at home, or at least very near to it” (2). the film itself utilises both of these observations that murphy makes on the suburban gothic. barbara is threatened by both the physical dangers of the ghouls outside, and the patriarchal dangers posed by the two male leader inside the house. night of the living dead indicates that it may be the external stimulus of supernatural horror that initiates the danger that the female heroine faces, but it is ultimately the flawed patriarchal structures within society that lead to her demise. during the second half of the film tensions begin to arise between the two leaders of the group: ben (duane jones), a young african american man who seeks refuge in the house after benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 81 his car is destroyed in the chaos occurring across the landscape, and harry cooper (karl hardman) a middle-aged white man whose family members have taken refuge in the basement of the house before barbara and ben even arrive there. the tension and arguments between these two characters allows them to dominate the group in terms of authority, whilst the other survivors—most noticeably barbara—are afforded far less agency as a result. as the situation become more desperate and the house itself is revealed to be incapable of protecting the inhabitants, ben and harry continue to argue more violently over how best to deal with the situation. however, both men’s inability to compromise ultimately leads to more danger for all of those occupying the house. it can be argued that, indeed, they resemble the tyrannical male villains of the female gothic far more than they do heroes. the film engages with elements of the female gothic mode in order to construct a female heroine, but it also utilises these elements to demonstrate the true patriarchal dangers that already exist for women within contemporary society. iii. barbara: establishing a female gothic heroine night of the living dead quickly establishes the gothic heroine trope during the opening of the film. barbara and her brother johnny (russell steiner) visit their father’s grave where barbara kneels and begins praying. johnny, on the other hand, stands aside and begins to tease barbara for her display of religious devotion. after a short pause, johnny comments that praying belongs in church, to which barbara responds, “i haven’t seen you in church lately” (00:05:36). johnny replies by suggesting that “there’s not much sense in my going to church” (00:05:38). the film also takes advantage of the black and white colour palette in order to further contrast the personalities of the characters. the most evident features of johnny’s clothing are his black suit and black driving gloves. barbara on the other hand is dressed in light colours, that appear almost white on the screen. the choice to dress johnny is these dark colours immediately signals him out as a potentially evil antagonist in contrast to the purity that the white of barbara’s clothes. the two characters, at least to an extent, adhere to maggie kilgour’s observation that gothic novels revolve around “a battle between antithetical sexes” in which the male character who “wants to indulge his own will, is set against a passive spiritual female, who is identified with the restrictions of social norms” (12). barbara is very much the conforming to the expectations of the society she lives in. she prays at the grave of a dead parent, and it is implied she regularly attends church. johnny, on the other hand, rejects these religious social norms by expressing his desire to not attend church or pray for his dead father even if it is at odds with the dominant ideals of the culture. by presenting barbara as a typically conformist, pure, and passive female from the outset, night of the living dead is able to establish her very quickly as the gothic heroine within the narrative of the film. barbara’s position as the gothic heroine is further solidified when she and johnny first encounter a ghoul. after initially childishly mocking the ghoul, believing it to be a dishevelled cemetery visitor, johnny runs away. conversely, barbara attempts to remain composed and benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 82 walk past the creature in a more refined and adult manner. however, upon attempting to pass the ghoul, barbara is attacked by it. johnny immediately pulls the ghoul away and attempts to fight it off. meanwhile, barbara escapes and—in an act of further passivity—watches as johnny is killed. the ghoul then proceeds to pursue barbara through the cemetery and to the sibling’s car, until she is eventually able to escape. throughout the pursuit, the camera shifts focus between distanced long shots of the predatory, near animalistic actions and movements of the ghoul and close-ups of barbara’s terrified face as she is subjected to this danger. barbara is now being actively pursued by a true embodiment of the gothic male character. the film depiction of the ghoul reduces the idea of the gothic hero-villain as “moodily taciturn and violently explosive by turns” (stoddart 112) to its most basic terms. the ghoul is initially so taciturn that it appears to be an old man wandering about the graveyard, and is unable to speak at all, before switching immediately to a mode of unprovoked violence at the mere sight of barbara and johnny. barbara is now a heroine who is very much at the mercy of this villainous character pursuing her. whereas her relationship with johnny helped to establish her position as a typically passive gothic heroine, it is with the introduction of this truly violent male ghoul that the framework for the gothic narrative is fully established within the film. the scene itself certainly presents the “focus on female suffering, positioning the audience as voyeurs” (a. williams 104) that is indicative of the male gothic. however, in williams’s reading of the male gothic, the narrative centralises the male attacker’s viewpoint as he pursues these female victims. this centralising of the male perspective echoes andrew tudor’s perspective on contemporary horror cinema which he states features a “continuing pattern of male domination of the genre’s central situations. women have always featured as horror-movie victims” (127). films more contemporary to night of the living dead, such as herschell gordon lewis’s blood feast (1963) or bob clark’s black christmas (1974) focalise the aggressive male perspective right from the outset. they both maintain the tropes that have been established through the male gothic genre despite taking place within a contemporary twentieth century setting. the male perpetrator’s actions are focalised as a source of pleasure for the character, and the same feelings are therefore encouraged in the viewer. however, by making barbara the focal point of this experience, night of the living dead starts to blur the lines between male and female gothic. despite focusing on her personal suffering, these events are presented through barbara’s eyes rather than that of the ghoul. consequently, the sense of voyeuristic pleasure is weakened by through the film’s choice to focalise the victim, rather than the perpetrator. the viewer is forced to sympathise with barbara, a central motif of the female gothic mode, rather than take pleasure in her suffering, as is often the intention of the male gothic. iv. the farmhouse: a contemporary female gothic structure in order to escape this predatory ghoul, barbara takes refuge in the abandoned farmhouse that serves as the main setting for the rest of the film. when barbara moves through the house benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 83 and into the dining room, the film quickly cuts between the stuffed heads of animals on the wall. the sequence is accompanied by a sudden loud musical eruption in order to heighten the level of fear. just as these animals have been hunted and killed by the former occupants of the home, the occupants are now being hunted by the ghouls roaming outside. in his reading of the film, tony williams notes that these images “symbolise a reverse world where humans change from being consumers to a hunted species facing consumption; humans now face becoming sustenance for zombies” (31). whereas these trophies would typically represent the contemporary dominance of humanity over nature, night of the living dead turns them into reminders barbara’s own vulnerability and victimisation at the hands of the ghouls. it serves as a physical manifestation of sigmund freud’s famous definition of the uncanny or unheimlich as the intrusion of the unfamiliar when the familiar is expected. by recasting elements of domestic safety as dangerous, night of the living dead engages with gina wisker’s argument that “[t]he uncanny, as a tool of the gothic, reveals what is concealed and unexpected: those alternative versions of self, of relationships, home and family, which relate to everyday ‘reality’” (15). specifically, the film reveals the alternative version of these hunting trophies as reminders not of human superiority but as representations of the vulnerability of all animals when faced with a more powerful predator. following this scene, barbara climbs the stairs and the camera cuts to a close-up this time of a dead and rotting body lying on the landing. the corpse further reinforces the notion this is a space of great danger, rather than providing any sense of reassurance to barbara. the house only serves to remind her of the danger that still exists outside and continues to pursue her. within the context of the female gothic, this entrapment was once limited to the “foreign, ‘ancestral’ location” (davison 93), that has become ruinous over a long period of time. however, as the genre has developed throughout the twentieth century and beyond, this foreign and ancient location has now been replaced by the contemporary home of middle-class society that exists within the suburban gothic mode. the film itself follows this course in its own presentation of the gothic abode. barbara’s imprisonment takes place in a setting that may not be totally familiar to her—she has never been to this particular location before—but still includes signifiers of the contemporary domestic space such as an oven, fridge, and cutlery draws. through the equation of these familiar domestic elements with the ever-approaching danger from outside, night of the living dead removes the potential safety that barbara may expect to find in the house. instead, the building is transformed from traditionally comforting structure it into a source of terror. the film adheres bernice murphy’s definition of the suburban gothic in which terror no longer stems from the purely foreign or outside dangers, but from within the very locale that is supposed to shield the individual from these threats in the first place (2). in terms of the external terror that barbara faces, night of the living dead subverts kate ferguson ellis’s definition of the male gothic. in her reading of these earlier texts such as matthew lewis’s the monk, charles maturin’s melmoth the wanderer (1820), and bram stoker’s benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 84 dracula (1897), ellis notes that gothic is preoccupied with “the failed home” from which “some (usually “fallen” men) are locked out” (ix). ellis’s reference to these men being fallen is indicative of their exclusion from accepted society. as ann williams points out, in these texts “the hero/villain is an isolated overreacher [sic] punished for his hubris, his violation of the law” (103). characters such as dracula and melmoth are depicted as indulging their own attempts at immortality and are punished for doing so in their respective novels for these acts of transgression. this trope is even visible in the cotemporary gothic. in her analysis of clive barker’s the hellbound heart (1986), lucie armitt indicates that in these contemporary gothic texts, “suburbia [is] revealed as only deceptively cosy in structure, in actuality housing nightmares within its bounds” (65). it may be set in a more contemporary structure than dracula and melmoth, but the hellbound heart is still focused on an individual, frank, who “looks to invent new ways in which sexual gratification can take him beyond the limits of mere pleasure” (armitt 63). frank’s desire to push the limits of sexual gratification again singles him out as transgressive within society’s norms. the transgressive and predatory male figure has now been allowed to enter the suburban, domestic space, but their characteristics remain strikingly similar to the predecessors who were still excluded from wider contemporary society. as a text that engages with the female gothic, the ghouls represent an extrapolation of the single tyrannical male figure—such as dracula, melmoth, and frank—that wallace and smith state is central to the genre. furthermore, the film also undermines holly blackford’s argument, which specifically cites daphne du maurier’s rebecca (1938) and shirley jackson’s the haunting of hill house (1959), that in “more modern gothic literature” the heroine typically finds “the house embodied in the figure of not a villainous father or husband but a creepy servant, who seems to surface from the very walls and who largely works alone” (236–37). although the villainous figure has changed, blackford still notes that these antagonists “largely work alone” in their evil. in contrast, night of the living dead removes the concepts of gender, class, or singularity from the equation. the ghouls do appear as undead men and women, but both genders of creature are depicted as equally vicious throughout the course of the film; their social position is irrelevant because they no longer occupy one. furthermore, rather than working alone, as the film goes on an increasing number of ghouls represent a threat to barbara’s safety. this ever-increasing mass of attackers outside of the house allows the film to enhance the level of terror surrounding her. barbara is not threatened by a singular tyrannical male anymore, but a large mass of multi-gendered antagonists, unmotivated by anything other than a desire to consume—rather than take authority over—her body. v. ben and harry: the patriarchal antagonists the film reinforces barbara’s lack of escape routes from these aggressive creatures when she immediately tries to leave the house after witnessing the deformed corpse. as she reaches the door, she is prevented from leaving by an african american man named ben, who will become the central male lead for the rest of the film. ben forces barbara back inside and takes benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 85 charge of the situation. barbara, on the other hand, regresses into a state of shock, continually asking ben “what’s happening?” (00:16:02). ben then asks her if there are any more ghouls around to which barbara replies “i don’t know” (00:16:29), repeating the phrase over and over until she reaches a state of near frenzy and collapses onto a nearby sofa. ben has immediately attempted to take control of the situation and, although he appears to have good intentions, is already trying to assert patriarchal dominance over barbara. in fact, when barbara tries to leave for a second time, ben strikes in the face. this causes her to faint and begin to enter the state of silence and passivity that she occupies for the majority the film. whilst this may appear initially to be for barbara’s own safety, his willingness to use violence so quickly against her suggests an underlying patriarchal danger that may already be beginning to manifest itself towards barbara through ben. the film hints that ben may not be a potential saviour for barbara, but the tyrannical male figure that seeks to oppress her, as is the case for other heroines within the female gothic genre. as the narrative continues, ben and barbara discover several more survivors. these characters include harry and helen cooper, a married couple who, along with their ghoulbitten daughter, have taken refuge in the farmhouse’s cellar. the introduction of these characters, specifically harry cooper, leads to another strong male presence within the film. they are revealed to be hiding with a young couple named tom and judy, who have also escaped the events occurring outside. as these new characters are introduced, barbara becomes less and less involved in the events taking place around her. she is not even able to ask the questions that she previously posed to ben when they first met. barbara’s state of shock and the internalisation of her trauma is an example of women in the male gothic being “trapped by societies that will not recognize the heroine’s plight as caused by factors external to her, but instead blame that plight on the fact she is female” (heiland 158). heiland’s reading of the gothic heroine argues that the main plight of these women stems from their gender. night of the living dead indicates that this is also the case for the male characters within the film. barbara’s earlier encounter with ben, and the introduction of harry lead to her being dismissed as ultimately incapable of acting her own interests. instead, she is placed in a position of subservience to the aims of the male characters who surround her. the film introduces the concerns of the male gothic genre, specifically the misogynistic treatment of women, into the plot in order to demonstrate the way in which even in contemporary society women are marginalised and ignored by patriarchal male figures. in terms of 1960s american culture, barbara’s character “would seem to support certain sexist assumptions about female passivity, irrationality, and emotional vulnerability” (waller 283). waller’s assertion echoes kilgour’s characterisation of the passive female heroine in other gothic texts. the film typecasts her into the vulnerable women role, who must be protected by strong assertive men. stephen harper counters waller’s reading of the film by asking “[c]an barbra [sic]—who is in shock after the death of her brother—be blamed for her passivity?” (3). harper goes on to point out “the patriarchal domination of the house is benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 86 unremitting. barbra [sic], in particular, is subjected to relentless abuse by the film’s male characters” (3). in contrast to waller, harper argues that the combination of witnessing her brother’s death and the strong male presence of the film prevents barbara from taking a greater level of agency. his argument revolves around the position that anyone is this situation would react in a similar way to barbara regardless of gender. however, all of the characters have also witnessed horrific events, and the film still chooses to present the most extreme response through the female character of barbara. furthermore, even harper acknowledges the abuse that barbara receives from the male characters. the film itself acknowledges the sexist tropes that exist within the contemporary society in which it takes place, bit also appears to adhere to them in this respect. in spite of the fact that barbara is presented as having the potential to become a true heroine, the film does not allow her the opportunity to do so as long as there are male characters around to dominate the discourse amongst the survivors. night of the living dead maintains this patriarchally dominated mode until the final act of the film, when the conclusion subverts the traditional ending of both the male and female gothic. in his exploration of the genre, fred botting indicates that the traditional gothic novel results in heroines/heroes returning “with an elevated sense of identity” (gothic 7). the characters in these gothic narratives are often threatened and entrapped, both physically and psychologically, but end the text with a stronger idea of their personal self then they had at the beginning. however, in night of the living dead this heightened sense of self never occurs for any of the characters. in fact, ben and harry spend much of the film bickering and arguing with each other, so much so that by the time they come to any concrete decision it is too late for any of the survivors to escape. in his reading of the film, jon towlson argues that the ghouls are representative of “a society devouring itself from within” (towlson, “why night of the living dead” n.p.). towlson understands the ghouls to be reflection of the culture that they threaten to destroy with the film. these creatures are presented not as othering forces in the sense that they wish to invade and challenge social convention, but as reflective of the basest instincts that already exist within society. however, the same is also true of ben and harry. they too reflect a society that is populated with male characters so concerned with their own authority that they are willing to bring about the destruction of the foundational elements, in this case the domestic and familial structure, in order to achieve a sense of personal authority. this sense of self-reinforcement is so pervasive that it ultimately leads to all of the characters losing not only their own sense of identity, but their lives as well. through the negative depiction of these two arguing male character the film satirises the patriarchal dominance of society through the tropes found in female gothic narratives. these two dominating male figures are unable to compromise and help each other even in the face of mortal danger. as ben and harry continue to argue, the ghouls grow in number and even show signs of working together in order to achieve their ultimate goal. during an escape attempt late into the film, several of the characters attempt to reach a fuel line in a pick-up truck that will allow all of the survivors to drive away from the house. however, when the benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 87 ghouls see the humans, they immediately begin to collectively attack them. rather than trying to assault each other in order to get to their victims, the ghouls remain focused on stopping the survivors. the implication being that they realise working together will give them the greatest chance of achieving their own goal. in his reading of the film, robin wood points out that “[t]he zombies attacks […] have their origins in (are the physical projections of) psychic tensions that are the product of patriarchal male/female relationships or familial relationships” (103). wood’s argument points towards two very specific forms of relationship that are present in the film, but as i have argued, there is also the patriarchal male/male relationship that forms the film’s greatest tension. ben and harry are constantly trying to confront each other in order to assert their own personal tyrannical views. the ghouls on the other hand have no understanding of these patriarchal hierarches and are not restricted by them. the lack of mental ability to form such hierarchical structures is presented as actually better suited to working together equally than the apparently more psychologically advanced patriarchies of the human characters. by having the escape inevitably fail, night of the living dead further erodes the possibility that a return to the realities of the past is possible. as the characters around her continue to fight against each other, barbara’s own hopes of survival are lost. in fact, the only other active contribution barbara does make comes at the very end of the film. she briefly regains her cognisance during an attempt to help helen cooper. in these final minutes, barbara resembles radcliffe’s heroine, who despite displaying “a relative passivity in female attitude” does unlike the heroines “of walpole, for instance, … take the initiative in certain instances” (tóth 25). tóth acknowledges that the heroines are still relatively passive in radcliffe’s and other female gothic writers’ works, but they still display more agency than those in the male gothic. this principle would be carried through into the later slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of the “final girl” (clover 35) trope. female characters in films like john carpenter’s halloween (1978) and sean s. cunningham’s friday the 13th (1980) are often the final survivors in these films, usually after defeating the antagonist themselves. the moment of self-elevation that botting cites as crucial to the gothic genre is achieved through this process of survival. often these women end the film emotionally traumatised but also defiant in their refusal to return to the position of innocent victim that they appeared to be in the film’s opening. night of the living dead refuses to offer this same moment of revelation. barbara’s attempt at one last act of autonomous bravery is what ultimately solidifies her total destruction, rather than the salvation afforded a traditional final girl. during this episode, harry has been killed and ben has already retreated, abandoning helen to the ghouls. it is with this failure of patriarchal dominance that barbara is finally able to act in her own interests, and the interest of another woman. in her reading of the slasher genre, carol j. clover discusses the final girl’s “castration, literal or symbolic, of the killer at hand” (49). though ben and harry are not the central villains here, at least not in terms of the physical threat to barbara, they too are castrated symbolically by the abandonment of their patriarchal positions. barbara, on the other benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 88 hand, begins to exhibit the features of the final girl in that she “specifically unmans an oppressor whose masculinity was in question to begin with” (clover 49). harry is always presented as a coward trying to hide rather than fight. he wants to stay in the basement locked away for the majority of the film, rather than actively attack the approaching ghouls. furthermore, whilst ben appears to occupy the opposing role to this cowardice, he too retreats when presented with the ghouls that threaten helen cooper. the implication being that once the male gothic aspect of the situation has been removed, the patriarchal characters have been unmanned, the female gothic is able to re-assert itself. although it is too late for barbara and helen, there is still a suggestion that had this mode remained in place all along the characters may well have been able to survive and defend each other. vi. conclusion night of the living dead inverts the typical narrative of the gothic heroine. even though barbara has much in common with the female gothic heroine, the film’s conclusion demonstrates the crucial difference between her, her predecessors, and those who would follow in her footsteps. both early gothic texts, such as ann radcliffe’s the italian (1797), and horror films, such as john carpenter’s halloween (1978), typically end with “the destruction of threatening, unsanctioned otherness” which allows “cultural anxieties (the apprehension of a gap, a rupture or hole in the fabric of ordered reality) to be expunged and limits and values to be pleasurably reasserted.” (botting, limits 26). however, night of the living dead indicates that it is possible to fight off the societal threat, but the issues will still exist even if the threat is erased. barbara is unable to vanquish these creatures because she does not have the support structure, both physically and psychologically, to do so. she is not only a victim of the ghouls that exist at the boundaries of society, but also of the patriarchal structures that claims to be able to protect her. when she is isolated from these male-led influences after the film’s opening attack and in the film’s concluding scenes, her own need for self-preservation allows her to take on the role of female gothic heroine. she is forced to take responsibility for her own escape from the threat with which she is faced. however, as soon as men begin to enact an influence upon her, her role as autonomous heroine is relinquished. her immediate transformation into a catatonic state, simply following the instructions of the men around her, demonstrates the lack of agency that women are afforded within the film’s society. not only is barbara assumed to lack the ability to defend herself by those around her, but she also already assumes these things about herself. rather than an active heroine, trying to save herself from destruction, she is forced into a position of death by the men who claim to know better. benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 89 works cited armitt, lucie. twentieth century gothic. university of wales press, 2011. blackford, holly. “haunted housekeeping: fatal attractions of servant and mistress in twentieth century female gothic literature.” literature interpretation theory, vol. 16, issue 2, 2005, pp. 233–61. botting, fred. gothic. routledge, 1996. botting, fred. the limits of horror: technology, bodies, gothic. manchester university press, 2008. clover, carol j. men, women and chainsaws: gender in the modern horror film. princeton university press, 2015. davison, carol margaret. gothic literature: 1764–1824. university of wales press, 2009. ellis, kate ferguson. the contested castle: gothic novels and the subversion of domestic ideology. university of illinois press, 1989. harper, stephen. “’they’re us’: representations of women in george romero’s ‘living dead’ series.” intensities: the journal of cult media, no. 3, 2003, online. https://intensitiescultmedia.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/harper-theyre-us.pdf. accessed 23 august 2021. heiland, donna. gothic and gender: an introduction. blackwell, 2004. kilgour, maggie. the rise of the gothic novel. routledge, 1995. kahane, clair. “the gothic mirror.” the (m)other tongue: essays in feminist psychoanalytic interpretation, edited by shirley n. garner, clair kahane, and madelon sprengnether, cornell university press, 1985, pp. 334–52. moers, ellen. “female gothic.” the endurance of frankenstein: essays on mary shelly’s novel, edited by george levine and u.c. knoepflmacher, university of california press, 1982, pp. 77–88. mulvey-roberts, marie. “the female gothic body.” women and the gothic: an edinburgh companion, edited by avril horner and sue zlosnik, edinburgh university press, 2017, pp. 106–19. murphy, bernice m. the suburban gothic in american popular culture. palgrave macmillan, 2009. romero, george a., director. night of the living dead. continental distributing, 1968. stoddart, helen. “hero-villain.” the handbook to gothic literature, edited by marie mulvey-roberts, macmillan press, 1998, pp. 111–15. tóth, réka. “the plight of the gothic heroine: female development and relationships in eighteenth century gothic fiction.” eger journal of english studies, vol. 10, 2010, pp. 21–37, online. http://anglisztika.ektf.hu/new/english/content/tudomany/ejes/ejesdokumentumok/2010/toth_r_2010.pdf. accessed 21 november 2021. towlson, jon. subversive horror cinema: countercultural messages of films from frankenstein to present. mcfarland, 2014. towlson, jon. “why night of the living dead was a big-bang moment for horror movies.” bfi, 2018, online. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/night-living-dead-george-romero. accessed 19 january 2022. tudor, andrew. monsters and mad scientists. wiley, 1989. benjamin brown | the construction of the gothic heroine in george a. romero’s night of the living dead (1968) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1422 90 wallace, diana, and andrew smith. “introduction: defining the female gothic.” the female gothic: new direction, edited by diana wallace and andrew smith, palgrave macmillan, 2009, pp. 1–12. waller, gregory a. the living and the undead: slaying vampires, exterminating zombies. university of illinois press, 1986. williams, anne. art of darkness: a poetics of gothic. university of chicago press, 1995. williams, tony. the cinema of george a. romero: knight of the living dead. columbia university press, 2015. wisker, gina. contemporary women’s gothic fiction. palgrave macmillan, 2016. wood, robin. hollywood from vietnam to reagan…and beyond. columbia university press, 2003. microsoft word 3.1_full issue.docx katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 65 writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward’s salvage the bones katerina psilopoulou university of cambridge abstract in her work, jesmyn ward has revitalized the southern gothic tradition and its tropes to better reflect the realities of black american life in the 21st century. this essay explores the reconfiguration of the grotesque body in ward's sophomore novel, salvage the bones, which follows an impoverished black family in mississippi in the days leading up to hurricane katrina. in contrast to her literary predecessors, ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on black bodies and then deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. as such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, the way in which it was previously utilized by southern writers like william faulkner and carson mccullers. instead, ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable. keywords: african american gothic, jesmyn ward, southern gothic, hurricane katrina, grotesque introduction in recent years, amidst the turmoil of the black lives matter protests spurred by the killings of unarmed black americans by police, a new literary and cultural phenomenon has been on the rise. the new african american gothic is a school that engages with the legacy of american slavery and racism, while at the same time linking it to the present and to the precariousness of black american lives. jesmyn ward, twice-winner of the national book award, has katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 66 been on the frontline of this emerging school of writers and artists.1 her work has contributed to the development of the new african american gothic by reviving the modes of the socalled southern gothic, a tradition preoccupied with the “haunted” south and its legacy of slavery and jim crow. a native mississippian, in her oeuvre ward seeks to historicize the southern gothic, revising its tropes to expose the continuing haunting of the present by past racial prejudice, discrimination and violence. thus, she revitalizes the genre while pioneering a new school of writing that shifts the focus from white subjects to the ongoing gothicism of black existence and the precariousness of black lives in america. this essay explores one aspect of this revisionist project by examining how ward repurposes the familiar southern gothic trope of the grotesque body in her novel salvage the bones (2011). in contrast to her literary predecessors, ward defines the grotesque as a state of debility imposed on black bodies and deemed uniquely problematic to them as a class and race, rather than the result of centuries of structural oppression. as such, she understands the trope as encompassing far more than bodily or intellectual difference, as it was previously utilized by southern writers like william faulkner and carson mccullers. instead, ward theorizes the grotesque as a biopolitical state, in which populations that do not conform to the status quo, and specifically the dominant capitalist mode of production and consumption, are driven to the margins and their lives deemed expendable. in salvage the bones, the grotesque manifests physically in the changing body of a pregnant teenager, esch batiste, and in the animal imagery that is repeatedly used to describe her and her family. the batistes live on the margins of society, in a dilapidated plot of land nicknamed “the pit,” trapped by poverty and lacking prospects as hurricane katrina approaches. their financial and social status is seen as a grotesque by mainstream society, and esch’s body is initially described as embodying and carrying the effects of this othering. the result of this othering is that people like the batistes are stripped of their political existence—what in homo sacer giorgio agamben termed bios—and are living in a permanent state of zoē, or bare life, which is defined as grotesque by mainstream, typically white and able-bodied society (agamben 10).2 agamben’s theory expanded on the greek concept of zoē, meaning biological life, and bios which encompassed one’s political existence as a citizen. in this context, bare life implies loss of political subjectivity and the denigration of life to its barest biological components. ward exemplifies this theory through the batistes, who live in a state of survival, forgotten by the state. hurricane katrina exacerbates the precariousness of their existence and exposes how devalued and grotesque the lives of black southerners are to the eyes of the state. by incorporating agamben’s theory alongside 1 other contemporary writers who work within the framework of the african american gothic include colson whitehead, ta-nehisi coates, maurice carlos ruffins, and reginal bradley, to name a few. 2 agamben’s concept of zoē and bios has been previously utilized by holly cade brown in her “figuring giorgio agamben’s ‘bare life’ in the post-katrina works of jesmyn ward and kara walker.” brown examines the effects of hurricane katrina through agamben’s lens, yet the concept has not been applied in the context of ward’s revisionism of the southern gothic. katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 67 the language and imagery of the grotesque, ward modernizes the trope to better reflect the reality of contemporary black american life in the south and the ways in which it remains subject to disenfranchisement and othering along both racial and economic lines. i. the gothic and the american south the gothic, a nebulous term which has greatly evolved since its inception in eighteenth-century british literature, has always had a close relationship with race and class. in the early british tradition, the gothic focused on “the past, and immoderate, ungovernable passions” and was marked by familiar tropes such as ruined castles, supernatural elements, dark villains and innocent maidens (weinstock 1). its early iterations were often allegories for the decline of rigid british class structures and critiques of the aristocracy. however, the genre became particularly problematic when it was exported to america and lost its usual referents: gloomy castles, ghosts and hapless heroines paled beside the wilderness and the natural and human threats the first settlers encountered in the new world. rejecting the structured class system of britain, america was seemingly founded on enlightenment ideals of reason and equality, characteristics antithetical to the traditional gothic. however, what links the two traditions is the legacy of slavery, as the emergence of the genre coincided with the height of the slave trade. slavery is widely acknowledged as the “central historical context that produces the gothic and against which it responds,” from the eighteenth century to the present (goddu 71). in 1960 leslie fielder even argued that the american literary tradition “is almost essentially a gothic one,” given the nation’s two particular sources of culpability: “the slaughter of the indians and the abominations of the slave trade” (142,144). his interpretation, which introduced the question of race in the discussion of the american gothic, calls for a sociohistorical reading rather than a psychological one. these two “original sins” in the edenic garden that was newly-settled america did not correspond with the nation’s self-mythologizing of innocence and new beginnings. thus, instead of being defined in national terms, the american gothic became most recognizable as a set of regional forms, including the southern gothic, which developed following the civil war. the south’s literary and material history, that is, the gothic’s relation to america and the south, is critical in understanding the scope and importance of ward’s new approach to the southern gothic tradition. the adjective “southern” gives regional specificity to the gothic and displaces any unsavoury aspects of american history onto a single part of the nation. teresa goddu notes that the south is “identified with gothic doom and gloom…[and] serves as the nation’s ‘other,’ becoming the repository for everything from which the nation wants to disassociate itself… a benighted landscape, heavy with history and haunted by the ghosts of slavery” (3). similarly, david punter and glennis byron describe the southern gothic as “investigating madness, decay and despair, and the continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with respect to the lost ideals of a dispossessed southern aristocracy and to the continuance of racial hostilities” (punter and byron 116-7). the south was constructed in opposition to the katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 68 north, reaffirming the latter’s identity as the progressive, true face of america. similarly, blackness was constructed in opposition to whiteness: the slave master projected his own brutality onto the black slave body, where he could whip it out of existence (wester 57). for black southern writers, then, a version of southern gothic limited to the works of william faulkner or flannery o’connor is incomplete, particularly if we consider their portrayal of black characters. as ward said of faulkner, “the failures of some of his black characters—the lack of imaginative vision regarding them, the way they don’t display the full range of human emotion, how they fail to live fully on the page—work against that awe [of him] and goad me to write” (hoover 2). the legacy of southern gothic informs the writing of contemporary black authors who are keen to explore the history and literature of their nation, whether they are southerners or not. however, instead of fixating on the south’s past sins and glories, many contemporary black writers refocus those narratives on the lingering effects of slavery and racism in contemporary america. for black as well as white writers, “southern gothic can be understood as a genre that is aware of the impossibility of escaping racial haunting and the trauma of a culture that is not just informed by racial history, but also haunted and ruptured by it” (wester 25). this haunting emerges through a fascination with the grotesque, usually manifested in the bodies of marginalized characters as a form of disability or disfigurement, as well as ghost stories and a sense of claustrophobia and impending doom inherent to the southern landscape. such elements have long been evident in the works of african american writers such as toni morrison, jean toomer and richard wright. indeed, wright famously noted in his introduction to native son (1940) that “if poe were alive [in the poor black districts of chicago in the 1930s], he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him” (31); in other words, for black americans, life was and is a gothic tale that needs no imaginary embellishment. ward, a native of delisle, mississippi, is unusual amongst contemporary black southern authors in that she left the south and, despite her ambivalence about the region, returned to raise a family. ward acknowledges that she feels at home in mississippi and that its context has shaped who she is, but at the same time “i dislike the fact that i have to bear up under the weight of the history of this place, of the history of slavery and jim crow and sharecropping, the history of this place that made me” (block). taking cue from faulkner’s yoknapatawpha county, ward situates her three novels—where the line bleeds (2008), salvage the bones (2011) and sing, unburied, sing (2017)—in the fictional mississippi town of bois sauvage, inspired by her hometown. all three novels have contemporary settings, detailing the lives and hardships of rural black families struggling with generational poverty, addiction, systemic racism and an inability to progress while haunted by the region’s past. ii. the grotesque body salvage the bones follows 15-year-old esch as she grapples with the implications of her unplanned pregnancy in the days leading up to hurricane katrina. ward situates the narrative katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 69 within the parameters and tropes of the southern gothic, including the grotesque, which takes on new meaning through her work. the grotesque is no longer simply the perceived, oftentimes shocking effect of physical difference, as found in the traditional southern gothic of o’connor and faulkner; instead, ward’s grotesque is the result of interpretation, of how dominant society observes and classifies populations deemed other and expendable, both in terms of race, gender, and political and financial status. the grotesque has had a peculiar relationship with the southern gothic, and is particularly identified with the works of william faulkner, flannery o’connor, and carson mccullers. a concise definition of what constitutes the grotesque has been notoriously difficult to pinpoint, leading to alan spiegel bemoaning that the term has been “applied so frequently and so recklessly” that it has become “increasingly difficult to use [it] with any degree of clarity or precision” (426). spiegel was one of the first critics to propose a definition of the grotesque, but one which is rather limiting: he posits that the term does not refer to a mood, style, or situation, but to a character type often found in southern fiction that is always a “physically or mentally deformed figure” (428). for spiegel, what makes characters—such as benjy in the sound and the fury—grotesque, however, is their transcendence of their disability, to the point where readers can evince pity and compassion for them. as such, the grotesque character is: …a thorn in the side of the society which produced him. his existence tells the society something about itself whether it wishes to acknowledge his presence or not. he informs society that his deformity is real, that it is there, and will continue to be there because it is society’s deformity [which produced it] as well as his own (spiegel 431, emphasis in original) spiegel’s definition uncovers the ableism inherent in the grotesque trope. characters with mental or physical disabilities are used either for shock value or as objects of pity for the presumably able-bodied reader, or as vehicles for the writer’s attempt at social criticism. as such, these characters tend to remain one-dimensional, their function and importance limited to their disability which forms the entirety of their personality. other definitions of the grotesque emphasize its radical potential as a disruptive agent operating at the margins of society. mikhail bakhtin links the grotesque with a body of “unashamed excess, anathema to authority and pious austerity” (303), a body that interacts intimately with the world and challenges its limits and hierarchies. bakhtin sees the grotesque body as potentially radical, able to disrupt social homogeneity, yet his definition implies a certain loose morality and inability to control individual urges, stereotypes often levelled at black southerners who were typically the objects of grotesque characterization. as such, the grotesque figure is a politically and socially charged symbol. as patricia yaeger has argued, grotesque bodies “provide a particularly condensed and useful figure of thought for presenting a set of problems plaguing the south,” such as oppressive ideals of womanhood and the pervasive memory of slavery and racial violence (25). for bakhtin and yaeger, these bodies also have the potential to disrupt the status quo, disclosing “the potentiality of an entirely katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 70 different world, of another order, another way of life” (bakhtin 48). in salvage the bones, ward appears to agree that there is potential for transformation through what others deem grotesque and thus aligns herself with this more radical tradition. however, she remains realistic about the difficulty of overcoming the stigma attached to the notion of the grotesque body, particularly as it is linked with years of intergenerational trauma. iii. debility and bare life as the modern grotesque in her use of the grotesque, ward challenges its traditional and problematic equation of physical or mental disability with either moral corruption or child-like innocence. her characters are not in the vein of faulkner’s innocent benjy or o’connor’s nihilistic hazel motes. instead, ward works within the framework of what jasbir puar has termed “debility”: that is, her aim is to capture the felt effects of “biopolitical control of populations that foreground risk, prognosis, life chances… and capitalist exploitation,” which is “endemic, perhaps even normative to disenfranchised communities… a banal feature of quotidian existence that is already definitive of the precarity of that existence” (16). debility implies a larger scheme of structural violence that marginalizes and oppresses certain groups and communities, manifesting tangibly as lower-quality infrastructure and schooling, fewer job opportunities, poverty, drug abuse and even premature death at the individual level. in salvage the bones, debility partly manifests as lack of healthcare which results in the death of esch’s mother in childbirth, and in esch’s little knowledge about her own pregnancy and options. she cannot access birth control, saying “i’ve never had a prescription, wouldn’t have the money to get them if i did, don’t have any girlfriends to ask for some, and have never been to the health department” (139). her peers seem as uninformed as she is, with esch recalling snippets of conversations from other girls about how to terminate an unwanted pregnancy: if you hit yourself really hard in the stomach, throw yourself on the metal edge of a car and it hits you low enough to call bruises, it could bring a miscarriage…this is what you do when you can’t afford an abortion, when you can’t have a baby, when nobody wants what is inside you. (138) esch concludes that “these are my options, and they narrow to none” (139). thus, debility is figured as a form of intergenerational trauma, carrying over from mother to daughter, whose effects white writers would deem grotesque. ward, however, sees these characters as victims of a system of debility and structural violence. she does not interpret the seemingly grotesque aspects of their bodies or their situation as indicators of their moral value, but rather the product of an environment of sustained violence. puar’s concept of debility is closely related to agamben’s theory of zoe and bios, the two states of human existence. in homo sacer, agamben elaborates on the concept of the “sacred man,” a figure in roman culture who has lost his rights to citizenship and can thus be killed by anyone with impunity, but cannot be sacrificed for religious purposes. as such, homo sacer is someone living outside the law, not afforded its protection, and must thus live outside of katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 71 society. those deprived of a political existence are living in a state of zoe, “bare life,” while those participating in society are part of bios, political life. esch and her family are living in a state of bare life as illustrated, according to holly cade brown, in the complete disregard the state has for their survival before, during and after katrina’s landfall. brown argues that “while the state in contemporary democratic societies is often portrayed as a force of protection, the aftermath of hurricane katrina demonstrates that the power of the modern state rests on a process of exclusion that can leave bodies to be rendered dispensable at any time” (1). when applied to ward’s revisionism of the southern gothic grotesque, however, bare life extends to individual autonomy, or lack of thereof, as well as the state’s disregard of those bodies. in other words, bare life can be the result of debility, which begins on a structural, state-level, but is ultimately experienced individually in the bodies of those affected and in the lack of choice and autonomy afforded to them. as pregnancy and motherhood are central themes of salvage the bones, debility and its grotesque effect are most clearly visible on esch’s body. it is clear, however, that this cycle did not begin with her, but that she is part of a chain of intergeneration trauma, passed on from her mother and stretching far to the past. iv. grotesque motherhood in salvage the bones the grotesque can be, then, defined as the result of loss of bodily autonomy due to an already precarious existence, an effect of living in a state of zoe instead of bios. in salvage the bones, that loss is exemplified through an unplanned pregnancy which literally takes over and transforms esch’s body. in a family dynamic partly inspired by as i lay dying, young esch finds herself pregnant, a precarious position made even more so because of her mother’s death in childbirth a few years back. motherhood and pregnancy, typically perceived as joyous life events, are figured as a form of debility and grotesquery for poor, black southern women like esch. lacking proper healthcare and familial support, and feeling ashamed of her condition, esch retreats into herself and interprets her pregnancy as grotesque and the child she is carrying as a parasite intent on taking over her body. she sees herself as a confirmation of white society’s stereotypes of young black women, and its “disdain for the ghetto and its outlaw sexualities… premised on an unspoken threat of an association with disability” (erevelles 72). these “outlaw sexualities,” relegated to poor black communities, echo bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque as a body of unashamed excess, reinforcing the stereotype of black women as sexually insatiable and reckless. thus, esch’s pregnancy is seen by white society as the result of her own recklessness and sexual profligacy, a condition only slightly better than an animal. ward depicts the bodily processes of pregnancy and birth viscerally and at times even grotesquely, illustrating her understanding of the south as a “place where black people were bred and understood to be animals” (ward 5). salvage opens with the family’s pit-bull, china, giving birth to a litter of puppies, effectively introducing the theme of motherhood through an animal. the physicality of the birth is rendered in stark realism, with china “turn[ing] on herself,” snarling, her sides rippling and then “she seems to be turning herself inside out” and katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 72 “splits” as she delivers (ward 1,4, 9). watching the birth, esch thinks “that is what killed mama” (10), while delivering her last child, junior. esch recalls her mother, “chin to chest, straining to push junior out, and junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try and stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born” (10). in her final moments, esch’s mother “shook her head…raised her chin to the ceiling like an animal on the slaughter stump” (221). she does not speak to esch, but looks at her for a last time, and esch imagines her mother saying to her, “don’t do it. don’t become the woman in this bed, esch” (222, emphasis in original). the grotesque descriptions of bodies in the act of turning in on themselves and transforming signify that motherhood is inscribed in esch’s mind as a life-threatening situation, one to be avoided at all costs, suitable only for animals and those privileged enough to be able to afford a safe pregnancy. these animalistic, grotesque aspects of southern black life—and motherhood, in particular—are punctuated by moments of literal bodily damage, leaving characters maimed and deformed, seemingly conforming with the original definition of the grotesque as a form of physical disfigurement. christopher lloyd observes that ward “is interested in the ways bodies are never quite entire, intact, or solid… black southerners are complexly presented as precarious, creaturely and throwaway” (255). ward maintains the parallelisms between humans and animals in a scene of shocking violence where china eats one of her puppies, occuring simultaneously with esch’s father losing a finger in an accident: “the blood on daddy’s shirt is the same color as the pulpy puppy in china’s mouth…daddy’s middle, ring, and pinkie finger on his left hand are sheared off clean as fallen tree trunks. the meat of his fingers is red and wet as china’s lips” (190). dogs are figured in the novel as stand-ins for humans, mimicking their behaviour, power dynamics, and social hierarchies. china’s attack on the puppy is prefigured by a vicious dog-fight she is forced to participate in against the puppies’ father, kilo. the fighting dogs are all maimed in some form, with “sliced ears,” “gashes on [their] shoulders” and multiple cuts on their bodies (242-3). when it is china’s turn to fight, one of esch’s brothers objects, saying, “how you going to fight her?... she’s a mother!” to which skeetah, the eldest, replies “and he’s a father…and what fucking difference does it make?” (247). life has taught skeetah and esch that living is a struggle, and that relationships between men and women, mothers and fathers, cannot exist without violence. motherhood is denigrated from an almost holy, untouchable state, to simply a biological phenomenon that does not differentiate between humans and animals. the fight between kilo and china is described in quasi-sexual terms; “they meet. they rise. they embrace. they bite, neck to neck” (255). however, this dance soon devolves into violence of a particularly gendered nature. kilo notices china’s teats, full with milk, and attacks. he “bows his head like a puppy to drink. but he doesn’t drink. he bites…her breast is bloody, torn. the nipple, missing” (253). esch uses the human “breast” to describe china’s teats, thus strengthening what she perceives as a connection between herself and the dog, the only two mothers in the novel. kilo’s attack is pointedly aimed at china’s role as a mother and he deforms her by attacking katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 73 the symbol of her motherhood. the dogs seem to physically carry the psychic wounds inflicted on their owners by the everyday hardships of life and by each other’s cruelties. their grotesque deformities are inflicted upon them by a system of violence—dog-fighting—which is figured as a microcosm of larger society, with man pitted against man, dog eating dog. ward takes the analogy a step further by drawing parallels between the dog fights and the antagonistic relationship between the sexes and the precariousness of being a woman and a mother in such an environment. esch, after witnessing china’s attack on her puppy, thinks to herself, “is this what motherhood is?” (191 emphasis in original). she understands womanhood and motherhood as grotesque states, not simply because of the bodily changes they entail, but also because of the violence they seem to generate and attract. in other words, esch understands how vulnerable she is bio-politically as a black pregnant girl, living in poverty, branded deviant and grotesque. however, despite the zoological imagery associated with esch from the beginning, ward makes it clear that she possesses a sophisticated inner-world that is deeply inspired by the environment around her and from her readings, which include faulkner and greek mythology. esch recalls reading as i lay dying in ninth grade and getting an a for answering “the hardest question right: why does the young boy think his mother is a fish?” (16, emphasis in original). having also lost her mother at a young age, esch understands vardaman’s need to mythologize his mother as a way of dealing with her death. esch does not think her mother is a fish, but her ghost lingers in the periphery of the text and in the depictions of violent motherhood that recur in the novel. esch’s literary interests, then, influence the way she thinks about motherhood and her own pregnancy, which is initially described in gothic terms, in the vein of faulkner or toni morrison. upon first discovering that she is pregnant, esch thinks, “the terrible truth of what i am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach… there is something in there” (36). later, when she vomits, the child is described as a mysterious thing clinging to her insides: “i cannot stop heaving up air and spit, but still i am not able to throw it all up. inside, at the bottom, something remains” (48). the foetus is figured as an unknown parasite and esch’s womb almost like a haunted house, terrorized by an unseen ghost. the situation recalls morrison’s beloved (1987), where the ghost of the titular child returns to haunt her mother, sethe. like sethe, esch struggles to maintain a separate sense of self as the child takes over. the fear of birthing a monster, another common gothic trope, is present in esch’s feelings about her pregnancy. monsters often represent unwanted aggressive or sexual thoughts and thus embody what humans fear is evil and destructive in themselves. they are also “like caricatures –larger than life—… by seeing them this way,” argues barbara almond, “we can deny their connection to our own impulses and feelings” (51). esch’s othering language when referring to her pregnancy and her fear of disclosing it to anyone reinforces this notion of the baby as something alien and hostile to her body, separate from herself. lacking any female figures to relate to, apart from china, esch navigates her new, confusing state, by turning to greek myth. like other african american writers — including katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 74 ralph ellison and toni morrison —, ward is drawn to the classics, although she complains that many readers and critics still assume that “the work of white american writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as ‘other’” (qtd. in hoover 3). she therefore “wanted to align esch with that classic text…to claim that tradition as part of my western literary heritage” (hoover 3). as such, greek myth gives esch a framework through which to understand and contextualize her situation, placing her amongst a long line of women who were branded grotesque and deviant, but who persevered in the face of a patriarchal and racist society. the figure that looms throughout the text is medea, notorious for murdering her children and becoming the quintessential symbol of monstrous—or grotesque—motherhood, but also the archetypal ‘other’: a witch and barbarian (non-greek) in the eyes of greek society, she is an example of how the oppressed victim will strike back against their oppressor. esch views her relationship with her child’s father, manny, as parallel to the one between medea and jason, romanticizing their affair, but also recognizing its toxicity. manny is solely interested in esch sexually and does not reciprocate her deeper feelings and esch understands, but cannot fully accept it. of medea, esch says, “but even with all her power, jason bends her like a young pine in a hard wind; he makes her double in two. i know her” (60). esch is torn between her devotion to her family, particularly her older brother skeetah, and her love for manny, which mirrors medea’s dilemma, being forced to choose between her brother and jason. in one version of the myth, medea “kills her brother herself…chops him into bits: liver, gizzard, breast and thigh…” (225), an atomized list reminiscent of the myriad injuries on the fighting dogs’ bodies. in fact, medea is most closely related to china, both in her battle with kilo and from committing infanticide. after the latter incident, esch describes china as “bloody-mouthed and bright-eyed as medea” (191) and the reader is left to wonder if esch will follow her to a similar violent conclusion, given the parallelisms between the girl and the dog. medea’s power is also linked to hurricane katrina, the inevitable conclusion to which the story is heading. hurricane katrina was often figured in the media as a “monster of the atlantic” and ward, who lived through the catastrophe, explains that “medea is in hurricane katrina because [medea’s] power to unmake worlds, to manipulate the elements, closely aligns with the storm” (qtd. in hoover 4). in the storm’s aftermath, grotesque images of bloated bodies circulated in the media, bodies which katrina had exhumed in a perverse kind of rebirth. esch talks of katrina as “the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sunstarved newly hatched baby snakes…” (337), highlighting the storm’s power to both create and destroy. what was brought to the surface, however, were not only bodies, but also “racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy… in which entire populations are considered disposable” (giroux 307). lacking the resources and means to escape the storm, esch’s family ignores the call for evacuation and brace for its impact, katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 75 aware that they might lose their lives and livelihoods in the process. their situation mirrors that of countless families in the wake of the storm, who were later blamed by the media and officials for not heeding the alarm, deeming their losses as the product of their personal choice and not the result of chronic, structural disenfranchisement. the storm highlighted existing inequalities and the environment of debility they were bred in which disproportionally target poor, black southerners. to use giorgio agamben’s terminology, these people’s lives were relegated to the status of zoē, bare, animalistic life, and their bios, their political existence as citizens, was excised. zoē is the reality for grotesque characters appearing in southern gothic fiction, characters who exist in the margins and have no control over their lives and destinies. for ward, their physical or mental difference is only the symptom, not the cause of this exclusion. what pushes these characters to the edges of society is their inability to “contribute to the prevailing consumerist ethic” (giroux 309), their unwillingness or inability to participate in an economy of production and consumption that characterizes modern america. as esch says, “katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes” (337), indicating that she knows the cycle of poverty and debility has not ended with the storm. despite the catastrophe, there is a subtle sense of optimism running through the later part of the novel. katrina destroyed, but what followed was a form of rebirth, a renewed awareness of the faults and prejudices of the system and hopes of reform. esch’s changing attitudes towards her pregnancy indicate that the storm has brought about a reconfiguration of values and priorities. toward the end of the novel, esch’s identification with medea intensifies, but does not take the violent turn of the original myth. esch confronts manny about the pregnancy and forces him to acknowledge her: … all i have ever wanted, here. he is looking. he is seeing me, and his hands are coming around to feel the honeydew curve, the swell that is more than swell, the fat that is not fat, the budding baby, and his eyes are so black they are all black, and they are a night without stars. all i have ever wanted. he knows. “fuck!” manny yells, and he is throwing me up and off of him (195, emphasis added) when she is finally seen for who she is, esch can acknowledge the foetus as a “budding baby,” despite manny’s disgusted reaction. in a later confrontation, when manny questions the paternity of the child and calls her a slut, she erupts and attacks him: “this is medea wielding the knife. this is medea cutting. i rake my fingernails across his face, leave pink scratches that turn red, fill with blood” (270). the fight between them mirrors the one between china and kilo, but in this instance, it is esch doing the damage, attacking and disfiguring manny just as kilo had done to china. she refuses to be stigmatized and have her motherhood and womanhood diminished, marked as grotesque and other for her state. as esch’s approach to herself and her pregnancy change, the kindness of the people around her is also revealed, fuelled by the storm and the need to rebuild the community. when her father discovers the pregnancy amidst the chaos, he is not cross or disgusted, like katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 76 manny; instead, he is gentle and understanding, saying only that she needs to see a doctor to “make sure everything’s okay…so nothing will go wrong” (326), so esch will not have to repeat her mother’s fate. her father’s subtle interjection points towards a gradual break of the cycle of violence and intergenerational trauma that has marked the family’s life. when asked by big henry, one of the neighbourhood boys, who the father is, esch replies, “it don’t have a daddy.” henry, though, answers, “you wrong… this baby got plenty of daddies” (254). esch is not a single mother in the traditional sense, as she is supported by a community similar to that found in beloved (1987). in morrison’s novel, that community comes together and their united song finally banishes beloved’s spirit. in salvage, after the catastrophe of hurricane katrina, the community’s joint efforts not only rebuild what was lost, but also foster new life out of the debris. thus, esch’s story moves from grotesquery to hope, from decay to regeneration. v. conclusions ward uses the conventions of the grotesque to consider the impact of addiction and teenage motherhood and their correlation with racial and socioeconomic factors in the rural south. in doing so, she writes against traditional gothic narratives which cast black people as “objects of discourse, rather than as social agents” (wester 53) and which allowed white writers and readers to meditate upon complex realities and behaviours without having to claim responsibility for them. her gothic tales speak against the strictly sociological narratives imposed on black communities. in her memoir, men we reaped (2013), ward presents statistics on poverty, drug addiction, police brutality and death rates within mississippi’s black communities. what those sociological statistics tell her is that a black life is worth nothing in the south: “in searching for words to write this story,” writes ward, “i found more statistics about what it means to be black and poor in the south,”(433) more numbers than human stories. ward insists on the gothic essence of those disparaging numbers and statistics, noting that “we were bewildered. there is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it” (250). her work gives words and voices to the men and women deemed merely unfortunate statistics. her oeuvre also reclaims the labels of “grotesque” and “savage” which black southerners have been time and again stigmatized with. according to her, “[savage] has a different meaning for us [black southerners.] for us it means that you’re a fighter and that you’re a survivor… we still survive and we still claim for ourselves a certain sense of dignity or humanity” (hartnell 212). ward’s characters are indeed thorns in the side of the society which produced them—but, she insists, they are also human. her work demands that the reader not look away from their plight. katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 77 works cited agamben, giorgio. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford, stanford university press, 1998. almond, barbara. the monster within: the hidden side of motherhood. university of california press, 2010. bakhtin, mikhail. rabelais and his world. translated by hélène iswolsky. indiana university press, 1965. block, melissa. “writing mississippi: jesmyn ward salvages stories of the silenced.” npr, 31 august 2017, npr.org/2017/08/31/547271081/writing-mississippi-jesmyn-ward-salvages-stories-of-the-silenced. accessed 15 june 2020. brown, holly calder. “figuring giorgio agamben’s ‘bare life’ in the post-katrina works of jesmyn ward and kara walker.” journal of american studies, vol. 51, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–19. erevelles, nirmala. disability and difference in global contexts: enabling a transformative body politic. palgrave macmillan, 2011. fiedler, leslie a. love and death in the american novel. cape, 1960. giroux, henry a. “violence, katrina, and the biopolitics of disposability.” theory, culture & society, vol. 24, no. 7, 2007, pp. 305–309. goddu, teresa a. “the african american slave narrative and the gothic.” a companion to american gothic, edited by charles l. crow, wiley-blackwell, 2013, pp. 71–83. hartnell, hannah. “when cars become churches: jesmyn ward’s disenchanted america. an interview.” journal of american studies, vol. 50, no. 1, 2016, pp. 205–218. hoover, elizabeth. “jesmyn ward on salvage the bones.” the paris review, 30 august 2011, pp. 1-5, theparisreview.org/blog/2011/08/30/jesmyn-ward-on-salvage-the-bones/. accessed 15 june 2020. lloyd, christopher. “creaturely, throwaway life after katrina: salvage the bones and beasts of the southern wild.” south: a scholarly journal, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, pp. 246–264. morrison, toni. beloved. vintage classics, 2007. puar, jasbir k. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. duke university press, 2017. punter, david and glennis byron. the gothic. wiley-blackwell, 2004. spiegel, alan. “a theory of the grotesque in southern fiction.” the georgia review, vol. 26, no. 4, 1972, pp. 426–437. ward, jesmyn. salvage the bones. bloomsbury, 2014. —. men we reaped. bloomsbury, 2013. —. where the line bleeds. bloomsbury, 2008. —. “introduction.” the fire this time: a new generation speaks about race, edited by jesmyn ward, bloomsbury, 2016, pp. 1–8. weinstock, jeffrey andrew. “introduction.” the cambridge companion to the american gothic, edited by jeffrey andrew weinstock, cambridge university press, 2017, pp. 1–12. wester, maisha l. “the gothic in and as race theory.” the gothic and theory, edited by jerrold e. hogle and roberty miles, edinburgh university press, 2019, pp. 53–70. katerina psilopoulou | writing the grotesque body in jesmyn ward's salvage the bones reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1424 78 —. african american gothic: screams from the shadowed places. palgrave macmillan, 2012. wright, richard. “how bigger was born.” native son, vintage, 2000, pp. 1–31. yaeger, patricia. dirt and desire: reconstructing southern women’s writing 1930-1990. university of chicago press, 2000. microsoft word 3.1_full issue.docx kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 94 schizoid masculinity and monstrous interiors in american haunted house narratives kerry gorrill manchester metropolitan university abstract in this article, i propose that the haunted house narrative, so central to american gothic, has itself mutated in response to a backdrop of post-millennial social, political and financial collapse in a manner quite different to developments in the rest of the gothic literary world. the narrative strand which has emerged presents the reader with a new form of the gothic male protagonist, whom the british psychologist r.d. laing would describe as a ‘schizoid’ subject (laing 17). fragile, failing and fragmenting, he escapes a failing career, marriage and parenthood by removing his family to a quasi-domestic space which promises repair. often combining work and home, the house rises up to meet the male schizoid, not merely as the traditional gothic setting, but as a sentient being; a monster in its own right. his entrapment in this new gothic labyrinth that is constantly shifting, expanding and shrinking, provides a performative stage on which the schizoid male is forced into an existential crisis beyond the trauma of spousal and parental failure, ultimately forcing him to confront what it is to exist in space and time. a reaction to the rise of neo-liberalism and toxic masculinity, this type of narrative embraces the multiplicity of the gothic’s new forms and is evident in texts such as steve rasnic tem’s deadfall hotel (2012), mark z. danielewski’s house of leaves (2000), thomas ligotti’s the town manager (2008), jac jemc’s the grip of it (2017) and shaun hamilll’s a cosmology of monsters (2020). developing from their deeper roots in the calvinist gothic tradition of hawthorne, brockden brown and poe via the midcentury works of stephen king and robert marasco, these new postmillennial narratives provide a space in which notions of masculine subjectivity are fundamentally challenged. keywords: schizoid, bachelard, quasi-domestic space, masculinity, cosmic terror. i. the emergence of a new strand of the american haunted house narrative the haunted house has always existed at the heart of the gothic mode, first as castles and country houses and latterly as suburban homes, prisons, asylums and hotels, providing a liminal space in which the protagonist is confronted by the supernatural. as catherine spooner points out in the contemporary gothic, the gothic operates like a “malevolent virus” (8), kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 95 constantly mutating in response to contemporary anxieties such as gender, class and sociopolitical concerns. in this article i will be presenting a new iteration of the haunted house narrative in which the male protagonist is presented, not merely as unstable or insane, but as a subject in a more complex state of insanity. most importantly, this subject finds himself in a hybridized setting, part domestic (in that it serves some or all of the functions of a home) and part workplace (either as a hotel, prison, asylum or where the character works from home). this setting does not simply provide a passive architectural space in which a haunting can occur, but responds to the presence of the masculine subject becoming a sentient being, a monster in his own right. this hybridized, quasi-domestic space then proceeds to mutate in ways that develop the traditional notion of the labyrinth into an architectural space that is intended to drive the fragile, schizoid protagonist into a confrontation with his deepest fears, memories and traumas. in identifying this key development in the haunted house trope, i aim to explain how the gothic affect created is not in the more conventional sense of the sublime, the numinous or simply terror in the reader, but a more unsettling sense of heideggerian angst at a cosmological level, generating a sense of nihilistic hopelessness. i will be identifying the historical origins and development of this new haunted house iteration that focuses specifically on the white middle class male, from its origins in the 1940s, as well as exploring the psychological construction of the male protagonist, the nature of the architectural space and the key contextual factors which have influenced its flourishing in the eco-gothic and new sub-genres of the gothic from 2000 to the present day. when early gothic literature relocated its settings from an othered catholic europe at the end of the eighteenth century to the various home grounds of england, scotland and america in works such as william godwin’s caleb williams (1794), charles brockden brown’s wieland (1798) and james hogg’s confessions of a justified sinner (1824), the protagonist of the haunted house tale changed gender from female to male, acquired a family and downsized from the ancient castle to a more domestic setting. rebecca janicker sees the early haunted castles of european eighteenth century narratives as “crude symbols of menace rather than the meaningful encounters with complex supernatural entities that appear in later haunted house fiction” (janicker 82). kate ferguson ellis tracks the development of the nineteenth century idea of the middle-class abode as the “safe sphere of home” against the literary trope of the castle acting as the “dark opposite.” it is a result of the development of “separate spheres for men and women,” she claims, in which the home (the private sphere) became the specific domain of women while the new, industrialised world of work (the public sphere) became that of men (ellis x). while many critics have commented on the setting of the haunted house, the focus has typically been on locating the home as a feminised, maternal or queer space. however, some of the recent work on the queer male protagonist and domestic space has been very pertinent, such as the work of gero bauer and andrew hock soon ng. bauer explains the changes in the way that homes were occupied during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, recognising the shift to the “emergence of modern civil society” and observing the kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 96 resulting emergence of “new spatial arrangements” in the home to reflect the development of these public and private spheres (bauer 17). he identifies in this development the emergence of the closet as a “specifically masculine space for men”—in which was housed the “resources needed to master the world” (bauer 21). however, bauer defines this space as one in which men conceal their homosexuality and so does not account for the role of the heterosexual male in gothic domestic spaces. hock soon ng does begin to identify the emergence of a symbiotic relationship between setting and protagonist, identifying “architecture” as “capable of implicitly influencing its occupant’s subjectivity” (ng 17). overall, however, there is little written that explores the relationship between the heteronormative, white male protagonist and the broadly domestic setting that now features so prominently in contemporary american gothic narratives. the switch in gender of the protagonist might simply be more directly tracked alongside the transference of this particular strand of the gothic to its new world setting, shifting as it does from the labyrinthine castles of the mode’s european origin in horace walpole’s the castle of otranto (1764), to the middle-class houses to be seen in the works of writers like charles brockden brown, nathaniel hawthorne and edgar allan poe, reflecting the more egalitarian, post-revolutionary political foundations of a newly established american nation. the innocent young orphan girl is replaced by the independent young man, more representative of the themes of universal suffrage and the pioneer spirit key to america’s search for its political ideals. in the aftermath of two world wars, the great depression and the twin threats of the atomic bomb and the cold war america, the twentieth century produces the beginnings of a more divergent instantiation of the motif. in particular, the horror films of the 1970s saw a return to the original and more visually tempting female protagonist, and this is reflected even earlier in the post-war works of a burgeoning number of female writers such as shirley jackson—and perhaps most famously, in the character of eleanor in the haunting of hill house—such representations engaging with the changing attitudes to women that arise in the post-war era. yet more importantly for my argument, the 1970s also sees the emergence of a new kind of male protagonist and a novel strain of the haunted house motif referred to by the gothic writer stephen graham jones as the “hungry house” in his introduction to robert marasco’s novel, burnt offerings (200). this new expression of the “haunted house” narrative reflects ongoing changes in the way that domestic architectural space is conceived and inhabited. the spaces described in texts that are part of this trope should now be described more accurately as hybridized, quasidomestic spaces which are both home and workplace, reflecting the conflicted nature of employment and family life for the excessively troubled male protagonist, who reflects the dramatic political and social upheaval of post-millennium america. this expresses a fundamental collapse of american masculinity so extreme, that these entrapped, troubled men are left with few options except to consider their very existence. the most recent examples of this divergent haunted house form occur in texts published post-2000, such as house of leaves by kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 97 mark z. danielewski (2000), thomas ligotti’s the town manager (2008), bret easton ellis’s lunar park (2005), steve rasnic tem’s deadfall hotel (2012), grady hendrix’s horrorstör (2014), jon padgett’s the secret of ventriloquism, (2016) and shaun hamill’s a cosmology of monsters (2020); novels that generate a powerful gothic affect—an unspecified, nihilistic, cosmic terror—that deeply unsettles the reader. it was not, however, the first outing for this new iteration, which could be seen to originate in l. ron hubbard’s novella fear published in 1941, though it really begins to develop in the 1970s with classic novels like stephen king’s the shining (1977), anne rivers siddons the house next door (1978) and the short stories of steve rasnic tem of the 1980s. the more recent short stories and novels published in the 2000s occur within the context of what the journalist hannah rosin sees as the loss of “the old architecture of manliness” (rosin 8). in her account of the latest american crisis of masculinity, rosin describes a “mancession,” as occurring thanks to the “post manufacturing age” dating from the recessions of the 1990s. she posits that the american male is left with only the “mancessories” of masculinity: “jeans and pickup trucks and designer switchblades, superheroes and thugs who rant and rave on tv and, at the end of the season, fade back into obscurity” (rosin 9). she goes on to quote from susan faludi’s stiffed, who describes masculinity as “ornamental” (qtd. in rosin 9). it is precisely this loss of the traditional concrete markers of masculine identity that seems to lie at the heart of this trope of haunted masculinity. in the premises of this kind of gothic text, the male characters are in peril of losing everything that would identify them as a heteronormative, white man: the expected role as patriarch, a wife and children, their career and pride in their abilities as breadwinners. the “hungry house” to which they decide to escape, in the belief that it will allow them to re-establish their traditional masculine identity, is revealed to be a dangerous space where they are confronted by a truth which will exacerbate their existential crisis and force them into a schizoid state. i argue that these texts reflect contemporary fears of an end of patriarchy and the notion that american men will soon have no option but to re-engineer the traditional, patriarchal image of themselves, perhaps best represented by images of men in the 1950s, as the paterfamilias living the american dream of home, family and stable career into a new, as yet unformulated model of masculinity, whose construction is fraught by “conflicting or unmanageable social expectations” (connell 23). the traditional models of american masculinity have been drained of any meaning and those that are suggested as replacements elicit the recurring fear of feminisation and powerlessness. faludi observes that men in the 1990s became like a 1950s housewife, “stripped of his connections to a wider world and invited to fill the void with consumption and a gym-bred display of his ultra-masculinity” (faludi 823). faludi’s suggestion here is that men have lost their connections to the traditional homosocial dimension of work and such loss sets them adrift, unable to fulfil the traditional heteronormative performative roles of father, husband, and most importantly, the subject who has symbolic control over the home and its physical spaces through its purchase and maintenance. kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 98 in stephen king’s novel the shining, for example, jack torrance has lost his job as a teacher and his career as a writer is stalled. the opportunity to move to the overlook hotel provides him with a traditionally practical and masculine role as caretaker. in mark z. danielewski’s house of leaves, will navidson is forced into his “cozy little outpost” (danielewski 8) to perform the role of husband and father but finds that this home refuses to be obedient to his wishes. both jack’s and will’s careers belong to sectors outside those traditionally associated with american masculine ideals—which revolve around steel and oil industries, as well as manufacturing processes such as car assemblage. such occupations demand participation in the homosocial public sphere, allowing men to publicly demonstrate their economic power and to dominate in the private domestic sphere. will’s career as a photojournalist and jack’s unsuccessful career as a writer require solitary work, outside both private and public spheres, demonstrating purely intellectual and aesthetic qualities which result in the production of the symbolic representation of actions, rather than the tangible products of traditional manufacturing industries. jack’s ostensible career teaching in a private school is one that he rejects as representing his sense of economic powerlessness and lack of status in the homosocial sphere. like faludi and rosin, michael s. kimmel points out that the american blue collar male worker has been hard hit by economic recession. he notes that, “80 percent of all the jobs lost since november 2008—a number in excess of 5 million—were jobs held by men.” (kimmel 14), while rosin argues that the increasing predominance of a “service and information economy” rewards skills traditionally associated with women rather than men, such as, “social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus” (rosin 5). the focus of this gothic form on protagonists who are writers, teachers or employed in “service industries” directly parallels the economic decline of those american industries most associated with men and the concomitant fears of feminization. historian howard zinn provides a crucial historical underpinning to the arguments of critics like faludi, rosin and kimmel by delineating the origins of america’s economic structures during the nineteenth century rise of industrialist elites, embodied by figures such as j.p. morgan and john d. rockefeller. these magnates controlled the most economically powerful industries—railways, steel and oil—and quickly learned to join hands financially and politically in order to create “an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors” (zinn 258). the government (often consisting of members of the wealthy industrialist elite) always sought to promote economic and social stability. nonetheless, the pattern of economic boom and bust that was established and persistent levels of unrest and workers’ strikes of the period seem to support zinn’s socialist critique, based on the idea that “the capitalist system was by its nature unsound: a system driven by one overriding motive of corporate profit and therefore unstable, unpredictable and blind to human needs” (zinn 387). he points out that the middle classes in america exist as a kind of aspirational steppingstone to the world of the super-rich upper classes. to maintain the illusion of the american dream as a political tool for control of the masses, according to zinn, the government has always ensured that the kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 99 economy was “doing just well enough for just enough people to prevent mass rebellion” (zinn 382). it can be no accident then that the male protagonists in the post-millennial texts i explore such as mark z. danielewski’s house of leaves (2000), steve rasnic tem’s deadfall hotel (2012) and shaun hamill’s a cosmology of monsters (2020) are middle class. these texts suggest that american men perceive middle class status to be a kind of gothic liminal space that simply exists to be traversed on the way to membership of the upper classes. a sense of gothic tension for the middle-class american male is derived from his being subjected to the constant double threat of failure to move into the upper class and the risk of falling back into the working class. this kind of protagonist is described as psychologically unstable, just as his position in american society throughout history has always been a precarious one. he is engaged in a struggle to inhabit the liminal space of the middle class, a space whose ill-defined borders move, shift, disappear and reappear at the mercy of the vagaries of an inherently unstable economy. the mutating nature of the settings i explore reflects this economic uncertainty, especially as this aspect has become especially marked as the home begins to merge with the workplace thanks to the development of technology and the necessities of the covid-19 pandemic. in all the texts examined, a hybridization between the home and the workplace becomes increasingly marked: in the shining the protagonist is a resident caretaker; in house of leaves, while navidson claims at first that he just wants, “to create a record of how karen and i bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children” (danielewski 8), he also uses that record to gain funding so he can turn the experience into a documentary. (danielewski 10). in more recent novels, the hybridisation of the domestic setting becomes more complex. grady hendrix’s 2014 novel horrorstör is set in an ikea-style store laid out as a labyrinth of fake domestic rooms in which the protagonists seek to escape the malevolent presence of the victorian prison which lies beneath its foundations. shaun hamill’s a cosmology of monsters (2020) is set in the protagonist’s home, which is also where he and his family plan and build their family business, a haunted house attraction. ii. laing’s schizoid protagonist to analyse the development of this fragile male protagonist and to explore the reasons for the changes observed, it is key to focus on the connections existing between the psychology of the gendered male subject and the social conditions of his production. in this article, i draw on the ideas put forward in r.d. laing’s the divided self (1964), his account of the schizoid subject allows a more nuanced and revealing exploration of this aspect of american gothic narrative than is possible with other more modern accounts of masculine subjectivity. laing, a member of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, reacted against mainstream freudian psychoanalysis, proposing his view that the freudian approach resulted in a series of binary oppositions that split the patient’s behaviour into normal/abnormal too reductively: kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 100 the most serious objection to the technical vocabulary currently used to describe psychiatric patients is that it consists of words which split man up verbally in a way which is analogous to the existential splits unless we can begin from the concept of a unitary whole, and no such concept exists, nor can any such concept be expressed within the current language system of psychiatry or psychoanalysis (laing 19). for laing then, it seemed to make no sense to begin from a point where the subject was treated as a mere set of symptoms outside the context of the subject’s relationship to others and the world: “this difficulty faces not only classical freudian metapsychology but equally any theory that begins with man or part of man abstracted from his relation with the other in his world […] we can be ourselves only in and through our world” (laing 19). laing wanted to move away from the freudian focus on the past as the key motivating factor for psychological disturbance. what he believed was that the production of the self was to be found in the subject’s interaction with others and the world and indeed, laing clearly references heidegger’s notion of “dasein”—or “being in the world” in his introduction: “i shall try to show that there is a comprehensible transition from the sane, schizoid way of ‘being-in-the-world’ to a psychotic way of being-in-the-world” (laing 19). this framework allows us to carry out a more detailed analysis of how this now masculine subjectivity is constructed; to focus not just on their family/childhood history, but on their immediate and wider social context. iii. jack torrance’s ontological insecurity the schizoid male protagonist is not just “insane” in the sense that characterises the nineteenth century narrators of edgar allan poe’s black cat (1843) or william wilson (1839), for example. rather, he is described in the “modern” manner identified by laing as “schizoid.” laing details the schizoid subject as having “a rent in his relations with his world” and “a disruption of his relation with himself,” so he is “not able to experience himself together with others” or be “at home in the world,” and is therefore forced to live in “despairing aloneness and isolation,” unable to “experience himself as a complete person but rather as “split” in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves” (laing 17). according to laing, the schizoid subject longs to be seen and understood by those around them but this is coupled with a crippling fear that this recognition will result in their “engulfment”—that is to say, the fear that their identity will be consumed and absorbed by the other. their response to this conflict is to split into a “true self,” which preserves their authentic self, and a “false self,” which presents a mask or persona to the outside world that allows them to avoid engulfment. the pressure of this conflict often forces the schizoid subject to avoid the threat of engulfment by isolating themselves from others or by objectifying them in order to depersonalise them and so make them less of a threat. as a result, the schizoid subject will often prefer to be hated by others as a way of avoiding relationships that could result in engulfment. in this new iteration of the haunted house narrative, therefore, we see male protagonists like jack torrance whose ontological insecurity was propelled by an unpredictably kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 101 cruel and violently abusive father: “’runt of the litter,’ he would say, and then cuff jack lovingly and laugh” (king 244). his father’s cruelty to his wife and sons leaves jack with a deeprooted inability to maintain relationships which are always already compromised and whose psychic construction is correspondingly fragile. jack himself recognises that his experiences have left him broken psychologically, in effect diagnosing his own schizoid nature: “there was a broken switch somewhere inside, or a circuit breaker that didn’t work” (king 177). jack’s schizoid tendencies are first revealed by his horrified and guilty reactions when he breaks his son danny’s arm, enraged after the boy spilled beer on the manuscript of his play. coupled with the conflicts intrinsic to his failing marriage, this event exacerbates his fear of engulfment by his family. jack reacts by indulging in lengthy drinking binges with his friend al shockley and groups of students through which he seeks to avoid his inability to be, as laing would put it, “alone with himself in the world,” yet fulfil his need to be “seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity” (laing 114). jack’s presence in the overlook hotel prompts it to change its shape; the colorado lounge, its bar stripped of alcohol for the winter, is returned to its 1920s heyday, populated with partygoers and its bar restocked and staffed by the barman, lloyd, who forces jack to confront the alcoholism that threatens his marriage. the ghosts of staff members, bartender lloyd and murderous caretaker delbert grady, appear in order to goad jack with his fear of engulfment suggesting that “[a] man who cannot guide the course of his own wife and son can hardly be expected to guide himself” (king 390). jack’s intention to rewrite himself literally and metaphorically in order to repair the threatened psychotic split is derailed, just as is his early writing success as his writer’s block returns. the constant work inherent to the maintenance of the hotel piles the pressure on his mental condition as jack needs to make daily repairs and monitor the furnace. indeed, many of the texts that form part of this trend reference the space’s tendency to decay and parasitic infestation such as those of insects and cats experienced in tem’s deadfall hotel. ultimately, the combination of career-related pressure, family conflict, taunting of the ghostly staff and exacting nature of the constant maintenance lead to an exaggeration of jack’s failings, resulting in what laing calls petrification. jack begins to disengage emotionally from his wife and son, “’i love you too,’ he said, but he was only mouthing the words” (king 294). jack’s petrification is accompanied by the process of depersonalisation—in order to survive, jack must reduce others to the role of objects who pose no threat of engulfment but can provide “constant confirmation …… of his own existence as a person” (laing 46). at first, he begins to refer to his wife wendy and son danny, not by name as previously, but only as “bitch,” or “the boy” (king 443). tormented by his own sense of failure, jack’s behaviour becomes typical of the patterns described by laing as he oscillates between extremes: “complete isolation or complete merging” (laing 53), until he feels the urge to “throttle” wendy and physically abuse danny: “the sound of jack’s open palm striking danny” (king 295, 323). eventually, the split in jack’s personality is so complete that he is left with “no sense of existence as a ‘unitary whole’” (laing 19), as recognised by danny at the kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 102 end of the novel: “it wore many masks, but it was all one. now, somewhere, it was coming for him. it was hiding behind daddy’s face, it was imitating daddy’s voice, it was wearing daddy’s clothes. but it was not his daddy” (king 466). jack realises that the hotel is sentient and it is explicitly working to do him harm and that, “the overlook was having one hell of a good time” (king 308) in doing so. iv. will navidson’s ontological insecurity in house of leaves, will navidson’s ontological insecurity begins with the protagonist’s dysfunctional childhood which bears a resemblance to that of jack torrance’s in the shining. his family experience is marked by a highly dysfunctional father, “an alcoholic prone to violent outbursts or disappearing for long periods of time” and a mother who “left them all to pursue a career as an actress” (danielewski 22). however, the key event that drives his schizoid split is the choice to photograph delial, the “sudanese child dying of starvation, too weak to move even though a vulture stalks her from behind…” rather than save her from her condition (danielewski 368). will is initially very close to his fraternal twin tom but the relationship serves to represent the splitting of will’s true and false self, highlighted by danielewski’s comparison to the biblical twins jacob and esau. while their ontological insecurity has the same cause, tom and will exhibit contrasting schizoid responses that result in the splitting of all positive and negative qualities between the two of them. compared to navidson’s success, “tom won no awards, achieved no fame, held no job for more than a year or two…” (danielewski 246). their estrangement occurs when will marries and has children which leads to tom describing himself as “orphaned at the age of forty” (danielewski 250), and reflecting that “he felt like a part of him had been ripped away” (danielewski 319), these experiences allowing the true and false selves to exist independently. the ontological insecurity caused by his childhood and the guilt over abandoning delial, simply exaggerates will’s fear of engulfment, causing him to seek isolation by being constantly away from home. just as wendy threatens to leave jack torrance if he does not give up drinking, will’s wife karen threatens divorce if he does not settle down to create a proper family home. consequently, the family moves into the house at ash tree lane which his son chad immediately perceives as sentient; he says: “it’s like something is waiting” and the house then proceeds to catalyse navidson’s schizoid split (danielewski 9). as laing says, the schizoid subject is “torn between his desire to reveal himself and his desire to conceal himself” (laing 37) and when forced into the family home, he resorts to recreating it as a workplace, distancing himself from the family by turning the process into a documentary. will has no direct voice within the novel, his character is constructed through third person accounts and a series of films that, at first, seem to be like an artful and persuasive construction of his position on the side-lines of reality, observing others. he does so always with the intention of kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 103 somehow manipulating his audience to believe in his constructed false-self, by not hesitating to “constantly include in his film evidence of his own failings” (danielewski 17). like the outlook hotel for jack torrance, the house at ash tree lane awakens to will’s presence. while the family are away for a weekend a mysterious closet appears in the master bedroom. will’s measurements of the space tell him it cannot exist in reality: “the width of the house inside would appear to exceed the width of the house as measured from the outside by ¼”” (danielewski 30). during the course of the novel, the closet proceeds to expand into grey-black and featureless rooms, corridors and staircases that constantly change shape and defy the laws of physics. unable to control this space, that should be at his command, will invites tom, who possesses all the traditional, practical skills usually associated with american masculinity, to help him investigate the strange happenings in his home; it is clear to the reader that the arrival of tom is, to an extent, an attempt to heal will’s psychic split. initially forbidden by karen to enter the space, will has to send in substitutes for himself in the form of tom and a team of experienced explorers but it becomes clear that the person the house really wants is will. driving the team to madness and murder in its ever-expanding and mutating rooms and corridors, the house finally swallows tom alive: the house is literally the “hungry house” and willing to force the protagonist into its depths. once inside, will is finally trapped on a balcony overlooking a bottomless abyss and he is left, quite impossibly, with only a printed copy of house of leaves and enough matches to read it by. the documentary film he has been working on records his descent into madness as the balcony disappears and he falls into the void: “so there is no bottom. it does not exist for me. only my end exists” (danielewski 472). while jack torrance dies at the end of the shining—unable to reconstitute his schizoid split—will navidson survives. rescued from the house by his wife karen, he emerges alive but emotionally and physically damaged in an unexpectedly positive resolution. as with many of the texts that belong to this strand of the haunted house narrative, the male protagonist emerges from his experience in the hungry house made whole, but always with a caveat. reunited with his family, the final images of navidson carry a dark existential warning—that existence is always under threat from unknowable cosmological forces. as will films his children trick or treating, he captures “the empty road beyond, a pale curve vanishing into the words where nothing moves and a streetlamp flickers on and off until at last it flickers out and darkness sweeps in like a hand” (danielewski 528). v. identifying the monstrous interior to analyse the symbiotic inter-relationship between the male protagonist and the sentient quasi-domestic setting in these narratives, it becomes necessary to go beyond the concept of the haunted house as simply a liminal space which hosts a supernatural manifestation and focus more closely on the psychological function of specific architectural spaces within the home. gaston bachelard’s the poetics of space, published in 1958, remains a highly influential work on the philosophy of architecture and provides a way of considering how the quasi kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 104 domestic space can set about influencing its occupants. it is referenced in the extensive footnotes of mark z. danielewski’s house of leaves, and the 2014 penguin edition of the poetics of space opens with a foreword written by danielewski himself, in which he says bachelard’s work “has everything to do with how our comprehension of space, however confined or expansive, still affords us an opportunity to encounter the boundaries of the self just as they are about to give way” (bachelard vii). this statement supports my view that bachelard’s theory has great potential in the criticism of gothic literature, providing a framework to understand the domestic space in its widest sense. in her consideration of the relationship between bachelard and gothic space, rebecca janicker helpfully points out that “any space which is regularly used by, and thus bears the mark of, human occupants can fundamentally be seen as a kind of ‘home away from home’,” meaning that a space such as the overlook hotel in the shining, becomes a domestic space in the same manner as the traditional home in house of leaves (janicker 397). for janicker, these gothic domestic spaces serve to provide “encounters with ghostly presences that work to estrange protagonists from their daily lives, forcing them to see previously-accepted versions of their “reality in a very different light” (janicker 430). the application of bachelard’s theories on narrative and space is a relatively unexplored line of investigation in the gothic field, having only emerged in the last twenty years. it has been adopted by a range of critics including fred botting in his article: “horrorspace: reading house of leaves” (2015), dylan trigg in topophobia: a phenomenology of anxiety (2017) and katherine hayles in “saving the subject: remediation in house of leaves.” however, currently only townshend has moved beyond the interpretation of the symbolic nature of space to articulate the relationship between character and space in terms of topophilic or topophobic environments, and at the moment there is no research exploring the relationship between setting and protagonist using both laing and bachelard. my approach might be viewed as philosophic rather than literary, but i argue that it redresses the gaps in current literary theory that prevents it investigating the existential nature of the relationship that i believe arises in this emerging, sentient space that shapes male subjectivity in a way that goes beyond that extends beyond psychoanalytic means. we can draw from bachelard’s critical frame when approaching these haunted house texts in order to identify the role that the individual spaces of the settings play in the ontological crisis undergone by the protagonists. bachelard appears to capture the quintessence of what it is about the relationship between inhabitant and space serving to illuminate why the spaces in the shining and house of leaves appear to become the living monsters of the text. bachelard argues for the “trans-subjectivity of the image”—the fluidity of meaning that occurs between subject and object within an architectural landscape—that he considers to be like a “phenomenological experiment” which is exactly what occurs inside the overlook and the house at ash tree lane (bachelard xix). in the poetics of space, bachelard sets out to create a literary taxonomy of rooms, making many references to gothic literature such as the works of poe. within such a taxonomy, the closet of house of leaves would be associated with order and kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 105 identity for bachelard and so the fact that it is the closet whose impossible proportions irrupt within the home at the centre of house of leaves, implies disorder from the outset. it is no surprise that, associated as they are with greater clarity of thinking, higher floors (as in above ground level) rarely appear in in the novel; however, the novel describes a wealth of staircases which, for bachelard are always heading downwards to cellars which generate an “anthropocosmic fear” (bachelard 23). these are coupled in house of leaves with functionless empty rooms, endless corridors and corners which all imply uncertainly and transition. vi. conclusion this iteration of the haunted house narrative can therefore be seen to emerge set against the decade of recession that would lead up to the rise of neo-liberalism under ronald reagan’s presidency. the shining delivers one of the earliest representations of the crisis of masculinity as jack torrance struggles to reconcile the traditional values of the 1950s he has inherited from his father with the more modern ideas of fatherhood emerging in the 1970s. the overlook hotel is represented not just as the setting of the novel, but as a character in its own right. the hotel manager ullman’s detailed account of the hotel’s history recounts its passage through the hands of its successive owners: the capitalist adventurers, the politicians, the prohibition gangsters and culminating in the faceless corporations of the 1970s, much as any character in a narrative might be introduced. such framing presents the hotel as a place which not only provides a setting for the action of the narrative, but also exists to situate jack within a microcosm embodying the society that results in the contemporary crisis of american masculinity. in narratives written post-2000, the representation of domestic space becomes more complex and explicitly threatening for a protagonist whose fears and anxieties have become more terrifying in a world of vanishing solutions. accounts of specific rooms become more highly charged and their changes become more pronounced and claustrophobic. will navidson’s eighteenth century, colonial home, embodies all the traditional ideals of the american dream, but instead of providing the “cozy little outpost for me and my family. a place to drink lemonade on the porch and watch the sun set” (danielewski 8), it revolts against him to reveal the futility of his existence on a cosmological scale, generating a sprawling black, featureless underworld of staircases, corridors and empty rooms whose existence defies the laws of physics. spaces in these narratives mutate with the specific intent to provoke a heideggerian sense of angst in the protagonist. for bachelard, the home is an oneiric space of memory and this is a key function of the sentient, simulacral and hybridised spaces found in this haunted house trope: the unmappable, decaying labyrinth of the hotel in tem’s deadfall hotel, the constantly reformulated haunted house attractions of hamill’s a cosmology of monsters and the home in ellis’s lunar park which slowly mutates into the protagonist’s childhood home, all serve to return him to his key memories of trauma, forcing him into an existential crisis. descriptions consist predominantly of corridors and corners which, for bachelard, always imply kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 106 change and transition, perhaps explaining how post-millennial protagonists survive the hungry house when pre-millennials do not. the message is that he exists in an incomplete and transitional state, doomed to failure, and worse, subject to the whims of the cosmos. the price of survival for the schizoid male protagonist seems to be the realisation that traditional models of american masculinity, and indeed of humanity itself, have failed him and the solution is to retreat to a vanished past, accept a “diminished” masculine model or become obsolete. the gothic affect of the narratives in this strand of the haunted house narrative therefore induces a terror in the reader that goes beyond simply failure as a husband, father and worker to embrace the terror of existence itself. in the end, it is laing’s sense of existential crisis which aligns bachelard’s taxonomy so well with this new gothic trope. laing perfectly describes the existential crisis forced upon the protagonist by the sentient, hungry house comparing it to the world created on stage by samuel beckett: “with samuel beckett, for instance, one enters a world in which there is no contradictory sense of the self in its ‘health and validity’ to mitigate the despair, terror, and boredom of existence” (laing 40). works cited bachelard, gaston. the poetics of space. penguin, 2014. bauer, gero. houses, secrets and the closet: locating masculinities from the gothic novel to henry james. transcript verlag, 2016. botting, fred. “horrorspace: reading house of leaves.” horror studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2015, pp. 239–254. brown, charles brockden. wieland. oxford university press, 1998. connell, r.w. masculinities, 2nd edition. polity press, 2011. danielewski, mark z. house of leaves. anchor, 2000. ellis, brett easton. lunar park. picador, 2005. ellis, kate ferguson. the contested castle: gothic novels and the subversion of domestic ideology. university of illinois press, 1989. faludi, susan. stiffed. chatto & windus, 1999. godwin, william. caleb williams. oxford university press, 2009. hamill, shaun. a cosmology of monsters. titan publishing group ltd, 2020. hayles, n. katherine. “saving the subject: remediation in house of leaves.” american literature, no. 74, 2002, pp. 779–806. hendrix, grady. horrostör. quirkbooks.com, 2014. kerry gorrill | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1430 107 hogg, james. the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner. penguin, 2006. hubbard, l. ron. fear. galaxy press, 2000. jackson, shirley. the haunting of hill house. penguin, 2009. janicker, rebecca. the literary haunted house. mcfarland and company inc., 2015. kimmel, michael s. angry white men: american masculinity at the end of an era. national books, 2017. king, stephen. the shining. new english library, (1977) 2011. laing, r.d. the divided self. penguin, 1964. ligotti, thomas. “the town manager.” teatro grottesco. virgin books, 2008, pp. 341-592. ng, andrew hock soon. women and domestic space in contemporary gothic narratives: the house as subject. palgrave macmillan, 2015. marasco, robert, burnt offerings. valancourt books, 2015. padgett, jon. “origami dreams.” the secret of ventriloquism. dunhams manor press, 2016, pp. 36–56. poe, edgar allan. “william wilson.” the fall of the house of usher and other writings, penguin, 2003, pp. 110–130. poe, edgar allan. “the black cat.” the fall of the house of usher and other writings, penguin, 2003, pp. 271–280. rosin, hanna. the end of men. penguin, 2012. ebook. siddons, anne rivers. the house next door. simon & schuster, 1978. spooner, catherine. contemporary gothic. reaktion books, 2006. tem, steve rasnic. deadfall hotel. solaris, 2012. townshend, dale. “towards a poetics of gothic space: from bachelard to beckford and beyond.” reimagining the gothic, edited by dale townshend. sheffield: http://sheffieldgothicreadinggroup.blogspot.com/2017/01/?m=1., 2017. trigg, dylan. topophobia: a phenomenology of anxiety. bloomsbury, 2017. walpole, horace. the castle of otranto. oxford university press, (1764) 1998. zinn, howard. a people’s history of the united states. harper collins, 2003. microsoft word 3.1_full issue.docx alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 79 ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival alberto andrés calvo independent scholar abstract this article aims at investigating the american folk horror revival of the 2010s, focusing on texts such as ari aster’s midsommar (2019) or robert eggers’s the vvitch (2015). this survey of the folk horror revival will inevitably lead us to the genre’s past, particularly to the so-called unholy trinity, comprised by three films released in great britain during the late 1960s and early 1970s. this temporal and geographical dislocation will be situated against a larger background of cultural production, arguing that the appearance of the folk horror revival sheds some light on the debate on nostalgia and pastiche as the predominant artistic modes under late capitalism. the notion of hauntology, as explored by jacques derrida, mark fisher, or katy shaw, will be used throughout the essay in order to provide a firm theoretical ground on which this debate can take place. keywords: american folk horror, hauntology, nostalgia, midsommar, the vvitch. i. introduction the past decade has seen an increase in the number and popularity of folk horror films. the re-emergence of this horror sub-genre is particularly intriguing because it involves not only a temporal relocation but also a geographical one. the origins of the folk horror film can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s in britain with filmmakers such as robin hardy or michael reeves. however, many of the contemporary iterations of the genre come from across the atlantic (see robert eggers’s the vvitch [2015], ari aster’s midsommar [2019] or malgorzata szumowska’s us-produced the other lamb [2019], among others). unfortunately, and despite recent efforts by adam scovell, andy paciorek, and other scholars, folk horror alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 80 remains largely under-theorised. therefore, the first aim of this article is to contribute to the budding theorisation of folk horror. furthermore, this article also aims to investigate the folk horror revival through the lens of a wider debate on cultural production in late capitalism. the concept of hauntology is central to this debate. derived from jacques derrida’s late writings, hauntology can be understood as the study of cultural spectres, “a science of ghosts, a science of what returns. it destabilizes space as well as time” (shaw 2). hauntology has been seeping into discussions of art and nostalgia, first in popular music and gradually in film and literature as well. it ought to be stated that the relationship between folk horror and hauntology is entirely symbiotic. hauntology is as useful to folk horror studies as folk horror is to hauntology studies. the emergence of both terms in academia is a recent and, perhaps more importantly, geographically bound phenomenon. folk horror and hauntology studies have been so far tied almost exclusively to the british isles. however, the recent appearance of an american form of folk horror forces us to re-evaluate this geographical connection. at this point, it bears asking several questions: how does this new american folk horror compare to its british counterpart from past and present? can these new folk horror films be comfortably lumped with the rest of horror revivals and remakes being currently released? are the films of eggers and aster as ripe for hauntological analysis as their transatlantic cousins? ii. running out of past: remakes and revivals it is worth investigating this folk horror revival through the lens of a culture obsessed with its own past. writing in 2011 about the music trends of the 2000s, simon reynolds argues that the first decade of the new millennium “has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once” (10). his book retromania (2011) explores revivals and pastiche in popular music, following the steps of marxist literary critics like raymond williams or fredric jameson. the latter’s theories on the prevalence of the so-called “nostalgia mode” are echoed throughout reynolds’s work. although their scope and target are different, both jameson and reynolds suggest that artistic production in late capitalism is under a state of arrested development, incapable of escaping its past precisely because the hegemonic social order has forced us to forget “how to think historically in the first place” (jameson 1) and to altogether give up on progress, here understood as the establishment of a new social order. reynolds calls the 2000s the “re” decade, a span of time when the shadow of the past looms over cultural production more than at any other previous time, when revivals and pastiche reign supreme and occupy a privileged position in the music industry. ten years after the publication of reynolds’s book, his words still ring painfully true. though reynolds writes about popular music, film is not exempt from this backward-looking craze. a cursory glance at the 50 highest alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 81 grossing films of the 2010s reveals that almost all of them are sequels, remakes, spin-offs or some sort of combination of the three.1 horror film has also been hit by a nostalgia wave. although there might be an argument for horror as a genre that has always looked to its past and favoured film franchises,2 the truth is that the past few years have seen a proliferation of remakes (it [2017], child’s play [2019], a nightmare on elm street [2010], sequels/reboots halloween [2018] and blair witch [2016]), and purely nostalgia artifacts like stranger things (2016-ongoing) that take horror’s historical tendency to looking back at its past to the next level. now, folk horror has also been brought back to life. are the new folk horror films part of this revivalist tendency? in order to answer this question, an expanded discussion on nostalgia by way of hauntology will be provided. however, it is worthwhile to take a slight detour and delve into the specifics of folk horror first. iii. folk horror: a short history despite the genre’s origins harking back to the late 60s in film and much earlier in literature, the emergence of “folk horror” as a critical term is a very recent phenomenon,3 particularly when studied in opposition to others like giallo, gothic horror, or monster horror. in his book on folk horror, adam scovell argues that the term became popularised in 2010 when used by mark gatiss in his bbc documentary a history of horror, and that it was coined as late as 2004 by filmmaker piers haggard. haggard’s the blood on satan’s claw (1971) is one third of what is popularly known as the “unholy trinity,” completed by michael reeves’s witchfinder general (1968) and robin hardy’s the wicker man (1973). these three films, all by british directors and released within five years of each other, are usually regarded as the three foundational texts of folk horror film.4 the three films express similar anxieties, arguably as a knee-jerk 1 there are several sources for this, and the fact that the list of films only differs slightly according to each source makes the point stand even more strongly. the most reliable list is based on imdb-owned website box office mojo, which tracks box office revenue in an algorithmic way: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/ 2 after all, what are the first gothic and horror films but adaptations of previous literary material? david pirie’s book a heritage of horror (1973) offers an insightful look at the relationship between horror film and gothic literature, arguing that the british horror films are “in no way imitative of american and european models but derive in general from literary sources” (10). 3 there is no mention of the term “folk horror” even in recent academic studies like columbia university press’s european nightmares: horror cinema in europe since 1945, published in 2012, or wiley-blackwell’s a companion to the horror film, published in 2014. 4 in an attempt to avoid anglocentrism, it ought to be stated that folk horror film existed before the unholy trinity. horror scholars, scovell among them, have made a commendable effort in recent years to reconcile the film history of countries like finland with folk horror, citing erik blomberg’s the white reindeer (1952) as a prime example. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 82 reaction to the countercultural movements of the late 1960s.5 rurality, anachronistic ways of living centred around tightknit societies, sexual liberation, cults: these are all thematic points of suture among the unholy trinity. however, each of the three films tackle these themes in a highly singular manner; they are simply too idiosyncratic and varied in tone for them to comprise a unified genre. the wicker man takes its cue from thrillers and even musicals, witchfinder general appropriates a number of tropes from the western, while the gory and racy the blood on satan’s claw borders on exploitation horror with its proneness to jump-scares and nudity. it might be argued that the delayed emergence of folk horror as a critical category owes as much to the cult status of many of its main examples as it does to the inconsistent nature of the texts we are working with. it would be easy to cite irreconcilable differences and altogether renounce studying folk horror film as its own phenomenon. a perhaps bolder approach, which is the one that will be taken here, is to embrace these discrepancies and recognise them as an integral element of the genre. if a set of films as dissimilar as the unholy trinity is to be taken as the bedrock of folk horror film, it is only logical to oppose gatekeeping and accept texts that might deviate from the (admittedly unstable) standard set by these three films. this flirtation with genre is not exclusive to the unholy trinity; in fact, it is at the heart of the films of the british filmmaker ben wheatley, who, alongside his partner amy jump, has penned some of the most compelling folk horrors in recent times. wheatley’s 2011 film kill list, for example, starts as a kitchen-sink drama, while 2013’s a field in england resembles a period comedy in its opening scenes only for it to gradually descend into horrific madness. folk horror should be accepted as a critical category intrinsically destabilised by its intermingling with other genres. that is not to say, however, that any horror film with a passing relation to folklore or the rural merits being studied as folk horror. a certain degree of accuracy should still be pursued. adam scovell resists offering a singular definition of the genre, and, as has just been exposed, for good reasons. perhaps the most satisfying definition of folk horror is one of the many offered by scovell in the introduction of his book, where he defines it as “a work that uses folklore, either aesthetically or thematically, to imbue itself with a sense of the arcane for eerie, uncanny or horrific purposes” (17). this definition touches on many shared features of folk horror films, from the musical numbers in the wicker man or a field in england to the folk legends behind the plots of the vvitch or witchfinder general. providing a taxonomy of folk horror is a near-impossible task, but the above-mentioned definition may still be expanded on by offering a set of tropes shared by several folk horror 5 once again adam scovell is the scholar to turn to. his book folk horror includes interesting discussions on the unholy trinity as a reaction to the cultural background of their time, tying the films’ concerns with hedonism to the counterculture’s interest in drugs or sexual liberation, and pointing out that the three of them were all released “during what can be called the british counter-culture movement, almost acting as signposts for its tidal high-point of 1968 in witchfinder and the dying, post-manson embers of wicker in 1973” (24). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 83 films. part of the horrific aspects of these films is that the events usually take place in the outside and in broad daylight, thus subverting horror’s predominant setting. the dark and closed spaces favoured by horror take the backseat; horrific events happen not only outside and during the day but also in communal settings. this is particularly true of these films’ climaxes, which, as in most horror, pivot around death. the individualistic murder is here often replaced by human sacrifice. the true source of the horrific is not the murder itself but the fact that there is an audience observing and sometimes celebrating it. folk horror tends to insert the viewer into these diegetic audiences, in what is effectively yet another turn on horror’s usual strategy of affect, here understood by following xavier aldana reyes’s description of it as the way in which “our bodies may be moved by those we see on the screen” (3). in horror, we experience fear and dread vicariously by reacting to the horrific events happening on-screen. folk horror adds another layer by which we are also horrified by the reaction (or lack thereof) of an audience that is more often than not complicit in this human sacrifice. the powerful last acts of the wicker man and midsommar serve as perfect examples for this point, as it might be argued that both films force their viewers to be complicit with the diegetic audience by presenting the sacrificed outsiders in opposition to the more enticing and adventurous natives. in the former, the painfully dull and sanctimonious sergeant howie stands in stark contrast to the sexually liberated natives of summerisle, while midsommar spends a good portion of its running time depicting christian as intellectually dishonest and emotionally abusive. following on the traits listed above, it might be argued that these films engage with the occult rather than the supernatural: it is also worth noting that, when the supernatural does emerge, it is usually after the characters have been exposed to drugs and other perceptionaltering substances (a field in england, midsommar), or by tying the supernatural to religious tradition (the vvitch or the blood in satan’s claw). these films are all marked by a necessarily isolating landscape—the banishment of the puritan family in the vvitch, sergeant howie’s inability to escape summerisle in the wicker man, or the constant references to phones not working properly in midsommar—, which can sometimes be outright oppressive and claustrophobic however open it might appear (a field in england). furthermore, precarious living conditions caused by the land itself are usually the triggers behind the plots (see the failing crops in the wicker man or the vvitch, or the quite literal image of the evil emerging from the ground in the blood on satan’s claw). in some of these films, folk horror works by contrasting the dominant cultural practices of westerners with those of the other. it usually involves a set of characters that are transposed to an unfamiliar setting, at odds with their culture and religion. think, for example, of the anthropology students—one of them conspicuously called christian—visiting a swedish cult in midsommar, or the banishment to the woods of the puritan family in the vvitch. scovell identifies these settings with “skewed belief systems” (30) as places where progress has stopped. the notion of progress stopping, particularly when referring to areas outside the alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 84 influence of western civilisation, is not without its problems. it would perhaps be more accurate to say that progress has taken an unexpected turn through a return of the occult. in any case, the introduction of progress grants folk horror a political and temporal dimension that eases our transition to hauntology. iv. hauntology a play on words between “haunt” and “ontology,” the term first appeared in jacques derrida’s essay “spectres of marx,” published in 1993 as an effort to reconcile deconstruction with marxism in the wake of the fall of communism. opposing francis fukiyama’s post-ideological defence of liberal democracy as the rightful ending point of history, derrida ponders on the ghosts of marxism that kept haunting world politics in the late 20th century. derrida builds on spectrality as an unavoidable non-presence: just like repressed and deferred meanings come back to haunt the text, so does marxism endlessly return to haunt the hegemonic social system: “no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all of marx’s ghosts. haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony” (34). though not de-politised by any stretch, “hauntology” was adopted as a music genre descriptor in the mid-2000s by critics like mark fisher or simon reynolds, who expressed a concern about the omnipresence of revivals and pastiche in popular music in the opening decade of the 21st century. fisher, who became one of hauntology’s most eloquent theorists and championed the term’s inclusion in academic cultural studies, speaks of hauntology as a reaction to life under neoliberalism, where every single aspect of life is subject to market relations and late capitalist logic. hauntology evokes a lament for the stifling of imagination provoked by these material conditions, effectively wondering out loud whether we have lost the capacity to imagine a different future. the future, fisher argues, “is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production” (16). if there is no future in sight, fisher argues, then cultural production will remain stuck in an inescapable loop of repetition and pastiche. fisher and reynolds saw hauntology as an apt descriptor for artists keen on recovering lost futures whose implications went beyond aesthetics.6 they used the term in order to describe the works of a number of mostly british electronic music acts that focus on the materiality of recording technology through noises like vinyl crackle or through physical deterioration of the material source of sound. hauntological art foregrounds the interplay between technology and the past, exploring themes of longing and decay through sheer materiality. in 6 the politics of hauntology reflects a longing for a social order progressively wound down with the establishment of neoliberalism. however, it would be an error to say that hauntology is a naïvely optimistic look back at the past. what is being longed for is not the past social order but the futures that said social order allowed us to dream up, the fact that it allowed “the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live” (fisher 16). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 85 music, that is best exemplified by the omnipresent vinyl crackle and sampling of records of bygone eras in burial’s untrue (2007), or by william basinski’s the disintegration loops (2002 3), a series of four albums consisting of pieces of music that are being played on loop on a tape. the tape’s gradual deterioration transforms the recording itself to the point of no recognition. another prime example is the caretaker’s everywhere at the end of time. released in parts throughout the 2010s, this six-stage album mirrors the effects of dementia by progressively distorting pre-war ballroom vinyl samples until they become a ghost of their former selves, with a handful of leitmotifs appearing several times throughout the six-hour album under different guises. hauntology was initially posited in opposition to nostalgia. if nostalgia is the straight, sometimes uncritical introduction of past tropes tied up to a bygone social order, hauntology experiments with these tropes by granting them a ghostly character. however, the distinction between the two terms is not as clear-cut as many of the theorisers of hauntology wished it was. fisher’s short essay, “no future 2012” (2020), is a good example of how easy it is for hauntology to become tangled up with nostalgia. building his argument off fredric jameson’s seminal text on postmodern pastiche, fisher argues that the preoccupation with the past in hauntological music could easily be construed as “nostalgic.” but it is the very foregrounding of temporality that makes hauntology differ from the typical products of the nostalgia mode, which bracket out history altogether in order to present themselves as new (716). the counterargument to fisher’s point would be that products of the nostalgia mode can (and do) also foreground temporality, often through self-referentiality and self-awareness of their status as a recycled cultural artifact. what ultimately defines hauntology is not the foregrounding of temporality itself but the ways in which this foregrounding takes place through formal devices concerned with the materiality of the work of art. a nostalgic work might foreground temporality through self-awareness and meta commentary.7 however, that does not necessarily make it hauntological. by venturing beyond self-awareness and meta discourse, hauntology thematises the dialogue between past and present through formal techniques that highlight the temporal incongruities that fisher, taking up on derrida’s conception of time as “out of joint” (34) aptly names “the time-wound” (716). hauntological art opens and navigates this time-wound, establishing a dialogue between past and present. insisting on hauntology’s dimension outside aesthetics, fisher argues that the first hauntological records he encountered “sounded ‘ghostly,’ certainly, but the spectrality was not a mere question of atmospherics” (16). fisher’s point is evident: the spectrality of hauntological art goes beyond an aesthetic eeriness. nevertheless, those ghostly sounds (or, in the case of film, analogous formal devices 7 there are plenty of examples of this in horror film, particularly from the 90s onwards, like wes craven’s postmodern slasher scream (1996), whose investment in self-awareness grows with every sequel. more recent examples include drew goddard’s the cabin in the woods (2011) or the horror-influenced comedy what we do in the shadows (2014). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 86 that achieve the same effect) should be pushed to the fore if one is to differentiate between hauntology and nostalgia. in music, these ghostly atmospherics are achieved through samples that, as jamie sexton puts in his valuable re-negotiation between hauntology and nostalgia, “can be transformed into more eerie sonic markers when treated with effects such as reverberation” (564). sexton’s introduction of the word “eerie” is not casual, and it opens up yet another avenue of communication between horror and hauntology. “eerie” is, after all, a term commonly used to refer to unsettling art which involves questions of spectrality and presence. in his book the weird and the eerie, fisher argues that the eerie “occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or if there is nothing present when there should be something” (61). fisher’s notion of eeriness fits nicely into the formal thematization of the time-wound in hauntological art. formal devices like vinyl crackle or the degradation of physical tape exemplify that which is present where there should be nothing—we don’t expect recorded music to incorporate sounds sourced from the act of recording itself. as shown above, the link between hauntology and horror is not one that needs to be artificially drawn up. film, particularly horror, has always been central to an understanding of hauntology. note how, for instance, the hauntological music label ghost box draws samples from british horror films and tv from the late 1960s and early 1970s, from the work of nigel kneale to the unholy trinity.8 the dialogue between hauntological music and film is at its healthiest and more open. the anxieties expressed by hauntological musicians are now being transmitted by horror filmmakers, who are manifesting them through formal devices (as in ben wheatley’s a field in england, which will be expanded on below) or through a thematic exploration of the time-wound, as in the work of the americans aaron moorhead and justin benson, who specialise in science fiction-horror hybrids. as hinted at by its title, the latter’s 2017 film the endless involves a cult whose members are trapped for eternity in their own particular time loops. almost working as a remark on the conflict between self-aware nostalgia and hauntology, the endless presents a scenario where the terror stems precisely from self-awareness. some cult members are well aware of their time-prison and try to escape it through violent death only to reappear at the exact same time and place. in what can be read as a commentary on nostalgia and the futility of metafictional devices to open valuable dialogue with the past, the endless presents a situation where self-awareness never allows the cult members to escape the time-loops; on the contrary, it only sinks them deeper into despair. an additional point in common between hauntology and folk horror is that they are disciplines intrinsically attached to the preservation of an alternative heritage. both are interested in left-field forms of popular (we might even venture to call them “folk”) heritage, as jamie sexton argues: “ghost box and its affiliates can be partly related to this surge of interest in marginal national history, in preserving a form of alternative heritage” (572). while not 8 see sexton: “the wicker man and blood on satan’s claw have both been cited as influential by ghost box (and have also had their soundtracks released by trunk records)” (574). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 87 hegemonic, this heritage is still tightly bound with notions of nationality. at least in its musical manifestations, hauntology has mostly been regarded as a british discipline. the association between hauntology and britain is surely aided by the fact that most hauntology scholars are british (see the aforementioned fisher and reynolds, or more recent academics like katy shaw or adam scovell), a trait shared by the cultural artifacts these writers tend to prioritise. folk horror is one of these prioritised artefacts. again, the recurrent examples are british, whether they come from the past (the unholy trinity, nigel kneale’s tv dramas and films) or from the present (ben wheatley’s kill list and a field in england). fisher argues that hauntology’s britishness is not accidental but consequential of a longing caused by “the expectations raised by a public service broadcasting system and a popular culture that could be challenging and experimental” (18). however, the past few years have seen an increase in the number—and, perhaps more strikingly, in popularity—of american folk horror films. can we build a bridge between the new american iteration of the subgenre and hauntology? do these films engage with their pasts through hauntological devices? v. folk horror revival: hauntological or nostalgic? music is one of the keys to answer this question. robert eggers’s the vvitch (2015) serves as a particularly useful example. eggers’s brief to composer mark korven was to come up with a minimalistic and amelodic score that eschewed all electronics.9 as a result, the film’s soundtrack is comprised of traditional hymns like “alas! and did my savior bleed,”—which initially seem to be grounding the vvitch firmly as a period film—and a number of terrifying and atonal folk ambient pieces. the key word in folk ambient is “folk”: korven’s score bears a number of similarities with electronic ambient music, most notably the omnipresence of drones, but it achieves this through the use of obscure traditional instruments like the nyckelharpa instead of through any digital sources. this generates an overlapping of timelines that destabilises the vvitch’s status as a period film and opens up the time-wound. due to the use of left-field, drone-producing instruments, the score is ultimately more reminiscent of the electronic-laden ambient records of brian eno and grouper than of any folk music made with analogue instruments. the score’s spectral quality is indebted to the eeriness of the music itself as much as it is to the sheer materiality of the instruments used, allowing for the encounter between various temporalities—and, given that the film’s characters are english settlers, geographies—to take place. david church notes in his book on horror in the 2010s that composing the vvitch’s score pushed korven to commission the creation of a new instrument nicknamed “the apprehension engine.” as church points out, the instrument’s sound is more terrifying “because their source seems more obscure, less readily pinned down via common referents in the listener’s 9 see mark korven’s interview with fact magazine: https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/16/streamthewitch-score-mark-koven-interview/ alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 88 mind” (1). the absence of a common referent allows us to describe this sound as spectral. korven’s commissioning of the apprehension engine is a fascinating example of the conversation between material polar opposites opened by hauntology, whereby an analogue instrument is chasing the spectrality of the digital. although the vvitch predates the commissioning of the apprehension engine, its score features the same sort of spectral sounds which this new instrument emits. the vvitch recycles aesthetic settings and plot points from the past: there are innumerable examples of horror films set in the woods, and eggers’s film’s portrayal of a young woman whose christianity is put into question is not particularly innovative for the horror genre either. however, the film’s engagement with the past through the spectral nature of its score rescues it from the nostalgia mode; it is eminently hauntological in its exploration of the time-wound via an unresolved tug-of-war between analogue and digital. ben wheatley’s a field in england, scored by his frequent collaborator jim williams, offers a different approach to the time-wound. what is at work in the score for wheatley’s film is not dissimilar to the hauntological experiments of basinski and the caretaker. the film’s main theme is “baloo my boy,” a popular scottish song from the early modern period. the tune’s first appearance in the film is diegetic, as it is sung by one of the protagonists. as in the vvitch, the introduction of a centuries-old folk song fences a field in england as a period film. however, as the narrative advances and the deserters succumb to the mind-altering effects of the mushrooms they have consumed, the score turns more synth-based and experimental. by the film’s ending, “baloo my boy” appears not sung by a character but as a heavily distorted version that is just reminiscent of the song’s original form. the song’s degradation through electronic means is effectively a way to tear a hole into the film’s historical fabric, opening up the time-wound and shattering the barrier between diegetic and non-diegetic. this should be regarded as a hauntological trope: dis-synchronicity and anachronisms are brought about by formal devices concerned with the materiality of music, mirroring katy shaw’s argument on spectrality and temporality: “the encounter with the spectre marks the point at which multiple temporalities meet and cross” (15). as wheatley and williams explain in an interview in the blu-ray edition of the film, the shift from fairly traditional period music (from “baloo my boy” to the thundering drums as harbinger of war in the film’s opening scene) to psychedelic electronic mirrors the deserters’ changing perception of their physical surroundings once the effects of the mushrooms have finally kicked in. one might even go further and claim that it also mirrors the change of tone that occurs in the film’s last act, where the comedic elements are brushed aside in favour of an engulfing sense of claustrophobic dread. the juxtaposition of traditional folk and electronic music is reminiscent of the hauntological sonic experiments of the ghost box label and others: like julian house and jin jupp note, the artists working for the bbc radio workshop, from which hauntological music sources a series of samples, had “studied medieval music” (sexton 577) and even made an electronic folk album. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 89 this juxtaposition also plays into the analogue/digital polarity explored in a field in england. the psychedelic last act of the film is completely reliant on visual effects that could only be achieved through digital technology. the blurring of the boundaries between analogue and digital, past and contemporary, heightens the film’s hauntological affect. and, in this case, such blurring is not only restricted to music. in his paper on a field in england, joel mckim mounts a strong argument for the film’s digital anachronism as the main indicator of its unsettling effect. mckim argues that the film’s digital colour grading brings about “a complicated set of overlapping historical temporalities—the civil war setting of the film viewed through the prism of a 1960s television aesthetic created via a contemporary digital technique” (48). as with the score in the vvitch, the time-wound is brought about by formal techniques whose concern with materiality situate the film at a temporal crossroads. wheatley’s exploration of the time-wound digs even deeper than eggers’s as it is not only limited to music. it might also be argued that it reinforces fisher’s argument about hauntology’s inherent britishness. one of the main exponents of the 1960s television aesthetic that mckim refers to is nigel kneale, whose sci-fi and horror work for the bbc in the 1950s and 1960s maintains its cult status in britain (it has often been sampled by british hauntological musicians) but remains largely unexplored elsewhere. so far, this essay’s efforts have been placed on contemporary folk horror films that extend the genre’s long-standing affair with hauntology. that is not the case of the work of ari aster, whose films hereditary and midsommar are among the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed horror titles of recent years. although hereditary bears a folk horror influence, the focus here will be on midsommar, a film that openly engages with the history of the subgenre. again, music is a convenient starting point. the score to midsommar, composed by the electronic artist the haxan cloak, presents a neat distinction between the folk-oriented orchestral pieces (“fire temple,” “maypole”) and the asphyxiating, over-pitched string pieces that, recycling a well-trodden horror trope, are reserved for the most shocking and horrifying scenes. the merger of digital and analogue present in a field in england or the vvitch is nowhere to be found here. the score does include electronic elements, but they are not on an equal footing with its folk numbers, nor is there any amalgamation between the two. unlike wheatley and eggers, aster is not interested in the hauntological exploration of the timewound through music. in fact, it could be argued that he is not interested in exploring the time-wound at all. although midsommar takes place in the present day, its setting in a remote rural commune in sweden suggests both a geographical and temporal dislocation. however, said dislocation is explored only through certain aesthetics features (e.g. the score’s nordic folk influence or the film’s costume design), not through formal devices related to the very materiality of the film as in eggers’s or wheatley’s films. in aster, the barrier between different temporalities and geographies remains firmly in place because there is no attempt to bring it down. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 90 returning to jameson’s definition of nostalgia as ahistorical revisionism is particularly useful when discussing midsommar in these terms. as previously argued, historical explorations of material conditions are central to past and present folk horror titles. these precarious living conditions, always tightly bound to the land itself, are the driving forces behind the plots of the wicker man, where a sacrifice is needed after a season of failing crops, of the vvitch, in which hunger turns the family against each other, and even in titles set in the present day such as wheatley’s kill list, where the economic recession of the late 2000s forces two former british soldiers to accept a job offered by a shady cult. these material concerns are all but absent in midsommar other than in the form of a passing reference to climate change made by one of the cult leaders (“and what poetry that it’s now the hottest and brightest summer on record”) that is never picked up on again. following jameson, aster’s film could be regarded as nostalgic in that it is not interested in thinking in historical or material terms. due to this refusal, midsommar’s intense climax differs from the one in a field in england. both films make use of similar technical wonders during their drug-fuelled last acts, doing a commendable job of evoking horrific disorientation through dizzy camera work and nightmarish music. the difference is that the formal blurring of temporalities grants wheatley’s film a historical dimension. by presenting these aesthetic components in dialogue with the past, a field in england interrogates notions of decay and historical progress, whereas midsommar’s ending remains impressive merely aesthetically. this contrast brings back to mind fisher’s and reynold’s defence of hauntology against nostalgia. both are representations of backward glances, but hauntology ventures beyond aesthetics and encourages historical and political discussions of art. because of its ahistoricism, midsommar’s relationship to folk horror works mostly as an aesthetic scaffold on which its familiar horrors are built. unlike the folk horrors previously mentioned, aster’s film is not concerned with historical explorations of time and place but with the expression of affect. like ari aster’s 2017 debut hereditary, midsommar wears its scares on its sleeve: the film starts with a shocking image, as the protagonist’s sister kills her parents and commits suicide. it is not so much the deaths themselves that cause the shock but aster’s insistence on showing us the pain they inflict on dani, the protagonist. aster continues folk horror’s long-standing history of incorporating elements from other genres. the expression of grief by female characters is a recurrent trait in his work, which finds a middle ground between folk horror and exploitative, torture porn10 films like hostel or saw. the difference in that, in aster’s case, the torture is not only physical but also emotional. aster’s focus on pain not caused by physical threat but by emotional distress offers a twist on folk horror’s strategy 10 like folk horror, torture porn is another heavily contested subgenre. for an in-depth discussion of torture porn, see steve jones’s book torture porn: popular horror after saw (2013). the term is here to refer to a number of horror films released in the 21st century that are “primarily based around protagonists being imprisoned in confined spaces and subjected to physical and/or psychological suffering.” (jones 13). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 91 of affect through the appearance of diegetic audiences complicit with the horrific events. midsommar presents two of these complicit diegetic audiences. the most obvious one is the swedish dish cult, whose members celebrate the brutal sacrifices taking place during the festival. however, there is also a complicit audience to dani’s grief from the very first scenes, as christian and his friends remain apathetic to her tragedy, if not dismissive. aster’s incorporation of torture porn tropes into folk horror grants his films a sense of reckoning with grief and fear that goes beyond life-threatening bodily agony. like with the vvitch or a field in england, the spectre of familiarity haunts midsommar.11 unlike the two previously mentioned films, however, midsommar only engages with these spectres aesthetically, through the sort of ahistorical aping decried by fredric jameson as “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language” (17). in this sense, midsommar is a fitting example of art born out of the nostalgia mode favoured in late capitalism. whereas eggers’s and wheatley’s films engage with the past through symbiotic dialogue, aster simply stares at it from afar, letting past and present stand as clearly separate entities. although its exploration of grief is novel for folk horror, midsommar can ultimately be seen as folk horror pastiche: it does not engage with its past ghosts through formal conversation but is simply satisfied with wearing their mask. vi. conclusions the contrasting ways in which the folk horror revival films tackle their relationship with their past signals the opening of two diverging paths for folk horror. in the first one, traversed by the vvitch or a field in england, the films engage in symbiotic dialogue with their ghosts through formal devices, linking their concern with temporality to the material fabric that shape them. the second path, best exemplified by midsommar, involves a willing refusal to start a conversation with these ghosts. as has been demonstrated, connecting the folk horror revival to the wider conversation on late capitalist cultural production produces illuminating results on both counts, going beyond making value judgement on the aesthetic merits of these films. we can therefore conclude by stating that, in its myriad ways, the folk horror revival is paradigmatic of current modes of cultural logic. a solid argument has been made for hauntology as an effective theoretical framework to explore the new american folk horror, particularly when placed in opposition to its british counterpart. there are good reasons why hauntology remains mostly a field of study concerned with british films and music, and as previously explained, the magnitude of formal explorations of time and place is greater in the films of ben wheatley than in aster’s, or even eggers’s. however, an effort should be made to free hauntology from its constraining 11 this familiarity is amplified by the film’s paratext, perhaps more tellingly with the casting of william jackson harper as an out-of-place intellectual in what is effectively a reprise of the actor’s role in the popular netflix sitcom the good place (2016-2020). alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 92 britishness, as its usefulness as a critical tool to inspect art’s relationship with its past overcomes all geographical bindings. hauntology’s concern with alternative heritage could open the door to an expansion of american folk horror film beyond the current revival, helping to draw up a genealogy of the subgenre that includes texts not previously studied under this light. works cited aldana reyes, xavier. horror film and affect: towards a corporeal model of viewership. routledge, 2016. aster, ari, director. midsommar. a24, 2019 —. hereditary. a24, 2017. basinski, william, musician. the disintegration loops. musex international, 2002-2003 bayer, samuel, director. a nightmare on elm street. new line cinema, 2010 benson, justin, and aaron moorhead, directors. the endless. snowfort pictures, 2017 bowe, miles. “the witch composer on making the most nightmarish horror score you’ll hear this year.” fact, https://www.factmag.com/2016/02/16/stream-the-witch-score-mark-koven-interview/. accessed 3 march 2021. burial, musician. untrue. hyperdub, 2007 church, david. post-horror: art, genre, and cultural elevation. edinburgh university press, 2021. clement, jermaine, and taika waititi. what we do in the shadows. paramount pictures, 2014. craven, wes, director. scream. dimension films, 2016 derrida, jacques. specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. routledge, 2006. duffer, matt, and ross duffer. stranger things. netflix, 2016. eggers, robert, director. the vvitch: a new england folktale. a24, 2015 fisher, mark. the weird and the eerie. repeater books, 2017. —. “what is hauntology?” film quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. —. ghosts of my life: writings on depression, hauntology, and lost futures. zero books, 2014. —. “no future 2012”. k-punk: the collected and unpublished writings of mark fisher. repeater books, 2020. goddard, drew, director. the cabin in the woods. lionsgate, 2011. gordon green, david, director. halloween. blumhouse productions, 2018. alberto andrés calvo | ghosts of britain: a hauntological approach to the 21st-century folk horror revival reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1428 93 haggard, piers, director. the blood on satan’s claw. tigon british film productions, 1971. hardy, robin, director. the wicker man. british lion films, 1973 imdb. 2021. the 50 highest grossing movies of the 2010s (worldwide) imdb, https://www.imdb.com/list/ls026040906/. accessed 5 march 2021. jameson, fredric. postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. verso books, 2009. jones, steve. torture porn: popular horror after saw. palgrave macmillan, 2013. klevberg, lars, director. child’s play. orion pictures, 2019. mckim, joel. “the digital anachronisms of ben wheatley's a field in england.” critical quarterly, vol. 58, no. 1, 2016, pp. 46–51. muschietti, andy, director. it. new line cinema. 2017. pirie, david. a heritage of horror: the english gothic cinema 1946-1972. equinox books, 1973. reeves, michael, director. witchfinder general, 1971. reynolds, simon. retromania: pop culture’s addiction to its own past. faber & faber, 2011. scovell, adam. folk horror: hours dreadful and things strange. auteur publishing, leighton, 2017. sexton, jamie. “weird britain in exile: ghost box, hauntology, and alternative heritage.” popular music and society, vol. 35, no. 4, 2012, pp. 561–584. shaw, katy. hauntology: the presence of the past in twenty-first century english literature. palgrave macmillan, 2018. the caretaker, musician. everywhere at the end of time. history always favours the winners, 20162019. wheatley, ben, director. a field in england. rook films limited, 2013. —, and jim williams. a field in england: an interview. rook films limited, 2013. wingard, adam, director. blair witch. lionsgate, 2010. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 16 digital gothic an interview with xavier aldana reyes laura álvarez trigo universidad de alcalá xavier aldana reyes is reader/associate professor in english literature and film at manchester metropolitan university and a founder member of the manchester centre for gothic studies. he is author of gothic cinema (2020), spanish gothic (2017), horror film and affect (2016) and body gothic (2014), and editor of twenty-first-century gothic: an edinburgh companion (with maisha wester, 2019), horror: a literary history (2016) and digital horror (with linnie blake, 2015). xavier is chief editor of the horror studies book series at the university of wales press and has edited anthologies of gothic and horror fiction for the british library. one of xavier’s research interests is the optical dynamics of found footage horror films. on this topic, he has published an article on narrative framing for gothic studies, and chapters on affective immersion in the film [rec] (2007) and viewer involvement and guilt in the last horror movie (2003). more recently, he wrote a chapter on ‘online gothic’ that considers social media found footage horror for the collection the edinburgh companion to globalgothic (2022). keywords: gothic, popular culture, digitality, horror, found footage, interview. laura álvarez trigo: this is our first interview for the section automata, cyber terror and technocratic realities and i am thankful to have xavier aldana reyes for it. to begin with, along with our increased dependency on technology, there has been a surge in fiction that focuses on cyberculture, the digital, and the dangers of technology. i would like to set off our conversation by thinking about the position of the audience when consuming this type of content. in the last few years, we can find various instances, both in movies and video games, of productions that are—or appear to be—recorded scenes of a computer/phone screen, which has come to be known as “desktop horror.” how is this “voyeuristic” perspective important in the gothic and horror genre? xavier aldana reyes: first of all, thank you so much for the invitation. i’m delighted to be part of this issue. to answer your questions, i would say that desktop horror is part of larger xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 17 trend, what we may call “computer screen cinema”, not all of which is necessarily horrific. desktop horror, in particular, focuses on the dark side of the connected anxieties you were mentioning (see larsen; hallam), and is primarily interested in the issue of human dependency on the digital world for practically everything. giving up on social media and smartphones is increasingly unthinkable, since we now need internet access for even minor everyday activities like catching the bus or shopping. part of desktop horror’s interest is how certain platforms and electronic gadgets are currently filtering human life, even guiding and predicting it to dangerous levels. we live through screens, through gadgets and informational flows, which breeds certain fears, like fraud or surveillance. these anxieties are key to the twentieth century and to the development of found footage. shoshana zuboff has written about this topic in the age of surveillance capitalism (2019), highlighting the fact that everything we do online leaves a trackable footprint. there is what she calls “behavioral surplus” (63–97), data exhaust which is being collected and used by companies like facebook and google for the benefit of third parties (advertising, for example). the voyeurism you refer to demonstrates an awareness that with social media comes the forfeiting of some personal freedoms, sometimes at a bigger cost than we realize. then, there is the nature of social media. films like megan is missing (2011), the den (2013) or the unfriended films (the first one from 2014, and the sequel from 2018, unfriended: dark web), and even ratter (2015), explore similar ideas of digital platforms and media being dispossessed or taken over by someone or something (some “thing”) else. they are also preoccupied with the fact that people could be recorded unawares, hunted down and threatened by cruel, opportunistic hackers (individuals or corporations). in horror that explores voyeurism, there is a sense of involvement, that the viewer is part of the horrific exchange. this is also true of found footage horror that is not in the desktop tradition. i am thinking of films like the last horror movie (2003), for example. in the desktop horror tradition, films like open windows (2014) or untraceable (2008) are interested in people signing in to watch others being tortured, and portray scopophilic anxieties also being exploited by more recent films, like keep watching (2017). part of it has to do with our moral position: are we willing consumers of, or passive onlookers to, filmic violence? i cannot help but feel that this is related to social media and our consumption of other people’s lives, and how this, in turn, forces us to alter our own behaviours and desires, consciously or subliminally. this new digital cinema is also distinct aesthetically, and inextricable from the interfaces it uses to express its horrors. as adam charles hart has posited, films like unfriended encourage a new type of involvement that exceeds the cinematic and is closer to the medium being rendered “uncanny;” they foster a species of “browsing” (3) of the film image. they stimulate a searching process for clues and, where supernatural agency manifests in the shape of glitches, viruses or intrusive pop-ups, for the cause of such errors and interruptions (daniel 151). desktop horror is, for obvious reasons, best enjoyed on an actual laptop that can frame the action xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 18 even more realistically. its most successful examples are a fantastic blurring of medium, product, aesthetics and cinematic affect. lat: so with desktop horror as a response to our increased dependency on technology, which is a form of reflecting on contemporary cultural anxieties, we see that part of that anxiety corresponds to our experience of space and time and what you were saying about our own involvement when we are online. in your work on horror film and affect (2016), you analyze "found footage" as a way of positioning the audience as a witness. now, let us compare this found footage with desktop horror, for instance, the movie host (2020). this movie is basically a recording of a zoom call, so as an audience member, as you watch this movie you are sitting there in your room, watching the screen as if you were actually watching a zoom call; you are watching and experiencing the same thing as you would “in real life” so to speak. so, how does it contribute to having the audience immersed in a more realistic way, contrasting with found footage movies when you are witnessing people moving around with their cameras in the woods, or running up and down a flight of stairs in found footage movies such as [rec] (2007), which are very different from the physical experience than the audience member is really having? does this physical aspect have a role in integrating the audience in the narrative? how is this sense of “being there” important in the gothic and horror genre in terms of the workings of fear? xar: you are picking up on a really interesting area of overlap here, but also potentially on where desktop horror and found footage horror diverge. in my work, i was initially interested in the dynamics of found footage horror precisely for the reasons that you raise. how do these films place us in the heart of the action? how do they mediate events and break the fourth wall? i was interested in these discussions at the time, when i was writing about torture porn and the kind of incriminating viewing experiences of films like saw (2004) and hostel (2005). my conclusion was that we could not call torture porn “sadistic,” since its points of view were used for maximum effect on viewers – aligning them with both the tortured and the torturer. this point was even better articulated by steven jones (2013), who wrote what is possibly the best defense of this subgenre in terms of its complex viewer alignments. found footage horror normally creates a sense of immediacy and of affect through an avatar that, in cases like [rec]’s, becomes a proxy for the viewer. pablo in that particular film does not really say very much; we never really see him so that we may most unobtrusively embody his position. the off-screen space here can become, as it does in first-person pov survival horror games like amnesia: the dark descent (2010) and outlast (2013) and even more so in virtual reality (vr) horror films like 11:57 (2014), a source of threat, and the camera a visual replacement that provides the illusion of immersion. technically, desktop horror is very different, as the action is somewhat more static and the story can take place “live,” as in the case of the zoom call in host. this should render a type of horror that is more democratic insofar as, to go with andré bazin’s influential view xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 19 on depth of field (35–6), one’s gaze should be able to travel anywhere on the frame. in reality, we know that this not how these films work all the time. host obviously directs our sight towards one video box or another as the narrative progresses. in other films, like unfriended, the actions of a character guide our attention, and in films like open windows or searching (2018), there are more media (news footage, for example) involved, live or not. some of these, like most found footage horror, betrays the existence of an external editorial hand. for me, this is where desktop horror and found footage differ, even if both are interested in the “being there” pretense. one could argue that 9/11 has something to do with this; especially with the idea that iconic images of the terrorist attacks reached us before the information (see wetmore 23–56). the digital image is now in a paradoxical position: it has massive indexical value, as we rely more and more on images and videos to chronicle and curate our lives; at the same time, it is a lot more prone to manipulation. digital technology and software have made the distortion and falsification of images easier than ever, affecting the ontological value of the photograph, long held as de facto marker of reality (see jenkins; manovich). and in “posttruth” times (mcintyre) where alternative facts carry as much weight as actual ones, social media (now largely the conveyors of news for many people) have become havens for the distribution of misinformation campaigns and doctored images. we are beholden to the image because it shows us reality as it unfolds; yet, it is also completely unreliable. found footage and desktop horror emerge from this tension. i see desktop horror as a natural evolution of the aim to create an illusion of the “now.” irrespective of whether one likes host, there is a certain prescient genius in deciding to shoot the film through zoom and in releasing it in the middle of a pandemic that came to be defined by video calls after travel restrictions affected vast swathes of the world. one of the many things that excites me about horror is that it always has its finger firmly on the social pulse; it is able to capture the zeitgeist like few other genres. desktop horror exploits the medium to tell us stories about our times and fears, which are really not that different from those of old—they are simply channeled by new, dominant technologies. lat: to expand on this idea of space and place from what you’ve mentioned about witnessing whatever is happening at the moment, and how it has become quite particular when thinking about the online realm; but also going a little bit more into gothic tropes, we could argue that the gothic mansion—as the liminal space—could be translated into an immaterial existence on the internet. we have the virtual space as a non-place with no physical substance (regardless of the fact that the internet is a physical thing that exists somewhere in the ocean, but we don’t think about that much), so the internet is this non-place where we are not physically there. we merely have some representations of ourselves, avatars, and, possibly, some form of displaced identity that we present online. do you think that this online realm can behave as a horror house? if so, how do you think our dependency on technology contributes xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 20 to these narratives? does this “new immaterial horror house” want to entrap us? or does the metaphor feel insufficient or inadequate here? xar: in terms of what the house normally represents in the popular imagination, it is a place of safety, privacy and reflection. this is why it is also ripe for gothic hauntings (among many others, see curtis; meehan). they are the closest spatial proxy for our psychologies, which can be externalised through them. think of roger corman’s famous house of usher (1960), where the crumbling, confusing mise-en-scène is meant to reflect usher’s descent into madness. so at a time when the boundaries between the private and the public are being eroded due to surveillance capitalism and the infiltration of social media into virtually everything we do, it makes perfect sense that the analogy of the haunted house should apply to the internet, that it would transmute into a haunted digital netherspace. this, of course, is not a new concept; it was already thoroughly explored in william gibson’s neuromancer (1984), where the mind floats freely in cyberspace while the body stays anchored, clotting in the reality of the bedroom, where time does pass physically. the internet, as a medium defined by flow and exchange, can also work as a threshold that lets through malignant entities. think of feardotcom (2002), with its “do you want to see a ghost?” website that unleashes hauntings remotely with one volitional click. the internet has become a new home for our private thoughts and the process of reflection, a door into other worlds, not always pleasant ones. we are haunted by the very social medium through which we construct our sense of self and by the avatars we invent from our bedrooms. lat: so, if we characterize the computer as specter and the internet as a horror house—and you were also mentioning how we become somehow part of it—this brings to mind fictions of the automata, and specially artificial intelligence nowadays, in terms of how they might have a similar role to the monster in gothic fiction. sometimes, this is a monster that is in a way enticing, attracting us, often sexually. and the sexuality of automata has been present in film for decades, mostly through men who establish romantic and sexual relationships with gynoids (a la pygmalion and galatea) such as ex machina (2014), to give a fairly recent example. so, thinking about affect—which you have mentioned before in our conversation—, how does the machine as a monster damage or enhance this human capacity for affect? is the source of horror here a reflection of our fear to establish real connections with other humans? and, is there a gothic element to this, so to speak, ill-advised connection formed with the abject, liminal monster? xar: there is quite a lot to unpack here. creationist fears of the machines we shape into being have an obvious and significant point of origin in the frankenstein myth and, more generally, the mad scientist tradition – that is, the idea of the tabula rasa in the form of frankenstein’s creature and the fact that the invention is always, to a certain extent, a mirror for the mind that makes it. this resonates with theorizations, like marshall mcluhan’s, of technology as “the final phase of the extensions of man [sic] – the technological simulation of consciousness” xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 21 (3). fear of the machine has now passed on to ai and robots: we are concerned that machines’ incremental power to think, to process vast amounts of information, will render our brains, with their organic limitations, obsolete. and we are very actively replacing human labour with machines in many industrial sectors, which generates concomitant suspicion and resentment towards automation. then there is the issue of the gendered nature of manmade creations. for example, in ex machina, the robot is given a female form. one of the things that this suggests, as explored in the novel frankissstein (2019), by jeanette winterson, is that we are updating technology at such a breakneck speed that we almost cannot cope with the practical and moral implications of our actions. our ideologies, our thinking, are not necessarily advancing as fast as our programming capacity. the prosaic example of the sex robot strikes me as significant: it is a technologically sophisticated sexual object thoroughly tied up in misogynistic and objectifying notions of womanhood. winterson’s novel critiques the gendered rise of this technology by contrasting it with a timeline featuring science fiction writer mary shelley and ada lovelace, whose famous account of the “analytical engine” made her a historically significant, if long overlooked, female scientist. this leads me on to something else raised in frankissstein: what do we do, morally, ethically, with new, complex technology? for all that our worries seem to be about robots taking over the world, at which point are we going to create conscious automated life that needs some form of legal protection? it might sound like a facetious question, but when will the life that we create be so autonomous in its thinking and power to feel that it requires its own rights? humans will not be the only thing at risk from our technoscientific prowess. lat: thinking about these ideas of the risks of technology, as well as bringing together all these ideas that we’ve discussed (audience point of view and involvement, the different elements of the gothic that might be present in cyberterror, our relationship to the machine/automata as a possible monster, the machines’ rights…), we also find that there’s been a number of quite successful recent productions in non-fiction dealing with these issues. some of these productions play both with documentary style and fictionalized recreations of our online existence, such as the quite popular netflix docudrama the social dilemma (2020), which foregrounds the dangers of social media and privacy by focusing on a crude dramatization of the dangerous experience, not focusing so much on discussing tangible political and economic measures that could be taken. and, quite a different example but also in the realm of dealing with some of the fears you have discussed in documentary form, we have the true crime series don’t f**k with cats: hunting an internet killer (2019), which explores issues already present in the genre of snuff movies but with the added preoccupation of the exponential growth and accessibility thanks to the internet. do you see horror elements in these narratives as a form of warning, of working through our fears and anxieties (both on the part of the creators and on the part of the audience)? are these retellings of the horrors of the digital? and, as you xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 22 were also mentioning in the beginning, there is the issue of privacy and corporate ownership so, in this sense, what is the political role of horror here? xar: to answer the first question: yes, both the social dilemma and don’t f**k with cats essentially play out like horror films. i am not sure if they constitute a direct case of influence, or maybe of equivalence, but both examples strike me as manifestations of something that is in the air: the fact that we are aware that we are being watched, that the things that we do online leave a digital trail. there are two aspects to a documentary like don’t f**k with cats that interest me. on the one hand, on a superficial level, it is about the direct dangers of the internet as a place where harmful content circulates freely. luka magnotta’s is a case in point: someone who uploaded videos of cats he was killing for views, and eventually went on to record the murder of a man. in that respect the documentary does raise some powerful questions about the internet as catalyst for such material, as a captivated stage for the demented. a film like unfriended: dark web (2018), which explores the “dark web,” goes even deeper into the pit of unregulated content not even indexed by search engines. but there is another, equally dark, side to that documentary, and that is the zealousness of the people who hunted magnotta down, especially how easy it was for them to track him down. it was a long process, admittedly, but they were eventually faster than the police. in effect, they were able to use the internet against the perpetrator. digital tracks make profiling easier than ever. to me, don’t f**k with cats is a great documentary because it both feels like a horror film and raises all these issues around surveillance capitalism. i guess this might sound a bit controversial, but to address the issue of what role the gothic has come to play in all of this, i feel horror films about technology have become social realism. i watch a film like host, a supernatural horror, and it does not feel too different from films where the killers are human, or from the documentaries you mentioned. whether we believe, as in ratter, that we are constantly being recorded and observed by people who do not have our best interests in mind, the capacity is there for people to hack into our accounts and gadgets. and that stands in for the surveillance practices of big tech. everything you like, everything you click through to, leaves a record somewhere, that can be exploited by others. we need laws to stop such covert practices, as they have a direct impact not just on our privacy and the collapse of the private into the public, but, as we have seen in recent examples covered in the great hack (2019), also on the future of democracy. it is interesting that technology that was intended to offer freedom of information has been turned into a new digital panopticon. the emphasis in recent years on wearables, potentially even more intrusive forms of data acquisition, signals that this trend is not about to buckle anytime soon. and the covid pandemic has only emboldened the tech giants, who have come out richer than ever before. lat: yes, i completely agree with that. that is really the true horror behind this thing that we’ve put so much hope on for being a democratizing tool and then it has transformed into a new panopticon. so finally, could you share some final thoughts on the role of cyber horror xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 23 in popular culture nowadays? how is it going to develop in the future and how is it going to continue to play with our contemporary cultural anxieties? xar: it is hard to say because, in many respects, some of the aspects that i thought would characterise the future of digital horror are now its present. we will see a rising interest in policing. i think catherine zimmer, in her brilliant book surveillance cinema (2015), talks about surveillance as the “logic” of contemporary cinema. it is a complex argument that has to do with the dynamics of cinema itself, but her point that surveillance is a new popular aesthetic and cultural primer is interesting. it is perhaps not a surprise that all these digital gothic texts, the supernatural ones in particular, are about the internet and digital media taking on a life of their own that resists human control. i am thinking of friend request (2016), where facebook becomes “haunted” and starts posting personal content following the suicide of a teenage witch. supernatural social media are the natural next stage in the evolution of “haunted media” (sconce) revitalised by ringu (the ring) in 1998. they replace analog abjection (bensonallott 102–31) with phobias about modern forms of image and information distribution such as streaming, browsing and downloading. these, in turn, materialise in forms of digital disruption like frozen frames and glitches (pixilation, changes in colour and other distortions), which, as marc olivier has put it, are “becoming to the twenty-first century what the crumbling mansion was to gothic literature of the nineteenth century” (253). we are also going to see more films about isolation, not just because of covid, but because of the silo-ing, cocooning nature of the internet. kairo (pulse, 2001) was a great film in terms of anticipating a lot of the dangers of the digital revolution. we still have not seen everything that horror can do with the idea of the internet as ”trap” and how social media encourage a particular type of very superficial level of engagement in human communications. so, i think it is inevitable that there will be stories that begin to fantasize about isolation as a route into privacy, into escaping the noise of the hyper-activated world, rather than as an indication of personal struggles. and finally, for the reasons that i mentioned above, we are going to see more horror stories focusing on forms of totalitarian control. we will see more dystopias in which the technology is going to play a significant part in the process of social discrimination. currently, the greatest fear for a lot of this fictional material is that the tools that are used to collect behavioral surplus are turned against us. if you know what someone likes, if you can work out who they are from their daily digital and online interactions, you can predict where they will be tomorrow, what they may need then. in fact, you can predict what they will need before they realise this themselves. these are the type of nightmares that we are likely to encounter over the next few years, which will build upon the concerns explored by fan footage and desktop horror: technology as not just capturing, but altering and even dictating, human behaviour. xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 24 open q&a session anna marta marini: this just came to my mind now when you were talking about the nonfictional kind of digital documentary, on this showing and fueling this fear of the digital world. recently i watched crime scene: the vanishing at the cecil hotel (2020). this is the story of this girl that disappeared and they found their dad in the water tank of the hotel. aside from the story, i found very interesting that a part of the documentary series was focused precisely on the found footage, basically because they found the footage from an elevator and you could see her and that sparked the attention of the public, and they really insist on this footage mystery. and then, the other interesting part was precisely what you were talking about now, the tracking of people on the internet because this want-to-be detectives on the internet tracked down this dude that was in mexico at the time, so he couldn’t have possibly been involved in the crime, and they accused him for some reason of being the murderer. and this guy had his life shattered, he lost everything. i liked that at the end of the documentary they interviewed him and they actually underlined this issue—even if i think not enough. so, considering this new—or renewed—passion for true crime shows, do you think there’s been a sort of blending with some horror techniques or narrative strategies that are usually found in horror narratives? xar: i must confess i have not seen this particular documentary, but i will look it up. it sounds to me very likely that somewhere there must be videos that could incriminate anyone, just by dint of the amount of surveillance footage that is automatically generated on a daily basis. i do not know whether, in this particular case, the investigators used such material. was it a public effort or a private one? amm: the police released this footage from the elevator and, for some odd reason, later on, some people on the internet thought that this other guy was the murderer when he wasn’t even there. so, i really felt, watching this series, that it was really like a fictional horror series. it was just planned and narrated like a horror series and not like just a documentary. xar: yes. they definitely speak to each other. the surveillance ethic is the same. i guess in this particular case it is being put to good service (in order to uncover a crime), but we have the incrimination of someone who did not have anything to do with it, which is worrying. i think this is the other scary aspect about cyber-life: its indelibility. but to answer you earlier question more directly: yes, i think cinema and the documentary have long influenced each other. documentary drawing on found footage techniques is an interesting reverse of events, as found footage films like the blair witch project (1999), diary of the dead (2007) and cloverfield (2008) definitely drew inspiration from the documentary format, as well as the homemade video tape, in the first place. and of course, many of the internal narrative tensions of the horror genre apply to detective films and thrillers, especially the building up of tension. xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 25 amm: yes, i thought it was very interesting because it exactly used those things and it was built like a horror movie. it was really building on the suspense and, in the end, the mystery wasn’t really a mystery. xar: i find the idea of documentaries being turned into a larger mystery series quite an interesting concept. it is probably not new, but i have definitely noticed the fact that documentaries have turned into suspense stories, with their own cliff-hangers and carefully curated storylines and character arcs. trang dang: i’m interested in how, when the horror occurs what is that makes us scared? is it the idea of how non-objects and non-human objects, automata, start to act more human and to have a consciousness? how does the agency of humans, and kind of automators in cyberpunk fiction and films portrayed in these media, is something described as something that humans and the automata already intrinsically have or is it something that they develop throughout the course of the films or the fiction? both their uncanny and human features. xar: i think there is a tipping point. to go back to the example that laura was referring to, ex machina strikes me as a great example of a story where technology is okay so long as it is dependent on humans, safe and controlled. the key to the horror in that film is that the automaton has been outsmarting the human all along and abusing our capacity for empathy. i think this is the most uncanny aspect of automata, not just the fact that they walk the path between what we recognize as human and inhuman, but the fact that we never really know what they are thinking or who has programmed them for what purpose. for example, in the youtube videos featuring sophia the robot, an incredibly advanced humanoid activated in 2016 and the first to receive citizenship of any kind, her suggestion that humans should not fear her immediately triggers doubt. i think there is something here around control and around who gets to make decisions. i would say that it is almost natural for us to feel this way because we simply do not know what hides behind the programming, in the same way that we do not know what databases hide behind alexa or siri. we talk to mechanized voices that have been programmed seemingly for our benefit, but where does that information go and who uses it? i think this is what one can extrapolate to the fictional automaton. it is all about the point at which we lose control over technology, at which we become potential victims of its magic, rather its beneficiaries. td: do you think that this discourages us to spend more time with technologies in a way because it makes us scared and think about the control and you know the power that technology might have upon us? xar: i think it is the exponential aspect of the ai that scares us, that at some point it begins to learn independently and can outsmart us. as with all things human, i think it is a question of mastery. my concern is not with automata themselves, but the fact that i feel that they are spokesperson for someone else i am not seeing. the other idea (robots dominating xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 26 humankind) seems to me still, although maybe not for much longer, more in the realm of the science-fiction dystopia. in any case, i do not think knowledge of such extant dangers prevents us from using digital technology. it has been created and perfected to be almost indispensable, so most people would rather put up with a little discomfort and fear than give it up completely. and then, of course, there is the issue that it creates psychological addiction. caitlin duffy: i’ve been thinking a lot about surveillance capitalism but in terms of haunted house films, so thank you for recommending catherine zimmer’s book. could you talk a little about how you see bodies, and maybe even body horror, play into desktop horror? as you were talking, i was thinking a bit about how surveillance capitalism sort of takes our digital selves and transforms us into just data, and i was thinking too about how the internet could be, and you talked about this, it could have been this place of freedom or at least that’s how we were originally imagining it, in this idealistic utopian sense, but then there’s also this loss of freedom in the way that we’re broken down into data. i think this comes across too in some horror movies and even the work we do to create our digital self. i was thinking in don’t f**k with cats we even see that with luka magnotta all the work he did to create this identity. we see it in unfriended a little bit too, and also in non-horror films like the recent jumanji: welcome to the jungle (2017) remake because there was sort of a chance for body horror there. so i was thinking about this and also the return of our past selves too because this other identity we sort of have to grapple with and i think that can be a sort of body horror in a way as well. xar: i think there are two types of body horror that are connected to digital horror. one of them has to do with our dependence on digital media. in the social dilemma, this is actually portrayed with both kids being so reliant on their phones that they cannot go without them for extended periods of time. another great example is the “nosedive” episode of black mirror (s3 e1, 2016), which is really a reductio ad absurdum or grotesque exaggeration of similar rating practices and apps already in wide circulation that articulate our social interactions and perceived socioeconomic and personal worth. it may seem like an overreaction, but the point about dependence is based on research that has proven that young people show all the withdrawal symptoms of addicts when their smartphones are removed for a day or more (zuboff 446–7). this dependency translates in some films into the melding of the system with the user. sequence break (2017) and peripheral (2018) illustrate interdependence through cronenbergian body horror. in one, a console the gamer is playing starts fusing with his own flesh; in the other, the writer gets inked up and becomes part of the intelligent software facilitating the writing of her novel. these films explore our digital subservience. we lose ourselves in the process of constantly checking for updates, of validating ourselves through others’ performative appreciation of us. the other issue is the capacity of social media to dictate lives. we are sold the illusion that, because we have a facebook profile that is ours, or an instagram profile, we have the freedom to project whom we are, or even who we would like to be. but of course this is not xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 27 the case; we succumb to peer pressure in the same way we do socially. and this technology is always a potential means of extortion and bullying. what worries me, and what maybe some of the new horror films mentioned in our conversation are beginning to capture, is how we never really are who we think – and old gothic trope that has traditionally found a fictional embodiment in the figure of the double. online, we become the person that pleases our followers the most or who will garner the most attention and acceptance. there is something of our personality that gets inevitably lost in the process. films like unfriended also seem to be exploring “revenge porn” and the illicit sharing of other people’s private images. this is not just about a lack of consent, but about the erosion of the private and personal. the cause of the haunting in unfriended is a girl who is humiliated publicly on facebook and who wants her own back. it is the same for friend request. someone who has been humiliated comes back for retaliation. it strikes me that these are the three things that body horror does in the digital realm: it explores internet dependence, the artificial construction of ourselves under social pressure, and the impact of other people sharing private data, especially data that has not been consciously passed on or that is recorded and used without our agreement. heather lukins: my question is about what you were talking about regarding digital desktop horror. with the current rise in zoom, teams and work from home in the current covid-era, i’m looking towards the post-covid era. would you say this is sort of globalized and, at least in the western world of understanding of desktop horror, or is there still something that you would classify about the genre as being sort of quintessentially american, or is it this just because the prevalence of american-based companies in terms of big data, facebook and twitter? xar: i would say a bit of both because zoom has strong links to china, as does tiktok. but yes, all the big tech has traditionally “lived” in silicon valley, in the us. i would say, though, that with google, microsoft and facebook all having a global presence, issues easily escalate into worldwide problems. where we might still see a difference is in europe, thanks to gdpr (general data protection regulation), which has gone some way towards visualising the vast amount of information retrieved and sold without express consent. i really hope that the implementation of gdpr in 2018 marks the beginning of a turn towards a harsher take on the regulation of personal data. host was able to appeal to all of us because it was not exclusively about the technology. it was also about human contact during the covid pandemic. this is probably what makes it a film that is not, strictly speaking, nationally specific. it is clearly a text about connecting with significant others during a time of enforced isolation, and the horrors that lurk within this mediated setup. if one believes that the internet ultimately isolates people as much as it connects them, then host becomes its own critique of how the very platforms supposed to bring us together can have unexpected negative consequences. xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 28 works cited aldana reyes, xavier. body gothic: corporeal transgression in contemporary literature and horror film. university of wales press, 2014. —. horror film and affect: towards a corporeal model of viewership. routledge, 2016. —, editor. horror: a literary history. british library publishing, 2016. —. “the mediation of death in fictional snuff: reflexivity, viewer interpellation, and ethical implication.” snuff: real death and screen media, edited by neil jackson, shaun kimber, johnny walker and thomas joseph watson, bloomsbury, pp. 211–23. —. spanish gothic: national identity, collaboration and cultural adaptation. palgrave macmillan, 2017. —. “jaume balagueró and paco plaza’s [rec] (2007)—the affective approach to horror.” horror: a companion, edited by 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project. directed by daniel myrick and eduardo sánchez, artisan entertainment, 1999. cloverfield. directed by matt reeves, paramount pictures, 2008. crime scene: the vanishing at the cecil hotel. directed by joe berlinger, netflix, 2021. the den, aka hacked. directed by zachary donohue, ifc midnight, 2013. diary of the dead. directed by george a. romero, third rail releasing, 2007. don’t f**k with cats: hunting an internet killer. directed by mark lewis, netflix, 2019. ex machina. directed by alex garland, a24, universal pictures, 2014. feardotcom. directed by william malone, warner bros. pictures, columbia tristar distributors international, 2002. friend request. directed by simon verhoeven, warner bros. pictures, 2016. the great hack. directed by karim amer and jehane noujaim, netflix, 2019. host. directed by rob savage, vertigo releasing, 2020. hostel. directed by eli roth, lions gate films, screen gems, 2005. house of usher. directed by roger corman, american international pictures, 1960. jumanji: welcome to the jungle. directed by jake kasdan, sony pictures releasing, 2017. kairo (pulse). directed by kiyoshi kurosawa. toho, 2001. keep watching. directed by sean carter. sony pictures releasing, 2017. the last horror movie. directed by julian richards. tartan films, 2003. megan is missing. michael goi, anchor bay films, 2011. “nosevide.” directed by joe wright, black mirror, netflix, 2016. open windows. directed by nacho vigalondo, aurum producciones, cinedigm, 2014. xavier aldana reyes | digital gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1812 30 outlast. pc version, red barrels, 2013. peripheral. directed by paul hyett, blue finch, 2018. ratter. directed by brandon kramer, destination films, vertical entertainment, 2015. [rec]. directed by jaume balagueró and paco plaza, filmax, 2007. ringu (ring). directed by hideo nakata, toho, 1998. saw. directed by james wan, lions gate films, 2004. searching. directed by aneesh chaganty, sony pictures releasing, 2018. sequence break. directed by graham skipper, shudder, 2017. the social dilemma. directed by jeff orlowski, netflix, 2020. unfriended. directed by leo gabriadze, universal pictures, 2014. unfriended: dark web. directed by stephen susco, otl releasing, bh tilt, 2018. untraceable. directed by gregory hoblit, universal pictures, 2008. preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads to violence and terrorism and the need for its effective implementation hana jalloul muro his article aims to explore the current measures related to the prevention of violent radicalization that leads to violence and terrorism, exploring the different dimensions of the phenomenon of radicalization and extremism, which cannot be applied to certain stigmatized communities but to a wider spectrum of different political violent ideologies. at this point the proper use of terminology in this field can help us to understand how to address this challenge as a whole. countries such as the usa and different international organizations have carried out a set of measures to prevent violent radicalization but not always in a successful or effective way, although many initiatives at a local level are showing promising results. there is still a lot of work to be done not only in the field of prevention, but also in the de-radicalization one, measures should be more efficient. understanding the importance of the terminology the knowledge of the terminology related to terms such as extremism, radicalization, violent radicalization or terrorism is fundamental in discerning one term from the other; each term has a different definition. knowing this fact, the adoption of radical ideas does not imply direct violence. even violent extremism does not have direct correlation to terrorism. t reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 1 adviser in the technical cabinet of the delegate of the government in madrid lecturer at carlos iii univeristy and universidad nebrija marc sageman (2017) mentions that: the process of turning to political violence is commonly called radicalization. however, this term has a double meaning: it refers both to the acquisition of extreme or radical ideas and to the readiness to use violence. the two are not the same. many people share radical ideas, but the vast majority do not go on to use violence in their pursuit. the literature unfortunately confuses these two very separate processes and assumes that belief in racial ideas inevitably leads to violence. (p. 9) 2 on the other hand, terms like extremism has been described by authors like shmidt (2013) affirming that: in terms of historical precedents (e.g. fascism, communism), extremists can be characterized as political actors who tend to disregard the rule of law and reject pluralism in society […] extremists strive to create a homogeneous society based on rigid, dogmatic ideological tenets; they seek to make society conformist by suppressing all opposition and subjugating minorities. that distinguishes them from mere radicals who accept diversity and believe in the power of reason rather than dogma. […]extremists on the political left and right and those of a religiousfundamentalist orientation as well as those of an ethno-nationalist political hue tend, in their struggle to gain, maintain or defend state power, to show a propensity to prefer, on their paths to realize their political programs: use of force/violence over persuasion; uniformity over diversity; collective goals over individual freedom; giving orders over dialogue. (p. 8-9) other authors like aron kundnani (2015) comments that “it is worth noting that the term “extremism” has long been used as a way of denouncing political dissent.” the knowledge of the terminology related to terms such as extremism, radicalization, violent radicalization or terrorism is fundamental in discerning one term from the other; each term has a different definition reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro 3 even violent extremism does not have direct correlation to terrorism terms like terrorism are explained by the europol in the tesat report 2018 as such: the definition of the term ‘terrorist offences’ is indicated in article 1 of the council framework decision of 13 june 2002 on combating terrorism (2002/475/ jha), which all eu member states have implemented in their national legislation. this framework decision specifies that terrorist offences are intentional acts which, given their nature or context, may seriously damage a country or an international organization when committed with the aim of: seriously intimidating a population, or unduly compelling a government or international organization to perform or abstain from performing an act, or seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of a country or an international organization. (p. 63) there are many definitions of terrorism but there is no definition that is widely accepted. the same happens with term such as extremism and radicalization. the centre for the prevention of radicalization leading to violence of canada describes radicalization leading to violence as “a process whereby people adopt an extremist belief system – including the intent to use, encourage or facilitate violence – in order to promote an ideology, a political project or a cause as a means of social transformation” (centre for the prevention of radicalization leading to violence, 2016 in youth work against violent radicalisation theory, concepts and primary prevention in practice, 2018, p. 15). schmid (2013) differentiate between radicalism and extremism saying that “in the past, radicalism has reformed our political systems, allowing fringe movements to become mainstream movements” (p.55), the author is stating that even if radicals share characteristics with extremists there are differences such as the willingness to engage in critical thinking. berger (2018) explains about radicalization that leads to extremism that “the escalation of an in-group’s extremist orientation in the form of increasingly negative views about an outgroup or the endorsement of increasingly hostile or violent actions against an out-group” (p. 172). it is very important to differentiate and understand all these terms so we can take it into account once we start designing policies and putting in place measures for the prevention of violent radicalization. understanding the factors that can lead a priori to a process of radicalization or to a process of violent radicalization constitute an important tool in order to carry into effect the policies to prevent such procedures. analyzing the context of the radicalized person and other crucial elements like his/her personality is extremely important too. oliver roy (2017) talks about the islamization of radicalism explaining that many youngsters in france related to terrorism had small curricula of petit crimes (p.17). from roy´s ideas we can conclude that people don´t have to get violent because they adhere to a concrete religious ideology, separating terror from religion; although it could indicate that once someone commits a violent act the following one would become much easier and can indicate also that the commission of a violent act can also 4 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos be influenced by individual´s social, political, religious and economic context…which excludes also the theory of violent predisposition1. diego muro (2016) explains that “radicalization towards violent extremism is a complex and multifaceted process that takes place at a variety of levels (individual, organizational and systemic)” (p. 2). from most of the explanation surrounding the studies related to the field of radicalization, like moghaddam’s model of six steps that illustrates the process of radicalization (2005), sagema´s (2017) explanation of self-categorization as “the core concept of a social science project analyzing the behavior of groups, known as the social identity perspective (sip)” (p. 6) is the approach that entails a more complete sense from our point of view. the author mentions the works of other scholars like tafjel “group bias involved identification with one´s group” and his student john turner noted that “these minimal group conditions showed that loners spontaneously acted out on behalf of a group with which they had no contact” (p. 6). berger (2018) also mentions the social identity theory as pioneered by social pshycologists henri tafjel and john c.turner, this theory stipulates that people categorize themselves and others as members of competing social group (p.24), the in-group vs out-group explained above. this reflection seems more adequate to the current events, i mentioned in other publications (jalloul, 2018) that if we circumscribe our analysis to the european muslim citizens that became radicalized and committed terrorist acts, we must not ignore the fact that they are european muslim citizens. that is to say that those individuals who are radicalized toward violence and execute it along with terrorist groups, advocate a cause that geographically and, in some cases culturally, is alien to them. we can mention the circumstance of those individuals, having or not arabic origins, who have never been in the arab world in countries like syria or iraq, in which organizations like isis raised the capitals of their caliphate. they identify themselves with causes that are not theirs, there is a misconception of the belonging identity. 5 there are many definitions of terrorism but there is no definition that is widely accepted. the same happens with term such as extremism and radicalization preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro 1 sageman (2017a) explains that “this common cognitive bias neglecting contextual factors and reducing actors to stereotypes, driven by simple internal factors such as personality or ideology […] two common explanations from this perspective are that terrorist are either criminals or mentally ill”. (pp. 92-93) 6 the categorization of terrorist ofenders when we talk about terrorism, we need to realize that terrorism as a consequence of a violent political action can be committed by groups with different political and religious ideologies, even carried out by political actors. we tend to think that terrorism only applies to individuals from specific religious communities, an example of this is when an individual of muslim confession commits a terrorist act. on the other side, when the press publishes about other terrorists’ attacks committed by non-muslim individuals, they are not labeled, in many cases, as terrorist. citing examples, we can mention the 2016 terrorist attack on a berlin christmas market. terrorist group known as islamic state claimed responsibility for the horrific attack which killed 12 and left up to 50 injured. if we considered sageman´s definition on terrorism “as a public´s categorization of political violence by non-state actors during domestic peacetime” (p. 91), we can evidently agree that the german market attack was carried out by a terrorist. the same definition can be used when in the us, last year´s mass shooting took place in las vegas, a gunman opened fire in a concert killing 58 people leaving 851 injured, resulting one of the deadliest mass shooting in recent us history, in this case the perpetrator was described as a 64-year-old gambler and former accountant (bbc, 2017) or as a gunman, in the case where 12 people were killed in a shooting the 8th of november at a bar in california. (new york times, 2018). although both cases confirm every pattern related to the several definitions known of terrorism. currently, the us is witnessing a huge growth of extreme right movements. in fact, as the washington post published recently (barret, zapotosky, stead sellers, 2018), after the pittsburgh synagogue shooting on the 27 of october that left 11 people dead, calls for the federal government to update its laws to put the kind of violence targeting minorities, religious groups and the public in the same category as terrorists inspired by overseas groups. the same article mentions that “a 2017 report by the government accountability office found that since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, far-right violent extremists were responsible for 106 killings in the united states, while islamistinspired violent extremists had killed 119. the gao found that while the number of deaths were roughly similar, the number of incidents were not; far-right extremists committed almost three times as many attacks — 62, compared with 23 by islamist extremists.” reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos we should not forget that not only individuals but also political actors can radicalize toward violence 7 preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro there is an acceptance of a certain type of violence used by political actors, like states, who are radicalized in their fight against those non-state actors whom they categorize as terrorists. this reality offers a dimension of conflict less clear, also compels us to think of the “other” as the “real terrorist” countering violent extremism (cve), according to a document of the european commission (2015) could be defined as: “the fight against violent extremism, or cve, constitutes all actions that strengthen the resilience of individuals and communities to the appeal of radicalizers and extremism” reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 8 other articles, (the conversation, 2018), state that from 1990 to the present, far-right extremists have committed 217 ideologically-motivated homicides. 19 of these homicides targeted religious institutions or individuals thought to be associated with a particular religion. eleven were motivated by anti-semitism, specifically. europe witnessed one of its deadliest terrorist attacks in the norwegian island of utoya in 2011 perpetrated by a far-right extremist, anders behring, breivik who killed 69 young people. the council of europe released a report last april 2018 (p. 16), based on the report by the centre for the prevention of radicalization leading to violence, in which several forms and manifestations of radicalization leading to violence are described. we find right-wing extremist violence, left-wing extremist violence, politico-religious extremist violence and single-issue extremist violence. in all the mentioned cases the range of violent actions can vary from verbal violence to terrorist attacks, damage to public goods, physical aggression or murders, amongst others. on the other hand we should not forget that not only individuals but also political actors can radicalize toward violence. there is an acceptance of a certain type of violence used by political actors, like states, who are radicalized in their fight against those non-state actors whom they categorize as terrorists. this reality offers a dimension of conflict less clear, also compels us to think of the “other” as the “real terrorist”, jalloul (2018). examples can be guantanamo, the persecution, torture and murder of the rohingya minority by myanmar’s security forces and other religious groups. civilians killed in syria by russian bombings and the us-led military coalition against daesh. civilian’s death toll by the nato air campaign in libya in 2011, among others. we cannot misjudge the fatal consequences of the jihadist terrorism in our society that tried over and over to undermine our democratic values, but also we cannot forget that in the field of prevention of radicalization that leads to violence and to terrorism, as its ultimate consequence, other types of terrorism are as dangerous as the jihadist’s type. as we said before, terrorism has several manifestations and the religious one is just one of them. the field of prevention of radicalization should take all of them into account in order to make our societies more resilient to the radicalizator’s discourses and ideology. preventive strategies to fight violent radicalisation that leads to violence different policies have been put in place for the fight against violent radicalization, they are known as countering violent extremism (cve), according to a document of the european commission (2015) could be defined as: “the fight against violent extremism, or cve, constitutes all actions that strengthen the resilience of individuals and communities to the appeal of radicalizers and extremism” (p. 9). its objectives are to prevent radicalization and also to achieve the de-radicalization of some individuals, before the latter could travel to fight with terrorist groups such as isis; or once they return after fighting with them. these programs have not always been effective as intended, it is worth mentioning that within these programs there are online counter narratives programs (counternarratives). different institutions at european level, as well preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro 9 as different civil organizations and different projects and institutions financed by the eu, have launched several projects and research groups related to the prevention of radicalization2. in 2016 the european commission presented a communication for the prevention of violent extremism3. the council of europe approved last july a counter-terrorism strategy (2018-2022) based mainly on prevention, prosecution and protection, including assistance to victims (council of europe, 2018). the parliamentary assembly of the council of europe launched in 2015 the initiative #nohatenofear, calling on politicians “to shoulder their responsibility to speak out publicly against fear and hatred, and to promote fundamental freedoms and the values of tolerance, non-discrimination and respect for human dignity. through practical action in their parliaments and in their constituencies, parliamentarians can help immunize society against fear and hatred.” the united nations also launched an action plan for the prevention of violent radicalism at the end of 2015. the projects have been carried out by organizations, even by the states. the fight against violent extremism (cve) is also known as prevention of violent extremism (pvepreventing violent extremism) term coined by the united nations, although in reality both are largely identical; in recent years they have been presented as alternatives to reduce the risks derived from radicalization processes toward violence and the commission of terrorist acts. the osce refers to the fight against violent extremism as “the fight against violent extremism and radicalization that leads to terrorism”, or verlt another term that is, again, largely similar to that of the cve (neuman, 2017, p. 19). the european union promotes initiatives through institutions such as ran (radicalization awareness network) funded by the european commission, which brings together european experts to work on the prevention of radicalization; or with projects of the european union such as ct morse, which provides policy monitoring and support for the actions of the european union instrument for stability and peace (icsp), in the fight against terrorism and violent extremism in third countries. among many other projects pertaining to the prevention of radicalization we find the counter-islamophobia kit, funded by the european commission-directorate of justice, which brings reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 10 2 for example, quilliam foundation, institute for strategic dialogue, fida management, rusi, global network against violent extremism (ave) formed by individuals who had been violent extremists, as well as by survivors of violent extremism, in the uk. british government also finance projects such as imams online; ran y ctmorse by the european union, counter extremism project, impact europe, icct, there is also a program form osce; in france the government supported the initiative stop d´jihadisme. in spain plan estratégico nacional de lucha contra la radicalización violenta, a program to stop radicalization in prisons, both of the since 2015, and the platform stop-radicalismos; nor very successful. while the the plan transversal por la convivencia y la prevención de la radicalización violenta in the city of málaga has been successful. in the middle east there are organizations like sawab center o hedayah countering violent extremism center in abu-dhabi 3 communication from the commission to the european parliament, the council, the european economic and social committee and the committee of the regions supporting the prevention of radicalisation leading to violent extremism brussels, 14.6.2016 com (2016) 379 final. there other documents: commission communication on preventing radicalisation to terrorism and violent extremism: strengthening the eu’s response, com (2013) 941 final of 15 january 2014, european parliament resolution of 25 november 2015 on the prevention of radicalisation and recruitment of european citizens by terrorist organisations (2015/2063(ini)), preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro in the united states the first national strategy to prevent violent extremism was launched in 2011 under obama´s presidency, this is known as empowering local partners to prevent violent extremism in the united states 11 12 in early 2017 the trump´s administration announced the name change for counter islamic extremism, which was widely criticized for being ineffective and for attacking muslim communities reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 12 experts from across europe. the objective of this project is to critically review dominant antimuslim narratives, comparing the use and efficacy of prevailing counter-narratives to islamophobia in eight european union member states in the united states the first national strategy to prevent violent extremism was launched in 2011 under obama´s presidency, this is known as empowering local partners to prevent violent extremism in the united states. in 2015 obama´s administration held a conference regarding this program; in early 2017 the trump´s administration announced the name change for counter islamic extremism, which was widely criticized for being ineffective and for attacking muslim communities; today the website of the department of security, which it seems to have opted not to adopt that name, shows the lines of work in terms of resources, research and programs on cve. authors such as aziz sahar f. (2017) criticizes considerably the effectiveness of cve programs in the united states, a country that suffers from important conflicts such as the deaths perpetrated by supremacist groups and the mass shootings in schools. other authors have criticized the orientation that cve programs took with trump’s administration, where it seems that securitization weights more than policies that focus on prevention; mentioning also that (stewart, 2017) “despite a wealth of data available to create an evidence-based policy, an american cve policy grounded in scientific support has not yet been produced. until these concerns are adequately addressed, cve efforts in the united states remain in a state of disarray and uncertainty” (p. 45-46). these remarks stress the deficiency of this type of programs in the us. in fact, having a look into the web page of the u.s. department of state, the global counter terrorism forum specifies that “it provides a unique platform for senior counterterrorism policymakers and experts from around the world to work together to identify urgent needs, devise solutions and mobilize resources for addressing key counterterrorism challenges. with its primary focus on capacity building and countering violent extremism”; we cannot find the word preventing, although we know that the term used, cve, has at one of its most important goals the prevention of radicalization that leads to violence. in the special briefing by nathan a. sales, coordinator for counterterrorism on the release of the country reports on terrorism 2017, also at the u.s. department of state’s webpage, he states that: the report notes a number of major strides that the united states and our international partners made to defeat and degrade terrorist organizations in 2017. we worked with allies and partners around the world to expand information sharing, improve aviation security, enhance law enforcement and rule of law capacities, and to counter terrorist radicalization with a focus on preventing recruitment and recidivism. we observe clearly that the us policy related to cve is focused on the terrain of securitization more than in the prevention or de-radicalization. if we study the efforts done with de-radicalization the perspective changes, taking into consideration that it is a step that must be taken when someone has been already radicalized: this preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro 13 person even if radicalized does not have to manifest any sort of violence, or he can be a radical ready to administer any type of violence, in a nearby geography or in the battlefield of places like syria or iraq, or he can be a freedom fighter whose returning from fighting with a terrorist groups such as al-qaeda or isis in the battlefield. or a person that is in jail in a place like iraq or syria. omar ashour (2009) comments that: de-radicalization is another process of relative change within islamist movements, one in which a radical group reverses its ideology and de-legitimizes the use of violent methods to achieve political goals, while also moving towards an acceptance of gradual social, political and economic changes within a pluralist context. a group undergoing a de-radicalization process does not have to ideologically abide by democratic principles, whether electoral or liberal, and does not have to participate in an electoral process. de-radicalization is primarily concerned with changing the attitudes of armed islamist movements toward violence, rather than toward democracy. many de-radicalized groups still uphold misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic and anti-democratic views (p.5). de-radicalization is now of utmost concern, especially once the caliphate of isis has fallen, in syria and iraq respectively. the main concern is focusing on those europeans who have been fighting with radical islamist jihadist militias in syria, from fatah al-sham, to isis and other factions in syrian territory; we shouldn´t forget to add the hundreds of europeans who joined militias not considered jihadists like the kurds. according to an egmont report, about 500 combatants have returned to the european union (renard and coolsaet, 2018). with these foreign fighters returning to their european countries, it is crucial to socialize them and integrate them into society, which is a laborious task, taking into consideration the different criteria of each case individually. that depends on the individuals, families, ages, process of recruitment and action on the battlefield, as well as the rank within the terrorist organization. the process of socialization of children, who have been born or raised in these group´s territories, must be analyzed carefully and case by case. many of them were not radicalized despite having socialized in the environment. on the other hand, there are adolescents who have participated in violent actions, and have been subjected to instructions and indoctrination. we must consider if those who returned wish to enroll in the de-radicalization process or program, or if the individual returned for economic or family reasons, because they were disappointed in what they have found within these groups, etc. we need to know how these people can reintegrate into society after spending time in such a hostile environment. in the european union there is a determined framework of action for freedom fighters in each member state (european parliament, 2017). there is also a common framework for action at eu level (european parliament, 2016). it is not yet known how many combatants of terrorist´s groups, such as isis, are still alive, have died, have joined other jihadist organizations or have been captured (jalloul, 2018). not every freedom fighter is returning to his country of origin, hundreds are kept in syrian and iraqi’s jails since their countries, not all, are reluctant to judge them in their home courts. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 14 preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro the us policy related to cve is focused on the terrain of securitization more than in the prevention or de-radicalization 15 france has many nationals in jail controlled by the kurds in syria, at this stage the country prefers that inmates would be judged case by case there, not in france (el país, 2018). human rights watch (2017) raised several concerns about due process in the screening process for people leaving isiscontrolled areas, including vetting procedures for lists of suspects compiled by local security forces. those wrongfully identified as suspects may spend months in arbitrary detention. the organization also gave numbers of those who were sentenced to death and executed. if we want our democratic system to remain impartial, we need to guarantee detainees’ fair trial, which by itself is a way of allowing them to be conscious of their mistakes, and it can work as a measure of de-radicalization. a report of icsr (2018) this year indicates that. recorded up to 7,366 persons have now returned to their home countries (20%), or appear to be in repatriation processes to do so. only 256 (4%) of total returnees are recorded as women, accounting for up to 5% of the women who travelled to syria and iraq. up to 1,180 (17%) of total returnees are recorded as minors, accounting for up to 25% of minors who travelled to, or were born in, iraq and syria. south-eastern asia saw the highest proportion of female and minor returnees at up to 59%, followed by western europe (55%); central asia (48%); sub-saharan africa (33%); eastern europe (18%); americas, australia new zealand (8%); southern asia (<1%); and mena (<1%). there were no returnees accounted for in eastern asia. significant discrepancies in accounting for foreign citizens in iraq and syria – including those described above – rarely distinguish between men and women, adults and minors, making is particularly problematic to fully assess the current status of these distinct populations. women and minors must be considered as distinct and complex categories, each with varying levels of agency. do not reference them in singular categories (‘women and children’, families,’ and so forth). minors in particular require nuanced consideration. delineate all data of persons affiliated with terror and extremist groups by age and gender. (pp.3-5) conclusions drawing conclusions, we can say that the use of terminology is basic when we speak about prevention of radicalization that leads to violence, we cannot infer that a process of radicalization can lead to violence or terrorism, since not all violence implies terrorism, although every terrorist action implies violence; therefore, prevention in an early stage could prevent radicalization and violent radicalization. associating processes of radicalization with security measures or linking them to specific communities’ conduct lead us to some sort of confusion that does not address the approach that must be taken if we want to fight against radicalization with preventive measures. not every process of radicalization must be associated with terrorism, as we just commented, and neither associated with muslim communities, stigmatization is the only result if we don’t analyze such processes on reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos 16 an individual level since each one can be subject to any type of radicalization. we need to reject the idea that there is a direct connection between processes of radicalization and religious ideology. that would imply that violence is inherent to any religious belief and that would mean that any person that embraces religion such as islam can become a terrorist. it is a fact though that a biased interpretation of the religious texts, if we talk here specifically about islamist violent-terrorist radicalization, and the efficiency of the religious discourses based on that interpretation has an important weight in the process of an individual’s radicalization, but radicalization per se depends on the person’s personality, his surroundings, his self-identification within a group. there are no general profiles for radical individuals, which depends on many factors. we are experiencing the growth of far-right extremist groups, sahar (2017) mentions that “from 2000 to 2015, the number of hate groups has -increased by 56%, which include a large number of anti-immigrants, anti-lgbt, anti-muslim, and antigovernment “patriot” groups. and from 2014 to 2015 the number of radical right-wing groups increased by 14%”. he also makes allusions about the increase of white supremacist and white nationalist online forums asserting that: and yet we are not seeing government cve programs targeting single white males in their thirties and forties who are the most common demographic committing mass murder. 127 nor are we seeing cve programs for christians due to right wing groups’ misappropriation of christian doctrine in furtherance of their violent political ends. government hearings are not being held to debate whether violence perpetrated by the ku klux klan, the army of god, or the lord’s resistance army should be called “radical christian terrorism”. (p. 274) another remarkable thing is that, as john horgan noted (schmidt, 2013): not every terrorist holds radical views. it is also important to distinguish between terrorism as a political doctrine and terrorism as an act of political violence. terrorist political crimes are in a way remarkably similar to war crimes as both involve, at their core, deliberate attacks on civilians and/or the taking of hostages. (p. 23) the main thing we should think about is why there is no consensus on the definition of terrorism, as sageman (2017a) asserts: “there is no consensus because different definers have different groups and different research question in mind” (p. 11). the term has been politicized many times, the same is happening with the term radicalization. political and nonpolitical actors can be subject to a process of radicalization, some political actors exercise violence at the expense of our liberties, we need to be careful and apply our critical thinking about conflicts in our home and foreign countries. the war in iraq, syria or libya has not made our planet more secure, at the contrary, it has contributed to the increase of frustration and violence. we need to ask ourselves why nationalist-populist movements and discourses, like in europe or the us, are growing profiting from the identity and economic crisis, and praising in their preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro 17 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos speeches the importance of national borders while displaced populations are dying in its way to a “fortress europe” and to a us “only for americans”. it’s important to remember that white supremacist terrorism and jihadi terrorism are undergoing a process of reciprocal radicalization, in which both become more extreme in response to each other’s activity. the process of radicalization in both terrorist ideologies are very similar, on-line and off-line radicalization, activism, recruitment, the relevance of the leader, the use of important historical events in their narratives, propaganda through the web, etc other concepts such as “radical” (schmid, 2013) “has changed quite dramatically in little more than a century: while in the 19th century, ‘radical’ referred primarily to liberal, anti-clerical, pro-democratic, progressive political positions, contemporary use – as in ‘radical islamism’ – tends to point in the opposite direction: embracing an anti-liberal, fundamentalist, anti-democratic and regressive agenda” (p. 7). that indicates that we use this kind of terms depend on the subjectivity of the interlocutor. we need to use our terms very carefully because any misuse can lead to a confusion. we are in need to strengthen our societies to the call of radicalizers. empowering our young people, investing in their resilience to violent ideologies. one of the best measures is fostering their critical thinking with an accurate use of the terminology related to radicalization that leads to violence. organizations such as the centre for the prevention of radicalization leading to violence has been working in prevention activities giving proper tools to actors affected by radicalization leading to violence. for example: public awareness workshops for young people, public awareness workshops for parents, community development and awareness activities and development of prevention strategies to meet the needs of individual groups, communities or organizations, they have also training programs. they work also with women and violent radicalization and returnees. they invest also in providing support and psychosocial counselling for individuals who are radicalized or becoming radicalized (cprlv, 2018). many specific recommendations have been published in a document by the high-level commission expert group on radicalization (hlceg-r), radicalization implies a multi-dimensional challenge that require multifaceted response. (hlceg-r, 2018). something noteworthy is that cprlv talks about disengagement and social reintegration more that de-radicalization. as explained before, an individual can be de-radicalized from the mindset related to the use of armed violence, but it does not imply that they give up radical views or attitudes. another important aspect to deal with radicalization is the need to separate securitization processes form the prevention of radicalization, we are not fighting at first stages against terrorism, we are fighting against radicalization processes that lead to violence or terrorism through prevention. many measures should be implemented in an effective way if we want to succeed in preventing radicalization that leads to violence. education is crucial, educators should be 18 preventive measures of violent radicalization that leads... hana jalloul muro another important aspect to deal with radicalization is the need to separate securitization processes form the prevention of radicalization, we are not fighting at first stages against terrorism, we are fighting against radicalization processes that lead to violence or terrorism through prevention 19 20 teaching terminology in the first place, preventive measures, working in group, detecting students’ frustrations, bullying etc. several projects in germany, sweden, italy, denmark, bosnia-herzegovina, and other european countries have put in place empowering youth fighting radicalization. (youth work against violent radicalisation) theory, concepts and primary prevention in practice, p. 32-68). talking with the families of radicalized individuals is important, trying to understand the pain that violence inflict in their lives, to the radicalized person and for everything surrounding it at physical, emotional, social, religious and intellectual level. testimonies of individuals disengaged from violent extremism are important to prevent the process of radicalization, testimonies of victims of terrorist attacks. interreligious activities, fomenting interculturality, involve students’ families, working at community-local and municipal level, promote the role of women in the prevention of extremism, control radical speeches and collaborating in projects with mosques, preventing radicalization in prisons with specific programs. advice through campaigns of the danger of the false online profiles and chats of extreme right, left and religious individuals and organizations. work in the deconstruction of islamist radical discourses through islamic law. keep working on counter-narratives through the internet and in educational centers (jalloul, 2017). putting in force a proper guideline for the prevention of radicalization that leads to violence within governments’ policies would mean that we understand the needs of our societies in a successful way, that we fight against violent extremism and terrorism, that we simply fight against the fear of the unknown. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos testimonies of individuals disengaged from violent extremism are important to prevent the process of radicalization, testimonies of victims of terrorist attacks. interreligious activities, fomenting interculturality, involve students’ families, working at community-local and municipal level, ashour, o. (2009). votes and violence: islamists and the processes of transformation. the international centre for the study of radicalisation and political violence. retrieved from https://icsr. i n f o / w p c o n t e n t / u p l o a d s / 2 0 1 0 / 0 1 / vo t e s a n d v i o l e n c e _ islamists-and-the-processes-of-transformation.pdf aziz, s. f. (2017). losing the “war of ideas”: a critique of countering violent extremism programs. texas international law journal. (n.17-22), pp. 256-279. retrieved from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers cfm?abstract_id=2913571 bakowski, p. and puccio, l. (2016). foreign fighters – member state responses and eu action. eprs | european parliamentary research service. retrieved from http://www.europarl.europa.eu/eprs/eprs briefing-579080-foreign-fighters-rev-final.pdf barrett, d., zapotosky, m. and stead sellers f. 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(2017). combating terrorism. briefing eu legislation in progress september 2017 eprs | european parliamentary research service. retrieved from http://www.europarl.europa e u / r e g d a t a / e t u d e s / b r i e / 2 0 1 7 / 6 0 8 6 8 2 / e p r s bri(2017)608682_en.pdf reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos microsoft word 3.1_full issue.docx elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 4 guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales elizabeth abele gulf university for science & technology abstract while critical attention has largely focused on del toro’s overt fairy tale pan’s labyrinth (2006), del toro’s hollywood films similarly incorporate the mythic, moral, and gothic qualities of classic fairy tales. his new fairy tales present vital contemporary lessons embedded in these archetypal journeys— and their audience’s memories. his free borrowings from fairy tales and popular culture deliberately connect the familiar to his uncanny worlds. this construction is most evident in his films hellboy ii: the golden army (2008) and the shape of water (2017). the contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender, and environmentalism are embedded within these original hollywood fairy tales. this essay focuses on the intersecting political messages woven into hellboy ii: the golden army and the shape of water, messages amplified not obscured by their fairy tale delivery. through rich textual references, intersections, and hidden subtexts, del toro creates new gothic fairy tales, with original protagonists, emerging from the margins. by resisting previous patriarchal and racial boundaries, these films challenge their audiences to embrace new paradigms. keywords: fairy tale, gothic, masculinity, race, disability, queerness. disney’s selection of guillermo del toro for a darker, live-action adaptation of pinocchio (2021) confirms an essential element distinctive of his films. as michael atkinson notes, all del toro’s films “are fairy tales, even when they’re science fiction, horror, straight fantasy or some coyote admixture therein. his sensibility is grimmian, born of urban-mexican culture steeped in native-arts crafts, poverty, simmering civil discontent and american pop” (50). while critical attention has largely focused on del toro’s overt fairy tale pan’s labyrinth (2006), atkinson is accurate in highlighting that del toro’s hollywood films all incorporate the mythic, moral, and gothic qualities found in the brothers grimm, as the filmmaker crafts new tales that draw on the ancient. his fantastical tales are not for children yet still present vital lessons embedded in these archetypal journeys—and their audience’s memories. his free borrowings from fairy elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 5 tales and popular culture deliberately connect the familiar to his uncanny worlds, adding weight to any moral within. while these folklore tales predate gothic novels, they contain many of the same qualities. lisa hopkins notes the gothic’s “aesthetic of violent contrasts” (xii), with the polarities of youth and age, beautiful and ugly, kindness and evil, innocence and knowledge. also, as it happens in gothic fiction, the sins of the parents may be visited on their children, with key action taking place in dark, removed spaces: dungeons, attics, towers, forests, huts. while the uncanny and supernatural in the gothic is often a threatening force, in fairy tales the supernatural has the potential for good or bad—sometimes within the same source. without the curses in “beauty and the beast” or “sleeping beauty,” there would be no chance for redemption and love. del toro has offered this explanation for the fairy tale elements in his work: “they tell the truth, not organized politics, religion or economics. those things destroy the soul” (qtd. in canfield, italics mine). jennifer orme notes that some critics were uncomfortable with how pan’s labyrinth fable was entwined with the politics of the spanish civil war, wishing that del toro’s film had either focused on the war or a fairy tale. however, she argues that this confluence was central to the theme of pan’s labyrinth, as the “hybrid nature itself constitutes a form of disobedience to audience expectations of each of these genres by combining genres that are normally distinct” (220). del toro’s hollywood fairy tales may likewise promote this disobedience through hybridity—yet they are subtler, with political concerns relegated to subtexts that gives weight to his fantastical characters’ journeys. while fairy tales are at least a subtext in his hollywood films, they are foundational to two of his films: hellboy ii: the golden army (2008) and the shape of water (2017). the prologues of both films include a fairy-tale narrative structure/device. likewise, these films contain allegorical elements that critique social inequities through their fantastical characters. the contemporary politics of race, sexuality, gender, and environmentalism are embedded within these original hollywood fairy tales. these two films are further linked in complicated ways. though hellboy ii is technically a comic book adaptation and a sequel to his film hellboy (2004), its story was largely original, allowing del toro creative latitude. while the shape of water may appear to be del toro’s hollywood film the least constrained by genre, it shares enough similarities with hellboy ii that some viewers have asked if the shape of water is an unofficial sequel. however, i suggest that hellboy ii was more of a rehearsal for del toro’s the structure of the shape of water, using hypertextual construction to carry his political objectives. guillermo del toro’s films are not only expressions of his gothic sensibility and his immersion in literature and popular culture—he crafts moral tales that challenge as much as they delight his audiences. this essay will focus on the intersecting political messages woven into hellboy ii: the golden army and the shape of water, messages amplified not obscured by their fairy tale delivery. through rich textual references, intersections, and hidden subtexts, del toro creates new gothic fairy tales, with original protagonists emerging from the margins. by elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 6 resisting previous patriarchal and racial boundaries, these films challenge their audiences to embrace new paradigms. i. a devishly romantic superhero before discussing hellboy ii: the golden army, it is important to note how del toro shaped a superhero protagonist whose gothic and liminal position allowed him to bridge the fantastical and political tensions fully explored in the sequel. del toro traces his gothic sensibility to watching wuthering heights (1939) when he was a child: falling asleep and waking up, the gothic atmosphere seeped into his consciousness more than narrative (calia). as a drowsy toddler, he absorbed the powerful force of love, without its pathology or tragedy. though others may also use the term horror to describe del toro’s films, it is a label that the director resists—even when his protagonist is the spawn of satan or an amazonian creature. in his hellboy films, del toro evokes the nightmare of his characters’ exclusion as well as the humanity and beauty within his characters, no matter how frightening—exploiting the tension between awful and awesome. cristina bacchilega and john rieder describe del toro’s process of preserving the beauty within horror, strengthening the moral imperative within both: “the strategy of merging fairy tale and horror, and then making them the emotional and thematic partners of historical realism, insists upon the intellectual seriousness of these forms of popular culture that have been trivialized in the past” (35). del toro’s fairy tales resonate because of their historical grounding and connections to social issues. in the first film, del toro addresses the opening question posed by hellboy’s adoptive father professor broom: “what is it that makes a man a man? is it his origins, the way things start? or is it something else harder to describe?” this question establishes the character of hellboy at the start as a and not a monster, defined by his choices and not his unfortunate birth or name. del toro’s hellboy is more interested in cats, candy bars, and television than the underworld. though creator mike mignola collaborated on both of del toro’s hellboy films, the protagonist of these films differs significantly from his other appearances. for example, in the 2019 hellboy reboot, hellboy takes great pride in being the “world’s greatest paranormal investigator” and operates alone. del toro’s red (as his friends call him) only wants love and acceptance, with his service to the bureau for paranormal research and defense merely a diversion from his broken heart. red represented a new screen superhero, predating tony stark’s wise-cracking persona in iron man (2008), choosing love over duty long before captain america gave up his shield. even if red resists being a figure of horror fiction, he remains firmly a gothic character— like quasimodo or the phantom, he is hidden from the eyes of the world, relegated to observing. it remains ambiguous whether red lives in his underground chamber as a son, guest, or prisoner. elizabeth parker and michelle poland explain the subtle construction of the gothic as “with an understanding of fear that is more nuanced than what we see in typical or traditional horror films—those that rely on tropes and stereotypes—leading us beyond cheap elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 7 scares and into a more profound feeling of ‘insidious unease’” (8). the supporting characters of fire-starter liz sherman and the fish-man abe sapien contribute to this unease, as their powers express the untapped potential of nature. despite their good intentions, they are figures of dread for exceeding what can be contained or understood by humans. in addition to being marked physically as otherworldly, they also possess mental powers that add a psychological aspect to the gothic dread they produce. having crafted this genre-bending superhero, hellboy ii: the golden army used the opportunity of the sequel to add both a fairy tale subplot and incorporate sociopolitical themes. the prologue presents red as a young boy, watching howdy doody and awaiting santa claus—both of whom red assumes are real. for his bedtime story, his father professor broom reads the tale of the golden army, an indestructible force commissioned by the elven king balor. though originally, “men, forests and magical beings” dwelled in harmony, the destructive nature of man led king balor to allow the goblin-blacksmith to forge the golden army. however, king balor could not stomach bloodshed of this unstoppable force. ignoring the advice of his son prince nuada, he offered man a truce—de-activating the army and dividing the crown that controls them. prince nuada exiled himself, pledging to return when his people needed him the most. this fairy-tale prologue establishes the environmental concern of the film—with the forests and magical beings aligned—while echoing the united states’ breaking of treaties with indigenous people, who likewise valued the preservation of forests and wildlife. as an indication of the consequence of this original fairy tale, del toro commissioned neil gaiman, an acclaimed author known for his rich fantastical worlds, to create it. father’s reading from an old book to red was then brought to life with puppet animation. kristine kotecki notes the authority of “print fairy tales being associated with an idealized and ageold folk knowledge” (238), an authority that this scene claims. this prologue’s blend of fairytale motifs and popular culture set the style of this film, displaying “a ‘hypertextual’ aesthetic, engaging the film’s audience with a network of links to follow and metatextual commentaries to process” (kotecki 243). the omnipresent television and popular music are appropriate for red as his only link to the outside world—which may explain why it may be challenging for red to know what is real and what is make-believe. as an adult, red’s bunker has a dozen tv screens, all presenting a different mediated image of the outside world. like other gothic figures, he is doomed to watch the world go by. in fairy-tale fashion, prince nuada reemergence in present-day manhattan is due to mankind’s breaking of their treaty. humanity’s greed and disrespect has destroyed the ancient forests, relegating magical beings to abandoned railway yards and hidden tunnels. it is not coincidental that the prince first strikes at an art auction, where ancient relics are being sold to privileged people with no respect for their spiritual value: the first item on the block is an ancient fertility goddess. prince nuada enters as the auctioneer places the segment of the royal crown of bethmoora on the block, labelling it part of a “lost culture.” if prince nuada’s elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 8 only intention was to retrieve the crown segment, he could have done so with minimal violence. instead, as punishment, he slaughters everyone present, proclaiming, “proud, empty, hollow things: let me remind you why you used to fear the dark.” nuada releases “tooth fairies,” winged black forest beings who voraciously consume living calcium, leaving nothing of their victims but goo. through the geographic origin of these tiny yet terrifying fairies, del toro deliberately evokes the ambivalent qualities of grimmian tales, with violence the consequence for the auction’s objectifying of ancient cultures. complicating the battle at the heart of this film is that prince nuada’s return—and his goal to awaken the golden army—is tied to ecological conservation. keith mcdonald and roger clark compare the strong presence of ecological issues in del toro’s films to the work of his friend director james cameron (8). similar to the character of thanos in avengers: infinity wars (2018), prince nuada justifies his ambition by citing mankind’s disrespect for planet resources, natural as well as super. as established in the prologue, mankind pledged the forests to king balor in exchange for deactivating his indestructible army. with magical beings exiled from the forests, prince nuada’s people do need him, almost absolving his patricide to seize the throne. del toro’s fairy tale construction allows sentient magical beings to stand in for forests, rivers, and animals that cannot speak, representing a formidable threat, evoking the ecogothic. as addie c. booth defines, “the ecogothic indicates a method of inquiry for understanding the darker, more disturbing aspects of human relationships with nonhuman nature,” highlighting the fear, anxiety, and dread that defines those interactions (755). like the tooth fairies, the magical beings in the golden army are dark, complicated, and beautiful, demonstrating the perils of disrespecting the nonhuman natural world. prince nuada cleverly links his battle against mankind to red’s own position, as he is likewise marginalized and unappreciated. red is confined to the subterranean bureau headquarters, transported to missions in a garbage truck. instead of recognizing his work, his bureau handler actively denies his existence, denouncing any sightings as “ridiculous” on television. when liz’s blaze exterminating the tooth fairies expels him to the sidewalk, red shouts “we are out,” reveling in being freed from his closeted existence. red yearns for a relationship with people beyond the television images in his bunker, yet the public responds by calling him names and pelting him with beer cans. when his relationship with liz is also revealed, he is accused of promoting interspecies relationships, challenging traditional marriage. in addition to the film’s link to ecological concerns, red is simultaneously a queer and racialized figure, as he strives to be less threatening and assure people that he just wants to be “normal—like you, you, everyone.” prince nuada’s taunt that humanity hates him, that red has more in common with nuada and his magical people, is continually confirmed, both by red’s interactions with people and as reported on his televisions. he does not realize that he and his companions exhibit humanity that exceeds those with only human dna. these transhuman or posthuman figures present a “rejection elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 9 and a reconfiguration of the values of the traditional humanist subject” (bolter 2), with mankind as the ultimate villains whose greed is responsible for this conflict and destruction. the action of hellboy ii: the golden army places the supernatural agents of the bureau for paranormal research and defense at odds with the humanity that they have worked to protect. like the kingdom of king balor, red and his colleagues have been used and unappreciated. the ecogothic asserts its power throughout this film, moving from “unease” to threat as it fights for its survival. ii. the princess breaks the spell the golden army also introduces a second love plot that connects the fairy-tale narrative to the franchise’s main characters, as well as crafting a unique princess. complementing the next stage in red and liz’s relationship, abe sapien—discovered beneath a foundling hospital in 1865 and labelled icthyo sapien—falls in love with princess nuala, nuada’s twin sister. princess nuala opposes her brother’s ambition to awaken the golden army, hiding her piece of the controlling crown from him. abe and nuala share the challenge of being exiled from their natural element (respectively water and the forest), as well as having the ability to probe people’s minds with their touch—probes that are not always invited. though unsettling ecogothic figures that resist containment or definition, they maintain a benevolent attitude toward humanity—as well as the “human” desire to love and be loved. significantly, abe and nuala first meet in the troll market, surrounded by marginalized yet diverse and awesome figures. this hidden space emerges as a place of acceptance—red describes it to liz as a place that he will bring her to, where no one will stare. the bodies in the market are not idealized figures, representing instead a range of physical configurations, demonstrating a lack of speciesism. hidden from the eyes above, they can circulate freely. in the troll market, “normal” is not limited to human. with abe and nuala’s voiceless communication, as well as their non-binary presentation, this couple anticipates david t. mitchell and sharon l. snyder’s reading of the shape of water, with its “complex crip and queer embodiments over metaphors of voicelessness” (153)—with speech often an inadequate prosthesis for expression. adding to the queerness of this couple is that it is technically a triangle: the royal twins nuala and nuada are psychically linked, to the extent that they experience each other’s thoughts and physical sensations. nuala can only partially cloak her link with her brother—both implicating him in her relationship with abe, as well as preventing her from shielding abe from her brother. nuala and nuada exist simultaneously as two individuals, and as one person with two genders and natures— further complicating gender in this franchise. mcdonald and clark connect del toro to other transnational directors whose work all “provide counter-discourse perspectives to heteronormative, straight narratives” (6), bringing a “queer appeal” to these romances. elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 10 like red, abe must question where his loyalties belong, as he is torn between his love for prince nuala and his duty to the bureau. yet abe consistently chooses love, with a woman who is most like him. however, by sheltering princess nuala, he puts red’s life in the balance. and when abe pays prince nuada’s ransom with the crown piece, he allows the golden army to come to life. abe declines to consider mankind (that has never considered him). while abe has previously played the celibate third wheel, watching red breaking rules for liz, he now asserts himself as a romantic (and potentially sexual) being. when red formally challenges prince nuada for the crown that controls the golden army, abe impedes him: abe explains that if red kills nuada, nuala will die as well. red acquiesces, leaving himself and mankind vulnerable—for the sake of abe’s love for nuala. figure 2 nuala and abe share their grief over the death of the awesome elemental, the last of his kind. however, princess nuala instead asserts her role as the hero, declining to be anyone’s hostage or prize. as the princess, only she can truly challenge her brother’s right to the crown. by figure 1 red (lower right corner) strolls unnoticed in the diversity of the troll market. elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 11 committing suicide, she removes herself from the equation, as well as killing her brother. however, as noble as her action might be, she has left the natural and magical world without a champion—as well as robbing abe of his chance at love. princess nuala chooses her father’s pledge to humanity and fratricide, over love with her fish-man. yet though she died to preserve humanity, the final choices of the supernatural agents of the bureau for paranormal research and defense make mankind’s victory more ambivalent: following prince nuada’s example, agent krauss, abe sapien, red and liz (carrying unborn twins) choose exile together, no longer willing to serve man from the margins. in these characters’ search for a new home, away from the eyes of man, they reject social death and fear-based labels—choosing to live the life in the wilderness that frankenstein’s creature had imagined with his bride. the sacrifice of princess nuala made these choices possible, reminding the viewer that loss is often essential for a happy ending, as they build their new community. iii. del toro’s savior princess when guillermo del toro saw the creature from the black lagoon (1954) as a child, he thought it was a romance, expecting the two would end up together. with the shape of water (2017), he corrected the ending: “the ideas i wanted to put in the movie, the reversal…to make the image of the creature carrying the girl a beautiful one, as opposed to a horror image” (qtd. in erbland). not only does del toro’s amphibious creature resemble abe sapien, both characters are interpreted by actor doug jones. the shape of water is steeped in del toro’s gothic vision, revealing the marginalized and the past that infect the visible present. with the shape of water, he presents a fable of crossing racial, national, gender and species boundaries—embracing instead courage, love, and acceptance. reviewing the timeline of 1960s baltimore, it is clear that del toro strategically placed his fairy-tale romance at the intersection of the civil rights movement, an emerging gay-lesbian community, the space race (russia is ahead) and the cold war, in a city adjacent to the pentagon. in 1962, baltimore's civic interest group was actively organizing protests on maryland’s eastern shore (baltimore), which was still largely segregated. concurrently, though the city had several established gay bars, they were subject to raids and the aftershocks of joe mccarthy’s lavender scare (“lgbt”). del toro deliberately evokes these various tensions. yet like much of 1960s culture, the characters prefer the distractions of an optimistic popular culture. this historical context of civil rights protests and the cold war, deliberately repressed by the film’s main action, adds gothic undertones to the forbidden love story at the center. like his hero, del toro’s “princess” defies expectations: elisa is a foundling and mute, bearing the scars of her early abuse. yet she finds joy in her life -with her two friends, her shoes, and her daily orgasm. being abandoned has taught her to be self-sufficient for her joy. her friendships cross 1960s boundaries: zelda is black and giles is gay, yet both accept her, ably reading her sign language. working as a night cleaner in a government lab, eliza is the elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 12 first to recognize the man within the amphibian, that government workers call the asset. she actively courts the amphibian—before organizing his escape to her apartment, with the help of her friends and the soviet agent. del toro’s construction falls within stephen shapiro’s definition of speculative nostalgia, which “mixes the past with an idea about an alternative lifeworld…to build a new social formation” (121). drawing on gothic tropes, with much of the action in hidden spaces, del toro presents invisible figures that defy restrictions of maryland 1960s to celebrate an unimaginable love. 1950s monster movies such as the creature of the black lagoon, drew their horror from the repressed fears of the cold war, sexuality, and race. in his reversal from a horror film to a romance, del toro deliberately chose to set his film at the intersections of these fears, making both the subtext and the repressions more visible. the shape of water opens with a lush dream sequence of eliza’s flooded apartment and this voiceover (by giles) that sets up both its fairy tale and historical context: if i spoke about it if i did what would i tell you? i wonder. would i tell you about the time? it happened a long time ago, it seems. in the last days of a fair prince's reign. or would i tell you about the place? a small city near the coast, but far from everything else. or, i don't know... would i tell you about her? the princess without voice. or perhaps i would just warn you, about the truth of these facts. and the tale of love and loss. and the monster, who tried to destroy it all. del toro says he chose to set the film in the year 1962 to show the hidden horrors of the period he sees referenced with “make america great again”: “everything was super-great if you were white, anglo-saxon, and protestant, but if you were anything else, you were fucked” (qtd. in erbland). in line with del toro’s explanation, the “monster” strickland is a white suburban father and husband. and despite the “reign of the fair prince” kennedy, racial protests in baltimore and elsewhere were more likely to be met with violence than with progress. though baltimore is described as “small city near the coast, but far from everything else,” it is not far from the pentagon and the industrial military complex. the action of the film begins september 17, 1962, ending october 10, 1962—days before the cuban missile crisis. this social and political context is part of the fabric of this fairy tale, as actively represented by the supporting characters. eliza’s neighbor giles is an isolated, gay man in his 60s, whose alcoholism made him lose his advertising job. her best friend and co-worker zelda is a married black woman, who works with eliza in the underground government laboratory. the lead scientist dr. robert hoffstettler, dedicated to the care and understanding of the amphibian, is actually the soviet double agent dmitri. their nemesis stickland is the government agent who brought the amphibian from the amazon, yet he is also an over-compensating family man. this baltimore laboratory presents the intersection of the soviet and u.s. militaryindustrial complex—who believe their captive asset may provide an advantage in the space race—with harassment of gay men, blacks, and women an accepted part of the workplace. however, the characters of this film live in active denial of their political reality. elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 13 del toro often balances his borrowing from classic fairy tales with popular culture references, but none so much as the shape of water. kotecki explains that “hypertextuality creates resistance to the constructs assumed of ‘canonical’ literary fairy tales” (236). eliza and giles share the upstairs space of a failing, third-run movie theatre. giles exclusively watches 1930s40s musicals, escaping the social tensions that could be found in 1950s horror, spy, or social problem films—while red watches television as a window to the “real” world, giles uses tv to escape what is outside his apartment. the first clip viewed is from the little colonel (1935), featuring bill robinson’s stair dance with shirley temple. though giles notes how hard that was to dance, he glides over how robinson’s innovations were stolen by james cagney and hollywood. like red, giles finds it challenging to be accepted by real people, as he also finds comfort in television and cats. these escapist texts that del toro places on television or the movie theatre below contain images of resistance and integration—even while giles ignores those messages, preferring the comforting narratives. figure 3 giles takes refuge in televised musicals and eliza’s friendship. an example of how del toro weaves these elements together is evident in a scene that follows eliza’s first meeting the amphibian. she and her neighbor giles are sharing a “sordid” pie from a new franchise (“the latest thing!”). as he clears the plates, eliza turns the tv to the news, reporting police violently breaking up a civil rights protest; from the next room, giles shouts: “oh, god, change that awfulness. i don’t want to see that; i don’t want to see it.” instead, she switches to betty grable dancing with a costumed horse to “pretty baby of mine.” though as a closeted gay man, giles might be expected to have sympathy for others’ rights, he prefers to escape to 1940s musicals, oblivious to the coded miscegenation that dances across his living room. on the other hand, eliza embraces the joy within these musical interludes, elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 14 tap dancing on her way to work. it is this joy and curiosity that has prepared eliza to meet her prince, while her awareness of the darker side of life allows her to disregard others’ judgments. significantly as the narrator of the story, giles is the figure most trapped in his selfloathing and denial of the tensions around him. unemployed, giles is carrying on a desperate flirtation with a younger counterman (despite how unappetizing the pie he serves is). on a later visit to the counter, his crush harshly turns away a black couple from sitting at the empty counter, followed by giles meek, “you didn’t have to be so mean.” but just, a few minutes later, giles is likewise banned from the restaurant when the pie guy realizes giles’ intentions: “this is a family restaurant.” giles may quietly applaud resistant figures like alice faye—but he still supports the status quo, as he draws advertisements of happy families, despite his marginalized and quietly desperate life. yet while giles may be in denial of his social marginalization, eliza denies society’s ability to limit or define her—instead she finds freedom in the margins. del toro strategically places his lovers at a point in u.s. history that was socially and politically volatile—while many others were actively in denial of lives who existed outside of television’s america. iv. the love that cannot speak though his couple may have come from a monster image, del toro’s love story draws on classic fairy tale figures, most strikingly the little mermaid and the frog prince. in her discussion of pan’s labyrinth, kotecki notes how “an older form approximating a newer one can produce an innovative effect” (236). while del toro’s canonical models were about hybrid beings striving to become human, this tale celebrates their differences and the sea. eliza subverts her fairy tale roots by actively resisting social expectations and constraints. rather than being a sweet and innocent girl, she is a complicated woman. after the opening sequence, eliza begins the ritual for her “day” (waking at 9:00pm), boiling eggs for her lunch and then using the egg-timer to masturbate in her bath. she also has an appetite for nice footwear and prefers to wear jewel tones over pastels. while the mermaid traded her voice to the sea witch for legs, eliza’s voice was stolen by her unknown abusers. like the mermaid, she was found by the river yet raised in a catholic orphanage (her origins echo abe sapien’s). but again, eliza does not fit the mold of the sweet orphan—she has no qualms about being late to work and breaking in line to clock in. despite his swagger, she is not intimidated by strickland. eliza most subverts expectations, canonical and sociopolitical, in her recognition and pursuit of her prince. instead of being the object of her prince’s gaze, eliza is immediately curious about the amphibian. despite the dangerous potential of the amphibian (she and zelda are called in after his attack on strickland), she is not deterred. as they mop the blood-smeared lab, eliza retrieves strickland’s fingers, calmly putting them in her lunch bag. while zelda is rattled by the blood, eliza approaches the amphibian’s tank, placing her hand against the glass—he is elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 15 the one who retreats. throughout the film, eliza pursues the amphibian. she first seduces him with hard-boiled eggs, showing little fear when he rises fully from his pool and shrieks. on her next visit, she adds music to her pursuit. rather than the beast reassuring the beauty or carrying her off, eliza is the one who proves herself to the amphibian, readying herself to rescue him. one quality that united eliza and the amphibian across species is their apparent voicelessness. but their lack of traditional speech is ironic—as they may be the most comfortable in expressing their needs and who they are. mitchell and snyder describe the film’s integration of voicelessness with political and queer coding: “elisa’s surgical neck stars, the amphibian figure’s gills, and their parallel communication disabilities connect them as objects of fascination for an intrusive normative medico-militarized gaze” (153). on the other hand, eliza teaches the amphibian to “speak” through sign language. her signing in several instances gives her “a voice” not available to others. and unlike abe and nuala, their love is consummated, with the film acknowledging their desire and sexuality. notably, voicelessness is not unique to eliza and the amphibian. as mitchell and snyder note, “voicelessness is often regarded as a metaphor for political powerlessness” (151). this powerlessness obviously silences zelda and giles, but white men strickland and hoffstetler are likewise silenced by their precarious position within patriarchal order. not only do strickland and the general ignore dr. hostetler’s pleas on behalf of the scientific and individual value of the asset, but dmitri’s soviet handlers also ignore him. most ironic is the ultimate voicelessness of strickland—despite being someone who uses speech to intimidate others. he makes frequent comments against the humanity of nonwhites and non-americans (comments strangely echoed by giles early in the film). yet the amphibian and his loss reveal strickland’s tenuous position. despite his brutal nature, strickland takes pride in his service to society and his family, humbly asking general hoyt: “when is a man done proving himself, a good man, a decent man?” hoyt makes it clear that one failure is enough to exile strickland to an “alternate universe of shit.” strickland experiences metaphoric castration throughout the film (losing his fingers first to the amphibian then to rot, giles’ side-swiping his new cadillac). finally, the amphibian takes strickland’s voice and his life, after his gunshot proves impotent. evangelina kindinger notes del toro’s evoking patriarchy’s menace in crimson peak (2015): “the real horror, del toro suggests, are not the figure 4 eliza gazes at the amphibian, beginning her courtship of him. elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 16 ghost but patriarchy, because it traumatizes women and turns them into ghosts and monsters” (63). if crimson peak is about how patriarchy traumatizes women, del toro’s hellboy films and the shape of water ask how a man can survive patriarchy. while the male characters in the golden army turn their backs on patriarchal service, strickland does not survive his blind loyalty. as in the golden army, the amphibian embodies the ecogothic, with abilities and origins that create unease—an alternate masculinity with no connection to patriarchy, that evokes more questions than answers. in the amazon, he protected natives who were resisting oil drilling. while giles and zelda see the amphibian as other, eliza sees her union with the amphibian fated by their shared difference (as with abe and nuala, or liz and red). when giles calls the amphibian “a thing” and therefore not worthy of rescue, eliza challenges giles’ definition of human: what am i? i move my mouth, like him, i make no sound, like him. what does that make me? all that i am... all that i've ever been... brought me here, to him. when he looks at me, the way he looks at me, he does not see what i lack or how i am incomplete. he sees me for what i am as i am. …i can either save him or let him die. like romeo and juliet, the shape of water is a love story that serves to transform the community left behind by the persecuted lovers. through eliza and the amphibian, giles, zelda, and dmitri/ hoffstetler found their voices—before eliza’s heroic example, it would not have occurred to any of them to “break the law,” despite how poorly the law has treated them. dmitri gave his life for his chance to speak, brutalized by agents of both the soviet and u.s. governments. however, giles and zelda survive within their marginalized communities but now with a voice to speak against their oppression as well as the oppression of others. in shapiro’s terms, eliza demonstrates how “an individual’s suffering can function as more than merely an object of empathy, but can also stand as a scaffold for mutually enabling development through coalitional alliances” (132). eliza has revealed herself to be their princess; instead of the authority, strickland is the vanquished monster. in del toro’s version, the landlocked mermaid does not die and the frog prince does not become human—her love and sacrifice restore his strength, which he uses to save her life and make her amphibious. to get to the canal, giles and eliza must half-carry the amphibian—where they are overtaken by strickland, who shoots both the amphibian and eliza. however, the amphibian heals himself, confronting strickland and slashing him across the throat (mirroring eliza’s scars). it is at this point that he picks eliza up in his arms—in the black lagoon pose—jumping into the canal. as he kisses her holding her neck, she revives and breathes through her new gills. some critics and viewers have noted this transformation as proof that eliza was always more than human, making her even more the mermaid, with the amphibian the only one to recognize her true nature. in donna haraway’s terms, the shape of water is an “argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (7). the elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 17 amphibian is the prince who awakens beauty—affirming her potential to be extrahuman. neither the frog prince or the little mermaid in del toro’s version aspire to be human—they embrace their differences and each other, finding a better place to live. figure 5 the amphibian’s kiss revives and transforms eliza. as a child, del toro instinctively saw the political power in the image of the hybrid man carrying the distressed woman. by choosing 1962, del toro not only places this final image as an argument for mixed marriages (maryland only repealed its miscegenation law in 1967), but it argues for recognizing the humanity in all marginalized people, as well as the dangers of unchecked patriarchy. eliza refuses to be marginalized by her past trauma or by men like strickland, empowering everyone to resist “the monster, who tried to destroy it all.” v. conclusions del toro’s has explained the message behind the shape of water ’s happy ending: i think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. every morning …the way you end your story is important. it’s important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer. silly as it may sound, it is the fucking answer to everything” (qtd. in erbland). as simplistic as this may sound, bacchilega and rieder see this as the strength that del toro draws from fairy tales, separating “the fairy tale’s moral imperative from the condescension that so often attends the encryption of adult rules in fairy tale situations” (34). this kind of fairy-tale love is a political act at it defeats fear, scaling walls and ignoring difference. returning to orme, del toro’s hybridity is central to the defiance within his narratives, as he both engages and challenges his audience through his dizzying hypertextual combinations—mirroring the mosaic of the characters at the center of his films, who refuse “to submit to the narrative desires of others at their own expense” (219). his fairy tale structures pull his elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 18 audience to root for endings that are not superficial—their love has been proven through their arduous journeys to lift the curse. as importantly, they are not stock princes/princesses, but characters that cross “natural” boundaries, finding the greatest humanity in the transor extrahuman. del toro’s fairy tales are politically effective because their quests for true love are tied to being our best selves in a moral world—respective of definitions or boundaries. 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true gothic romance of crimson peak.” wall street journal 12 oct. 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/bl-seb-91470. accessed 15 july 2021. canfield, jared. “pan’s labyrinth is still guillermo del toro’s best movie.” screen rant 2 jan.2017. screenrant.com/pans-labyrinth-guillermo-del-toro-best-movie/ accessed 1 may 2021. erbland, kate. “the shape of water: guillermo del toro explains why his fairy tale is really about a different sort of ‘disney f–ing princess.’” indiewire 12 sept. 2017. www.indiewire.com/2017/09/the-shape-of-water-guillermo-del-toro-disney-princess-1201875416/. accessed 7 may 2021. haraway, donna. “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and social-feminism in the late twentieth century.” manifestly haraway. u of minnesota p, 2016. hopkins, lisa. screening the gothic. u of texas p, 2005. kindinger, evangelina. crimson peak, nineteenth-century female gothic, and the slasher.” necsus vol. 6, no. 2, 2017, pp. 55-71. necsus-ejms.org/the-ghost-is-just-a-metaphor-guillermo-del-toroscrimson-peak-nineteenth-century-female-gothic-and-the-slasher/. accessed 15 july 2021. elizabeth abele | guillermo del toro’s political fairy tales reden vol 3, no 1 (2021) doi: 10.37536/reden.2021.3.1408 19 kotecki, kristine. “gothic nature: an introduction.” gothic nature: new directions in ecohorror and the ecogothic: textual and sociopolitical authority in guillermo del toro’s pan’s labyrinth.” marvels & tales: journal of fairy-tale studies vol. 24, no. 2, 2010, pp. 235-54. ebscohost, search.ebscohost.com.ncc.idm.oclc.org/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hus&an= 509973286&site=ehost-live. accessed 10 april 2021. “lgbt history—stonewall, baltimore-style, 1955.” daily kos 27 oct. 2015,” www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/10/27/1441385/-lgbt-history-stonewall-baltimore-style-1955. accessed 25 aug. 2021. mcdonald, keith and roger clark. guillermo del toro: film as alchemic art. bloomsbury, 2014. mitchell, david t. and sharon l. snyder. “room for (materiality’s) maneuver: reading the oppositional in guillermo del toro’s the shape of water. journal of cinema and media studies. vol. 58, no. 4., 2019, pp. 150-56. project muse muse-jhu-edu.ncc.idm. oclc.org/article/730112. accessed 20 april 2021. orme, jennifer. “narrative desire and disobedience in pan's labyrinth" marvels & tales: journal of fairytales, vol. 24, no. 2 (2010), pp. 219-34. jstor www.jstor.org/ stable/41388953. parker, elizabeth, and michelle poland. “gothic nature: an introduction.” gothic nature: new directions in ecohorror and the ecogothic” no. 1, 2019, 1–20. gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/parker-poland_1-20_gothic-nature-1_2019.pdf. accessed 1 july 2021. shapiro, stephen. “speculative nostalgia and media of the new intersectional left: my favorite thing is monsters.” the novel as network: forms, ideas, commodities, edited by tim lanzendörfer and corinna norrick-rühl, palgrave, 2020, pp 119-36. filmography the creature from the black lagoon. directed by jack arnold, universal, 1954. crimson peak, directed and co-written by guillermo del toro, universal, 2015. hellboy. directed and written by guillermo del toro, performances by ron perlman, selma blair, doug jones, and jeffrey tambor, sony, 2004. hellboy. directed by neil marshall, lionsgate, 2019. hellboy ii: the golden army. directed and written by guillermo del toro, performances by ron perlman, selma blair, doug jones, anna walton, luke goss, and jeffrey tambor, sony, 2008. the little colonel. directed by david robinson, performances by shirley temple and bill robinson, fox, 1935. the shape of water. directed and co-written by guillermo del toro, performances by sally hawkins, doug jones, richard jenkins, michael shannon, octavia spencer, and michael stulhbarg, fox sea. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 43 of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country alejandro batista tejada universidad de sevilla abstract there has been, in recent times, a resolution to make up for the traditional lack of prominent female representation in audiovisual popular culture. hbo’s series lovecraft country (2020) constitutes one of such proposals. by focusing on a group of african american characters who must struggle with the terrifying reality of jim crow us as well as with magic and other-worldly creatures, the show constitutes a fascinating platform whence a powerful social criticism is proposed to the audience. being the series a version of matt ruff’s novel of the same name, it is my intention to analyze one of the transmedia alterations which took place in the adaptation process. the creators of lovecraft country deemed it necessary to gender-swap two of the characters from the novel, with the possibilities this change opened. the inclusion of two female characters in the series in detriment of their male counterparts in the novel is quite telling and has an underlying significance, for it points out to a strong determination to alter female representation in science fiction and the gothic. additionally, christina braithwhite and dee freeman are the only two characters to acquire a posthuman state. it is therefore this paper’s main aim to provide an examination of their characters and their process of “transhumanization” through the lens of transhumanism and posthumanism. both represent different trends of transhumanism and embody disparate stands to posthumanism, hence the necessary analysis of the latent subtexts which these two characters catalyze. keywords: transhumanism, posthumanism, lovecraft country, science fiction, african american. science fiction has been an ever-growing field and a space for reconfiguring reality. imagination is an uppermost part in the process of conceiving an alternative future and of commenting on a distant past through the lens of fantasy. popular culture has experienced a rise in this type of narratives in which authors turn to controversial pasts to examine their flaws and imagine new possibilities. this reconstruction is crucial when it comes to introducing alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 44 contemporary concerns while, at the same time, picturing a different future. afrofuturism, for instance, is an important example of this practice, for it constitutes a catalyst for an alternative envisioning of what life could be for black people away from prejudices and color lines. coined by mark dery in 1993 and fostered by cultural critics such as greg tate, tricia rose and kodwo eshun, this genre allowed authors to imagine “possible futures through a black cultural lens” (lafleur 00:01:16–00:01:19). the myriad alternatives which stemmed from this new cultural and aesthetic movement relied heavily on technoculture and speculative fiction and used these to envision black futures that stem from afro-diasporic experiences (yaszek 42). ytasha l. womack, on her part, defines afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation” (9). in her view, it is more than necessary because “it’s one thing when black people aren’t discussed in world history… but when, even in the imaginary future… people can’t fathom a person of non-euro descent a hundred years into the future, a cosmic foot has to be put down” (7). however, science fiction had already been a genre in which black voices had been heard and where explorations of connected with african american experiences had been carried out. lisa yaszek, for example, argues that ralph ellison’s novel invisible man (1952) is an early piece of science fiction inasmuch as it “predicated upon both realist and speculative modes of storytelling” (41), which is very much what the series lovecraft country strove to do. drinking from elements of the afrofuturist tradition, the case study analyzed in this paper, lovecraft country (2020), is a tv series aimed at examining a terrifying past for people of african descent during the jim crow period in the us while proposing other possibilities for this ethnic group through the alternatives which community, friendship, family, and technology afford. this series thus constitutes not only a pointing of fingers (or a “cosmic footstep”) with regards to systemic racism in the us, but also an act of picturing a different scenario for black people in this country. additionally, the series includes powerful images of gender transgressions as well as a criticism of patriarchal structures. this paper’s intention is to analyze the role of two female characters in this hbo’s series and how both acquire a posthuman state following a process of transhumanization. the fact that they are the only characters to do so is revealing, but it is even more relevant when we realize that they did not appear in matt ruff’s original novel, lovecraft country (2016). the way in which the series challenges female representation in science fiction and the dichotomy between tradition and technology is also of interest to this paper. considering the theoretical framework of transhumanism and posthumanism, this article explores how christina braithwhite (the daughter of an all-white all-men logia’s leader) and dee freeman (the protagonist of the series’ little cousin) transcend their human condition and how they do so. the fact that the series gives these roles to female characters is noteworthy, for this allows it to touch on issues of gender and feminism but also because it responds to the lack of prominent female representation in genres like the gothic or science fiction. as alexis lothian proposes, women’s roles “have been constrained by patriarchal social and familiar alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 45 structures” (70). however, since the late nineteenth century, “speculative visions of alternate futures, pasts, and elsewheres have provided individual and collective spaces in which to reimagine the workings of gender, sexuality, love, and desire in both political and personal worlds” (lothian 70), and this is what we encounter in lovecraft country. in fact, the series draws from feminist dictums such as the ones proposed by kate millett in sexual politics (1969) or germaine greer’s urgings to dismiss “the baggage of paternalistic society” and to choose “self-determination” (119). although carol margaret davison conceives american fiction as a place “where the individual is vulnerable and damningly alone, even if married and specially if female” (491) and helen merrick, on her part, states that “[science fiction] has been considered a predominantly masculine field which, through its focus on science and technology, ‘naturally’ excludes women and by implication, considerations of gender” (241), lovecraft country builds on lothian’s ideas about reconfiguring notions of gender and race. therefore, the prominent role female characters play in general, and the gender-swapping of these two characters in particular, speaks of the series’ subversion of some traditional conventions of the science fiction genre.1 i. science fiction, lovecraft country and its social implications ever since the first inclusion of science fiction in the visual arts, there has been a constant and simultaneous development in popular culture and its representation of social and political concerns. as john clute suggests, “a genre such as sf had rapidly to adjust its sights in order to apprehend the new, or its heart would die” (66). however, the essential tropes underlying this genre have mostly remained the same. in fact, lovecraft country is also filled with and influenced by prototypical science-fictional motifs (e.g., the time machine and the laboratory). another influence can be appreciated in the scientific experiments whereby the braithwhite family and the sons of adam logia obtain their power: a biotechnological magic. in the series, magic is, as it is inferred, an invisible power which permits the caucasian members of the logia to control the wealth and the political sphere of jim crow america, as well as performing magic spells. concerning its symbolism, richard gordon states that “from the very beginning, magic has been a term whose semantic implications can only be understood by close attention to context, to the values and claims that it is made to sustain” (162). in the series, magic is portrayed as a natural force only accessed and controlled by white men. magic and social 1 the most significant case is letitia lewis. throughout the novel, she is a secondary character. in the series, though, she is from the beginning an active participant. she single-handedly spelled a malignant spirit from the house she buys in a white neighborhood and she drives the car as they escape from a racist town. dee’s mother hippolyta and ruby are other examples, for their stories suffer significant changes that enable them to become the catalyst for the exploration of important topics. alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 46 dominance thus go hand in hand if we extrapolate both ideas to the history of the united states. in addition to science fiction tropes and imagery, the series repeatedly turns to h.p. lovecraft as an inspiration both for intertextuality and to draw from the author’s reprehensive views on racial superiority to build up its comment on racism in the united states. there is a powerful image in the extremely sci-fi opening of the series which explicitly addresses h.p. lovecraft and his legacy. after a sequence amidst a cosmic landscape, a fictional jackie robinson bats off a giant cthulhu-like monster, splitting its head in a million pieces. the characters smile relieved, only to find that the monster has wholly come back for them. indeed, this sequence bears an important message. the characters stand for the minority groups which will be given a central position in the series’ narrative, while the giant cthulhu is a symbol of its creator and, at the same time, of every oppressive person and institution throughout the united states. however, although a prototypical beast-like creature is shown, the true monsters in lovecraft country are white citizens and their monstrosity is enacted through what maisha l. wester terms as “a schizoid psyche” common to white people with regards to race and otherness (161). after all, as jeffrey weinstock proposes, “human beings define that which is monstruous in relation to themselves,” being the monster “the other, the inhuman, the ‘not me’” (48). therefore, while black people have been traditionally portrayed as “monstruous and unfathomable,” if not as a degeneration of the white race through miscegenation, as h.p. lovecraft imagined in his stories, science fiction has proved to have an “engagement with current political, social, and philosophical issues” (geraghty 281) and consequently such neglected groups have become central to its narratives. another reference to the author is found in the name of the region where the protagonist’s father is at the beginning. atticus refers to that region as “lovecraft country.” the village in which they were to find his father is ardham (a clear reference to arkham), in massachusetts. this location is a well-known place in the lovecraftian imagination, for it is the setting for many of the author’s stories (e.g., “herbert west: reanimator” (1921-1922) or “the dunwich horror” (1929)), thus establishing a geographical reference to the writer. in fact, “‘lovecraft country’ [is] a metaphor for rural new england (if not the entire united states)” (sanders). but not only does the series rely on lovecraftian inspiration, for the influence of other prominent science fiction authors such as philip k. dick can also be appreciated in the narrative. for instance, dick was tremendously interested “in the human consequences of any kind of future or imaginary change in social conditions” (palmer 392), and lovecraft country, as we will see, strives to explore the human struggle for and the possible outcomes of social and gender reconfigurations. the series also relies on intertextual references to artistic and intellectual productions by african american authors. there are abundant cases where a voice-over serves as a social critique. significant instances of such intertextual additions are the spoken word poem alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 47 “whitey on the moon” (1970) by gil scott-heron, james baldwin’s speeches or sonia sanchez’s poem “catch the fire” (1995). by drawing from these, lovecraft country confronts the racist history of the united states. after all, as the director of the series misha green points out in the video-documentary crafting lovecraft country: “there’s a lot of american history we aren’t taught in school. and i think that american history is an important story to tell” (vena). the protagonists continuously face problems which depict horrible events of the united states’ history, such as sun-down towns, segregation or historical tragedies such as the tulsa massacre or emmet till’s murder. therefore, as green states, “our fictional world bleeds into reality.” after all, “many of the ideas, themes, and conventions of contemporary science fiction take their roots in a distinctly american cultural experience,” and therefore reflects “america’s hopes, desires, ambitions, and fears” (link and canavan 221). pepetone, on his part, defined the early united states as “a collection of theocratic city-states consecrated to the god of adam and burdened by a strong calvinistic sense of sin and predestination” (50). drawing from these ideas, lovecraft country comments on the country’s underlying psyche “consecrated” to the god of adam (significantly, the all-white all-men secta is called “the sons of adam”). after all, this is a country that modeled its social system after those representing the same adam. the series therefore took the chance to build on these national ideological foundations to create a story focused on the african american community and on depicting prominent women in the series. ellen e. jones would say that the show’s mission is “to reclaim horror genre territory for black america and beyond.” furthermore, the show also reclaimed a space for gendered figures in science fiction. the series is therefore conceived as a catalyst to explore systemic racism using science fiction and the gothic genre. by doing so, it defied the national psyche and uncovered some national guilts which were awaiting projection (fiedler 130). after all, having been released in 2020, the series constitutes an attempt to tackle some of the most important issues of our current historical moment.2 the series touches on crucial subjects such as racism and law enforcement abuse, gender configurations and queer otherness, for, as michael j. sanders correctly states: the show does a great job of echoing these horrors back and forward into the american past and present. alongside its realism, the show’s episodes also portray terrors of american racism and sexism through the tropes of horror, fantasy, and science fiction – monsters, magic, time travel, and yes, love of comic books – to an effect that starts off lovecraftian and often ends closer to indiana jones and back to the future. (n.p.) 2 in fact, the series was released shortly after the george floyd incident and includes a subtle reference to this issue. when dee is being cursed by the law enforcement officer, she whispers at one point: “i can’t breathe,” thus establishing a clear intertextual reference to what george floyd was uttering a few moments before his murder. alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 48 lovecraft country represents a new proposal at challenging the boundaries between reality and fiction, between tradition and the most perturbing fears which still permeate our time. it also proposes new outlooks on the present and the future by giving voice and shape to contemporary preoccupations. in fact, the series does so by following one of science fiction’s conventions as it “weave[s] in and out of the distant past in order to comment on the state of contemporary american culture” (bruhm 259). in so doing, it showcases how the united states has always been a country where oppression (both to racial and gender others) is sometimes more frightening than other-worldly elements. lovecraft country thus reveals that for many african americans, reality within a racist and patriarchal system has been as horrible and gruesome as any fictional horror story. therefore, despite the show being a mixture of different genres, the gothic and science fiction permeate the whole series with multiple reality layers that speak of a horrible past and a promising future only attainable through community and sacrifice. ii. transhumanism and posthumanism as seen in two female characters before we delve into the process and significance of the characters’ posthuman condition, the concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism should be explained. mark o’connell defines transhumanism as “a social movement which aims to use technology to push out the boundaries of the human condition,” but concludes that, in short, it is “all about being immortal, really” (words to that effect 00:03:42–00:04:32). benjamin ross, in his book the philosophy of transhumanism (2020), observes that “it is possible to discern a variety of themes which continuously appear across transhumanist discourse.” (2) those themes consist of: an attitude towards humanity as constantly evolving with no fixed nature, a preoccupation with biotechnological ‘upgrades’… and a general view that impermanence, entropy, and the related suffering that they cause to humanity are technical glitches waiting to be edited out of the species. (2–3) for josé luis cordeiro, “the philosophy of extropy and transhumanism explore the boundless possibilities for future generations, while we approach a possible technological singularity” (69). similarly, joel garreau would say that transhumanism is dedicated “to the enhancement of human intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span” (xiii), which directly addresses several of the problematics posed by lovecraft country’s christina and dee. dee’s life is enhanced, and her body healed, by transhuman means (i.e., technological improvements). christina, on the contrary, strives for a dramatic extension of life span. garreau goes on to say that “transhuman is [the] description of those who are in the process of becoming posthuman.” for n. katherine hayles, “the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg,” for its “defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” (4). both christina alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 49 braithwhite and diana freeman embody different ways of achieving these physical improvements and a reconfiguration of their own subjectivities, and both provide space for a deeper analysis of gender roles and transethnic relations in literature, film, and history in the united states. for instance, we eventually witness how christina performs magic to be both man and woman. moreover, her main ambition is to achieve an immortal posthuman state through a long-lost spell, an ambition which directly affects the group of african american protagonists. therefore, the decision to include these adaptational changes in these characters is highly significant, for as jerrold e. hogle explains: “the gothic has long confronted the cultural problem of gender distinctions, including what they mean for western structures of power and how boundaries between the genders might be questioned to undermine those structures” (9). not only has the series been described as an exposure of systemic racism in the us but, by introducing christina as the seeker of immortality, it also involves a crucial alternative intention: commenting on patriarchy and on how women are normally denied equal opportunities in patriarchal spaces. after all, ever since the 1980s, small-screen science-fiction has been “a feast of innovation and transformation,” for it has “spoken about the most important issues of the day” (redmond 141). carol margaret davison argues that “while these innovations enhanced the representation of the supernatural, they also offered writers and directors daring new ways to express and explore character psychology” as well as directing these genres “toward greater social critique, becoming more nationally introspective in new, exciting, yet unsettling ways” (494). iii. transcending the text as we can see, while the traditional image of women in the small screen has tended to be one of frailty and subordination, in lovecraft country female characters are the focal point of several of the ideas developed in the series. specifically, the two characters who are analyzed here are even more relevant if we consider that in matt ruff’s novel lovecraft country these characters were male. how these characters represent different ways of achieving a posthuman state and, in dee’s case, how she does so by using a cyborg mechanism, are at the center of this discussion. christina braithwhite, from her privilege position as a white woman, strives to achieve an immortal state using biological scientific advancements based on a “natural science” which draws its powers from a so-called book of names, a tool her family has possessed from the dawn of american history to control the socio-political scheme. on the other hand, dee turns to mechanical advancements to survive a curse put on her by a law enforcement officer. both female characters go through a transhuman process and achieve a posthuman condition towards the end of the series for quite different reasons, and therefore both come to represent equidistant stances with regards to scientific and stem developments. alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 50 it is now widely acknowledged that both the role and the representation of women in fiction had to be drastically changed. ever since hamlet uttered his famous words “frailty, thy name is woman” (15), there has been a significant and constant shift in how female characters have been portrayed in literature and on screen. as hollinger puts it, “feminist theories resist the ideological self-representations of the masculinist cultural text that traditionally offers itself as the universal expression of a homogeneous ‘human nature’” (125) and, consequently, we have frequently found in science fiction that “in the narratives of this subject, women have tended to play supporting roles as the ‘others’ to men” (125). however, as dennis m. lensing points out, “throughout the 20th century… american feminist authors have frequently found utopian fiction a highly useful literary mode in which to develop their various social visions” (87). science fiction narratives are therefore interesting possibilities to explore the past and also the promising technologically-based futures with significantly different status for women. lovecraft country then can be said to use science fiction as a medium where a social (and racial) conundrum is tackled. donyae coles proposed that “afrofuturism creates stories that puts blackness in a central role and deals with the reality of what that means in the cultures and societies that it creates.” in a similar fashion, this hbo’s series provides a story which sets a group of black people with self-determined women in the spotlight, and which examines their place in jim crow society by means of exploring the multiple possibilities which science fiction allows. bearing in mind the series’ multifaceted nature in terms of social criticism and the different genres it gets inspiration from, it is no wonder that its creators wanted to provide powerful representations of women in such a supernatural and, at times, technological context (being episode 7 “i am” one of the clearest examples, with hippolyta’s time travel through multiple universes thanks to a high-tech time machine).3 the series’ aim to provide both women in general and black characters in particular with prominent roles is thus reflected in one of the decisions taken when adapting matt ruff’s novel. regarding this idea, misha green, in crafting lovecraft country, comments: yeah, we gender-swapped a lot of characters… changing horace from the book to diana. we have been really seeing a conversation about violence being done against black boys and we hadn’t quite seen the conversation happening to the extent that it was for young black girls. (vena) 3 hippolyta’s travel is highly significant as well because it is both a time travel and an initiation journey in which she realizes two things: that she had been deferring her dreams due to patriarchal constraints and that she is the only one who can give meaning to herself. that is, the only person to define herself by saying “i am.” after all, she comes back from this other-worldly trip with new wisdom and a redefined awareness of her role as a mother (that of taking care of her offspring and of passing a legacy of love and community onto their daughters). alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 51 she then goes on to touch on christina’s gender-swap: “changing caleb from the book to christina… what happens when you have a daughter? are there daughters of adam?” (in reference to the patriarchal logia “sons of adam”). in fact, there is a scene where the protagonist, atticus, discusses the changes made to the book with his father: “[the book]’s our family story. some of the details are different. christina’s a man, uncle george survives ardham. and uh, dee’s a boy” (hbo). out of the changes mentioned, two-thirds concern the female figures studied in this paper, which is telling of how the series puts women in the spotlight. christina braithwhite and dee freeman therefore stand as ideal substitutes for their male counterparts, for they catalyze relevant messages in new and important ways. for instance, the fact that christina can transform into a male version of herself is extremely transgressive, for her character thus challenges both patriarchal structures and defies gender configurations (most prominently with her relationship with leti’s sister, ruby). by magically gender-swapping, she accesses places and environments she had previously been denied by patriarchal and moral constrains imposed by society. christina is, for example, able to win ruby over, thus creating an interracial and, unwittingly for the latter, non-heteronormative relationship. christina is then the prompter of various explorations of contemporary themes, but she is in the end a perpetrator of traditionally problematic behaviors as well. such faults include the using of the black protagonists in her own interests or neglecting other people’s— and consequently other women’s—advancement in her quest for posthumanity. the inclusion of dee as a character in detriment of cousin horace also allows for interesting possibilities. in dee, we see an innocent little black girl who dreams about space and intergalactic travels. in opposition to horace, dee is both a message in herself and the catalyst for further discussion as well. she embodies violence (both physical and emotional) on innocent black young people, for she is cursed by a police officer from the logia and haunted by the country’s history as symbolized by topsy and bopsy (picaninny caricatures4 popularized in the novel uncle tom’s cabin). additionally, she is emotionally damaged in several ways, the most prominent being her friend bobo’s death. regarding the scene in which bobo’s (emmett till’s) funeral takes place, heather seelbach would correctly argue that: the decaying corpse of till stirs up trauma in dee, which represents the real, that which cannot be signified… lacan’s three registers, the real, the imaginary and the symbolic, exist in an entanglement of the iconic photo, the racist society of america, and the miasma of death and decay present in the scene. (6) in dee, as opposed to christina’s process of becoming posthuman, we find that she is eventually forced to transcend her body due to the curse imposed on her. even though the curse is 4 this is a term which has its origin as a pidgin word, although it has derogatory connotations due to its use in relation to african american people’s children and the picaninny caricatures which became famous in us advertising. see cynthia bailin’s “from picaninny to savage brute” (2014) or david pilgrim’s understanding jim crow (2015). alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 52 reverted thanks to atticus, letitia and hippolyta, dee’s decomposing body did not wholly recover, for an entire arm is left rot. however, the insight which time traveling gave hippolyta grants her the right knowledge to save her daughter. therefore, we appreciate how christina and dee are represented differs in this regard as well, for their posthumanity comes from poles-apart reasons. while christina’s is attained by using the black protagonists for her own interest, dee’s posthuman state comes from overcoming racist physical violence and from a process in which community is fundamental for her survival in such a violent environment. iv. personal transhumanism and immortality: christina braithwhite the character of christina embodies the prototypical female gothic figure in its aesthetics, but one with quite contemporary subtexts and which responds to the need to challenge traditional portrayals of female characters. the most significant scene in which christina takes part is seen in the second episode, when atticus is summoned to samuel braithwhite’s laboratory. there, we find a painting he is observing, which is entitled “genesis 2:19.” samuel asks if they know what this biblical verse is about, to which christina replies by reciting it. although quite long, the verse is worth citing as a whole because of its significance: “and out of the ground, the lord god formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air and brought them unto adam, to see what he would call them. and whatsoever adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” she recites it from memory but does so with monotony and an ironic tone. samuel braithwhite then develops his point: “… this act of naming is more than a simple picking of labels. adam is sharing in creation, assigning each creature its final form and its station in the hierarchy of nature… what does that mean christina? what did adam do?” christina then stares at the floor with contempt and atticus intervenes: “he put everything in its place.” indeed, the idea of everything being “in its place” undoubtedly refers to the established status quo that placed white men over women and any other person or creature. as samuel finally states, “at the dawn of time, everything was where and as it should be,” a remark which is telling of how he and his logia strove to go back to that state of nirvana where the hierarchy of nature was undisturbed. however, christina picks up the argumentation and mockingly adds: “then that stupid, meddlesome, troublemaking bitch eve brought entropy and death. what was an elegant hierarchy became a mess of tribes and nations. of course, it didn’t really happen that way. biblical literalism is for the simple.” christina is, right from the beginning, dissociating herself from that traditional conception of nature and of the patriarchal power system. and what is more, if we go back to a previous quote by benjamin ross, we observe that entropy is central to the transhuman discourse inasmuch as it needs to be “edited out of the species” (3). she does not conceive magic as a resource to go back to nirvana, but a tool to defeat entropy at an individual level, only transforming herself in a posthuman entity. alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 53 her attitude is thus significant with regards to her transhuman ambition of becoming immortal. she wants to use the sons of adam’s magic power but at the same time rejects the logia’s very ideological foundations. after all, adam was the mortal representation of god, and as mortal, his existence was finite, as we see in this same episode when samuel braithwhite dies while performing the immortality spell. christina’s goal, on the contrary, is to achieve what no man (no adam, that is) has ever achieved: a posthuman condition as an immortal being. just as social and gender configurations in science fiction, “species are not static entities but dynamic biological systems in constant evolution” (cordeiro 70). christina braithwhite strives to take evolution a step further by becoming posthuman. according to transhuman thinking, “the human body is a good beginning, but we can certainly improve it, upgrade it, and transcend it,” being traditional fiction-writing likewise improvable and “transcendable.” christina’s character consequently shows a twofold symbolism. she embodies this transhuman ambition of transcending our mortal condition but also symbolizes the series’ intention to transgress gender boundaries, for she uses her power both to become male whenever she needs to access male-dominated spaces and to achieve a posthuman state. in fact, according to transhumanist scholar steven lilley, there are three forms of transcendence: “cosmic, personal, and civitas” (14). the version of transcendence which would best fit the character of christina is “personal transcendence,” for it seeks “the bold application of enhancement technologies for extropy” or, as max more would call it, “open-ended lifespan” (qtd. in lilley 16). max more defends, in lilley’s words, that “transcendence is primarily a personal experience, a process of self-transformation” (16). indeed, what christina braithwhite strives for is an upgraded lifespan afforded by her access to the “enhancement technologies” which magic provides. however, the posthuman condition to which christina turns herself is flawed, for this transcendence is achieved by means of an extremely traditional method in the fictional imaginary. magic is therefore an old-fashioned form of achieving grander enterprises, as opposed to the more advanced stance which cyborg upgrading poses through the character of dee. in addition to such tragic flaw, the series implicitly channels another theme through the character of christina. the extent to which her character challenges patriarchal systems by seeking female advancement is unquestionable, but at what cost? this idea of christina’s quest for achieving a posthuman condition despite patriarchal constrains is clearly a transgressive one, but it also mirrors a problematic which resembles second-wave feminism and the criticism it aroused, as kevin wong correctly points out: “it is a common criticism that third wave feminists lob at second wave feminists—that ‘feminist’ advocacy too often refers to the rights and privileges of white women exclusively, rather than women of color” (wong). similarly, “science fictional feminist critiques have often focused intensively on gendered power relations as experienced by white, middle-class american women; other axes of oppression and difference remain marginal” (lothian 73). in a similar fashion, christina defies patriarchal institutions by showcasing that women could also achieve what the sons of adams alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 54 logia historically sought, but does so by neglecting women of color’s rights for similar advancement. therefore, both the use of old-fashioned technologies and the mistreatment of the series’ black community condemns christina to a tragic end at the hands of dee, thus deeming her efforts futile. v. civitas transhumanism and cyborg posthumanism: dee freeman in dee’s case, the transhumanism she represents is, in stephen lilley’s definition, civitas transhumanism. he argues that “because they are augmented by biotech, nanotech [or] neurotech, cyborg citizens will be more capable and energetic citizens and be able to contribute more to community and society” (17). in general terms, dee’s bionic and posthuman state is achieved by communal effort and maternal care. her civitas posthumanism consequently has a twofold nature, for it stems from her community’s resolution to save her and is used for the survival of her community as well. therefore, against christina’s individualist stance with regards to posthumanism, dee poses a more choral approach. and what is more, dee’s state is only made possible because of her mother’s help. as lillian osaki points out, “motherhood is important among african american communities because of the position that… mothers have assumed in the survival of black people, their history, and culture” (21). similarly, dee survives the curse thanks to hippolyta’s knowledge of a time travel machine which could recover the missing pages of the spell-book. in fact, when the characters are in tulsa back in the 1921, it is letitia who retrieves the original book from atticus and dee’s family’s house. specifically, it is handed to letitia by atticus’s grandmother, thus reaching a bit further in the ancestral genealogical tree of mother figures. the point here is that the first step towards her posthuman condition takes place because of her mother’s urge to recover the spell which would save her life. however, even after successfully saving dee’s life, there still is a mark on her body reminding us of the previous violence exerted on her. symbolically, instead of lamenting and tormenting over this new bodily state, hippolyta takes advantage of her technological knowledge from the future to create new possibilities for her offspring, thus representing a different approach to facing a systemic hatred against their race. alice walker, in her essay on the artistic legacy of black mothers, would say with regards to her mother: “she has handed down respect for the possibilities—and the will to grasp them” (408). likewise, dee inherits hippolyta’s resolution to turn a situation around by creating new hopes. in fact, the way in which this situation is reversed is by turning dee into a cyborg being, a posthuman condition stemming from her unintentional civitas transhumanism. groundbreaking and technologically-advanced as this is in opposition to christina’s immortal state, dee’s condition additionally bears a powerful message. as donna j. haraway defines in a cyborg manifesto (2016), “the cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. it is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. . . the cyborg defines alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 55 a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations,” to which she adds that, with the cyborg “nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (7). referring to her ideas, christina cornea explains that haraway uses the cyborg “to suggest how feminists might engage with contemporary technological society in a way that can be considered empowering” (278). this may be why, in the series, thanks to maternal love and bio-technological enhancements, dee is eventually able to rework nature and culture, but also societal and ethnic hierarchies. by drawing from the afrofuturist tradition in this sense, the series “appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (dery 180) to picture a utopian possible world. although dery proposes that afrofuturism should be “sought in unlikely places, constellated from far-flung points” (182), the series uses the household of the us to launch its afrofuturist stance against racism, white feminism and patriarchy through the character of dee. vi. conclusions resilience is not always sufficient when it comes to facing the different ordeals systemic racism entails, though. christina braithwhite is determined to attain immortality to prove that women (that is, white women) can also partake in political and social power and only collaborates with her black counterparts inasmuch as they can help in her undertaking. we therefore see that “despite her empathy for ruby, and despite her understanding and identification with being a second-class citizen, she still aspires to the power of white men, even at the cost of black bodies” (wong n.p.). the final scene when atticus’s sacrifice has been performed and christina’s posthuman state has been achieved thus culminates a fictional journey of violence, horror and science fiction in which the audience has been moved, terrified, and enlightened to similar extents. the last bit of the series has, at least, a twofold interpretation. it constitutes the ultimate mockery on lovecraft’s racist and misogynistic literature. after all, it includes one of his famous creations, the shoggoths, a white woman defeated by the race he abhorred, and a young black girl with a robot arm (a fact which is doubly ironical considering his hatred of advancement and modernization). but it is also highly relevant if we consider the final clash between the two transhumanist approaches at stake here. christina’s search for immortality stems from her personal quest for reclaiming a space for herself within the patriarchal socio-political circle whereas dee’s cyborg posthuman condition is incidentally attained as a way of overcoming physical and mental violence posed by systemic racism. it is no wonder then that, in the end, christina fails to preserve her posthumanity due to the black community’s efforts to defeat her. lovecraft country shows a world which is deeply rooted in our real world, but it is also a universe where magic and wizardry are real things that dictate the socio-political hierarchy. however, this universe is greatly science alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 56 fictional as well, for it has myriad possibilities to offer to the oppressed group fighting for survival. while magic stands for the status quo in america, community and technological advancements turn the situation around for dee and her family. the final magical explosion ends up with christina exclaiming: “you’ve bound me from magic!,” to which letitia, another powerful black female in the series replies: “not just you,” but “every white person in the world… magic is ours now.” as the title for the final episode of the series implies (‘full circle’), dee’s process of transhumanization is part of the journey this group of african americans had to take in order to revert the hierarchy imposed by white society. additionally, by bounding christina from magic and subsequently killing her, they close the circle for their community. the final sequence in which dee crushes christina’s neck with her black shoggoth companion is the cherry on the cake, for it depicts how it is the new generations who must continue the fight for their freedom. both characters embody quite different approaches to transhumanism and posthumanism, thus rendering similarly antagonistic messages. while christina’s intention is transgressive as it offers an explicit criticism of patriarchal structures, she stands for an individualistic approach to transcendence. on the other hand, dee’s posthumanism is the product of a process of healing and of overcoming violence, both physical and psychological. in general terms, the inclusion of these two female characters provided the series with some powerful possibilities, for they made possible the discussion of patriarchy, gender representation on the small screen, transhumanism and posthumanism. works cited bruhm, steven. “the contemporary gothic: why we need it.” the cambridge companion to gothic fiction, edited by jerrold e. hogle, cambridge up, 2006, pp. 259–76. clute, john. “science fiction from 1980 to the present.” the cambridge companion to science fiction, edited by edward james, cambridge up, 2003, pp. 64–78. coles, donyae. “afrofuturism is the sh*t: a brief history and five books to get you started.” afropunk, 26 oct. 2017, afropunk.com/2017/10/afrofuturism-sht-brief-history-five-books-getstarted/. accessed 12 march 2022. cordeiro, josé luis. “the boundaries of the human: from humanism to transhumanism.” the transhumanism handbook, edited by newton lee, springer nature, 2019, pp. 63–74. alejandro batista tejada | of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1762 57 davison, carol margaret. “the american dream/the american nightmare: american gothic on the small screen.” a companion to american gothic, edited by charles l. crow, john wiley & sons, ltd., 2014, pp. 488–502. dery, mark, ed. flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture. duke up, 1994. fiedler, leslie. love and death in the american novel. stein and day, 1960. garreau, joel. radical evolution: the promise and peril of enhancing our minds, our bodies—and what it means to be human. random house, 2005. geraghty, lincoln. “television since 1980.” the routledge companion to science fiction, edited by mark bould, andrew butler, adam roberts and sherryl vint, routledge, 2009, pp. 144–52. gordon, richard. “imagining 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alice. “in search of our mothers’ gardens.” within the circle: an anthology of african american literary criticism from the harlem renaissance to the present, edited by angelyn mitchell, duke up, 1994, pp. 401–09. weinstock, jeffrey a. “american monsters.” a companion to american gothic, edited by charles l. crow, john wiley & sons, 2013, 41–55. wester, maisha l. “the gothic and the politics of race.” the cambridge companion to the modern gothic, edited by jerrold hogle, cambridge up, 2014, pp. 157–73. womack, ytasha l. afrofuturism: the world of black sci-fi and fantasy culture. lawrence hill books, 2013. wong, kevin. “lovecraft country season 1 finale: easter eggs and references in episode 10, ‘full circle.’” gamespot, 19 oct. 2020, www.gamespot.com/gallery/lovecraft-country-season-1-finaleeaster-eggs-and-references-in-episode-10-full-circle/2900-3605/. accessed 4 may 2021. yaszek, lisa. “afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future.” socialism and democracy, vol. 20, no. 3, 2006, pp. 41–60. ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s transcultural and transnational views about history and literature in rosinante to the road again reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 eulalia piñero gil universidad autónoma de madrid 94 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s transcultural and transnational views about history and literature in rosinante to the road again eulalia piñero gil universidad autónoma de madrid t ab st ra ct eulalia piñero gil is an associate professor in american literature and gender studies at the universidad autónoma of madrid. she has published extensively on american modernism, comparative literature, women’s literature, gender studies, music and literature, and nineteenth-century american literature. in 2018, she published the first translation and critical edition of john dos passos’s a pushcart at the curb. invierno en castilla y otros poemas (editorial renacimiento). currently, she is the president of the spanish association for american studies (saas). piñero gil, eulalia. “‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passo’s transcultural and transnational views about history and literature in rosinante to the road again”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 93-114. recibido: 29 de noviembre de 2019; 2ª versión: 01 de julio de 2020. his interdisciplinary essay analyzes john dos passos’s travel book rosinante to the road again (1922) from a jamesonian perspective, focusing on the implicit dialectical interaction between creativity and the totality of history, the role of the modernist utopian illusion and the quest for return to an edenic past, the cosmopolitan expatriate individual as a fundamental part of a historical context, and the implications of the literary form in relation to a concrete textual tradition or movement. for this purpose, the analysis draws on jameson’s the modernist papers and the political unconscious to establish a dialectical criticism that investigates how the literary form is engaged with a material historical situation. therefore, the spanish socio-historical reality depicted in rosinante becomes a symbol of dos passos’s search for the return to the mythic arcadia. in his transcultural and transnational quest for the spanish gesture, dos passos was searching how to define his own unstable hybrid modernist identity in the context of spanish history and literature. as a result, rosinante becomes a sort of paradigmatic modernist epic in which the american writer experiments with the literary motif of the journey as a form of self-exploration. his temporary expatriate condition, and the reality of being an american with portuguese 95 1. travelling across cultures: dos passos’s utopian illusion and the epic narratives in rosinante to the road again in the modernist papers (2007), fredric jameson refers to john dos passos’s modernist approach toward the fictional space as a “discontinuous literary cross-cutting.” (167) the american cultural critic and theorist alludes to the author’s transversal and dialectical relationship between creativity and the totality of history. in fact, dos passos showed a utopian commitment with ideological radicalism in his literary aesthetics, and in his historical and political views of america and europe. in this regard, jun lee draws attention to the fact that “as a modernist he tried to connect his aesthetic creativity to the totality of history in a dialectical way, since the perspective of totality is the core of his political radicalism as well as his art.” (18) in his quest for the totality of history, dos passos needed to internationalize his experience and creativity to connect them to the historical context like some modernists who expressed in their artistic creations a deep sense of loss and despair for their society. this was the case of the expatriate members of the lost generation, namely t.s. eliot, gertrude stein, scott fitzgerald, ernest hemingway, and ezra pound. they sought to internationalize their literature and lived in european urban centers such as london and paris to show their disillusion and despair with the materialist ideas of human progress and the invisible role and place of the artist in contemporary life. in my view, distance became a metaphor of their alienation and the urge to convey a de-centered perspective was a crucial aspect of their modernist poetics. therefore, crossing cultural and ideological frontiers was at the core of their artistic experience. even though dos passos was never considered an “exile because he was born uprooted to any plot of ground,” and he embarked “on a search for congenial soil and climate for new ground on which to stand or in which to grow” (wrenn 19), i think that he shared most of the expatriates’ experiences and visions of life and art, and became “an archetypal artist of the lost generation.” (lee 98) his journey of discovery to spain in 1916 inspired the travel book rosinante to the road again (1922), which is a series of narrative chapters and essays on his experiences in the villages and cities, and an insightful literary analysis of spanish poets such as jorge manrique, joan maragall, juan ramón jiménez and antonio machado. in rosinante, dos passos put madrid and other spanish cities on the map of the global scope of modernism in his quest for the modernist cosmopolitan subject and initiated, at the same time, a very fruitful transatlantic dialogue between american and spanish literatures. for this purpose, he wrote an innovative modernist epic, in which his fictional reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 roots, determined his need for a more edenic and epic culture far from the limitations of the american urban industrialization and materialism. key words: john dos passos; rosinante to the road again; fredric jameson; spain; spanish history and literature; modernism. heroes, telemachus, lyaeus, don quixote and sancho panza, are searching for the transcendental and abstract totality of life. this holistic approach can be found in many of the colorful sections of the travel book which shows dos passos’s experimentation and intense interaction with prose, poetry, and painterly descriptive techniques. such experimentation illustrates the author’s relevant involvement with modernist poetics in his ground-breaking and “discontinuous literary crosscutting.” in this sense, ezra pound’s famous avant-garde exhortation “make it new” is clearly reflected in the rhetorical techniques employed in rosinante, as it is an experimental travel book that departs from the classical linear descriptions of this kind of texts, introduces the fictionalization of the protagonists, and uses a discontinuous and fragmentary narrative structure. thus, dos passos’s fictional alter ego, telemachus, becomes a “wanderer in search of a father” (pizer 144) and an epic hero who undergoes an initiation journey of transformation and spiritual awakening in the spanish society. for this reason, the author structures his interpretation of contemporary spain on the parallel mythic pairs of telemachus and lyaeus1, and of don quixote and sancho panza: “telemachus and quixote constitute the life of the intellect and spirit, lyaeus and panza that of the body and the senses.” (pizer 142) in this way, the classical spanish culture offered the american writer the opportunity to explore in depth the significance of don quixote of la mancha’s protagonists in order to revaluate the complex meanings of the wandering hero from la mancha and his squire, an aspect that was characteristic of high modernist poetics. most of the critical analyses on rosinante have explored it from different perspectives and theoretical stances: the great impact of spain in dos passos’s work (zardoya; montes; marín madrazo; ludington), the influences and traces of cervantes’s don quixote in this early work (marín ruíz; villar lecumberri), the representation of the modernist expatriate imagination (pizer), and the importance of the text as a testing ground for later aesthetic experiments (juncker). however, this interdisciplinary essay represents a shift in focus on dos passos’s rosinante in the sense that it is my intention to analyze it from a jamesonian perspective, exploring the implicit dialectical interaction between creativity and the totality of history, the role of the modernist utopian illusion and the quest for return to an edenic past, the cosmopolitan expatriate individual as a fundamental part of a historical context and, finally, the implications of the literary form in relation to a concrete textual tradition or movement. 96 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil 1 lyaeus is an epithet of dionysus/bacchus which were greek and roman mythological variations of the same god. lyaeus is traditionally considered the lord of exuberance, fertility and drunkenness. besides, he freed people from care and anxiety. in rosinante, dos passos put madrid and other spanish cities on the map of the global scope of modernism in his quest for the modernist cosmopolitan subject and initiated, at the same time, a very fruitful transatlantic dialogue between american and spanish literatures. 97 the classical spanish culture offered the american writer the opportunity to explore in depth the significance of don quixote of la mancha’s protagonists in order to revaluate the complex meanings of the wandering hero from la mancha and his squire, an aspect that was characteristic of high modernist poetics. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 in jameson’s the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (1981), dialectical criticism is the main methodological framework that the critic develops within his complex and influential theories. this critical approach is based on the idea that literary works are always part of a larger structure or a concrete historical situation. then, in a duality based on the external and the internal conformation of a text, a dialectical criticism will seek “to unmask the inner form of a genre or body of texts and will work from the surface of a work inward to the level where literary form is deeply related to the concrete.” (selden 114) as for the role of the literary text and the artistic artifact in modern societies, jameson demonstrates that it is inextricably bound up with a larger whole, and part of a historical situation. therefore, from a jamesonian perspective narratives always respond to history and are ideologically conditioned and utopian, and in most cases project an ideal future. in general, as for the role of the work of art in society, jameson suggests: in this way, the jamesonian critical background will enable me to establish a dialectical criticism that investigates how the experimental fragmentary form of rosinante is also deeply engaged with a specific historical situation and how dos passos poses his aesthetic, political, and literary ideas from a comparative perspective in a fruitful translinguistic and transcultural literary dialogue between the united states and spain. likewise, the spanish idealized vision depicted in rosinante becomes a symbol of dos passos’s quest for the return to the mythic arcadia and a “counter image to a world destroyed by its devotion to the false gods of modernity” (pizer 141) previously depicted in three soldiers (1921); but it also provides a compensation for the loss of his homeland, a quest for transformation, and the eradication of the money-making culture which he clearly rejected. in this light, jameson emphasized the role of purification that most modernist fiction had in an attempt to separate literature from the dissatisfaction and disillusionment of the existing capitalist order, so that it could embody “the great utopian idea of a purification of language, a recreation of its deeper communal or collective function, a purging of everything instrumental or commercial in it.” (the modernist papers 8) similarly, it is my contention that rosinante represents the jamesonian quest for purification, and it might be explored as the symbol of dos passos’s utopian illusion about an ideal future, in contrast to the despair and disillusion that he represented in all of his major novels. as a result, the spain depicted in rosinante symbolized for the writer the original fullness and “the true gods of the past still potent.” (pizer 141) nevertheless, as the writer evolved in his literary career, a deep change was depicted in his fiction, a clear image “of the disintegration of america, symbolized by his concept, the two nations in a dialectical tension with his utopian vision of one community where people live together in harmony and are allowed to have their own opportunities of self-realization.” (lee 197) 98 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil it is clear that the work of art cannot itself be asked to change the world or to transform itself into political praxis; on the other hand, it would be desirable to develop a keener sense of the complexity and ambiguity of that process loosely termed reflection or expression. to think dialectically about such a process means to invent a thought which goes “beyond good and evil” not by abolishing these qualifications or judgments but by understanding their interrelationship. (223) as it has been previously observed, rosinante can be studied from the political and literary perspectives as an example of dos passos’s early experimentation that embodies the spirit of american radicalism and the aesthetic techniques of modernism. therefore, it should be explored as the symbol of the writer’s idealized vision of literature in a concrete textual tradition and as the paradigm of his early expectations about a more harmonic future for america which was unavoidably connected to the exploration of other countries and cultures. for this purpose, he makes inter-textual allusions to the classical epic narratives, the odyssey and don quixote, from a modernist perspective. related to this, it is important to highlight that “epic narratives focus on a crisis in the history of a race or culture,” (peck and coyle 31) and they are always concerned with crossing cultural frontiers. thus, for the writer the crisis in which american civilization was immersed had to be explored by crossing literary frontiers, incorporating the deeds of epic warriors and heroes from other cultural contexts. this is how other modernist writers—t. s. eliot, gertrude stein, and ezra pound chief among them—approached the epic conventions in their literature. in other words, their modernist creativity was based on the crossing of cultural and ideological frontiers. then, for dos passos the epic journey becomes a cross-cultural experience to learn a lesson, change, and later return home after he had achieved self-knowledge, transformation, and the exploration of new cultures and ways of life. in fact, he was restless for travel all his life and believed in travelling as a personal experience of discovery and learning, but his deep sense of social uprooting and displacement had also a significant role in his urgent need for having the perspective of another land.2 moreover, he appreciated solitude, independence, and the personal enrichment he found in the exploration of diverse cultures and in the opportunity of looking at his own with a certain critical distance and without prejudices or attachments. as a result, his journeys in many different countries all over the world became for the writer transcendental processes of personal metamorphosis which provided a great opportunity for exploring his adventurous spirit and never-ending curiosity. as donald pizer has cleverly noted, “he sought in his depiction of a foreign culture to explore in striking new forms the meaning of his own.” (137) 99 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 it is my contention that rosinante represents the jamesonian quest for purification, and it might be explored as the symbol of dos passos’s utopian illusion about an ideal future, in contrast to the despair and disillusion that he represented in all of his major novels. 2 there might be also other significant biographical reasons for his need to travel. dos passos grew up in european exile as his father was married back in the united states to mary dyckman hays who was not his mother. as his biographer townsend ludington has observed, “his first lonely years seemed like a hotel childhood… he felt like a double foreigner… a man without a country” (a sort of family feeling 121). 100 2. dos passos’s epic journey in spain and cervantes’s don quixote of la mancha dos passos discovered spain in 1916 when he still was a young man full of illusions and expectations about the old world. his journey to southern europe also included his painful experience in france as a volunteer ambulance driver during the first world war. the writer’s antiwar views and emotional crisis emerged rapidly in the form of writing and he fictionalized his disappointment in three soldiers and in many of the poems of a pushcart at the curb (1922), where his lyrical voice emerges openly with a desperate tone to save the world from the deceptions of the great warlords. in the novel, the reader has the opportunity of facing the emotional effects of the european conflict which were devastating for the majority of modernist writers. thus, these authors concluded that it was the epitome of the human atrocities, the hideous ugliness and the confirmation that history was coming to an end; as a consequence, modern life was confusing, terrible, and futile. his anti-war novel shows a deep sense of loss, despair, disaffection, and a direct questioning of materialism and the evils of industrialism in american society from its very roots. moreover, during that period of his life, the american writer suffered a personal crisis which appeared in part from his freudian response to his father’s values, and the deep sense of displacement he felt from the vital uncertainties of his childhood and early adolescence. as a result, his disappointment with the contradictions of the american economic system, the sense of social uprooting, and the war experience unchained his need to search for an alternative vital experience. in this manner, his discovery of spain became a sort of positive personal catharsis (piñero gil 2015) in a crucial period. even though his first stay was less than four months, “he had learned a great deal, not only about spain but also about himself,” as ludington has noted (316). similarly, the spanish experience played a central role in dos passos’s development of his cosmopolitanism as a writer and “it was the most important factor among many in shaping dos passos’s ideas and forming the way he saw the world.” (ludington 313) hence, for the writer the iberian peninsula was an arcadian or idyllic society compared to the industrialized european and american countries. likewise, during his visits to portugal, he was also able to appreciate his own ancestry and was eager to compare and contrast its culture and traditions that he described as “having a certain mildness, a lack of the racial and ideological fanaticism that has brought our civilization to the verge of destruction... the more i study it the prouder i am of my portuguese inheritance.” (ludington 133) nevertheless, historian daniel aaron has observed that spanish social and cultural idiosyncrasies had a greater impact in dos passos’s imagination: ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil dos passos’s ancestral roots in portugal were next door to spain, whose greatest literary works, such as don quijote, had a tremendous effect on him, as did the nation itself, with its proud history; its varied, striking landscape; and its national traits of an almost anarchistic individualism and a notable, if not always successful, defiance of oppressive authority. (ludington 314) 101 for dos passos the epic journey becomes a crosscultural experience to learn a lesson, change, and later return home after he had achieved self-knowledge, transformation, and the exploration of new cultures and ways of life. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 for the writer the iberian peninsula was an arcadian or idyllic society compared to the industrialized european and american countries. 102 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil i certainly agree with aaron’s view because in rosinante, dos passos not only tested his beliefs about the kind of individualism he was looking for in america, but it was also a radical way of approaching life and politics which was far beyond the limits of capitalist society. the epic journey he initiated in spain became a sort of quest for the promised land in which he discovered a colorful society full of positive aspects in a colorless world; thus the travel book is deeply engaged with a concrete social reality. with regard to dos passos’s decision to articulate his spanish experience with cervantes’s don quixote in mind, it seems that the novel was for dos passos the perfect representation of the literary archetype of the dreamer and the motif of the epic journey that crosses cultural frontiers. in fact, he was fascinated with the novel and had read it more than nine times, the last time in spanish. besides, he also intended to study it in depth because he believed that, among many other things, it represented the palimpsestic spanish history and that significant aspect could help him in establishing the connections between both cultures. in this sense, it is important to draw attention to the fact that dos passos belongs to a remarkable tradition of american writers who have established an inter-textual dialogue between their fiction and don quixote of la mancha from the american renaissance to postmodern literature: washington irving, william dean howells, mark twain, herman melville, eudora welty, william faulkner, john steinbeck, jack kerouac and paul auster, among others. 3 in order to explore the connotations and intertextual implications of the novel in dos passos’s travel book, it is pertinent to analyze the title of the book, as a paradigm of the writer’s quixotic vision of his epic journey in spain. to begin with, rosinante is don quixote’s old nag, his faithful companion and doppelgänger. in fact, the old hidalgo considers it of foremost importance to find a proper name for his steed before his first adventure: according to howard mancing, “rocinante becomes one of the most important and most comic figures of the novel” (618). therefore, we might conclude that dos passos chose the name of rosinante for his travel book as a literary homage to one of the most significant western epic novels and more specifically to the protagonist horse who symbolizes the union between the heroic knight and his steed, his master’s virtues and the idea of coming back to the road to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked. for instance, telemachus discovers a horse on his way to toledo and immediately shows his affection and recognition of the heroic animal protagonist: 103 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 four days were spent in thinking what name to give him, because (as he said to himself) it was not right that a horse belonging to a knight so famous, and one with such merits of his own, should be without some distinctive name, and he strove to adapt it so as to indicate what he had been before belonging to a knight-errant, and what he then was. (chapter i) 3 these authors reveal their debt to miguel de cervantes’s novel in the genesis of their fiction or in their metafictional essays in the following works: washington irving’s “the legend of sleepy hollow” and the tales of the alhambra; mark twain’s a connecticut yankee, the adventures of huckleberry finn and the adventures of tom sawyer; william dean howells’s “the spanish student” and criticism and fiction; herman melville’s moby-dick; eudora welty’s the golden apples and losing battles; william faulkner’s light in august, go down, moses and the sound and the fury; john steinbeck’s the wizard of maine, travels with charley, and the prologue to east of eden; jack kerouac’s on the road and paul auster’s city of glass. likewise, dos passos’s alter-ego shows his attraction to don quixote because the wanderer hero embarks on an idealist journey of self-discovery and embodies an indestructible chimera which is grounded in a quest for a new utopian dream of human regeneration: “gentleman, it is a little ridiculous to say so, but we have set out once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed.” (37) it is well-known that dos passos showed a striking nostalgia for a golden age during his youth that was based on a primordial social harmony in which people could survive without the constraints of the materialist society. in other words, he struggled between the old and the new and the loss of innocence in his early literature in what could be described as a quixotic attitude. in this sense, he also identified the fictional character’s idealism with what he defines as one of the most extraordinary virtues of the spanish people: “the spaniard, like his own don quixote, mounted the warhorse of his idealism and set out to free the oppressed, alone.” (45) as a result, his journey into the heart of the spanish landscape, culture, and its peoples was embedded in a utopian illusion that foregrounded the interaction between creativity, history, and the role of purification of literature. with this ideological background, the impact of dos passos’s spanish experience was so deep that he had to share his discovery with dudley poore, one of his many american college friends, when he was about to return to madrid: “i am mad about spain—the wonderful mellowness of life, the dignity, the layered ages.” (qtd. in ludington 110) 3. rosinante to the road again as a historical narrative as i have argued before, dos passos’s rosinante can be considered a historical narrative from a jamesonian perspective in the sense that the writer establishes a dialectical representation of history in an international context. in order to achieve this interaction, he analyzed the complex layers of spanish history and the social influence of the different civilizations and concluded that this fact was a fundamental feature in the construction of a solid society. in other words, the palimpsestic history was an alternative to the capitalist dissolution of history. in one of the many conversations he has in rosinante about the multicultural heritage of spanish culture, one of his friends observes: 104 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil telemachus got up on his numbed feet and stretched his legs. “ouf,” he said, “i’m tired.” then he walked over to the grey horse that stood with hanging head and drooping knees hitched to one of the acacias. “i wonder what his name is.” he stroked the horse’s scrawny face. “is it rosinante?” the horse twitched his ears, straightened his back and legs and pulled back black lips to show yellow teeth. “of course it’s rosinante!” the horse’s sides heaved. he threw back his head and whinnied shrilly, exultantly. (38) dos passos analyzed the complex layers of spanish history and the social influence of the different civilizations and concluded that this fact was a fundamental feature in the construction of a solid society. 105 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 related to the historical context, rosinante is dos passos’s first publication of european reportage that clearly had ideological implications about his cosmopolitan identity as an american modernist writer and intellectual. but paradoxically this personal analysis had to be achieved abroad during those years in which he was on the road and immersed in a deep cultural exploration in the lands of castile, la mancha, madrid, andalusia, toledo, and the mediterranean coast. the exotic spain was for the writer the perfect place for this transformation, a kind of peaceful refuge in which he could reflect on his own country from a distance with the necessary detachment to be really critical about his complex american identity. similarly, it was the social milieu where he found the raw materials from which he crafted his experimental fiction. in this sketchy narrative he is seeking understanding of himself through self-exile. moreover, it is an intriguing self-exploration journey through which he discovers a positive value system in spanish culture that contrasts with “the materialism and moral narrowness of american life.” (pizer 149) from a rhetorical perspective, rosinante consists of seventeen essays and narrative segments dos passos wrote in a fragmentary form with the recurrent leitmotif of the journey as a quest of discovery. for pizer the text “is a significant expression of what can be called the modernistic expatriate imagination.” (137) the travel book opens in madrid, which was one of dos passos’s favorite cities, with a vivid reference to one of plaza santa ana’s cafés: “he sat on a yellow plush bench in the café el oro del rhin, plaza santa ana, madrid, swabbing up with a bit of bread the last smudges of brown sauce off a plate of which the edges were piled with the dismembered skeleton of a pigeon.” (1) each of the seventeen sections of this fragmented travel book is a detailed impressionistic word painting of spanish society, culture, ideology, art, history and literature. in my view, dos passos’s fragmented style is related to the complexity of spanish culture and society as well as his desire to represent the valuable information he gathered during his intense journeys. one of his most distinctive rhetorical strategies was the direct interaction with ordinary people he met on the road, and in the villages and cities. in fact, the book has five sections titled “talk by the road” in which the author uses an interactive dialogical structure with a polyphonic interplay of various characters’ voices which contributes to a fruitful exchange of ideas. those conversations were essential materials which showed his interest in how spaniards lived in a particular historical moment as political subjects and how they expressed themselves about it. as a result, even though he had a very idealized image of spanish social reality, he was also interested in investigating the spaniards’ response to the political situation as part of a larger structure or of a historical situation. in section two of rosinante telemachus has a long dialogue with a donkey boy about the significance of productive work in spain: “not on your life, in america they don’t do anything except work and rest so to get ready to work again. that’s no life for a man. people don’t enjoy themselves there.” (11) throughout the conversation, dos passos cleverly contrasts two radically different lifestyles and how the individual’s vision and experience is really significant for his own ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil 106 spain, he said, is the most civilized country in europe. the growth of our civilization has never been interrupted by outside influence. the phoenicians, the romans-spain’s influence on rome was, i imagine, fully as great as rome’s on spain; i think of the five spanish emperors;-the goths, the moors; all incidents, absorbed by the changeless iberian spirit. (31) on this coast, señor inglés, we don’t work much, we are dirty and uninstructed, but by god we live. why the poor people of the towns, do you know what they do in summer? they hire a fig-tree and go and live under it with their dogs and their cats and their babies, and they eat figs as they ripen and drink the cold water from the mountains, and man-alive they are happy. they fear no one and they are dependent on no one; when they are old they tell stories and bring up their children. you have travelled much; i have travelled little, madrid, never further, but i swear to you that nowhere in the world are the women lovelier or is the land richer or the cookery more perfect than in this vega of almuñécar…if only the wine weren’t quite so heavy. (16) 107 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 study. once more, the writer gives voice to a peasant who has a very clear vision of life even though he is young and innocent; his testimony is very helpful as he is able to articulate the importance of his independence and the real value of time in a hedonistic life: in the same way, dos passos foregrounds the conflict between andalusian peasants and landowners, showing a distinctive capacity to analyze in depth the injustice, poverty, and economic slavery those workers suffered in cordova. the writer became familiar with the political turmoil of the city, the strikes of farm-laborers and the fact that the region had been under martial law for months: “we talked about the past and future of cordova;” (53) “many of the peasants had never dared vote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the caciques, the bosses that control spanish local politics.” (56) in his permanent need to denounce social injustices and protect human dignity, the writer also criticized the evils of industrialism and the enslaving effects the system had for the american working classes: 4. “the eye of a painter and the ear of a poet”: rosinante to the road again as a transcultural travel narrative from a rhetorical perspective rosinante, like the poetry collection a pushcart at the curb, shows an impressive emphasis on visual imagery. according to john dos passos coggin, the writer “always had the eye of a painter and the ear of a poet.” (8) in particular, the author was aware of the importance of verbally representing the perceptual information in the absence of visual input. in other words, it seems as if dos passos really had a deep need to paint the spanish picturesque images he was describing visually throughout the different sections of rosinante. in fact, he also left a visual testimony of his sensorial perception of the spanish landscapes in the form of a series of colorful watercolors and canvases as he was also an accomplished painter who created over four hundred artworks during his lifetime. in addition, dos passos absorbed from the avantgarde painters of his time elements of impressionism, expressionism and cubism. the extreme under industrialism the major part of human kind runs in a vicious circle. three-fourths of the world are bound in economic slavery that the other fourth may in turn be enslaved by the tentacular inessentials of civilization, for the production of which the lower classes have ground out their lives. half the occupations of men today are utterly demoralizing to body and soul, and to what end? (lee 98) 108 modernity of his early watercolors from the countryside of spain shows how he opted to combine elements from different styles and textures. there are many relevant examples of his sensorial way of depicting the landscapes, as when he visited the mediterranean island of mallorca: in rosinante, telemachus, the wandering character, becomes a sensorial observer who merges with the landscape and its people. in this process, he learns through the sensorial perception to encompass the enormous variety of sensory experiences he found in spain. thus, the nomadic character is always accompanied by lyaeus, who is a faithful counterpoint, a ficelle, that inevitably reminds the reader of the special relationship don quixote and sancho panza develop through their long and adventurous journey. the mythical couple represents for dos passos the duality of the spanish character: • telemachus ----------don quixote. • these characters symbolize the intellectual life, a never-ending quest for adventure, and the need to embark on learning adventures. • “don quijote, the individualist who believed in the power of man’s soul over all things, whose desire included the whole world in himself.” (24) • lyaeus -------------sancho panza, the ficelle, a character who is a confidante and provides the reader with significant information about the main protagonist. • these characters represent the body, the senses, and a hedonistic approach to life. • “sancho, the individualist to whom all the world was food for his belly.” (24) dos passos was also intrigued by the word “lo flamenco” which was, in some way, related to the spanish folkloric world and the sensorial experience. in a long conversation with his friend don diego, the narrator insists on the meaning and cultural implications of the expression: “in spain, we live from the belly and loins, or else from the head and heart: between don quixote the mystic and sancho panza the sensualist there is no middle ground. the lowest panza is lo flamenco.” (17) the response emphasizes the idea of an affective and artistic culture with strong social bonds that rely on the communal experience of music and dancing. one of the most striking aspects of the mythical couple’s journey is that it becomes a personal fictional narrative of dos passos’s complex relationship with the powerful and successful image of his father john randolph dos passos. in rosinante, the american writer explores his childhood and adolescence as an immigrant, as a fatherless child who dreams about finding the roots of his origins: “telemachus had wandered so far in search of his father he had quite forgotten what he was looking for.” (1) his successful father embodied the values of the american dream: material progress, social regeneration, and social mobility. however, dos passos soon detected ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil we sat looking at the sea that was violet where the sails of the homecoming fishing boats were the wan yellow of primroses. behind us the hills were sharp pyrites blue. from a window in the adobe hut at one side of us came a smell of sizzling olive oil and tomatoes and peppers and the muffled sound of eggs being beaten. we were footsore, hungry, and we talked about women and love. (91) 109 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the historical tensions of the american dream and its deep historical contradictions. therefore, in spain and from a distance, he was able to see the disturbing proximity of dream and nightmare and the effects of the loss of innocence in american society. as an expatriate in spain he discovered “what he was prepared to find in an older and mainly unindustrialized culture, just as a few years afterwards many american artists would find in paris the freedom they believed lacking in america,” as pizer has observed (139). moreover, in spain, he found his real self: “i am very happy…walking about here in these empty zigzag streets i have suddenly felt familiar with it all, as if it were a part of me, as if i had soaked up some essence out of it.” (130) similarly, he became the adamic hero par excellance, separated from his culture in search of a reality more substantial than that embraced by the materialistic society he had rejected. and as it has been mentioned before, don quixote, the knight of the sorrowful countenance, “blunderingly trying to remould the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal” (33) was one of dos passos’s favorite characters (schwartz 188) and he incorporates this powerful mythical character in the travel book to create a modernist epic narrative based on his edenic dreams and powerful experiences in spain. thus, the writer “made a significant contribution to the modernist revival of the epic as well as a desire for organic totality” (lee 17) with the inclusion of one of the most influential novels in the western canon. in this light, dos passos also followed the poundian concept that considered the aesthetic to include a social purpose, something that is clearly reflected in the rhetorical techniques employed in rosinante, as it is an experimental travel narrative that departs from the classical linear descriptions of this kind of texts and introduces the fictionalization of the protagonists. therefore, dos passos’s fictional alter ego telemachus, the son of odysseus and penelope, an observer, merges with the landscape and establishes a dialectical criticism between the edenic spain and the excesses of american society from a distance. likewise, the old spanish culture offered the american writer the opportunity to explore in depth the myth of don quixote and sancho panza in order to re-evaluate the meanings of the wandering hero from la mancha and his squire, an aspect that was distinctive of high modernist poetics. therefore, the odyssey and don quixote serve as a literary map for dos passos. his reading of these classical epic narratives is that “of the map of a whole complete and equally closed region of the globe, as though somehow the very episodes themselves merged back into space, and the reading of them came to be indistinguishable from map-reading.” (jameson, the modernist papers 167) dos passos really had a deep need to paint the spanish picturesque images he was describing visually throughout the different sections of rosinante. 110 5. dos passos’s quest for the “spanish gesture” and his cultural immersion in spain dos passos found in the spanish society of the 1910s and 1920s “the full life of spirit in which the natural, the honest, and the good still existed” in the civilized world (pizer 149). but he also discovered in his idealized image of spain “a space that resisted capitalism, homogeneity, centralized nationality, and the devastation of modern war, all of which he saw as ingrained in american culture.” (rogers 77) for that reason, the fictional narrator’s quest focused on what he described as the “spanish gesture” embodied by two mythical individuals: the flamenco dancer pastora imperio and the baker of almorox in toledo. that village of la mancha becomes a metaphor, a sort of arcadia, and a vehicle for the expression of his essential beliefs: “men lived in harmony with nature, fulfilled in body and soul,” (pizer 140) and the fact that generations of individuals had had the opportunity to develop their own idiosyncrasies based on the anarchistic spirit which traditionally characterized spaniards: “spain is the classic home of the anarchist.” (45) the writer was filled with admiration for this distinctive aspect of the iberian personality but he was also faithful to the individual in a thoreauvian way. in other words, he believed deeply in the transcendentalist writer’s ideas on self-sufficiency, integrity, peaceful civil resistance against an unjust government, as shown in his open defense of the individual’s right to dissent. a similar point may be made about dos passos’s interest in the spanish historical background, “roots striking into the infinite past,” and the connection he established between the palimpsestic history and the positive effects the layers of different civilizations had in that society. in other words, the writer believed that spanish long history had an extraordinary impact on its paradigmatic social cohesion: at the same time dos passos’s political insight was surprising. his remarkable capacity to show the world how centralism was one of the most significant political debates of spanish society in the 1920s can also be appreciated in his brilliant analysis: ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil first came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his door, his memories of them when they had had strong rounded limbs like his, and of their parents sitting old and withered in the sun. then his work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of neighbors who came to buy […] in him i seemed to see the generations wax and wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and strain of muscles against the earth […] everywhere roots striking into the infinite past […] in almorox the foundations of life remained unchanged up to the present. the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the walking, consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling of a reality outside of themselves…here lies the strength and the weakness of spain. this intense individualism, born of a history whose fundamentals lie in isolated village communities— pueblos, as the spaniards call them—over the changeless face of which, like grass over a field, events spring and mature and die, is the basic fact of spanish life. (23-25) 111 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 it is important to note that the writer spent most of the time in madrid, which became his center of operations. it was the city that most inspired his need for deepening in the “spanish gesture” and in its lively streets and people. it was “his adopted city,” and, as he confessed many times, the capital was a complete sensorial experience: “honestly. i’ve never been in such a musical city as madrid, everything jingles and rings […] i am quite settled in madrid now, i feel as if i’d lived here all my life.” (ludington 100-101) his cultural immersion underwent an unusual and intense adaptation to the customs and habits of the people of madrid. as bautista has pointed out, “dos passos felt fascinated by chocolate, the sierra de guadarrama, botijos, donkeys and mules, multicoloured shawls and the hours madrileños keep.” (57) nevertheless, he was also aware of the inevitable transformations of modern life and of how the anglo-american influence was changing the city: 6. dos passos’s trans-literary dialogue with spanish writers dos passos’s main literary aspiration in the capital was to establish a trans-literary dialogue with the most relevant spanish writers. for this purpose, he got in contact with antonio machado, juan ramón jiménez and other authors whose works he wanted to translate into english. in fact, he attempted to imitate and made a poetic homage to the castilian poet machado in “winter in castile,” which is the longest and more spanish section of a pushcart at the curb (piñero gil 3637). it goes without saying that dos passos can be considered a hispanist as he not only read cervantes but became familiar with baroja, benavente maragall, manrique and unamuno, among other spanish writers: “he saw spanish literature as a diverse assemblage of styles and ideas rooted in preindustrial artisanship rather than factory-driven commodification.” (rogers 78) in this sense, his readings of the most significant authors of the 98 generation gave him a direct vision of the political and historical crises the spanish writers were depicting in their work as a result of the war of 1898 that ended spain’s colonial empire in the americas. and he “essentially agrees with the nationalist line within spain that ’98 is an exceptional generation,” as rogers has observed (78). therefore, in rosinante, dos passos not only makes “a complex fusion of travelogue, literary criticism, translation, autobiography, fiction, propaganda, and socio historical commentary” (rogers 79); he also attempts to establish a trans-literary and transatlantic dialogue between american and spanish literatures in his quest for the internationalization of the literary experience. similarly, he encourages the american public to read spanish literature in a very persuasive way: spain as a modern centralized nation is an illusion, a very unfortunate one; for the present atrophy, the desolating restlessness of a century of revolution, may very well be due in large measure to the artificial imposition of centralized government on a land essentially centrifugal. (25) at present in madrid even café life is receding before the exigencies of business and the hardly excusable mania for imitating english and american manners. spain is undergoing great changes in its relation to the rest of europe, to latin america, in its own internal structure. (102) 112 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil in section xvi, dos passos also pays a tribute to miguel de unamuno, one of the leading intellectuals of the period who had been condemned to fifteen years’ imprisonment for lése majesté (117), for an offence committed against the dignity of the reigning sovereign. with this reference, the narrator makes a statement about the right for freedom of opinion and expression that should prevail in any modern society like spain. in the same way, dos passos shows his ideological proximity with the spanish writer when he stresses unamuno’s resistance to the materialistic “modernization and europeanization of spanish life and thought.” (121) the philosopher believed that spanish society had to endorse the democratic political principles in order to be like other european societies. furthermore, dos passos praises the philosopher’s views on the chasm between faith and reason and the transcendental significance of each individual in essays such as “del sentimiento trágico de la vida,” (1913) “the tragic feeling of life.” certainly, this is one of unamuno’s most influential essays and dos passos stresses its significance when he quotes a long paragraph on don quixote’s idealism and the hero’s importance in spanish society: 7. conclusion finally, it remains to say that in dos passos’s rosinante there is a synthesis between the spirit of american radicalism and the aesthetic techniques of modernism like the implicit dialectical interaction between subject and object, the representation of the cosmopolitan expatriate individual as a fundamental part of a historical situation, the modernist self-referentiality poetics, and, finally, the literary form deeply related to a concrete textual tradition or movement. as a result, the spanish reality depicted in rosinante becomes a symbol of dos passos’s quest for the return to the mythic arcadia, but it also provides a compensation for the loss of his homeland. in his transnational quest for the spanish gesture and for a utopian territory, dos passos was searching for a way to define his own unstable hybrid modernist identity and establish a dialectical interaction between his artistic subjectivity and his idealization of a new country. thus, his spiritual journey in spain was not similar to that of the american nineteenth-century conventional travelers or tourists; rather, his way of travelling and visiting spain was based on his curiosity and preference for knowing the language, the literature, the food, the politics and, above all, the idiosyncrasy and the peculiarities of spanish culture and history. in this way, rosinante embodies dos passos’s cosmopolitan modernist quest to internationalize literature, often making powerful connections between his literature and a broad range of literary myths, finding a more what is, then, the new mission of don quixote in this world? to cry, to cry in the wilderness. for the wilderness hears although men do not hear, and one day will turn into a sonorous wood, and that solitary voice that spreads in the desert like seed will sprout into a gigantic cedar. (123) if the american public is bound to take up spain it might as well take up the worth-while things instead of the works of popular vulgarization. they have enough of those in their bookcases as it is. and in spain there are novelists like baroja, essayists like unamuno and azorín, poets like valle inclán and antonio machado…but i suppose they will shine with the reflected glory of the author of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. (66-67) 113 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 meaningful modern culture. likewise, it becomes a sort of paradigmatic modernist epic in the way in which the american writer experiments with the literary motif of the journey as a form of self-exploration and as a creative way of establishing an original transatlantic literary dialogue. his temporary expatriate condition in spain, and the reality of being an american with portuguese roots, determined, in some way, his need for a more edenic and epic culture far from the limitations of the excesses of american urban industrialization and cultural materialism. therefore, we might conclude that spain became the country that inspired his rebellious spirit and innovative writing in a period in which he clearly devoted himself to radical politics and experimental modernism to construct a cosmopolitan subjectivity. references bautista cordero, rosa maría. a descriptive analysis of the spanish translations of manhattan transfer and their role in the spanish construction of john dos passos. universidad autónoma de madrid, 2016. cervantes, miguel de. the ingenious hidalgo don quijote of la mancha, translated by john ormsby. t.y. corwell and co., 1981. dos passos, john. (1922). rosinante to the road again. london: onesuch press, 2011. ---. the fourteenth chronicle: letters and diaries of john dos passos. ed. t. ludington. boston: gambit publishers, 1973. ---. “a pushcart at the curb.” travel books and other writings. washington: library of america, 2003. dos passos coggin, john. “prefacio.” invierno en castilla y otros poemas de john dos passos. editorial renacimiento, 2018, pp. 7-9. gonçalves de abreu & bernardo guido de vasconcelos, editors. john dos passos: biography and critical essays. cambridge scholars publishing, 2010. jameson, frederic. the modernist papers. verso, 2007. ---. the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. cornell university press, 1981. juncker, clara. “john dos passos in spain.” miscelánea, vol. 42, 2010, pp. 91-103. lee, jun young. history and utopian disillusion. the dialectical politics in the novels of john dos passos. peter lang, 2008. ludington, townsend, “‘i am so fascinated by spain’: john dos passos, january 1917.” nor shall diamond die: american studies in honour of javier c coy, edited by carme manuel & paul derrick. u. de valencia, 2003, pp. 303-319. ---. john dos passos. a twentieth-century odyssey. carroll & graf publishers, 1998. ---. “’a sort of family feeling’: the two dos passoses, portugal and brazil.” ilha do desterro, vol. 15, no. 16, 1986, pp. 116-135. mancing, howard. the cervantes encyclopedia. greenwood press, 2004. marín madrazo, pilar. la gran guerra en la obra de hemingway y dos passos. almar, 1980. marín ruíz, ricardo. “tras los pasos de rocinante: imitación y re-elaboración del personaje cervantino en john dos passos, graham greene y john steinbeck.” don quijote en su periplo universal: aspectos de la recepción internacional de la novela cervantina, edited by hans christian hagedorn. u. de castilla-la mancha, 2011, pp. 337-362. 114 ‘this man is looking for a gesture’: john dos passos’s... eulalia piñero gil montes, catalina. la visión de españa en la obra de john dos passos. almar, 1980. peck, john, & martin coyle. literary terms and criticism. macmillan press, 1984. piñero gil, eulalia. “la utopía modernista y don quijote de la mancha en rosinante to the road again de john dos passos”. cervantes y la posteridad. 400 años de legado cervantino, edited by alfredo moro martín. vervuert, 2019, pp. 175-191. ---. “introducción.” invierno en castilla y otros poemas de john dos passos. editorial renacimiento, 2018, pp. 10-71. pizer, donald. “john dos passos’s rosinante to the road again and the modernist expatriate imagination.” journal of modern literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1997, pp. 37-150. rogers, gayle. “restaging the disaster: dos passos, empire, and literature after the spanish-american war.” incomparable empires. modernism and the translation of spanish and american literature. columbia university press, 2016, pp. 76-106. schwartz, delmore. “john dos passos and the whole truth.” dos passos: the critical heritage, edited by barry maine. routledge, 1988, pp. 175-185. selden, ray, et al. a reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory. prentice hall, 1997. villar lecumberri, alicia. “sobre rocinante vuelve al camino de john dos passos.” recreaciones quijotescas y cervantinas en la narrativa, edited by carlos mata induráin. eunsa, 2013, pp. 265-378. wrenn, john h. john dos passos. twayne publishers, 1961. zardoya, concha. “madrid en la poesía de john dos passos”. verdad, belleza y expresión: letras anglo-americanas. edhasa, 1967, pp. 113 122. writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing in cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters, and king of cuba inger pettersson university of gothenburg 95 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing in cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters, and king of cuba inger pettersson university of gothenburg he building of bridges between cuba and the us has been ongoing for a long time, not least by artists. reconciliation work preceding the commencement of diplomatic relations between cuba and the us encompasses, for example, novelist cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban (1992), the agüero sisters (1997), and king of cuba (2013). i argue that these novels take on the task of lessening polarizations with the aspiration of furthering reconciliation processes through concentrating on the divisiveness between families and politics within the cuban communities, focusing on the island cubans and the us cuban diaspora. garcía writes conflict to end conflict and this is, i claim, her strongest contribution to the t 96 they are disappearing from the planet, and i wanted to get them in the last throes —chronicle what they were doing in their last days, their last obsessions. for they will pass, and the generations behind them will write their own histories. i also wanted to give a more nuanced voice to the sixty-year shouting match between cuba and its exiles. (jorge santos, “multi-hyphenated identities on the road”: an interview with cristina garcía) reconciliation is not only about finding common grounds; it is also about understanding our differences. (maría de los angeles torres, in the land of mirrors) * pettersson, i. “’fiction as close as i can get to understanding reality’: modes of translation and reconciliatory writing in cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters, and king of cuba”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 96-116. web. recibido: 27 de julio de 2019; 2ª versión: 31 de octubre de 2019 ab st ra ct 1 cristina garccía came to the us at the age of 2 in company of her parents who went into exile. whether or not dreaming in cuban is a “product of exile” is debatable. 97 reconciliation processes. in the last part of the article i briefly discuss how i use the concept of translation to theorize the relationship between fiction and reality. key words: cristina garcía, reconciliatory writing, cuban fiction, translation of culture the building of bridges between cuba and the us has been ongoing for a long time, not least by artists. reconciliation work preceding the commencement of diplomatic relations between cuba and the us encompasses, for example, cristina garcía’s novels that concentrate on the divisiveness between families and politics within the cuban communities, focusing on the island cubans and the us cuban diaspora. through her characters, most of them indulging in extreme positions regarding cuba and the cuban regime, garcía’s fiction gives life to polarized politics. in this article i argue that garcía’s novels dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters, and king of cuba take on the task of lessening polarizations with the aspiration of furthering reconciliation processes. in dreaming in cuban, my reading highlights the active mediating and translating role of pilar and i argue that she is a significant figure of reconciliation. in what follows i use the concept of translation, mainly metaphorically, to explore garcía’s writing as “reconciliatory” and as a way to understand how she links fiction and reality. my metaphorical use of translation is influenced by my disciplinary background in an english department, where my work primarily has been concerned with the socio-cultural and ideological aspects of literature and authorship, linking fiction and reality, as it were. garcía writes conflict to end conflict and this is, i claim, her strongest contribution to the reconciliation processes. in the last part of the article i briefly discuss how i use the concept of translation to theorize the relationship between fiction and reality. dreaming in cuban one of the complexities involved in cuban (american) identity is, thus, strongly political, which, for example, political scientist maría de los angeles torres points out as she protests against “the either/or dichotomy of my identity – a dichotomy that [in cuban america] demands that i choose sides” (15). in bridges to cuba/puentes a cuba (1995), editor ruth behar comments on dreaming in cuban, the novel written more than two decades before diplomatic relations between cuba and the us were taken up: “in a situation where there is no bridge linking the two sides of the cuban community, garcía suggests that women’s’ dreams can begin to heal the wounds of the divided nation” (12). dreaming in cuban was a finalist for the national book award, securing its position within the corpus of us latina/o fiction. ylze irizarry writes in 2007 that the novel “was not only pivotal in the career of its author but also a watershed moment for latina/o literature” (irizarry n.p.). in the same year, marta caminero-santangelo finds that dreaming in cuban is “perhaps the best-known work to date by a cuban american who is the product of exile from castro’s regime” (177)1. the novel portrays the divisive effects on families and individuals resulting from the 1959 overthrow of dictator fulgencio batista and fidel castro’s coming to power. there are four main reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson 98 garcía writes conflict to end conflict and this is, i claim, her strongest contribution to the reconciliation processes. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 99 pilar puente is often read as garcía’s alter ego, a reading that is not contested by garcía, who went back to cuba to meet her own grandmother after 24 years. characters in the novel. celia del pino, revolucionaria y fidelista, and her daughter felicia, who becomes infected with syphilis and commits suicide both live in cuba. in the us, we find celia’s daughter, lourdes puente, and lourdes’s daughter pilar; lourdes and her husband finding exile in brooklyn together with their daughter. the novel spans the period from 1972 to 1980, the year lourdes and pilar visit cuba. through celia’s letters, which begin in 1935, the novel stretches back to pre-revolutionary cuban history and society during the regime of dictator fulgencio batista. celia’s letters are written to her first lover, gustavo, a married lawyer from spain who breaks celia’s heart. the real purpose of the letters is disclosed at the end of the novel, when celia gives them to her granddaughter pilar who will, as celia assures herself, gustavo and the reader, “remember everything” (p. 245). maría de los angeles torres even reads pilar as taking on the role of “remembering for the nation,” (164), an active rather than a “passive” representative of those who left their homeland (ibid.). pilar puente is often read as garcía’s alter ego, a reading that is not contested by garcía, who went back to cuba to meet her own grandmother after 24 years: when i finally met my own maternal grandmother in cuba in 1984, i was flooded with a sense of loss for everything that we hadn’t experienced together. i wanted to capture something of that lost connection in the relationship between celia and her granddaughter, pilar. (brown: 250-51) referring to dreaming in cuban, garcía has said that “[her] writing in english is an act of translation” (kevane & heredia 77), as most of the things that she writes about “would normally be taking place in spanish” (78). garcía’s professed undertaking of “writing it in english, approximating it in english, trying to rework the english to sound more like spanish” (ibid.) has a clear objective: “i wanted the book to feel as though the reader were experiencing it in spanish” (brown 254). garcía’s writing in english is, she says, inflected by the spanish language: “there’s a kind of musicality and cadence in spanish that works its way into my english” (kevane & heredia 78). garcía experienced that the spanish translation of her second novel, the agüero sisters, “felt like more of a restoration than a translation” (ibid.). nevertheless, according to garcía, translations risk “diminishing” things (kevane & heredia 77). in dreaming in cuban, pilar articulates the same idea. being kicked out of a catholic school and sent to a psychiatrist for the content of her paintings, pilar is asked about her “urge to mutilate the human form”: “painting is its own language, i wanted to tell him. translations just confuse it, dilute it, like words going from spanish to english. i envy my mother’s spanish curses sometimes. they make my english collapse in a heap” (59). pilar expresses a feeling of never 100 garcía’s writing in english is, she says, inflected by the spanish language writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson 101 knowing fully what the translation has translated, and that certain things just do not translate (very well). pilar’s envy of her mother’s curses in spanish is somewhat puzzling, given that pilar’s spanish appears to be good. however, pilar’s fluent understanding of spanish does not mean that she is fluent enough to break out in convincing curses. nor, perhaps, is there anyone at whom she could curse, convincingly, in spanish. i understand her feeling of having her english “collapse in a heap” as a feeling of being lost between countries, languages, cultures and politics, matters that the novel sets out to reconcile. reconciliation through “messages from the dead” garcía has ascertained that “a lot of immigrant literatures are making english do things it hasn’t done before” (kevane & heredia 78.) in borrowed tongues: life writing, migration, and translation, eve c. karpinski supports garcía’s idea that writing in english can be “an act of translation”: [t]ranslation in a wider sense involves more than a language transfer in that it also requires a transposition of an entire system of cultural, political, and historical meanings. this tendency to see language as embedded in culture allows us to consider as translations even texts written in english but originating in other than english-speaking cultures – such as immigrant cultures or diasporic cultures... (27) the idea of translation as transfer and transposition of culture finds its perfect illustration in an early scene in dreaming in cuban, a scene that critics have paid attention to and that i will come back to. celia del pino is on guard for the cuban revolution when the novel begins. seated on her porch in santa teresa del mar, keeping vigil of her piece of the coastline, celia is about to get a visit from her deceased husband: at the far end of the sky, where daylight begins, a dense radiance like a shooting star breaks forth. it weakens as it advances, as its outline takes shape in the ether. her husband emerges from the light and comes towards her, taller than the palms, walking on water in his white summer suit and panama hat. he is in no hurry. [. . . .] her husband moves his mouth carefully but she cannot read his immense lips. his jaw churns and swells with each word, faster, until celia feels the warm breeze of his breath on her face. then he disappears. (4-5) jorge’s “visit” takes place at dawn and with celia being on guard all night, her eyes affected by “the sweetness of the gardenia tree and the salt of the sea” (3). a preceding passage states that celia repeatedly and “like a blind woman” (5) has read a letter which arrived that morning. from the “decay” in the handwriting, celia understands that “jorge must have known he would die before she received it” (6). rubbing her smarting eyes at dawn, we may assume that she is expecting news of her husband’s death. as daylight begins, bringing with it changes and phenomena of lights and shadows, the lights play a trick on celia, producing a visualization of jorge. celia, instead of blinking her eyes to have the image of jorge change (back) into something “real”, stays with reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 the vision and, i suggest, runs with it. celia’s vision is not to be construed as a mental picture, a hallucination, a dream, or a figure of magic realism. celia experiences something that many people have experienced. like when the darkness in a room transforms the bookshelf in a corner into a man or the branch outside a window becomes a huge bird thrashing its beak against the window. a common reaction to such a sensation is to blink one’s eyes and use rationality to call back the reality of bookshelves and branches. celia acts differently. she welcomes the vision of jorge as his visit ends the wait for the announcement of his death. celia performs an act of translation, one may argue, an act of translating visions and emotional needs into rational behavior. this reading corresponds well with what garcía has said about the translational aspects of fiction: “i think fiction is translating intuition, dreams, and interior lives” (irizarry n. p.)3 appropriately, the first section of the novel that includes jorge’s apparition is called “ordinary seductions” and the seduction here, the coming of the daylight and the consequential illusions of both eye and mind, troubles the borders between irrationality and rationality.4 the day after celia envisions jorge, felicia learns that her father came to announce his death and to say goodbye. felicia is right there with her mother on this frequency of communicating with the dead. the ensuing exchange between mother and daughter is an example of how the novel, through its main characters and often in a playful way, crosses and destabilizes borders between rationality and irrationality, with the aim set for reconciliation: ‘he was here last night.’[…] ‘who?’ felicia demands. ‘your father, he came to say good-bye.’ […] ‘you mean he was in the neighbourhood and didn’t even stop by?’ she is pacing now, pushing a fist into her palm. ‘felicia, it was not a social visit.’ (9-10) the underlying assumption here, shared by mother and daughter, is that presences of the dead are to be expected in the lives of the living and that communication between the dead and the living is to be expected and dealt with. going out on a limb, i assert that, generally, cubans give more presence to the dead than most other people in the westernized world and garcía strengthens the ties within the community of cubans by putting this into words. the subtexts in the brief exchange 102 3 in the interview, irizzary asks garcía whether journalism and fiction “share any affinities” (paragraph). garcía’s answer is that “they are both forms of translation, really.” garcía, having worked as a journalist for a long time, thinks of journalism versus fiction as “an exterior versus interior thing. in fiction, you have both, but you also try to translate those interior worlds, which are not usually the purview of journalism. it is not really why; it is more where and how. in a perfect world, a journalist is not the interpreter. this has changed, though, with fox news!” (irizarry, n. p.). as always, garcía is outspoken in her comments on society and politics. 4 i”up to six in ten grieving people have ‘seen’ or ‘heard’ their dead loved one, but never mention it out of fear people will think they’re mentally ill. among widowed people, 30 to 60 per cent have experienced things like seeing their dead spouse sitting in their old chair or hearing them call out their name, according to scientists. the university of milan researchers said there is a ‘very high prevalence’ of these ‘post-bereavement hallucinatory experiences’ (pbhes) in those with no history of mental disorders” (roberts, 2016). writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson between celia and felicia allow for the interpretation of an endearing and playful contact between mother and daughter, instead of a dead serious conversation. readers might smile and the scene, which i thus understand as translating a not uncommon cuban cultural positioning of the dead, testifies to the humour of the novel.6 the dead are also present in the lives of the living in the agüero sisters. remarkable, and noticed by both sisters, is the circumstance that the face of one of the sisters is replaced by their dead mother’s face. to reina this makes sense: “’you think the dead just lie still, constancia? coño, just look at yourself’” (1997: 275). constancia, on her side, “is appalled by the tenacity the deceased have for the living, by their ferocious tribal need for reunions” (1997: 259). possibly constancia, who has lived in the us for many years, is less comfortable with visits from the dead than reina who has spent her whole life in cuba, accustomed to “listening for messages from the dead” (1997: 158). garcía’s king of cuba equally testifies to contacts between the dead and the living, as when el comandante (the fictionalized fidel castro) ponders yet another intrusion of his (dead) parents, here on a plane to new york: the pilot announced that they were flying through an electrical storm […] when mamá visited the tyrant during thunderstorms, she mostly complained about her inability to track down papá in the afterlife. ‘he’s hiding from me,’ she would grumble, adjusting her slack, ghostly breasts. ‘probably shacked up with some cualquierita.’ the despot had hated hearing about his parents’ marital problems when they were alive, much less so posthumously. (2013: 217) as when celia visualizes jorge, we have external conditions, here in the form of an electrical storm, producing all kinds of sensations. the dead appear to have continuous access to their living family members, visiting them as they find appropriate. one of the two main characters of king of cuba is goyo from miami, one of el comandante’s arch-rivals, who is also visited by the dead: about a month after papá died, he visited goyo in the middle of the night. his father looked shrunken in his white linen suit […] mumbling under his panama hat. ’where are you going, papi?’ goyo cried out, but his father ignored him. (2013: 64) curiously, goyo’s father’s “white linen suit” and his “panama hat” correspond to the “white summer suit and panama hat” that jorge wears as he appears to celia in the beginning daylight in dreaming in cuban. goyo’s father appears “in the middle of the night”, presenting the same reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 103 3 in my article “telling it to the dead: borderless communication and scars of trauma in cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban”, i focus on the character of lourdes who is traumatized by her mother celia’s abandonment of her as a child and the rape she suffered in connection with the appropriation of her husband’s property in cuba. in the article, i read lourdes’s communication with her deceased father as a way of working through trauma. 6 there is indeed a lot of humor in garcía’s writing and she refers to it as “the saving grace of humor,” offering a version of a common saying in regard to a “cuban propensity for exaggeration . . . if every exile who claimed to have a deed to his ranch on the island actually produced it, the joke goes, cuba would be the size of brazil” (brown 254–55). the dead appear to have continuous access to their living family members, visiting them as they find appropriate. 104 writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson 105 a sudden vision caused by the play of light and dark hooks up with a cultural propensity to run with the vision as it makes possible not only the contact with the dead but closure and reconciliation. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 105 probable imperfection of vision as when celia visualizes her husband jorge. a sudden vision caused by the play of light and dark hooks up with a cultural propensity to run with the vision as it makes possible not only the contact with the dead but closure and reconciliation. the same notion, articulated even clearer, is found in garcía’s novel here in berlin (2017), where one character declares that: “cubans […] frequently have trouble distinguishing the living from the dead” (86). here in berlin has a more rational way of speaking about the dead and their possible activities (the novel is indeed set in germany), but the link between the desires of the dead and those of the living is clearly present. the “visitor” frequents cemeteries, “imagining the uplifted arms of the dead,” hearing “lone syllables, whisperings she couldn’t decipher” and she draws the conclusion that ties in well with garcía’s earlier fiction, also regarding the author’s poetic skills: “at times it seems to her that the dead were more conversational than the living. was she meant to escort a few of them to the page?” (2017: 107). 106 scenes that require a stretch of the imagination and scenes that verge on the surreal certainly occur in dreaming in cuban. these passages mostly focus on contacts between the dead and the living and on the impact that the dead have on the living. in my understanding, the apparitions of dead people in garcía’s novels have led to a label of magic realism. kim anderson sasser’s inclusion of dreaming in cuban in magical realism and cosmopolitanism: strategizing belonging (2014) speaks for itself. magic realism is, to anderson sasser, very “malleable” and in her view “magical realism […] is flexible enough to structure diverse projects and even divergent, incompatible views” (2). in contrast to my reading, kim anderson sasser reads the scene where celia experiences a visit from jorge as magic realism. furthermore, she also reads jorge’s “magical appearance,” as “dramatiz[ing] a communication breakdown” (2014: 173). it must be the fact that celia cannot read jorge’s lips that leads anderson sasser to conclude that this is a “communication breakdown.” in contrast, i understand the soundless apparition of jorge as, partly, yet one more boundary against magic realism. and the many props of psychological nature left lying about by the author, so to speak, trouble a categorization of the event as magic realist. however, as do i, anderson sasser lingers with the opening scene of dreaming in cuban where celia sights jorge. where i find a desirable goodbye scene much needed for celia, opening a path towards scenes that require a stretch of the imagination and scenes that verge on the surreal certainly occur in dreaming in cuban. these passages mostly focus on contacts between the dead and the living and on the impact that the dead have on the living. writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 reconciliation with jorge’s death and their long and cumbersome life together, anderson sasser sees “a moment of failed interaction, and thus disappointment” (ibid.). though we differ in the interpretation of the passage, anderson sasser’s reading of the scene confirms the importance of the scene and its literary value. shannin schroeder also includes garcía in the north american variety of magic realism but finds that dreaming in cuban’s “link with the mode is most tenuous,” qualifying the idea of “tenuous” as that of being “questionable, shaky, fragile, half-hearted” (2004: 70). schroeder does not elaborate on what garcía’s style really is about but talks about celia’s sighting of jorge as an “encounter [of] the supernatural in inexplicable ways” (ibid.). my view, as argued, is that celia’s sighting of jorge is most explicable. cristina garcía has commented on her relation to magic realism: “the south american variety [of magic realism], however, particularly resonated with me and gave me a tremendous sense of possibility. what i liked to explore is the borderland between what is only remotely possible and what is utterly possible” (brown 254). garcía credits gabriel garcía márquez for “just inform[ing] everything”, admitting that “[i]n some way he seeps into every sentence,” giving “total licence […] to the imagination” (kevane & heredia 77.) cristina garcía’s literary style in the novels is a wink to magic realism but rationality, transparency, and logical explanations dominate these “magic” scenes. to use her own words in her novel a handbook to luck (2007), garcía’s “magic [is] largely a matter of making ordinary things appear extraordinary with a touch of smoke and illusion” (10). writing conflict to end conflict politically and morally we often associated the term of reconciliation with specific countries; south africa with the well-known truth and reconciliation commission (trc), and rwanda and the former yugoslavia have had long-lasting processes of reconciliation processes with the focus on “moral and political issues that arise in the aftermath of wrongdoing and conflict between persons and groups” (radzik & murphy). cuba and its conflicting history in connection with and after castro’s revolution, and the decades-long exodus from the island, might still be far from real and realistic reconciliation processes but there are attempts made in that direction. 2003 saw the publication of cuba, la reconciliación nacional. grupo de trabajo, memoria, verdad y justicia, also translated into cuban national reconciliation. task force on memory, truth, and justice. there is a paperback from the same year in spanish, but the english version is only available on the web. the project was carried out by cuban scholars not living in cuba, and this at a point in time when, in contrast to the countries mentioned above, a change of regime in cuba had not taken place: “we were not a truth commission. deciding whether or not to convene a truth commission will be the prerogative of cubans on the island once a transition from the current regime is in process” (cuban national reconciliation n.p.)7 i understand cristina garcía’s three novels to further the 107 7 “our aim was to do some of the background work that might prove useful to those who actually engage these matters in the future. only then and by them will it be possible responding to new political realities in cuba to determine what course to follow regarding past human rights violations” (cuban national reconciliation). idea that the national reconciliation regarding cuba must be preceded by a healing of the divided nation. through her fiction, garcía takes active part in the processes of reconciliation, advancing an improvement in the realms of behavior, interactions, attitudes and expectations (radzik & murphy). cristina garcía grew up in new york, after coming to the us at the age of 2. in 1987, as a journalist for the miami bureau chief for time magazine, she felt that her limitations of “one-page articles” would not suffice to describe her new experience in miami of “being an exile within an exile community”: i’d never been so shunned in my life as i was in miami among the cubans. [. . .] i had thought in a weird way it would be a kind of homecoming. i mean, i understood the exile, the trauma, from my parents, but to be surrounded by it, that was a whole other order of asphyxiation. [. . .] it was so striking to me that i think that’s what made me want to start writing. (wallace) 108 garcía’s fictional chronicling of unsolvable conflicts testifies, i argue, to the desire to end conflict. in dreaming in cuban, celia and lourdes represent two extreme political positions regarding the cuban socialist regime. celia’s position is crystal clear at the very opening of the novel: square by square, she searches the nights for adversaries […] no sign of gusano traitors. […] from her porch, celia could spot another bay of pigs invasion before it happened. she would be feted at the palace, serenaded by a brass orchestra, seduced by el líder himself on a red velvet divan. (1992: 3) celia is devoted to the revolution, honoured by the “neighbourhood committee” having chosen her house as a “primary lookout” (ibid.).8 celia’s daughter lourdes, exiled in new york, fiercely expresses her resentment to everything connected with socialist cuba throughout the novel. at the end of the novel, lourdes is back in cuba, visiting cuba so as not to lose her daughter pilar who, above all, in dreaming in cuban, garcía starts writing conflict to end conflict, with young pilar shouldering the task of moving reconciliation forward by identifying conflict in order to end conflict. 8 the passage also alludes to the cult around fidel castro as the supposed object of much female cuban sexual desire. writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 is the character dreaming in cuban. lourdes’s position is, just as celia’s, crystal clear; lourdes is a die-hard anti-castro cuban also in the streets of havana: ‘look at those american cars. they’re held together with rubber bands and paper clips and still work better than the new russian ones. oye!’ she calls out to the bystanders. ‘you could have cadillacs with leather interiors! air conditioning! automatic windows! you wouldn’t have to move your arms in the heat!” then she turns to me, her face indignant. ‘look how they laugh, pilar! like idiots! they can’t understand a word i’m saying! their heads are filled with too much compañero this and compañera that! they’re brainwashed, that’s what they are!’ (1992: 221) lourdes’s view, now directly expressed to cubans in cuba, is familiar to pilar, a die-hard position shared by many exiled cubans in the us. listening to her mother roaring to an audience of a few cubans in the street – and obviously lourdes’s tirade is in spanish substantiating garcía’s feeling that her novel was “an act of translation” – pilar takes in the situation, pulling her mother from “the growing crowd,” thinking that “[t]he language she speaks is lost to them. it’s another idiom entirely” (1992: 221). pilar’s desire is to bring together both parts of her existence, the cuban and the new york identities. she strives to move beyond the conflicts by acknowledging and articulating the very same conflicts. to pilar, the conflicts between cuba and the us are embodied by her grandmother celia and her mother lourdes. the reconciliation is, however, already begun through pilar’s witnessing of the event and her empathy towards her mother. as a result of her visit to cuba and to abuela celia, pilar reconciles the divisiveness regarding her own belonging. she concludes that she belongs both in cuba and the us: “i’m afraid to lose all this, to lose abuela celia again. but sooner or later i’d have to return to new york. i know now it’s where i belong – not instead of here, but more than here” (1992: 236). pilar, lourdes and celia appear to be inspired by garcía’s experiences of having a family in the us who was “frothing-at-the-mouth anti-castro,” and of her meeting in cuba in 1984 with her grandmother with whom she developed “a strong relationship”(kevane & heredia 70). through the contact with her grandmother, garcía has stated that she understood that many accounts that she had heard from her mother in the us were “distorted” and that “nostalgia and anger had clouded her [mother’s] vision of events” (ibid.). fictionalizing the experience, i say that dreaming in cuban translates the original experience: “it’s not just our personal history that gets mangled. mom filters other people’s lives through her distorting lens” (1992: 176). in dreaming in cuban, garcía starts writing conflict to end conflict, with young pilar shouldering the task of moving reconciliation forward by identifying conflict in order to end conflict. there is, thus, a definitive aspiration of moving beyond the conflicting views. ellen mccracken presents a very different view in her influential work new latina narrative: the feminine space of postmodern ethnicity (1999), finding that “garcía emphasizes a postmodern indeterminacy, ‘grayness,’ and multivocal presentation of reality” (23). mccracken fails, in my opinion, to detect the determination and the very opposite of “grayness” in, for example, pilar’s actions and thoughts. mccracken’s postmodern reading of dreaming in cuban is set on an “unfinalizability of the text 109 [which] parallels its refusal to invoke the closure of a single truth about the cuban revolution or the cuban experience of exile in the united states” (23). mccracken’s way of reasoning is highly debatable given pilar’s intention of finding (political) closure. certainly, pilar’s closure might mean an acknowledgment of the conflicting views but, nevertheless, pilar’s yearning for “going south” should not be seen as a wish to find “a single truth” about cuba and about the realities of cubans in cuba – pilar travels to cuba to find out not only where she belongs but to understand better the very essence of the conflicts. pilar has a conclusive observation on the hardships of people in cuba: “i have to admit it’s tougher here than i expected, but at least everyone seems to have the bare necessities” (234-35). pilar went to cuba to find facts and a personal understanding of cuba and the cuban society, and her visit is, partly, motivated by her wish to experience a counterpart to her mother lourdes’s total rejection of the cuban socialist society. contrary to my understanding of dreaming in cuban as presenting, or translating, political polarizations in order to acknowledge and move beyond these polarizations, mccracken sees the “multivocity” of the novel as “facilitat[ing] a range of reading positions that, by pleasing many sides, helps to sell books” (24). in mccracken’s reading, garcía’s first novel is a “postmodern commodity, a novel in which truth is decentered and political correctness eschewed, a book in which people of diverse political persuasiveness can find perspectives with which they agree” (ibid). in dreaming in cuban, in mccracken’s view, everything goes. marta caminero-santangelo shares my view in on latinidad: u.s. latino literature and the construction of ethnicity (2007) where she understands the multivocality as “presenting a “progressive vision against which the various positions on castro are measured”: “garcía presents a nuanced portrayal of castro’s revolution as addressing certain problems (for example, those of extreme poverty) while remaining seriously flawed according to other liberal/progressive criteria (e.g., with regard to civil liberties” (177-178). garcía, thus, voices the extreme dividing lines between cuban revolucionarios and diehard anti-castro cuban exiles. she does it in dreaming in cuban, and no less in her second novel, the agüero sisters (1997). visiting her sister constancia in miami, reina reflects on how politics are expressed through choice of words: reina likes to listen to the reactionary exile stations in miami best. they play the best music and the most outrageous lies on the air. […] the minute anyone learns that reina recently arrived from cuba, they expect her to roundly denounce the revolution […] these pride-engorged cubanos want her to crucify el comandante, repudiate even the good things he’s done for the country. what’s the use of learning to read, they say, if all you get is that comemierda propaganda? of course you get free health care! how else can you afford even a measly cotton swab on your salaries de porquería? the other day, reina’s vernacular slipped, and she called the winn-dixie cashier compañera by mistake. well, all hell broke loose on the checkout line, and a dozen people nearly came to blows! el exilio, reina is convinced, is the virulent flip side of communist intolerance. (196-97) reina’s daughter dulce blatantly accounts for the state of affairs through grim examples: “i heard of one family committing their grandmother to an asylum to get her apartment in old havana, of a brother killing his twin over a used battery for his chevrolet” (56). dulce fuerte, her last name translating into “strong”, also comments on the currency of sex in cuba: “it takes an occasional 110 writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 novio [boyfriend] to get by” (52), positing that “[s]ex is the only thing they can’t ration in havana” (51). the inclusion of the cuban jineterismo testifies to garcía’s familiarity with the contemporary cuban society.9 written 5 years after dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters demonstrates more concrete knowledge of experiences and realities of cubans in cuba. in this novel, there is less dreaming and more reality. the agüero sisters voices harsher criticism against the cuban regime, without necessarily letting this criticism come from die-hard anti-castro characters like lourdes in dreaming in cuban or goyo in king of cuba. dulce, exhibiting “explicit exhaustion and impatience […] with the revolution” (kevane & heredia 80), voices an understanding and somewhat reconciliatory voice: “mamá isn’t the most fervent revolutionary on the island, but she’s basically tolerant of the system” (garcía 1992: 52). after they’re gone over 600 attempts were made to assassin fidel castro.10 he died of old age and sickness in 2016. in king of cuba, goyo herrera, an octogenarian exiled in miami, lives to see his nemesis dead, following “the tyrant’s” daily health: his daughter often accused goyo of staying alive for one purpose only: to celebrate the news of the tyrant’s death. he couldn’t deny it. goyo subscribed to an exile website – hijodeputa.com — that charted, hourly, the maximum leaders’ body temperature (it was 99.6 degrees the last time goyo checked, at 7:00 a.m., the apparent result of a minor ear infection). (2013: 16) goyo feels betrayed by his daughter, “a blatant liberal who argued against the ‘futile’ trade embargo” (19). goyo’s sole purpose left in life is, in the first hand, killing the tyrant himself, and, in the second hand, getting news of his death. goyo is counterposed by the fictionalized fidel who in garcía’s novel comes across as ludicrous and dangerous. death is “a fate for lesser men” in the eyes of “the tyrant” who proclaims that he has got rid of the gusanos in cuba, if not in the us, and the fictionalized fidel is content for having “left his mark on history with ink, and action, and blood” (34). the novel presents no (partial) defense of la revolución in contrast to, i would say, dreaming in cuban through pilar. again, garcía directs the headlamp at the unbending political views that have divided families. in king of cuba there is no (fictional) room for any processes of reconciliation without certain figures gone. thus, proposing reconciliation by death, garcía’s king of cuba (2013) does away with irreconcilable principles by having the two protagonists, the fictionalized fidel castro and an exiled octogenarian, die at the end of the novel. a gun shot and possible heart attacks leave the reader certain of only one thing, the arch enemies have both died, one of them representing 111 9 julie rausenberger provides a good explanation of jineterismo in “queering jineterismo: a genealogy of sexual politics in touristic cuba”: “the colloquial term jineterismo refers to the ‘riding of tourists’ which can include any activity or behavior associated with tourist hustling, including transactional sex” (n.p.).” 10 in the preface to the second edition of the cuba project: cia covert operations 1959–62 by fabián escalante, javier salado villacín states that “638 assasination attempts [were] planned against fidel castro” (6). himself and the other one representing a long collective anti-castro hatred and bitterness. king of cuba, as i see it, puts forth the idea that certain people must die, both literally and figuratively, before reconciliation can begin. boldly, one could argue, garcía kills the fictionalized fidel three years before the actual death of fidel castro. however, garcía started plotting against the life of el comandante already in the agüero sisters. dulce reflects on the state of things in havana: men from all over the world tell me that havana is the most beautiful city they’ve ever seen. so when will we get it back? when will it be truly ours again? coño, el caballo has four broken legs, and no one has the courage to put him out of his misery. (1997: 53) “el caballo,” one of the nicknames of fidel castro, with all his legs broken, is wanted dead by dulce for change to happen. just like dreaming in cuban, the agüero sisters and king of cuba form part of garcía’s literary project of writing conflict to end conflict. “processes of reconciliation are designed to contribute to the improvement of relationships damaged as a result of wrongdoing” (radzik& murphy). garcía moves forward with processes of reconciliation regarding communities and individuals, not with reconciliation as an outcome which stipulates the inclusion of “apologies,” “memorials,” “truth telling”, “amnesties”, “trials and punishment”, “lustration”, “reparations”, “forgiveness”, and “participation in deliberative processes” (ibid.). i turn to the words of political scientist maría de los angeles torres, who writes about the politics of the cuban exiles, and who, like cristina garcía, came to the us as a child: “reconciliation is not only about finding common grounds; it is also about understanding our differences” (21). garcía gives voices and bodies to characters for the “understanding of differences”, but what about the “common grounds” needed for reconciliation? are these taken as obvious? of course, there is kinship, cubanía, and, above all, language.11 but is language, here cuban spanish, enough for the sharing of “common grounds”? in the agüero sisters, garcía draws attention to how the spanish language differs from cuban to cuban, depending on geographical, historical and political location. reina agüero arrives in miami in the community of exiles and reflects upon which language she should best use to make herself understood: reina wonders if her english will serve her better here than her quotidian spanish. in miami, the cuban spanish is so different, florid with self-pity and longing and obstinate revenge. reina speaks a different language entirely, an explosive lexicon of hardship and bitter jokes at the government’s expense. and her sister sounds like the past. a flash-frozen language, replete with outmoded words and fifties expressions. for constancia, time has stood linguistically still. it’s a wonder people can speak to each other. (1997: 236) perhaps more than language, the “common grounds” consist of the sharing of culture, partly the culture in which the dead are sought by and understood as seeking the living. three years after dreaming in cuban was published, cultural critic coco fusco gives a prominent position to garcía 112 11 coco fusco emphasizes garcía’s cubanía: “the cubanía evoked by cristina garcía in her novel dreaming in cuban floats effortlessly across borders, as family members separated by geography, politics, and even death communicate with one another” (20). writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 and her novel as advancing reconciliation processes: “that a generational split distinguishes political and cultural sensibilities inside and outside cuba is now undisputable; those involved in culture are not waiting for political change to happen first” (19). cristina garcía gets the last words in this section on reconciliation work. in an interview in 2016 she speaks about the inspiration to dreaming in cuban, but her words certainly harmonize with the agüero sisters and king of cuba as well: what inspired me was the fact that my parents’ generation is on its last legs. i wondered if anyone, aside from their own self-aggrandizing, had really chronicled them or done them justice in fiction. of course, i couldn’t help skewering and parodying them a little — it was too irresistible; i’m only human. but it was time. […] i also wanted to give a more nuanced voice to the sixty-year shouting match between cuba and its exiles. (santos 207) between the covers of her novels discussed here, garcía stages this “shouting match,” chronicling the “last obsessions” of (arch) enemies (ibid.). and consistently, alongside her “skewering and parodying”, garcía shows sympathy and understanding for her characters and for their need to hold on to certain (political) opinions: “mom’s views are strictly black-and-white. it’s how she survives” (2016: 26). coda: fiction as a translator of reality as an immigrant in the us, lourdes’s heart goes out to that which is left without translation: she ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. what happens to their languages? the warm burial grounds they leave behind? what of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts? (garcía 1992: 73) cristina garcía comes to the protagonist’s rescue, translating passions and languages through her fiction. to claim that fiction is a language of its own is not uncommon and not contentious. to claim that fiction translates reality, however, is less common. ideas of reality as interpreted or represented by fiction respectively translated by fiction all originate from the notion that there is a relation between fiction and reality, that fiction and reality hook up in certain ways. (i simply skip over the poststructuralist model which, generally and unreservedly, severs text from reality). i understand garcía’s novels here discussed as a sort of “life writing”, and karpinski’s borrowed tongues: life writing, migration, and translation provides support for my model of seeing fiction as translating reality: “in the landscape where migrancy and translation are inextricably linked, people affected by larger historical shifts, past and present, turn to life narrative as a means of translating their lived experiences into texts” (1). karpinski stresses that “[t]he act of translation is necessarily dialogic” and that, and here karpinski invokes ricoeur, the “translator who recognizes the absolute otherness of the other” will be rewarded (35). garcía excels, i believe, in recognizing the “otherness of the other.”12 113 12 karpinski writes that “[a]ccording to benjamin [karpinsky references walter benjamin’s essay “the task of the translator”], translation is transformative rather than imitative in that it makes the target language ‘grow’ at the same time as it ensures survival of the original by making a foreign text perform new meanings in the target culture “ (8). in contrast to an interpretation, a translation signals its otherness. similarly, fiction signals its otherness regarding reality, without necessarily renouncing its close relation to reality. my model makes it possible to speak of an improved precision between fiction and reality precisely through the signaled “otherness” of the translation. at one point in dreaming in cuban, pilar’s words on her mother lourdes’ english express this idea of an enhanced precision through translation: “and her english, her immigrant english, has a touch of otherness that makes it unintentionally precise” (17677). lourdes painstakingly translates words from spanish into english and the “precision” that pilar finds in her mother’s english comes from the words and phrases being stripped of embedded cultural and linguistic structures. pilar’s observation reflects the idea of a translation always signaling its own otherness, or foreignness, while still maintaining its faithfulness.13 fiction is an art form in which realities thrive. with helena maría viramontes, chicana author and essayist, and author doris lessing, i attempt to close in on the link between fiction and reality. and just as a translation refers to an original, i see fiction as referring to reality. viramontes has an elegant way of articulating the vulnerable but tenable link between fiction and the world outside of fiction. in her essay “the writes ofrenda,” viramontes writes about a fear that she shares with many women of color and the many hardships the communities of color —among these the chicano/a community– face: “my brothers and sisters suffer the scourages (sic) of alcoholism; drug, child, physical abuse; domestic violence; police brutality; unequal access to healthcare and education; environmental racism; toxins from the burning of other people’s profits, and on and on” (128). viramontes sees her writing as standing between hope and hopelessness: “writing is the only way i know how to pray” (ibid.). the connection between fiction and reality that she experiences is distinctly expressed: “fiction is as close as i can get to understanding reality” (127). as little as viramontes expands on this, what she invokes is what could be called the power of fiction. doris lessing, a master of many genres, hints at what one could think of as the same power of fiction. she is no more explicit than viramontes as to why fiction has its special power: “i have to conclude that fiction is better at ‘the truth’ than a factual record. why this should be so is a very large subject and one i don’t begin to understand.”14 in the golden notebook, lessing, among other things, examines the relationship between language and experience and finds language faulty as she finds that “there is a thinning of language against the density of our experience” (273). though frustrated with “words,” i understand lessing to hold fiction as being more reliable than other modes of language when it comes to transmitting and knowing “the real experience”: words. words. i play with words, hoping that some combination, even a chance combination, will say what i want. perhaps better with music? but music attacks my inner ear like an antagonist, it’s not my world. the fact is, the real experience can’t be described. i think, bitterly, that a row of asterisks, like an old-fashioned novel, might be better. (549) 114 13 as far as i understand, the matter of whether a translation of, for example, a poem or a novel should signal its “otherness” regarding the original is debatable. 14 lessing’s words come from her 1993 “preface” to the golden notebook and are also quoted in the “biographical sketch” that forms part of the harper perennial modern classics edition published in 2007 (10). writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 lessing understands experience to surpass words but not its knowing. her struggle is to find words, patterns, and structures that render the knowing of the experience. despite the somewhat enigmatic connection between “asterisks” and a “novel,” lessing must be understood as regarding the novel as being her best mean to “describe” experiences. the idea that (the language of) fiction translates (the language of) reality is, i propose, viable and applicable. invoking viramontes and lessing, i posit the reader as competent in both “languages,” the language of fiction and that of reality. this competence makes it possible to assess the translation, for example a novel like dreaming in cuban, and, to speak with terminology from translation studies, to assess the correspondence between the so-called source language (reality) and the target language (fiction). importantly, one should bear in mind the vast difference between translating, for example, a scientific report versus a poem. correspondence between the source language and the target language is important in both cases but the correspondence takes different forms. also, the more proficiency we have in reading, writing, and understanding (the language of) fiction, the easier it will be for us to assess the translation, that is, the adequacy of fiction in its mode of translating reality.15 the model of fiction as translation of reality is, of course, an aspiration to get intimately close to reality, through words. to venture into discussions around the nature of reality and the ways we dispose of to “read” and understand reality would entail depths and lengths of discussions that fall beyond the scope of this article. whether (the language of) reality can be accessible in other ways than in translation is not the topic of discussion here. so, should my interest in seeing fiction as a translator of reality be regarded as an attempt at “upping” the status of fiction as a means of expressing a close(r) relation to reality? to a certain extent i would say yes. i believe that this model is more successful than ideas of representation and interpretation that, i suggest, practically have played out their roles due to a maze of connotations and explanations of how, exactly, these link fiction to reality. dreaming in cuban started out as a poem and after writing about a hundred pages the author was “surprised” to find out that she was working on a novel (brown 249). garcía describes that “the sense of not fitting in either in havana, or in miami, the heart of the cuban exile community, made me start questioning my own identity. where did i belong? what did it mean to be cuban? and the poetry made me feverish to write” (ibid.). in this interview, garcía also clearly lays down what being cuban means to her: “there are many ways to be cuban and i resist the notion that to be cuban is to hold particular political views or act in certain circumscribed ways” (ibid.). critics, scholars, politicians deal with realities and reconciliation work, and, as i have argued, so does cristina garcía in her fiction. 16 115 15 translation studies and theories include an abundance of ideas on the relation between an original and its translation. karpinsky goes through theorists like paul ricoeur and his ideas on “equivalence without adequacy” and “equivalence without identity” and derrida and his thoughts on “the performative dimension of translation” as opposed to “the representative or reproductive” (karpinsky, 2012, 8–9). the concept of “equivalence without adequacy” belonging to ricoeur’s essays on translation and cited by karpinski would certainly be worth exploring in an extended exploration of fiction as a translator of reality (35). 16 i wish to acknowledge and thank the two anonymous reviewers of my article for their very constructive and helpful suggestions for improvements. my gratitude also extends to all the scholars who attended my presentation of an earlier version of this article at the ix international american studies association world congress (iasa) in alcalá de henares in july 2019. their engaging and insightful comments greatly inspired me to write this article. 116 andersson sasser, k. magical realism and cosmopolitanism: strategizing belonging. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014. print. behar, r. ed. bridges to cuba/puentes a cuba. michigan: michigan up, 1995. print. brown, s. s. “a conversation with cristina garcía”. dreaming in cuban. c. garcía. new york: ballantine books, 1993. print. caminero santangelo, m. on latinidad: us latino literature and the construction of ethnicity. gainesville: florida up, 2007. cuban national reconciliation. task force on memory, truth, and justice. latin american and caribbean center, florida international university. miami: university park. web. 2003. fusco, c. english is broken here: notes on cultural fusion in the americas. new york: the new press, 1995. print. garcía, c. a handbook to luck. new york: alfred a. knopf, 2007. print. _. dreaming in cuban. new york: ballantine books, 1992. print. _. here in berlin. berkeley: counterpoint, 2017. print. _. king of cuba. new york: scribner, 2013. print. _. the agüero sisters. new york: alfred a. knopf, 1997. print. irizarry, y. “an interview with cristina garcía”. contemporary literature review, 48:2. (2007). web. karpinski, e. c. borrowed tongues: life writing, migration, and translation. waterloo: wilfried laurier up, 2012. print. kevane, b. & j. heredia. “at home on the page: an interview with cristina garcía” in latina self-portraits: interviews with contemporary women writers. b. kevane & j. heredia. albuquerque: new mexico up, 2000. print. lessing, d. the golden notebook. london: harper perennial, 2007 [1962]. print. mccracken, e. new latina narrative: the feminine space of postmodern ethnicity. tucson: arizona up, 1999. print. pettersson, i. “telling it to the dead: borderless communication and scars of trauma in cristina garcía’s dreaming in cuban”. journal of literary studies, 29. (2013). print. radzik, l. & c. murphy. “reconciliation”. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. e. n. zalta. ed. web. 2019. rausenberger, j. “queering jineterismo: a genealogy of sexual politics in touristic cuba”. academia. web. 2016. roberts, e. “six in ten grieving people ‘see or hear dead loves ones’”. the telegraph. 12 march 2016. web. salado villacín, j. “preface”. the cuba project: cia covert operations 1959–62. f. escalante. 2nd ed. melbourne & new york: ocean press, 2004. print. santos, j “‘multi-hyphenated identities on the road’”: an interview with cristina garcía”. melus, 41:2. (2016): 202-212. print. schroeder, s. rediscovering magical realism in the americas. westport: praeger, 2004. print. torres, m. a. in the land of the mirrors: cuban exile politics in the united states. ann arbor: michigan up, 2001. print. viramontes, h. m. “the writes ofrenda”. máscaras. l. corpi. ed. berkeley: third woman press, 1997. print. wallace, m. m. “the saturday rumpus interview: cristina garcía and truong tran.” the rumpus. web. 16 july 2016. references writing conflict to end conflict: reconciliatory writing... inger pettersson traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model to study serial shakespeares víctor huertas martín universidad de extremadura reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 27 traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model to study serial shakespeares víctor huertas martín universidad de extremadura his article proposes a methodology to study shakespearean intertexts in contemporary complex tv series. while the presence of shakespeare’s inter-texts in contemporary complex tv seems ubiquitous, a sustained and theoretically focused academic study of the impact of shakespeare in these works has not been produced. reviewers and social media users’ comments have proposed readings of the series pointing at the importance of the series’ redemptive qualities. taking hannah wolfe eisner’s “into the middle of things: traumatic redemption and the politics of form” as basis, i am presenting a theoretical model to study serial shakespeares, with which i am referring to a limited corpus of american complex tv series appropriating shakespeare’s texts, as narratives embedded in a cultural politics of trauma and redemption. additionally, it shows that such series potentially work as guidelines to study the overall impact of traumatic redemption in other contemporary adaptations of shakespearean plays. key words: shakespeare, inter-text, appropriation, trauma, redemption t ab st ra ct 28 * huertas martín, v. “traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model to study serial shakespeares”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 27-48. web. recibido: 25 de julio de 2019; 2ª versión: 15 de octubre de 2019. there is consensus that shakespeare’s adapted texts end up being both shakespeare’s and someone else’s. thus, oftentimes shakespearean adaptations and appropriations are studied alongside conventions of film genres, fictional styles or the narrative procedures of new media, such as web series or vlogs, etc. yet, the overall impact of shakespeare’s intertexts in complex tv series has been examined only in part. this article reviews criticism situating the shakespearean intertexts in complex series in a light that makes them analyzable from the lens of traumatic redemption. it sets down the theoretical premises for such a study and provides examples on how it may develop. doubtless, complex tv series have followed the 21st century trend to appropriate shakespearean materials to supply other narratives which rework such texts according to their conventions. thus, they appropriate shakespearean narrative structures, themes, characters, textual references, etc. to enrich their own narratives. this has not escaped teachers, bloggers, journalists and artists who make it a point to identify their shakespearean readings with hbo, netflix or fox. as kinga földváry suggests, “it is instructive to see what purposes shakespeare and his characters are made to serve on contemporary american television” (6). such purposes are necessarily constrained by media features and conventions of genres. in this case, jason mittel’s description of the features of complex tv –a form of storytelling occluding “the need for plot closure within every episode that typifies conventional episodic form,” that foregrounds “ongoing stories across a range of genres” and deploys “a range of serial techniques” (18)– supplies an overall syntax for series. thematically, many series engage in dialectics of trauma and redemption. the lack of redemptive closure and the conflicting narrative strands in series –which delay resolution for years– are enmeshed with shakespearean inter-texts deployed through them. culturally speaking, series have constituted a prestige culture which, as the story goes, leaves behind formulaic 20th century television in lieu of ground-breaking creativity and artistic quality1. such statements have met criticism. concepción cascajosa-virino critiques the neoliberal policies of private channels and distributors who, disguised as promoters of élite culture, vest their interests on the placement of new technologies and apparatuses. cascajosa-virino also exposes contemporary series’ perpetuating of gender and race inequalities that are a far cry from the progressive promise they make. a look at the corpus of series confirms that these white male-centered cultural hierarchies remain fundamentally unchallenged. however, these cultural hierarchies lay the foundations for narratives energizing a trauma-redemption dialectics by exposing these problematic characters’ zig-zagging journeys. shakespeare’s prestige as an icon of world literature, like the prestige of series, does not work outside ideology. critics such as michael d. bristol and susan bennett have observed that shakespeare’s cultural capital has been used to perpetuate economic inequalities via distribution and dissemination of prestige culture. yet, bristol himself and others, such as denise albanese), admit that audiences have been able to find genuine value in their experiencing of shakespeare reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 29 1 as christopher anderson puts it, “in the case of hbo dramas, the aesthetic disposition brings to television the cultivated expectation that watching certain television series requires and rewards the temperament, knowledge, and protocols normally considered appropriate for encounters with museum-worthy works of art” (24). traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín complex tv series’ constant associations with shakespeare present the same ambivalent picture. starting with george anastasia’s statement, “if shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for the sopranos”, a plethora of catchy phrases arouses the suspicion that shakespeare’s cultural capital is being used just to indicate that the product is high quality. 30 even in ideologizing contexts. complex tv series’ constant associations with shakespeare present the same ambivalent picture. starting with george anastasia’s statement, “if shakespeare were alive today, he’d be writing for the sopranos”, a plethora of catchy phrases arouses the suspicion that shakespeare’s cultural capital is being used just to indicate that the product is high quality. nonetheless, i suggest that we take such contributions seriously, for they, as i will show, offer powerful insights to understand shakespeare’s relation to series. this research owes, in fact, much to such contributions. tv serials such as rome, deadwood, empire, succession, sons of anarchy, boardwalk empire, game of thrones, house of cards or westworld insert shakespearean quotations, references and allusions and use shakespearean themes and narratives to reinforce stories of traumatic redemption. trauma culture, as recent critical writings show, gained resurgence after the disaster of 9/11 in the us and, arguably, it spread across continents2. cultural memory, collective and individual suffering and pain as well as different forms of redemption and emancipation are of interest in the narrativization of trauma and the search for affirmative outcomes to the suffering that trauma provokes. a crucial question to answer is whether shakespearean texts strengthen the healing of the pain or provide forward gazes out of the traumatic experience. since the question of how we heal is as crucial as the goal of healing, we think that hannah wolfe eisner’s model provides an adequate lens to think of shakespeare’s contribution to redemption in dialectic, not absolute, terms. critical review in her analysis of deadwood made through the lens of shakespeare’s henry iv, susan c. ronnenberg identifies a “response to 9/11, seeking removal from the present given horrific national trauma, but choosing an historic setting that would permit exploration of some aspects of national anxiety regarding american values and identity related to that event” (25). such trauma she associates to both works, for, as ronnenberg later argues, characters in them are “predicated on their pasts, forcing them to return to their own personal histories in an attempt to negotiate their problems in the present” (26). other essays engage with serials as appropriations of shakespeare’s plays, often setting the foundations for further exploration through the lens of trauma-redemption dialectics. in her analyses of rome, sylvaine bataille departs from the premise that bruno heller and the creators resisted shakespeare’s legacy. yet, as bataille suggests, the ghost of shakespeare often appears (2008). in a later essay, she shows the strategies followed by rome’s creators to dialectically engage with shakespeare through the series’ negative portrayal of the ruling classes, using offensive unshakespearean language and graphic sex and violence to clear the story from the dust of bookish reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 31 1 see kaplan, e. a. trauma culture (the politics of terror and loss in media and literature). new brunswick, new jersey, london: rutgers university press, 2005. print. on shakespeare and the culture of trauma, see silverstone, c. shakespeare, trauma and contemporary performance. new york; london: routledge, 2011. print.; hawkes, t., m. biberman & j. lupton. shakespeare after 9/11 (how trauma reshapes interpretation). new york; queenston: the edwin mellen press, 2011. print. graveness (2009). i suggest that bataille’s presupposed audience knowledge of shakespeare’s julius caesar –expressed, for instance, via self-conscious omissions of some well-known passages (e.g. ‘e tu brute’) (2009)– be further explored. also, bataille hits on the nail when she points at the series’ emphasis in both essays on the role played by the people of rome in the narrative. such a role which has produced a massive corpus of speculation in shakespearean criticism and which, largely, remains undefined by shakespeare. thus, rome aligns shakespearean intertexts with a set of conventions identified by russell jackson’s description of holly rome’s metanarrative: the struggle of the people of rome to be free. rome combines the audience’s knowledge of shakespeare –a play culturally, ideologically and politically relevant for the configuration of the us state– and a shared culture based on us roman narratives, which have traditionally linked christianity to freedom and a democratic ethos (2008). analyzing sons of anarchy (soa), katarzyna burzynska (2017) pairs shakespeare’s and sutter’s works as models for patriarchal familial ideologies, upon whose structures lies stability in both fictional worlds. doubtless, such an essay studying the cultural transposition of the patriarchal hierarchies in hamlet to the contemporary context of soa helps rethinking the series’ problematizing of these structures. bataille (2008) identifies jax’s hesitation on the course of action to take and his changes of heart as fundamental to his construction as a modern hamlet. however, the imperative guidelines of complex tv, as bataille suggests, force the hero to be proactive, a fact which has been problematic to develop this idea properly. to tackle these, as she continues, sutter deployed a repertoire of narrative strategies dilluding the literary classic, transforming it into a narrative memory for another age and, for that purpose, elements of hamlet are appropriated (2008). thus, jax teller’s journey involves exploration of the sources of his anxieties as well as his trauma culture, as recent critical writings show, gained resurgence after the disaster of 9/11 in the us and, arguably, it spread across continents. traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 32 desires to provide his family with a better future. nonetheless, such exploration goes alongside the hero’s apparent inability to escape his outlaw fate. many contributions by bloggers and social media users engage in the complex interpretive activity of using shakespeare’s play to predict the series’ outcomes, which often leads to imaginative and convincing predictions. but, most important, some attention has been paid to the redemptive features of the series. as sutter indicates in interviews, “this [season seven] is the season coming up where jax needs to decide. there is no more debate. i think it’s the season where he’s in or out [of the club]” (ford n. p.). not all interpretations in these sense associate teller with hamlet but rather with a christ-like sacrifice figure. joanna robinson eschews debates on obvious shakespearean references and stresses this aspect of jax’s characterization: sons of anarchy was so enamoured with the idea of jax as jesus that they packed the [final] episode to the gills with references to his martyrdom. any one of these jesus references might have been a nice touch, but the frenzy of imagery just made jax’s end ridiculous, rather than tragic. (robinson n. p.) robinson refers to jax’s suicide riding his bike, opening his arms wide right before clashing with a track in the middle of the road. the last shot reveals jax’s blood and a piece of bread getting stained with it. robinson’s critique on this labored ending points precisely at what makes jax’s redemption story relevant, for sutter self-consciously heightens this excess of christian associations in ways that incite skeptic readings on the meaningfulness of jax’s sacrifice. troy l. smith reads soa as a story which is “also about love, loyalty and people trying (and failing) to find the right way to do the wrong things. just like ‘the walking dead’ is about humankind being its own worst enemy, ‘sons of anarchy’ is about reconciling who you are with learning to live with it” (n. p.). in a post-industrial context in which the us working-classes need to find their way out of under-education, smith’s analogy of mankind turning against itself while trying to survive gains weight and significance in the political and ideological worlds depicted in these series. amidst a plethora of got reviews which mostly deploy character parallels and interpretations of martin’s quotes as shakespearean paraphrases, it is significant that the serials’ motto –the motto of the house stark– (“winter is coming”) bears resemblance to the opening sentence in shakespeare’s richard iii (“now is the winter of our discontent”). r. r. martin identifies reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 many contributions by bloggers and social media users engage in the complex interpretive activity of using shakespeare’s play to predict the series’ outcomes, which often leads to imaginative and convincing predictions. 33 traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín in a post-industrial context in which the us working-classes need to find their way out of under-education, smith’s analogy of mankind turning against itself while trying to survive gains weight and significance in the political and ideological worlds depicted in these series. 34 the geopolitical context of the series, immerse in global conflict, terrorism, a lack of faith in the institutions – particularly the presidency of the us – and, importantly, the risk of socioeconomic exclusion affecting the us and the world’s working classes should, in principle, make us think of complex tv works as politically concerned and progressive in their criticism of leading institutions, surveillance, financial capitalism and sustained irresponsible economic growth reliant on predatory practices such as gentrification and the state’s involvement in public scandals. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 35 winter with a “deeper metaphorical meaning generally expressing the sentiment that dark periods occur in life. even if things are currently going well in your world (“summer”), this won’t last forever. there will eventually come a dark period, a coldness, when events turn against us (“winter”) […] nobody is ever safe or comfortable for too long” (saporito n. p.). yet, such a winter, arguably, precedes a change and redemption or new beginning marking a recovery of faith and hope. at least, this goes for some of the identifications established between got and shakespeare. as matt amarall, whose associations between got and shakespeare include passages from othello or antony and cleopatra, says, “in their characters [martin’s and shakespeare’s] we see ourselves, in their struggles we see our own, and in the unjust world in which they live we still see hope… if you want to know how it all ends [in martin’s work and hbo’s series], you might want to revisit the old bard, because i can tell you –there are hints everywhere” (n. p.). indeed, the clues for such hopeful readings may indeed lie in the series’ possible associations with shakespearean romances. also, these expectations may explain why many fans were disappointed with the ending of got. as slavoj žižek says: the stakes in the final conflict are thus: should the revolt against tyranny be just a fight for the return of the old kinder version of the same hierarchical order, or should it develop into the search for a new order that is needed? the finale combines the rejection of a radical change with an old anti-feminist motif. (2019: n. p.) traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 36 westworld (lisa joy and jonathan nolan, 2016), based on the film written and directed by michael crichton in 1973, has attracted public attention using shakespearean quotations and the uncanny reworking of neo-baroque meta-theatricality as an oppressive metaphor. yet, it is possible to think of emancipatory readings too. fans have contributed to develop insightful interpretations of the quotes across the episodes of the first series. peter abernathy, a host programmed to have been a teacher and an ex-member of a theatre company, combines two fractured quotes from shakespeare: ‘by my most mechanical and dirty hand’ (henry iv part 1) and ‘i shall have revenges on you both’ (king lear). many commentators have pointed at the redemptive potentialities underlying sustained reading of the quotes, though some voices, such as daniel pollack-pelzner’s, disclaim such potentialities. literature, enlightenment and emancipation forces in westworld wave shakespearean flags. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 37 for pollack-pelzner, shakespeare served capitalist ideological purposes for those taking part in the westward movement who carried copies of shakespeare’s works with them. this may be so, but some narratives propose alternative readings. helen wickham koon’s study, how shakespeare won the west (players and performances in america’s gold rush, 1849-1865), shows how miners and workmen travelling westward attended shakespearean performances as “enlightenment to the spirit” (1989: 4). this idea may be equally applied to westworld. as david rodemerk suggests, when combining the quotes in westworld, the effect is that the mechanicals, figures generally scorned in shakespeare’s text, now are ready to lead a rebellion. as noel ceballos affirms, abernathy, in his remembering of his acting days, fathoms an emancipatory force which comes associated with his memories of shakespeare in the theatre. as janey tracey says, in shakespeare’s king lear, lear earns an ‘enlightened soul’ through suffering. in this way, “the androids may achieve enlightenme the wire nt through their traumatic reveries – and through their exposure to literature” furthermore, as matt patches suggests,, the series’ delving in trauma is not a cynical study but a recognition that “grief, and the little voice in [the human] head who wrestles with those though situation, is what makes us human” (n. p.). katheleen walsh’s explanation of the show’s quotes of romeo and juliet suggests another emancipatory movement lying ahead once the hosts – symbolizing the alienated underdogs of mankind in the era of neoliberalism – violently revolt against those who oppress them. literature, enlightenment and emancipation forces in westworld wave shakespearean flags. theoretical model: chronotope of traumatic redemption for serial shakespeares the geopolitical context of the series, immerse in global conflict, terrorism, a lack of faith in the institutions – particularly the presidency of the us – and, importantly, the risk of socioeconomic exclusion affecting the us and the world’s working classes should, in principle, make us think of complex tv works as politically concerned and progressive in their criticism of leading institutions, surveillance, financial capitalism and sustained irresponsible economic growth reliant on predatory practices such as gentrification and the state’s involvement in public scandals. david simon’s the wire has been signalled as representative of this phenomenon. for xavier antich, the wire diagnoses the social failure of the capitalist system. what in 2008 showed the realities of a poor town in the us, today represents where we are” (2011: n. p.): for many, this could be summarized as a global apparatus in which financial capitalism has purchased enough public power to block significant social transformations. analysing the series, žižek revises how recent cultural critique against capitalist culture is based on practices of resistance against the market’s aggressiveness, although he identifies in the series instances of utopia and points at examples of radical honesty in the story (2012: 97). nonetheless, the show ultimately fails, as he argues, to transcend the limits of social realism and, this way, it does not present the abstract motions of capitalism, for which an entirely – perhaps a more brechtian or chapliniesque – different turn would have served (žižek 2012). the only choice left for individuals seems, as žižek continues, to be patient resistance to the inevitable workings of the state apparatus and the traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín the geopolitical context of the series, immerse in global conflict, terrorism, a lack of faith in the institutions – particularly the presidency of the us – and, importantly, the risk of socioeconomic exclusion affecting the us and the world’s working classes should, in principle, make us think of complex tv works as politically concerned and progressive in their criticism of leading institutions, surveillance, financial capitalism and sustained irresponsible economic growth reliant on predatory practices such as gentrification and the state’s involvement in public scandals. 38 aggressiveness of financial capitalism (2012). against this, žižek proposes stopping all resistance to the dominant dispositif (2012), for acts of resistance only “keep the system alive” (2012: 109). žižek’s conclusion on the series is that: “whatever the outcome, one thing is clear: only when we fully embrace simon’s tragic pessimism, accepting that there is no future (within the system), can an opening emerge for a radical change to come” (2012: 111). in more positive terms, hannah wolfe eisner traumatic redemption as a narrative experience which, fundamentally, does not dodge the ethical question of analysing the nature of pain. she defines trauma as an event which suddenly rips “its victims out of their lifeworlds.” trauma is “so sudden and violent that it cannot be fully processed in the moment,” but it is remembered “in fragments through a mixture of disembodied and highly visceral sensations” (3). for eisner, trauma and redemption should be studied within a relational rather than a linear framework. it does not presuppose a reconstitution of stability and order after disorder and instability (eisner10-11). instead, eisner’s non-linear angle favours close analysis of trauma in its concrete expressions. her appropriation of bakhtin’s chronotope theory allows the arrangement of trauma-redemption experience in terms allowing their study. rather than straightforward attention to healing, eisner’s model proposes to first take the effects of trauma seriously, exposing trauma’s multiplicity and making of disorder part and parcel of the narrative. for that purpose, she provides two sets of variables which can, as i will show, be used to explore redemption in complex tv series. eisner differentiates “space-time” and “time-space” variables. the former denotes the material in which one’s body and the rest of the universe exist. the latter denotes a world system in which narrative comes into play. the former applies to material reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 39 rather than straightforward attention to healing, eisner’s model proposes to first take the effects of trauma seriously, exposing trauma’s multiplicity and making of disorder part and parcel of the narrative. reality, the latter to epistemology and ideology – or even teleology. these two inform about the range of nuanced interpretive possibilities within traumatic redemption. crucially, time-spaces translate as conversations about trauma allowing individuals to develop different perceptions, memories and interpretations on their experiences and, also, to discern how these interpretations affect social interactions and social organizations (eisner). trauma is, thus, experienced differently by individuals and characters. consequently, characters’ individual redemptions take idiosyncratic forms. eisner inherits an additional set of variables from theodore adorno’s essay “commitment” from the new left review. on the aesthetics of sacrifice and suffering, adorno claims that “the aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. this alone does an injustice to the victims” (85). eisner defines adorno’s term “transfiguration” by relating it to the transformation in an external appearance glorifying a given process. seen from this angle, suffering and pain are elevated and sorrow serves a high purpose. clearly, this is a narrative that many post-colonialist, feminist and classical marxist scholars, artists and writers may challenge. eisner also uses lawrence langer’s concept of “disfiguration,” i.e. the conscious and deliberate alienation of the reader’s sensibilities from the world of the usual and familiar disorienting her/ him and, arguably, eliminating the possibility of aesthetic pleasure3. these two variables allow us to think of imaginative ways of representing the unrepresentable specificities of trauma. at the same time, they allow us, following eisner’s suggestions, to reconcile these representations with forms of narrative that represent ultimate forms of healing. theoretical model: chronotope of traumatic methodological application: rome and julius caesar both sets of variables can be used, as i intend to show, to describe the characters of titus traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 40 pullo and lucius vorenus in rome (bbc/hbo 2005-2007), written by bruno heller, john milius and william j. macdonald. the characters are based on two real centurions described by gaius julius caesar in de bello gallicum. in rome, they represent two differentiated ideological types despite their soldierly status and, as the series’ progress shows, such ideological inclinations are determined by class. naturally, their views on progress and redemption differ. pullo, the son of a slave, is a simple soldier and vorenus, coming from a wealthier but still non-aristocratic family, is a centurion …two variables allow us to think of imaginative ways of representing the unrepresentable specificities of trauma. at the same time, they allow us, following eisner’s suggestions, to reconcile these representations with forms of narrative that represent ultimate forms of healing 3 see the holocaust and the literary imagination. new haven: yale university press, 1975. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 41 who quickly becomes prefect of the evocatti, later a senator, later captain of the aventine collegium. their characters might well serve to embody the two ideologies that shakespeare presents in the first act of julius caesar when the cobbler and the two tribunes confront each other over caesar’s triumph. for the tribunes flavius and murellus, the cobbler and the other citizens should rather be at work whereas the cobbler and the crowd would rather celebrate caesar’s triumph. similarly, competing worldviews regarding public responsibility are embodied in the protagonists of rome. in vorenus’ case, a hard-working ethos based on loyalty to duty and to the principles laid down by the founding fathers at the twelve tables of the roman republic prevail over julius caesar’s act of rebellion against the republic. in pullo’s view, such acts of defiance are justified on the grounds of pure desire, buddy-boy camaraderie and the seemingly unstoppable power logic of testosterone. pullo himself explains his worldview in the first episode: “i like to kill my enemies, take their gold, enjoy their women. that’s it”. rather than the emulation dynamics which define their rivalry in caesar’s account of the gallic wars, these two characters’ conflict has to do with class and education. most of their mutual attacks, scorns, fights and struggles amplify the taunting and bantering going on between the respectable tribunes, deeply devoted to the state and to the discipline required by office’s dignity, and the scallywags who rejoice in caesar’s trampling over their brethren’s corpses in shakespeare. oftentimes, vorenus admonishes pullo for being unreasonable, imbalanced, disobedient and unnecessarily violent. pullo resents vorenus’ self-importance, his coldness, and, especially, his rapid promotion. not accidentally, scene one in the series commences with a fisticuff exchange between pullo and vorenus in the middle of a skirmish with the gauls after pullo disobeys vorenus’ order to be back into the line. vorenus’ interpellation to pullo echoes murellus’ command to the plebeians: be gone! run to your houses, fall upon your knees, pray to the gods to intermit the plague that needs must light on this ingratitude. (1.1.53-56) contrarily to what happens in shakespeare’s plays –in which the mob irrationally kills cinna the poet–, rome allows the people of rome moments to be at peace with themselves. as the series progresses, pullo and vorenus’ bonds of friendship and brotherhood acquire more and more depth. if there is anything that pullo and vorenus’ friendship symbolizes is the emancipatory possibility of union of peoples belonging to different social ranks in order to oppose or, at least, contend against the ideological, coercive and military forces that the state displays over the population. yet, such redemptive story is filled with dark stretches. despite the simplicity with which he presents himself, pullo’s deep pain –much of which he recurrently recalls via storytelling about his parents– have hardened him and made him ready for dangerous situations. he only realises that something is going wrong with his own world when he decides to marry. unconsciously, his own courage leads him away from the means to carry a genuinely happy existence in the terms he later pursues. for, despite their clear similarities in soldierly value, vorenus quickly ascends through the political ladder and he does not. pullo’s plight is not unlike that of many us citizens belonging to depressed areas who, until the industry fell and the current financial crisis started, thought there would be always time to find the way to settle down. while some of them were hard-working, lucky, or clever enough to move up the social ladder, others did not have access to the means to do so. pullo’s suffering during the last episodes of series one develops through the steps in the process of ideological obfuscation identified by žižek, whose borrowing of elisabeth’s kliiberross’s classification may be of help here. firstly, “denial” defines the individual’s perception (2010: xii). “anger” follows this first stage, which, in pullo’s case, is burdened by his awareness of his disadvantaged educational position. while vorenus’ parents raised horses in mutina, pullo, the son of a slave, has known no other trade except violence. the radicalization of rome’s exploration of the plebeians in shakespeare’s tragedy lies in its engagement with social, ideological and cultural divisions outside the senate and the aristocracy. when pullo is about to ask eirene the slave’s hand in marriage, he discovers that she is already engaged with another slave in vorenus’ house. social difference reveals itself even there, for pullo lacks the means to raise a family even with a slave. he belongs neither in communities of racialized freed people nor in the roman elite. after killing eirene’s fiancé and being expelled from vorenus’ house, he engages in criminal activity and is arrested by the authorities. in the face of death, he undergoes the last stage žižek points at. disinterested in defending himself in trial or in fighting for his life, he develops “acceptance,” which, for the marxist philosopher, allows the subject to discern “the signs of an emerging emancipatory subjectivity” (2010: xii). once he stops fighting against his own apparent doom as an outcast veteran without a future, he manages to win eirene’s forgiveness and her hand in marriage. as monica s. cyrino says, while vorenus’ downfall occurs in the last episode of season one, “pullo is redeemed by his indissoluble bond with vorenus and his own powerful instinct to survive. even as rome falls into turmoil with the assassination of caesar, the final shot of pullo walking hand-in-hand with his beloved eirene, whose name means, “peace,” offers a visual promise of the ultimate survival of the roman people” (6). pullo’s redemption is not linear, for more violent episodes involving his wife will follow. yet, i would like to focus on vorenus’ attempt to redeem himself from doom over season two. this intent is recognized by other characters who describe what he expects from his children once he calms after realising that his jealous rage has provoked the death of his wife niobe. a solid, practical, hard-working man, his instincts dictate him when honour determines the course of action to follow and when it is best to look to the other side. for instance, though in episode 1 he commands pullo to respect army protocols in battle, when mark antony sexually assaults a shepherdess en route to rome, he justifies his general’s act by saying that, while doing it, he is not under the thirteenth legion’s standard. aware of this microphysics of power necessary to survive in rome, he thinks of his own and his family’s prosperities as a matter of career progress, movement upward in the social scale and political promotion. such forward-looking principle, which deliberately obscures details, is the one he intends to stick to in order to sort out the self-inflicted pain produced by the death of his wife niobe. being informed that niobe conceived a child with another man when he was at war, vorenus abandons caesar, runs into his house and, threateningly approaches his terrified wife, who puts an end to her life by jumping from the verandah. his strategy, during season two, consists of obtaining his children’s and his gods’ forgiveness as soon as possible. when he rescues the children from slave camp (episode 2, 4), he faces young lucius, niobe’s son, momentarily. instead of killing him, as honor dictates following the family’s institutional patriarchal rules, he embraces the boy. from the corner of the room, vorena, his daughter, who has been turned into a prostitute, observes traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 42 his father’s reactions. behind her back, a sinister doll hanging on the background produces a disturbing feeling revealing that everything will not be well. in fact, we know subsequently that vorena and the kids plan to escape from their father as soon as possible. one shot presenting the reconciliation of vorenus with his child seems to suggest that niobe’s sacrifice was meaningful whereas the disfiguration image of the doll as a marker for future turmoil unravels the optimistic resolution of this progressive affirmative narrative that vorenus wants this event to be. the conclusion of rome is just as problematic as the conclusion of shakespeare’s winter’s tale. in shakespeare’s romance, hermione’s apparent resurrection seemingly crowns leontes’ longed-for redemption, though hermione’s silence in the final scene renders this conclusion suspicious. in reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 one shot presenting the reconciliation of vorenus with his child seems to suggest that niobe’s sacrifice was meaningful whereas the disfiguration image of the doll as a marker for future turmoil unravels the optimistic resolution of this progressive affirmative narrative that vorenus wants this event to be. 43 rome, the last shot showing vorena and her dying father in bed is brusquely cut. thus, we are deprived of definitive conclusions regarding vorena and vorenus’ reconciliation. julius caesar beyond rome complex tv series have had an impact in contemporary shakespearean performance4. a comparative approach to read a corpus of shakespearean adaptations from the lens of traumatic redemption – and, interestingly, following douglas lanier’s rhizomatic model, using rome as vantage point – permits examining a selection of adaptations of julius caesar as trauma-redemption dialectics. as lanier suggests, the corpus of shakespearean adaptations, sources, afterlifes and scripts do not need to be presented in a hierarchical or chronological order. a dialogue rooted in historical specificity involving all adaptations as well as the original text allows inquiry into the concerns present in rome as these are transferred to other adaptations of julius caesar. this way, cultural meanings mobilized in rome may be vantage points to study other adaptations. for instance, the study of rome from this angle would require an engagement with materialist and historicist criticism on the role of the plebeians in shakespeare’s roman plays. my analyses should address the question of whether bruno heller’s show responds to past or current 4 sophie bourdais mentions a few productions from the 2014 avignon festival in which the duration of henry vi, redesigned by thomas jolly and la piccola familia company, took the shape of two seasons imitating the tv serial format with cliff-hangers and ‘rhapsods’ summarizing preceding episodes. other collaborations have taken place between artists of shakespeare-inflected series and theatre artists. stage productions of hamlet have been mounted using the concerns in the representation of the people in julius caesar. rome clearly responds to these concerns ambivalently. for, contrarily to what cultural materialist and to what conservative critics have respectively promoted, it refuses, for better or for worse, to simplify the people of rome. instead, it displays the whole social map of rome with all its complexities, its shadows and its lights. it makes the socio-economic differences between centurions and soldiers evident through pullo and vorenus’ often conflictive friendship. it displays the relations of rivalry and solidarity between women in the series –through the evolving journeys of atia of the julii and her daughter octavia–. likewise, it stresses the political importance of women in the roman politics which shakespeare leaves unattended. it largely represents the ethnic and racial prejudices in the roman society but, also, it reveals the survival strategies of some of the characters heavily marked by alterity. for instance, the greek slave posca at times seemingly emulates lear’s fool, for he is one of the few characters –together with antony and octavian– who speak their true minds in front of caesar. timon, a jewish tradesman and an assassin, trying to pass himself as a businessman –perhaps alluding to shakespeare’s hero in timon of athens– experiences his own redemption journey via sexual involvement and affiliation with a high-class woman, atia of the julii, who hires him to carry out criminal acts. resentful with his domina, timon joins a radical group intending to overthrow roman rule in israel. yet, when he has the chance to assassinate king herod in his visit to rome, seeing that atia travels near the eastern monarch, he chooses to abandon this enterprise, go back to his family and leave rome for good. as the roman aristocracy, the roman plebs are embedded in the power dynamics of rome, which becomes a traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 44 aesthetics of six feet under and 24 hours (2014). jonathan stamp, historical assessor for rome, took part in the writing of the programme for lucy bailey’s rsc production of julius caesar in 2009, for which she borrowed the color palette of the series. also, as she says, she found the show ‘astonishingly fresh and tapped into the addictive violence and brutality that i found in the play’ (2009). comments have been made on how the appearance of actors from complex tv series may affect our interpretations of their partaking in contemporary shakespearean productions. thus, as erin weinberg says, taking into account his role in got, we could read robert pugh’s interpretation of glendower in richard eyre’s henry iv part 1 from the lens of got. this way, pugh’s glendower, influenced by craster, a character who commands the spirits lying beyond the wall in hbo’s epic fantasy, may be read not as a caricature of a magician as harry hotspur does but in rather darker and more serious ways (2014). local and amateur productions of shakespearean plays have been part of this phenomenon too. we have news of a high school play, game of tiaras, written by don zolidis, adapting king lear with the heritage of disney and got in mind. in 2016, the university of nebraska and omaha partnered with creighton university and nebraska shakespeare to mount of a production of the wars of the roses keeping the popular impact of got in mind. more straightforwardly, in april 2016, a troupe of 36 sixteento nineteen-year-old actors mounted a production of the wars of the roses at warwick called games and thrones. parallels with hbo’s work went beyond the cast’s youth and the title. as james rodgers says, playbox’s production wanted to ‘fully immerse the audience in the story – which house [would] they support, the red or white rose? which contender to the throne [would get] their vote? which acts of treachery and plotting [would] they condone or condemn?’ (2016). with this practice, immersive theatre imitated some of the strategies of engagement of complex tv based on the creation of blogs, forums and social networks rallying viewers to speculate, opine and intervene in the narrative. crucially, this would imitate hbo’s practice of transforming audiences into potential judges of characters, as has been the case with the series. an additional example is the henry vi presented by phil willmott company: hvi: a play of thrones, adapted from shakespeare’s plays by willmott himself an explicitly marketed as ‘the brutal reality that inspired rr martin’s novels’ and as ‘a passionate accessible take on shakespeare’. nonetheless, these got-based initiatives on stage may fall flat. icarus theatre company makes a point to perform shakespeares for the hbo generation and to embrace hbo’s fantasist conceits. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 45 character in its own right. thus, rather than choosing to favor any of the two meta-narratives –progressive and skeptic– on the roman plebs, hbo embraces a dialectical view and places the people’s complexities, virtues and inclinations to irrational violence center-stage. the recent films cesare deve morire (taviani brothers, 2012) and julius caesar (phyllida lloyd, 2018), both framed within the genre of prison shakespeares, are, like rome, people-centered shakespearean adaptations in which male and female convicts use theatre and shakespeare’s tragedy to explore their own traumatic experiences. while the taviani’s film stresses the healing, curative and emancipatory potentialities of literature, drama and shakespeare’s words for a group of fairly enlightened prisoners at the institutional penitentiary of rebbibbia (rome), the female cast of actresses in lloyd’s film interpret the characters as male, thus engaged with the brechtian fashion of depicting the brutal, de-humanized and stark macho politics of prison using estrangement mechanisms that disallow affirmative conclusions for the self-proclaimed curative quest the female prisoners seek in doing the play. the realistic documentary style followed by the tavianis reinforces a redemptive prison narrative in which, after meeting shakespeare, some prisoners make sense of their life and find ways out of darkness through literature and drama. the brechtian style in lloyd’s film displays metatheatrical strategies which, by pointing at the performance, depict the details of arbitrary violence in ways that echo the abuse that these female convicts must have suffered. suffering becomes meaningless, obsessive, not a means to achieve a higher end, but a constant struggle to negotiate the dialectics of hope and suffering. at a time in which, following žižek, “the global capitalist system is approaching its apocalyptic zero point” (2010: x), a focus on social division, inequality, rage, suffering, trauma and search for forms of enlightenment seem a fitting choice for appropriations of julius caesar. these two films radically engage with the popular zeitgeist of rome in order to explore class, education and masculinity issues and, also, to exercise the intellectually and theatrically compelling exercise of having women play male characters in ways that depict, show and expose –rather than encourage identification with– the male characters in the play. conclusions this essay has shown that, to a great extent, the shakespearean intertext contributes to add layers of meaning to current redemption narratives. since trauma culture affects varied geographies and localities, particularly those affected by social division –particularly, regarding gender and ethnicity–, economic hardship and identity crisis, eisner’s theory allows us to think of complex tv series as lenses to look into worldwide shakespearean adaptations and appropriations. furthermore, this may be possible even with complex tv serials whose relations with shakespeare have been proved only in sketchy ways. jo nesbø’s macbeth is, resembling the norwegian author’s harry hole series, inserted in the grey urban landscapes subsumed in wild late capitalism, political corruption and drug-dealing. characters are ridden by guilt-atonement and a constant need to make up their minds in the face of a world where honesty inside institutions seems suicidal, especially for working-class types, whose choices are limited by the operating mechanisms of social inequality and educational difference. this novel lends itself to comparison with the serial format developed by complex tv. particularly, it lends itself to a reading alongside the wire, for it addresses concerns and questions which simon tackles. additionally, it is also worth reading the wire in contrast with michael almereyda’s film adaptation of cymbeline (2014). arguably, the setting chosen for this adaptation –a us city in which a gang of drug-dealers (the britons) constantly fight with the police (the romans)– might be proposed as a utopian alternative to the insufficient progressive politics of the wire, for conventions of shakespearean romance indeed, contrarily to the wire, transcend the parameters of social realism. at the same time, the wire and the conventions it develops provide a solid set of guidelines to study the transformations and variations of the conventions of shakespearean romance embedded in the world depicted by the series. potentially, shakespearean romance provides ways out in a chronotope in which simon’s politics falls short. reading serial shakespeares from the lens of traumatic redemption maps the way in which shakespearean reception evolves across the centuries, for series often draw ideas from shakespearean reception and performance histories. observing, for instance, the character of claire underwood from house of cards (david fincher, 2012-2018) in the light of the us’s overall interpretation of the scottish heroine lady macbeth in performance, it is observed that the physical and magnetic character played by robin wright departs from and radically transforms standing misogynistic representations of lady macbeth: a powerful female who, nonetheless, shows too many signs of instability to leave government in her hands. needless to say, such myth has been used in order to disqualify the potential as leaders of first ladies such as hillary clinton and previous us female political leaders. claire’s characterization seems to run along other characterizations of the shakespearean heroine which, in the early twenty-first century, have re-considered lady macbeth’ agency. sarah fraser king’s protagonist in lady macbeth is solid, resourceful and capable of military prowess – as this historical novel suggests. nonetheless, ultimately, her subordinate role is confirmed despite the amount of equality granted to the couple in fraser king’s exploration. melanie karsak’s four-part saga celtic blood more radically re-reads lady macbeth as a queenin-the-making who is not only decided to rule but who is also decided to be a mother of many children and, while revengeful, is also capable, thanks to her magical powers and her romantic relationship with banquo of lochaber, to create, envisage and inhabit alternative worlds outside the hetero-normative, war-ridden and male-centered kingdom of scotland. reading shakespearean adaptations and appropriations across geographies and transcending genre-specific –and, as lloyd’s film shows, gender-specific– barriers, we find that serial shakespeares are barometers of the shape shakespearean performance seems to be taking in the global landscape. they do so not just at surface level –via the odd casting of an hbo actor in a shakespearean production, for instance, though this is a frequent strategy– but with regard to their attention to deeper intertextual, political, ideological and cultural meanings calling for crossmedia analyses. traumatic redemption chronotope as theoretical model... víctor huertas martín 46 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 47 adorno, t. “commitment.” new left review. 87. 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what does that even mean?” screenprism. 2015. web. shakespeare, w. julius caesar. d. daniell. ed. london; new york: bloomsbury publishings, plc, [1623]1998. print. smith, t. l. “‘sons of anarchy’: the lasting legacy of fx’s groundbreaking biker drama”. cleveland. december 2014. web. tracey, j. “in hbo’s westworld, literature is the key to personhood”. ploughshares . 2019. web. walsh, k. “what shakespeare play is the “violent delights” quote from on ‘westworld’? it’s popular”. romper. 23 october 2016. web. weinberg, e. “creative casting: shakespeare featuring game of thrones actors”. the bardolator. 24 october 2014. web. žižek, s. living in the end times. london; new york: verso, 2010. print. ---. the year of dreaming dangerously. london; new york: verso, 2012. print. ---. “game of thrones tapped into fears of revolution and political women – and left us no better off than before”. independent. 2019. web. 48 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 alicia ors ausín instituto franklin-uah 70 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín instituto franklin-uah j re su m en alicia ors ausín es doctora en estudios norteamericanos por el instituto franklin-uah, licenciada en periodismo por la universidad ceu-cardenal herrera y máster en guión de cine y televisión por la uimp. ha trabajado en radio televisión española, en radio televisión valenciana, en la agencia efe, así como en la oficina de comunicación del presidente de la generalitat valenciana. también ha trabajado como asesora en diferentes proyectos de comunicación política y startups. actualmente, es directora de comunicación en la agencia rmedios marketing y profesora de teoría de la comunicación en la universidad ceu-cardenal herrera. ors ausín, alicia. “jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt”. reden, vol. 2, no. 1, 2020, pp. 69-92. recibido: 10 de diciembre de 2019. an karski, un joven polaco fue el testigo incómodo del holocausto. introducido por la resistencia de forma clandestina en el gueto de varsovia y más tarde en el campo de tránsito de izbica, almacenó en su imaginario personal el verdadero horror de lo que era un plan calculado por el gobierno nazi para acabar con el pueblo judío en europa. palabras clave: exterminio; judíos; campos de concentración; roosevelt; genocidio. 71 entre saber, creer y ser consciente del holocausto existe una gran diferencia. así lo expresa el historiador y comentarista político walter laqueur en su libro the terrible secret: suppression of the truth about hitler’s “final solution”. y sin embargo, la línea que separa los tres términos es muy fina. lo explica jan karski, miembro de la resistencia polaca en la segunda guerra mundial, y posteriormente académico en la universidad de georgetown, en una entrevista para el documental de claude lanzmann shoah. karski es un personaje fascinante por su lucha para dar a conocer al mundo la existencia del holocausto, pero todavía es un desconocido para el gran público. en dicha entrevista cuenta que entre 1942 y 1943 informó al gobierno polaco en el exilio y a los aliados occidentales acerca del exterminio judío en europa con testimonios y documentos aportados por testigos de los crímenes, pero sus noticias no tuvieron el eco que merecían. laqueur recoge concretamente la conversación de karski con el juez del tribunal supremo americano, felix frankfurter: el 27 de noviembre de 1944, the new york times publica “books of the times”, un artículo de opinión firmado por el periodista orville prescott, quien hace una crítica feroz a los americanos por no haber dado crédito a declaraciones de testigos, a fotografías que muestran el terror al que están siendo sometidos los judíos en europa. prescott pide que se lea la obra de jan karski, story of a secret state. un libro publicado por primera vez en 1944, en el que karski, mensajero del gobierno polaco en el exilio, cuenta de primera mano todo lo que ha visto y oído en europa sin que nadie hiciera nada por remediarlo. muchas fueron las reuniones con altos cargos del gobierno estadounidense que karski mantuvo a la vuelta de sus diferentes viajes a europa, para manifestarles su inquietud por los asesinatos de judíos. unos encuentros que no tuvieron ningún efecto. prescott da a conocer la figura de karski a los lectores de su periódico, y dice de él que de no ser por la invasión nazi, muy probablemente hubiera sido un estudiante más que hubiese vivido una vida plancentera. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 frankfurter told karski that he did not believe him. when karski protested, frankfurter explained that he did not imply that karski had in any way not told the truth, he simply meant that he could not believe him—there was a difference. (3) muchas fueron las reuniones con altos cargos del gobierno estadounidense que karski mantuvo a la vuelta de sus diferentes viajes a europa, para manifestarles su inquietud por los asesinatos de judíos. karski fue entrevistado el 9 de febrero de 1995 para la publicación the diary of hannah rosen, un compendio de artículos sobre el holocausto basados en testimonios reales. durante la conversación, a karski le preguntan sobre las razones que pudieron pesar para que la administración roosevelt no actuara antes e hiciera más para salvar a los judíos europeos. karski respondió que los americanos no querían entrar en guerra, aunque finalmente lo hicieron porque hitler declaró la guerra a estados unidos, pero hacerlo antes le hubiera acarreado a roosevelt una importante pérdida de popularidad. no obstante, karski reconoce que, a pesar de haberse entrevistado con él, no tuvo valor para preguntárselo. “why didn’t he extend more aid? how can i know? i couldn’t ask the president, “what do you think about the jews, what are you going to do.” i couldn’t. i was just a messenger”. el 21 de enero de 1945, the new york times publica por primera vez un titular relacionado con las víctimas del nazismo que apela directamente a la sensibilidad de los americanos, “u.s citizens killed in lwow by nazis”. del mismo modo, es la primera vez que se recogen evidencias de que los nazis quieren borrar todas las pruebas de las masacres de los judíos, porque advierten que llega su final. 1. entrevista de jan karski con el presidente de los estados unidos, franklin d. roosevelt jan karski explicó a claude lanzmann en la entrevista para el documental “shoah”, que durante su reunión con roosevelt el 28 de julio de 1943 le refirió el maltrato a los judíos, las deportaciones y la existencia de los campos de concentración. una conversación que duró horas y en la que el presidente de estados unidos tan solo le preguntó en una ocasión por los judíos. esta es parte de la transcripción de la conversación que tuvo lugar en ese encuentro, que ofrece la página web sobre la figura de jan karski, jan karski. humanity’s hero. the story of poland’s wartime emissary, 72 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín reporting the evidence of violence, torture, mass shootings and murders, both in death camps and among the civilian population of the district, the soviet state committee says that with the russian advance, the hitler government and the german military command grew panicky and ordered measures to cover their extermination of the foreign nationals who had been in the concentration camps. (párr. 3) mr. karski is a young polish leader of the underground. had his country not been attacked in 1939 he might have spent a leisured and pleasant life as a student of demography, the science of population. but he was called up to service as an artillery officer and soon was part of the confused retreat across southern poland that swept so many polish soldiers into the prison camps of the russians without their ever having had a chance to fire their guns at the germans. (párr. 2) 73 durante su reunión con roosevelt el 28 de julio de 1943 le refirió el maltrato a los judíos, las deportaciones y la existencia de los campos de concentración. una conversación que duró horas y en la que el presidente de estados unidos tan solo le preguntó en una ocasión por los judíos. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 después, roosevelt se interesó por la resistencia polaca, por las condiciones de vida y por la labor de karski, pero no utilizó la palabra “jew” en niguna de sus preguntas posteriores. el periodista norteamericano marvin kalb dice que roosevelt se debatía entre la respuesta político-militar y la indiferencia, 2. desconocimiento e indiferencia: el contexto creado por la prensa norteamericana el 7 de marzo de 1943 el periódico norteamericano the new york times, dirigido por arthur hays sulzberger, publicó en la sección “letters to the times” (85) un artículo titulado “while we do nothing” firmado por la soprano británica dorothy moulton-mayer. en él, esta mujer, casada con el filántropo alemán robert mayer y residente en estados unidos, reprocha a los norteamericanos vivir en cierta paz y tranquilidad mientras en europa se suceden las atrocidades cometidas por adolf hitler. literalmente, la articulista apunta que uno de los activos más fuertes de hitler ha sido sorprender desde el principio al mundo con la incredulidad que generaron sus actos. “when he commenced his series of aggressions he profited always from the pause of petrified amazement which followed each of them”. (85) la autora apunta con sus palabras que los americanos, de una u otra manera, han escuchado o leído sobre los planes de hitler, pero las prácticas nazis de esterilización y exterminio masivo contra ciertos grupos de ciudadanos europeos suenan tan alejadas de la realidad, tan inverosímiles, que resultan difíciles de creer como posibles en pleno siglo xx. por eso, denuncia la soprano, las grandes potencias y organismos internacionales no saben reaccionar a tiempo y asegura que esos años de incredulidad están siendo aprovechados por hitler para llevar a cabo su macabro plan palabra por palabra: “and now that we are awake, the horror seems too great for any mind not nurtured on nazi principles to grasp. yet, grasp it we must, if we are to act in time to save what may still be saved in europe and our own honor here at home”. (85) 74 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín president: do you cooperate with the jews? karski: yes. in two ways: the jewish workers (socialist) movement participates in the underground resistance in close cooperation with the polish socialist party. independently, there is a special committee for the aid and protection of the jews (zegota, which is affiliated with the government delegate). there are poles in the committee, which is run by a jew, and which has relatively large sums of money at its disposal. (párr. 32-33) for example, in early 1942, he told felix frankfurter not to worry—that the jews were being dispatched to eastern europe to build fortifications against a soviet counter-attack. was he lying? or was he dissembling? surely roosevelt knew better. laqueur cited an august 22, 1942, news conference, at which the president said that the report of nazi atrocities “gives rise to the fear that […] the barbaric and unrelenting character of the occupational regime will become more marked and maye ven lead to the extermination of certain populations.” certain populations? was roosevelt using code language, too? who else but jews? (6) a través de su carta a un medio de comunicación del calado e impacto de the new york times, esta mujer trata de abrir los ojos a la población americana sobre las atrocidades que se están cometiendo en europa, recordando que desde el mes de julio de 1942 los asesinatos a judíos se están haciendo masivos. incluso plantea varias preguntas al lector para hacerle más consciente de su indiferencia y, por extensión, de la indiferencia de todo el pueblo americano: la autora insta al lector a la acción y es en este punto donde las buenas intenciones de moultonmayer ponen de manifiesto su absoluto desconocimiento del derecho internacional. propone el uso de herramientas diplomáticas como solución a una situación de emergencia humanitaria sin precedentes. plantea la posibilidad de rescatar a las víctimas, proporcionarles transporte y recibirlas en estados unidos o en palestina, previo permiso del país en el que se encuentran atrapadas, pero teme que la gran afluencia de refugiados judíos europeos hacia norteamérica genere reticencias en la sociedad americana. aún así, afirma que se trata de una dificultad fácilmente superable con una buena planificación y lanza una pregunta para la reflexión general, “can we get hold of the surviving jews and how can we put them into temporary shelter for a few years where they will be safe?” (85). la articulista no habla de política, habla de humanidad porque la política, dice, se está revelando lenta y excesivamente burocrática. la situación que se está viviendo en alemania supone una realidad tan nueva y tan lejana de la imagen de una europa civilizada, que la respuesta que plantea la autora del artículo podría calificarse de inocente y poco realista. olvida que la salida de ciudadanos de un país para refugiarse en otro está regulada por leyes estrictas, que no menciona en su reflexión. en su lugar, la autora pide respuestas a los ciudadanos de a pie, cuando en realidad debería existir un respaldo político. sus buenas intenciones demuestran, por lo tanto, falta de conocimiento del aparato político, a quien debería dirigirse públicamente reclamando soluciones. moulton-mayer plantea la pregunta de cómo proporcionar un abrigo temporal y seguro a los judíos supervivientes, y destaca especialmente el término “temporal” porque está convencida de que los judíos afectados por el nazismo querrán volver a su país para reconstruir su vida de nuevo, una vez acabe el régimen de adolf hitler. la autora tiene en mente a ciudadanos alemanes, polacos, holandeses y franceses, de clase media y alta, en su mayoría profesionales, artistas, científicos, escritores con una vida y un reconocimiento social asentado durante años en sus respectivos paises. sus prejuicios de clase la impiden ver que entre los afectados por el régimen de 75 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 no words can compute the sum of such misery. and yet, it is your child, torn, crying from your arms, gone forever—where? your father, your mother, old and loved, kicked into a truck and taken away—where? your wife whom you adored […] you yourself, respected citizen, honorable businessman, well dressed, clean, decent—beaten, bruised, covered with filth and unmentionable horrors, locked away from sight and sound of the world—where? the question now arises: what can be done? there can be no questions what any of us would do if we were confronted really with what is happening—a jewish child running from nazi tormentors would be helped and sheltered. the trouble is that we do not see these things. we hear of them on the radio or we view them in pictures indistinguishable from the preceding fictitious “thrills” at the movie. the cries and sobs, the torn and violated bodies, the starving babies, the desolate mothers are not real to our minds; if they were, our apathy could not continue. (85) 76 hitler y las prácticas nazis, además de la preocupación por la suerte de los ciudadanos burgueses que animan su discurso y despiertan sus inquietudes morales, existen millones de judíos de las clases trabajadoras y del ámbito rural, muchos de ellos analfabetos, pobres y sin recursos sociales, y son precisamente estos los que tienen más dificultades para poder salir de sus países y huír del nazismo. de esta forma, la soprano avisa al lector estadounidense del destino incierto de un grupo de ciudadanos de ascendencia judía, que realmente ya intenta planificar la huida de su país, encontrando dificultades insalvables, incluso para aquellos que habían disfrutado de posiciones sociales privilegiadas. sugiere la autora, además, la posibilidad de sacar a los judíos de los países donde sus vidas corren peligro y enviarlos a una potencia protegida, como podría ser suiza. incluso, formula la opción de recoger a los judíos supervivientes con la ayuda de cruz roja para trasladarlos de forma segura a territorios neutrales como inglaterra, ee. uu. o palestina. en este punto, se dirige a la conciencia de quienes tienen el poder de hacer algo, entre los países que cita está palestina. recuerda moulton-mayer que en 1939 el libro blanco dispuso que 75 000 judíos pudieran entrar en palestina en los siguientes cinco años, pero hasta ese momento tan solo 45 000 lo han hecho. una de las cuestiones prácticas que identifica es que ninguno de los países europeos posee un servicio consular para controlar pasaportes y “so if any of these unfortunately reach palestine, they are turned back”. (85) no obstante, propone que, resuelto este escollo, los judíos residentes en palestina podrían cuidar de exiliados, e incluso, hace también un llamamiento a los cristianos en el mismo sentido, por último, culpabiliza al pueblo alemán por no haberse manifestado ni haber protestado ante la falta de humanidad del régimen de hitler, ni siquiera en las universidades “when books were burned and colleagues thrust into concentration camps” (85). la articulista asegura, sin embargo, que aún no es demasiado tarde para actuar. el hecho de que moulton-mayer plantee todos estos temas todavía en el fragor de la batalla de la segunda guerra mundial hace que su visión sobre el conflicto subyacente, el genocidio, sea realmente útil aún hoy en día para comprender cómo es posible que tal crimen contra la humanidad se estuviese cometiendo ante los ojos impasibles de la humanidad. es importante recordar que la segunda guerra mundial comprende una lucha global, en la que los hechos que constituyen el llamado holocausto no pueden entenderse como crímenes de guerra, ya que dichos hechos no tuvieron lugar en los campos de batalla, ni fueron consecuencia de jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín what of the more than 1,000 children who were to be saved out of france in the fall and who are still there? unfortunately, they fell victims not only to deliberately dilatory measures on the part of french authorities but also to red tape nearer home. (85) it seems incredible that we, the so-called christian people of the world, can calmly go about our business, eat, drink, amuse ourselves, in fact, live our normal lives, while in the world exists such misery […] the suffering of these persecuted innocent people is another; it is removable; it should be faced and overcome. when the story of these years comes to be told in its hideous entirety we shall be face to face with the record of our inhumanity. (85) 77 la segunda guerra mundial comprende una lucha global, en la que los hechos que constituyen el llamado holocausto no pueden entenderse como crímenes de guerra, ya que dichos hechos no tuvieron lugar en los campos de batalla, ni fueron consecuencia de acción bélica alguna, como años después se demostrará en los juicios de nuremberg. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 los juicios de nuremberg se convirtieron en los primeros de la historia por crímenes contra la humanidad en el mundo. así se puso de manifiesto en la declaración inicial que los inauguró, y donde se dijo que el verdadero acusador en aquel tribunal era la humanidad. 78 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín acción bélica alguna. como años después se demostrará en los juicios de nuremberg, los asesinatos de millones de civiles cometidos por los nazis constituyen un crimen contra la humanidad de proporciones nunca antes imaginadas y tipificado hoy en día como genocidio en el derecho internacional, y por tanto, una instancia jurídica por encima de las leyes de cualquier país. de esta forma, los juicios de nuremberg se convirtieron en los primeros de la historia por crímenes contra la humanidad en el mundo. así se puso de manifiesto en la declaración inicial que los inauguró, y donde se dijo que el verdadero acusador en aquel tribunal era la humanidad. tan solo partiendo del conocimiento de estas premisas somos capaces de entender por qué jan karski y su discurso ante roosevelt sobre los hechos que acontecían en europa parecía del todo inverosímil. 3. el holocausto: el secreto de la segunda guerra mundial según coinciden diferentes fuentes historiográficas, las causas bélicas de la segunda guerra mundial son: en occidente la invasión de polonia por parte de las tropas alemanas, y en oriente, la invasión japonesa de china, las colonias británicas, neerlandesas y posteriormente el ataque a pearl harbor. acciones agresivas todas ellas que recibieron como respuesta la declaración de guerra de estados unidos contra europa. no obstante, entre todas esas causas no figura el holocausto porque, como ya hemos comentado anteriormente, los hechos que se engloban bajo ese término no formaban parte de la contienda. según explica el profesor walter laqueur, durante 1943 y los inicios de 1944 los asesinatos masivos a judíos, que se están produciendo por todo el territorio invadido por el ejercito alemán, no figuraban de forma destacada en los medios de comunicación de los países aliados y neutrales, ni tampoco se mencionaban en las declaraciones oficiales de las potencias aliadas. “many american and british jews realized the full extent of the catastrophe only during the last year of the war and many non-jews only after the war had ended”. (6) revela laqueur que en enero de 1943, justo después de la declaración de los aliados condenando las atrocidades de los nazis contra los judíos, más de la mitad de los ciudadanos americanos entrevistados para una encuesta sobre este tema no podían creer que los nazis estuvieran asesinando deliberadamente a los judíos. otra investigación similar realizada a finales de 1944 mostraba que la mayoría de los americanos todavía creía que menos de 100 000 judíos habían sido exterminados bajo el mandato de adolf hitler. afirma el profesor laqueur que tampoco se le dio demasiada relevancia política a estas encuestas que dejaban entrever una y otra vez “a regrettable lack of information about facts and figures in general including, for instance, the size of the population of the united states or even their home state or town”. (6) el día que se publicó la citada carta firmada por dorothy moulton-mayer, el 7 de marzo de 1943, hacía ya casi un año y tres meses que se había celebrado en una zona burguesa de berlín, wannsee, la conferencia que debatió la “solución final al problema judío en europa”, el 20 de enero de 1942. con este macabro eufemismo se referían los nazis al asesinato deliberado y 79 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 cuidadosamente planificado de millones de ciudadanos europeos, una matanza inconmensurable de seres humanos que después será conocida como genocidio de los judíos europeos. aún así, wannsee no marcó el inicio de aquel histórico exterminio, tan solo fue un lugar donde concretar dentro de las más altas instancias nazis, el plan que ya venía ejecutándose desde 1941 con las cámaras de gas experimentales de auschwitz, y anteriormente con las unidades móviles en chelmno, treblinka, sobibor y belzec. más de dos años, pues, en que las autoridades y miembros de la sociedad civil estadounidenses escuchaban atónitos las noticias intermitentes que llegaban sobre lo que estaba ocurriendo en europa, sin dar crédito a las acciones y los métodos, que se decían, utilizados por hitler, un líder elegido democráticamente por el pueblo alemán. las noticias sobre las matanzas contra civiles señalaban la impunidad con que se estaba llevando a cabo un plan estratégicamente pensado para exterminar al pueblo judío asentado durante siglos en europa, y de esta forma acabar con cualquier vestigio de su cultura. sobre la importancia de la conferencia de wansee reflexiona laqueur, apuntando que esta cita fue la ocasión en la que adolf eichmann convocó a los representantes de varios ministerios alemanes, cuyo apoyo le era imprescindible para acelerar la “solución final”. fue un paso importante, dice laqueur, pero en modo alguno fue el principio del exterminio. “in the six months preceding this conference more than half a million jews had already been killed by the special ss units, the einsatzgruppen, and the first extermination centre (chelmno) already functioned”. (6) en abril de 1945, una vez liberado auschwitz, los soldados de las filas aliadas que participaron en la cancelación de aquella especie de prisiones diseminadas por europa desconocían la naturaleza de los campos de concentración nazi y manifestaban su horror ante lo que iban descubriendo: ¿eran campos de trabajos forzados? ¿eran lugares para recluir enfermos? ¿eran campos de prisioneros en situación de desnutrición y suciedad extremos? ¿se trataba de espacios de tortuna y lugares de exterminio? hay que tener en cuenta que cuando las tropas británicas entraron por primera vez en el campo de bergen-belsen, en abril de 1945, las actividades de exterminio sistemático habían cesado meses antes. las unidades especiales de las ss se habían afanado, viendo el desarrollo y avance de las tropas aliadas, en borrar las huellas del exterminio masivo destruyendo los campos y evacuando a los prisioneros a través de las conocidas como marchas de la muerte, que consistían en trasladarlos lejos de los aliados, hacia campos del interior de alemania, para prevenir que pudieran apresarlos y contaran los asesinatos masivos. se trataba de marchas en las que los prisioneros recorrían largas distancias bajo unas estrictas medidas de seguridad, sufriendo maltrato por parte de los guardias de las ss y soportando unas condiciones meteorológicas extremas. muchos de los prisioneros no sobrevivieron a estos traslados y otros fueron asesinados en el trayecto, ya que los guardias tenían órdenes de disparar a todos aquellos que mostrasen síntomas de agotamiento. según recuerda el united states holocaust memorial museum de washington en un artículo titulado “la liberación de los campos nazis”, en julio de 1944 las fuerzas soviéticas encontraron el campo de majdanek cerca de lublin, en polonia, donde los alemanes intentaron esconder la evidencia del exterminio, 80 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín las autoridades y miembros de la sociedad civil estadounidenses escuchaban atónitos las noticias intermitentes que llegaban sobre lo que estaba ocurriendo en europa, sin dar crédito a las acciones y los métodos, que se decían, utilizados por hitler, un líder elegido democráticamente por el pueblo alemán. 81 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 pero no en todos los campos existieron cámaras de gas. es interesante en este punto prestar atención y analizar brevemente el sistema de campos de concentración que establecieron los nazis, ya que no en todos ellos se produjeron exterminios planificados en cámaras de gas, y algunos campos evolucionaron de ser originariamente centros de detención a convertirse en campos de la muerte. en un artículo titulado “el sistema de los campos de concentración en profundidad” publicado por el united states holocaust memorial museum, se apunta la primavera de 1933 como el momento en el que las ss establecieron el campo de concentración de dachau, “que sirvió como modelo para un sistema de campos de concentración centralizados y en expansión” (párr. 2). en un principio se trataba de lugares de detención para recluir a opositores políticos al régimen, y con el tiempo se convirtieron en lugares “donde las personas eran encarceladas sin respeto por las normas que habitualmente se aplican al arresto y la custodia” (párr. 1). este mismo artículo establece una tipología de campos existentes en europa que detallo a continuación: el mapa de centros creados por los nazis para acabar con la vida de los judíos en europa era desde un principio, y tal como se comprueba tras la liberación, una especie de puzzle desordenado de piezas aterradoras y sin sentido dentro de los parámetros del mundo civilizado. escapaban a la moral y a la lógica de la razón de los valores que supuestamente habían alumbrado la cultura europea y, para las tropas extranjeras, carecían de toda explicación. ¿cómo articular y dar explicación a aquello que no la tenía? jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín 82 • campos de trabajos forzados: donde se obligaba a los prisioneros a trabajar en condiciones infrahumanas. kaufering/landsberg, flossenbürg, dachau, buchenwald, breitenau o mittelbau/dora, en alemania, son algunos ejemplos. • campos de prisioneros de guerra: donde eran recluidos los prisioneros que los alemanes realizaban durante la contienda. niederhagen, en alemania, o grini, en noruega, son algunos casos. • campos de tránsito: donde se realizaba la primera criba de presos, como ocurría en theresienstadt, en la república checa. • campos de concentración: es la evolución de los campos de trabajos forzados que, con el tiempo, se convirtieron en lugares donde las condiciones de trabajo y de vida eran infrahumanas. mauthausen en austria es un sombrío ejemplo. • campos de exterminio: también conocidos como campos de la muerte, de los que ya nunca más se volvía. auschwitz-birkenau y chelmno, en polonia, son algunos de los que encabezan esta lista infame. el personal del campo incendió el crematorio grande, pero en la apurada operación quedaron intactas las cámaras de gas. en el verano de 1944, los soviéticos también llegaron a los campos de exterminio de belzec, sobibor, y treblinka. los alemanes habían desmontado estos campos en 1943, después que la mayoría de los judíos polacos habían sido matados (sic.). en enero de 1945, los soviéticos liberaron auschwitz, el campo de exterminio y concentración más grande […] había abundante evidencia del exterminio masivo en auschwitz. los alemanes habían destrozado la mayoría de los depósitos en el campo, pero en los que quedaban los soviéticos encontraron las pertenencias de las victimas. (ushmm párr. 2) 83 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 este es, según recoge el united states holocaust memorial museum en su archivo online, el mapa de los campos nazis en europa durante 1943 y 1944. este contexto, unido al escaso y discontinuo flujo de información que llegaba a estados unidos en lo que se quiso entender como rumores acerca de las prácticas nazis contra los judíos, generó un vacío de comunicación al respecto. no es un tema baladí éste último, ya que los medios informativos, con sus reportajes y su labor desde el lugar de los hechos son, según un estudio de sandra d. melone, georgios terzis y ozsel beleli, los que alteran el entorno de comunicación y los que tienen capacidad de convertirse en supervisores de las posibles violaciones de los derechos humanos que pudieran estar cometiéndose en el escenario de la contienda, porque aportan “advertencias precoces sobre posibles intensificadores del conflicto” (3). unir, por tanto, todas las piezas de aquel puzzle inconexo de campos de concentración diseminados por europa llevó mucho tiempo, y solo con tiempo se pudo observar ese mapa the camps in which systematic extermination had been practised had ceased to function months earlier. in comparison with the death camps, belsen was almost an idyllic place; there were no gas chambers in belsen, no mass executions, death was merely by disease and starvation. but at the time it was considered the greatest possible abomination, and the luckless commanders and guards of belsen were the first to be brought to trial; their colleagues who had been in charge of the death camps in the east were to appear in court only many years later and some would never be judged. some had died or disappeared, others were too old or too sick, the witnesses had forgotten or died, too much time had passed. (laqueur 2) figura 1: mapa de los campos nazis en europa 1943-1944 (ushmm). 84 al completo y calibrar el peso de lo que acababa de ocurrir en pleno siglo xx en un escenario desarrollado y de la más sofisticada civilización como era europa. 4. the new york times – el periódico más leído y que menos usó los términos ‘extermination’ y ‘jew’ entre el 20 de enero de 1942 y el 27 de enero de 1945, fecha de la liberación del campo de auschwitz, the new york times publicó 42 noticias que contenían los términos ‘extermination’ y ‘jew’. seguramente no fueron suficientes noticias, porque desde la primera información que se publicó con las palabras clave citadas anteriormente, el 4 de febrero de 1942 con el titular “our own fifth column urged. refugees from germany recommended for propaganda work”, hasta que finalmente se liberó auschwitz, pasaron poco más de tres años. haciendo un recorrido a través de las noticias más desgarradoras y humanas que publicó the new york times sobre el genocidio judío con los términos citados anteriormente, encontramos historias personales, cartas, gritos de auxilio, que incrementan su crudeza y su intensidad con el paso del tiempo, y que empiezan a publicarse en 1942 como elocuentes esbozos de que algo estaba ocurriendo. es a partir de 1943 cuando los artículos incluyen por fin la expresión “mass murders” para dar nombre a algo nuevo que ocurría paralelamente a la guerra, fuera del campo de batalla, lejos de la mirada de la comunidad internacional, y que constituía un crimen contra la humanidad. el 4 de febrero de 1942, en la sección “letters to the times”, the new york times publica una carta firmada por gunnar leistikov titulada “our own fifth column urged. refugees from germany recommended for propaganda work”, en la que el autor insta constantemente a las democracias a utilizar las mismas armas de las que hace uso el enemigo, para de esta manera combatirlo. se refiere a la propaganda para hacer contrapropaganda al mensaje nazi y cita palabras de hitler para demostrar que el canciller hablaba, desde que llegó al gobierno, de la desaparición de los judíos. a lo largo de 1942, este diario recoge diferentes noticias que apuntan a la supuesta comisión de crímenes en alemania y polonia por parte del régimen nazi, aunque todavía no se conoce la verdadera naturaleza de los mismos y las fuentes que proporcionan la información son muy pocas. en respuesta a algunas afirmaciones, se producen una serie de protestas en nueva york de las que se hace eco the new york times. son movilizaciones promovidas por el american jewish congress, bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... alicia ors ausín hitler’s speeches are always made to cover and influence a special situation […] at last, he scares his fellow-countrymen: “we know fully and well that the war can end only by the extermination of the germanic peoples or by the desappearance of jewry from europe. fort he first time in history whole peoples will not be bled, but for the first time the old judaic law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth will be applied”. (párr. 1) 85 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 the jewish labor committee y el b’nai brith. el 20 de julio de 1942, este diario titula “fight mass slaughter. jewish groups to hold rally in the garden tomorrow”, y recuerda que la condena pública contra la “mass slaughter” se llevará a cabo al día siguiente en el madison square garden. posteriormente, el 17 de octubre de 1942, the new york times publica “poland indicts 10 in 400,000 deaths. they head roster of 3,000 war criminals to be brought to trial after peace”, y desgrana las acusaciones una a una. noticias como esta llevan al presidente roosevelt a tomar la decisión de estudiar el posible nombramiento de una comisión que, junto con las naciones unidas, recoja y examine todas las pruebas sobre actos criminales cometidos por los nazis en los países que han ocupado. lo anuncia este periódico el 9 de diciembre de 1942, “president renews pledges to jews. he tells group every effort will be made to fix guilt in axis crimes agains race”. se trata de una reunión de los altos representates de las comunidades judías en estados unidos, de la que sale un memorandum con propuestas para el presidente roosevelt con el objetivo de que los nazis rindan cuentas por los crímenes cometidos y las deportaciones de judíos. a continuación, este artículo recoge cifras de los judíos asesinados en alemania, austria, bélgica, bohemis, holanda, yugoslavia, grecia y rumanía, cerca de dos millones en total. los representantes de las comunidades judías hacen uso de su influencia para conseguir ser oídos por el presidente de los estados unidos, que les ofrece su compromiso serio de ayuda para atajar lo que está ocurriendo en europa con los judíos. la reunión con los altos representantes de las comunidades judías en estados unidos acaba con un memorandum que recopila pruebas que doten de más fuerza, si cabe, su solicitud de ayuda urgente para los judíos en europa. the story will be told at the meeting of how a million jews have been murdered by the nazis in occupied countries, how two and one-half million are being starved to death in ghettos and the remainder of the seven million under nazi domination exposed to economic persecution and other brutalities with a view to their extermination. (párr. 2) 1. the german governor of poland, hans frank, charged with ordering the execution of 200,000 poles, the confiscation of polish property, the transfer of hundreds of thousands of polish workers to germany, the suppression of polish citizenship and the establishment of ghettos. (párr. 4) president roosevelt did not doubt, rabbi wise said, that the united nations would be prepared, as the american government will be, to take every step “which will end these serious crimes against the jews and against all other civilian populations of the hitlerruled countries and to save those who may yet be saved.” […] at that time you will recall, the president added, “i said the american people not only sympathize with the victims of nazi crimes but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accuntability in a day of reckoning [sic] which will surely come.” (párr. 4-8) we come to you as representative of all sections of the jewish community of the united states. within recent months all americans have been horrified by the verification of the reports concerning the barbarities against the inhabitants of countries overrun by hitler’s forces. to these horrors has now been added the news of hitler’s edict calling for the extermination of all jews in the subjugated lands. (párr. 11) 86 pocos días después, el 18 de diciembre de 1942, the new york times califica de “war” al exterminio al que los judíos están siendo sometidos por los nazis: “11 allies condemn nazi war on jews. united nations issue joint declaration of protest on ‘cold-blooded extermination’” y recuerda el comunicado de roosevelt del 21 de agosto de ese mismo año, en el que se denuncian las persecuciones y se advierte a los responsables de que serán llevados ante los tribunales; y la del 7 de octubre del mismo año, en el que habla de crímenes de guerra. a continuación, el 20 de diciembre de 1942, the new york times publica un informe de las naciones unidas que ya habla del exterminio a los judíos, e incluso de los métodos empleados por los nazis. “allies describe outrages on jews”, reza el titular y en él se reflexiona sobre la suerte que habrán corrido cinco millones de judíos en europa, e incluso llega a temer que hayan sido “wiped off from the face of the earth”. un objetivo para el cual, según el informe de la onu, los nazis podrían haber redoblado sus esfuerzos. en ese momento ya se sabe, porque así lo cita este diario en palabras de hubert pierlot, político belga, profesor de derecho y presidente del belgian government in exile en 1939, que el tratamiento que alemania da a los judíos es uno de los dramas más oscuros de la historia. a partir de 1943, las noticias sobre ejecuciones masivas se suceden, alternándose con las peticiones de auxilio internacional. el 17 de enero de 1943, encontramos el siguiente titular, “germans clearing silesian corridor. area 60 miles wide is called scene of biggest drive to exterminate poles”, y el 5 de abril del mismo año “jewish congress asks aid in europe. chicago division to push jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín president roosevelt on 21 aug. 21, 1942, issued a statement denouncing the persecutions and warning those responsible that “the time will come when they shall have to stand in courts of law in the very countries which they are now oppressing and answer for their acts.” in another statement, on oct. 7, 1942, president roosevelt advocated a united nations commission for the investigation of war crimes for meting out “just and sure punishment” to the “ringleaders responsible for the organized murder of thousands of innocent persons and the commission of atrocities which have violated every tenet of the christian faith.” (párr. 14) reports from various and unquestionable sources confirmed that jews were being deported from their homes and sent to concentration camps in other countries (notably poland) in everincreasing numbers and that a large proportion of them were being put to death by methods utterly foreign to any known standards of human behavior. no attempt has been made to present a complete historical record, the committee says because “that would not be possible, for many details have been shrouded in death itself—but sufficient is shown to reveal the continent— wide consistency of the persecution that is now taking place. the statement thus presents but a summary of the evidence.” (párr. 4) the report goes on to quote hubert pierlot, premier of the belgian government in exile, who declared that belgians felt unanimously that “germany’s treatment of the jews is one of the darkest dramas in history.” the same conditions are reported from luxembourg and the netherlands, as well as the scandinavian countries in german hands—norway and denmark—where the jews, though few in number, face the same fate as in the rest of the continent. most of norway’s jews are said to have been sent to concentration camps in toensberg and poland. (párr. 10) 87 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 succor programs for the 5,000,000 jews there. warning by a senator”. ambas noticias no ocupan la portada, sino que se encuentran publicadas entre las páginas 12 y 14 de este diario. algo más cercana a la portada, en la página 7, publicó el 4 de junio de 1943 the new york times la nota de suicidio de szamul zygielbojm, un polaco residente en londres como consecuencia del exilio del gobierno de polonia. en ella, según apunta el diario en un subtítulo, la víctima pide ayuda urgente para los supervivientes y denuncia la apatía de las autoridades polacas en el exilio ante lo que está ocurriendo en europa con los judíos. además, se desgranan los motivos de su suicidio, que él mismo justifica diciendo que su mujer y su hijo se encuentran entre las víctimas de hitler, y que hasta el momento él había trabajado incansablemente como miembro del polish national council y del jewish socialist party para aliviar la situación de los innumerables oprimidos, cuyas casas en los guetos fueron gradualmente “being ground out of existence” (párr. 1), pero que ya no puede más. esta noticia cita tres elementos importantes para ser conscientes de que sí hubo solicitud pública de auxilio por parte de las víctimas y que sí hubo denuncia social debido a la inacción de las autoridades: 1. la carta de suicidio de szamul zygielbojm va dirigida al presidente polaco en el exilio, wladislaw raczkiewicz, y al premier, wladislaw sikorski, dos personas públicas. by my death i wish to express my strongest protest against the inactivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of jewish people. i know how human little life is worth, especially today. but as i was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death i shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act in order to save now, maybe at the last moment, this handful of polish jews who are still alive from certain anihilation. (párr. 12) i take the liberty of addressing to you my last words, and through you the polish government and people, the governments and people of the allied states and the conscience of the world. from the latest information received from poland, it is evident that without doubt the germans with ruthless cruelty are now murdering the few remaining jews in poland. behind the walls of the ghettos the last act of a tragedy unprecedented in history is being performed. […] i have also to state that although the polish government has in a high degree contributed to stirring the opinion of the world, yet it did so insufficiently, for it did nothing extraordinary enough to correspond to the magnitude of the drama now being enacted in poland. (párr. 4) 2. zygielbojm señala como responsables no solo a los que él llama “perpetrators”, verdugos, sino también “indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity.” (párr. 6) the responsability for the crime of murdering all the jewish population in poland falls in the first instance on the perpetrators, but indirectly also it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the allied states, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purpose of curtailing 88 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín 3. zygielbojm desvela la existencia de organizaciones clandestinas de información, formadas por judíos y miembros de la resistencia, que trabajaban incansablemente para dar a conocer la tragedia que estaba ocurriendo en polonia. out of the nearly 350,000 polish jews and about 700,000 jews deported to poland from other countries, there still lived in april of this year, according to the official information of the head of the underground bund organization sent to the united states through a delegate of the government about 300,000. and the murders are still going on incessantly. (párr. 8) el 25 de septiembre de 1943 the new york times publica en su página 6 la petición del secretario de estado, cordell hull, para que los judíos de los países ocupados por los nazis sean considerados legalmente prisioneros de guerra, y que las naciones unidas admitan todos esos territorios bajo su control. “hull tells labor aid to jews is aim” es el titular, y el subtítulo reza: “notice that all individual nazis will be prosecuted for crimes is sought”. en el cuerpo de la noticia, las palabras de hull ya se refieren a la necesidad de depurar las responsabilidades en los crímenes cometidos contra la comunidad judía. the united states therefore, must warn the german people that the united nations have decided to establish the identity of those germans who are responsible for the acts of savagery against the jews and other peoples; that as each of these criminal deeds is committed it is being investigated, and evidence is relentlessly being piled up for the purposes of justice. we also appeal to our government and to the governments of the united nations”, the statement continued, “to admit to all territorities under their control, jewish refugees who may succeed in escaping from the nazi hell. (párr. 10) y mientras esa ayuda llega, este diario también recoge las campañas de organizaciones judías americanas, como la american jewish joint distribution, para recaudar dinero destinado a ayudar a los judíos en alemania. el 6 de diciembre de 1943, se publica en la página 17 el siguiente titular, “jewish aid group to seek $16,000,000. greenstein, chief of welfare branch, says agency needs support in its work”. a continuación, durante 1944 y enero de 1945, los titulares publicados por the new york times sí permiten atisbar ya la verdadera situación que se vive en europa, bajo el dominio de hitler. desde el 18 de mayo de 1944, el titular “savage blow hit jews in hungary. 80,000 reported sent to murder camps in poland non jews protest in vain”, se describen con mucha concreción las atrocidades y saqueos que sufre la población judía por parte de los nazis, y cuenta que cientos de judíos prefieren el suicidio antes que caer en manos del ejército de hitler. apunta, además, que la gran mayoría de la población aborrece las atrocidades cometidas contra los judíos compatriotas, “most of whose ancestors lived in hungary for centuries and played and important role in the country’s social, economic and political life”. (párr. 2) pero también reconoce que hitler tiene muchos adeptos, a los que llama oportunistas, ya que se están beneficiando de la política de confiscación y expropiación de bienes aplicada a la comunidad judía. this crime. by passive observation of this murder of defenseless millons and the maltreatment of children and women, the men of those countries have become accomplices of criminals. (párr. 6) el 25 de septiembre de 1943 the new york times publica en su página 6 la petición del secretario de estado, cordell hull, para que los judíos de los países ocupados por los nazis sean considerados legalmente prisioneros de guerra, y que las naciones unidas admitan todos esos territorios bajo su control. 89 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 90 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín el reportaje aclara que la información proviene de la narración de dos jóvenes judíos eslovacos que escaparon de birkenau el pasado 7 de abril de 1944 y recoge las palabras del presidente del hebrew committee for national liberation, peter h. bergson, que recomienda diversas acciones a las naciones unidas, entre ellas una declaración conjunta que proclame los asesinatos de judíos como un crímen sin fronteras, independientemente del territorio en el que se haya cometido. una solicitud que conecta directamente con la lucha que raphael lemkin llevaba desde hacía tiempo, el reconocimiento del crimen contra la humanidad con independencia de la nación de la que se trate. pocos días después, el 20 de mayo de 1944, se advierte de que si los aliados actuasen con rapidez, todavía podrían salvarse millones de vidas, “speed seen needed for jews’ rescue. 1,500,000 in hungary and rumania can be saved, says official in palestine”. una información que se publica en la página 5 del diario y como un breve, es decir sin apenas repercusión, cuando perfectamente podría tratarse de un tema digno de ocupar un editorial del periódico, un espacio precisamente dedicado habitualmente a aconsejar a líderes políticos sobre cómo actuar ante determinadas circunstancias. there is no doubt that this clique has acquired a fairly large number of followers, nor is it surprising that the numbers of such sympathizers are growing, especially since scores of thousands of jewish shops, homes and businesses are being distributed to influential prospective supporters. (párr. 4) tendremos que esperar al mes de noviembre del 1944, concretamente al día 26, para que the new york times cite declaraciones de testigos directos de los asesinatos en masa, que hablan de sistematismo en las prácticas nazis. todos estos testimonios están recogidos en un informe al que tiene acceso la war refugee board, y a través de la cual se conocen los detalles. el informe reflexiona, incluso, sobre la posibilidad de que la falta de crédito a las atrocidades nazis sea la causante de la tardanza en la actuación por parte de los aliados. in the first detailed report by a united states government agency offering eyewitness proof of mass murder by the germans […] “the board has every reason to believe that these reports present a true picture of the frightful happenings in these camps. it is making the reports public in the firm conviction that they should be read and understood by all americans.” (párr. 1) la lucha que raphael lemkin llevaba desde hacía tiempo, el reconocimiento del crimen contra la humanidad con independencia de la nación de la que se trate. 91 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2020. volumen 2 he added that his committee was recommending the following action to the united nations concerned: “that they issue a joint declaration proclaiming that crimes committed against hebrews in europe, irrespective of the territory on which the crime was committed or the citizenship or lack of citizenship of the victim at the time of death, be considered as a war crime and punished as such.” (párr. 10) 5. conclusiones hannah rosen recoge en “interview with jan karski” sus palabras sobre la indiferencia americana ante el holocausto. el 27 de febrero de 2011, el periódico el país publica un reportaje titulado “este hombre quiso parar el holocausto”, en referencia a jan karski y recoge sus palabras: “los líderes judíos lo dejaron claro: los alemanes no intentan esclavizarnos como hacen con otros pueblos, estamos siendo sistemáticamente exterminados. esa es la diferencia […] creen que exageramos, que somos unos histéricos, pero millones de judíos están condenados al exterminio” (párr. 5). karski fue el testigo incómodo del holocausto. introducido por la resistencia de forma clandestina en el gueto de varsovia y más tarde en el campo de tránsito de izbica, almacenó en su imaginario personal el verdadero horror de lo que era un plan calculado por el gobierno nazi para acabar con el pueblo judío en europa. así se lo contó a lanzmann en el documental shoah, “las imágenes de lo que presencié en el campo de exterminio son, me temo, mis posesiones permanentes. nada me gustaría más que liberar mi mente de estos recuerdos”. una entrevista plagada de silencios interpretativos, necesarios para que karski pudiera recomponerse tras revivir segundo a segundo el horror del holocausto, a medida que se lo iba relatando a lanzmann. su memoria fotográfica fue su única herramienta para informar al estado polaco clandestino sobre las atrocidades que se cometían en los campos, y finalmente para llegar a entrevistarse con el presidente de los estados unidos. este último encuentro acaba con la idea de que los altos dirigentes políticos, y especialmente los americanos, no sabían lo que ocurría en europa. karski se entrevistó con el ministro de asuntos exteriores británico, anthony eden; pero el primer ministro, winston churchill, no lo recibió. el presidente norteamericano franklin d. roosevelt sí lo hizo, aunque con una actitud indiferente. el tiempo dio la razón a jan karski que, como él mismo dijo a claude lanzmann, tuvo que vivir por siempre con esas imágenes que le atormentaban. era fácil para los nazis matar judíos, porque lo hicieron. los aliados consideraron imposible y demasiado costoso acudir en rescate de los judíos, porque no lo hicieron. los judíos fueron abandonados por todos los gobiernos, jerarquías eclesiásticas y sociedades, pero miles de judíos sobrevivieron porque miles de individuos en polonia, francia, bélgica, dinamarca y holanda ayudaron a salvar judíos. ahora todos los gobiernos e iglesias dicen “intentamos ayudar a los judíos”, porque están avergonzados y quieren conservar su reputación. no ayudaron, porque seis millones perecieron, pero quienes estaban en los gobiernos y en las iglesias sobrevivieron. nadie hizo lo suficiente. 92 jan karski: el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante roosevelt alicia ors ausín revisar con detenimiento los titulares del diario the new york times en el periodo comprendido entre 1936 y enero de 1945, con los filtros “extermination” y “jew”, arroja resultados suficientes como para afirmar que no solo jan karski sabía lo suficiente. la prensa sabía lo suficiente, aunque no supo valorar el calado de esas informaciones. karski se convirtió en el testigo incómodo del holocausto ante, quizá, el hombre más poderoso en cualquier contienda: el presidente de los estados unidos. jan karksi falleció en el año 2000 en washington y la universidad de georgetown, de la que era académico, le dedicó una estatua en sus jardines donde reza lo siguiente, jan karski (jan kozielewski), 1914-2000, mensajero del pueblo polaco ante su gobierno en el exilio, mensajero del pueblo judío ante el mundo, el hombre que alertó sobre la aniquilación del pueblo judío cuando aún había tiempo para detenerla. nombrado por el estado de israel justo entre las naciones, héroe del pueblo polaco, profesor en la universidad de georgetown (1952-1992), un hombre noble que caminó entre nosotros y nos hizo mejores con su presencia, un hombre justo. referencias breitman, richard. official secrets. what the nazis planned, what the british and americans knew. penguin books, 1998. karski, jan. historia de un estado clandestino. acantilado, 2011. lanzmann, claude, dir. shoah. new yorker films, 1985. laqueur, walter. the terrible secret: suppression of the truth about hitler’s “final solution”. routledge, 1980. leff, laurel. buried by the times. the holocaust and the america’s most important newspaper. cambridge university press, 2005. levi, neil; rothberg, michael. the holocaust: theoretical readings. edinburgh university press, 2003. lipstadt, deborah. beyond belief: the american press and the coming of the holocaust 1933 1945. free press, 1986. luzán, julia. “este hombre quiso parar el holocausto”. el país. 27 feb. 2011. melone, sandra d. et al. utilización de los medios de comunicación para la transformación de conflictos: la experiencia del common ground. berghoffoundation. rodríguez andrés, roberto y teresa sádaba garraza. “periodistas ante conflictos. el papel de losmedios de comunicación en situaciones de crisis”. universidad de navarra, sa, 1999. rosen, hannah. “interview with jan karski”. remember org. a people’s history of the holocaust & genocide. 9 feb. 1995. ushmm. “la legislación anti-judía en la alemania de la preguerra”. united states holocaust memorial museum, washington, dc. ---. “la liberación de los campos nazis”. united states holocaust memorial museum, washington, dc. the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet universidad carlos iii de madrid reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 49 the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet universidad carlos iii de madrid riticism to the system is a core place in the us american culture. the self-criticism gets its roots in the permanent restlessness of the american people, in their fears, in their dissatisfaction, and even in their insane self-destructive behabiour. many episodes in the american history have worked out from attitudes of paranoia, disgust or anger towards communities or the public administration. the natural rhythm of society in the united states is far from acceptance and calm. on the contrary, the us history is defined by restlessnees and doubious sentiments. thus, one might think that the american dream is fundamentally a state of permanent crisis in which people, unable to deal with their present vital conditions, transmute these conditions into havoc and creation. in the pages of this article, a breaf tour into the historical and cultural trend of discouragement is offered. it also pays attention to the american ability to self-analyze its own historical experiences. the fictionated stories, that come from the imagination but also from people’s voices and memories, convey a sense of dissatisfaction and of struggle to improve the american way of behaving. those citizens, especially uncomfortable with themselves or with the administration, may not be aware that they are precisely those who constitute the best us image abroad. in the ostentation of a selfcriticism, of a subversive thought, these americans, opposed to the official positions, feature the virtue of the relentless self-purge. therefore, looking at past and present times, this paper is composed by six related arguments c 50 ab st ra ct * huguet, m. “the us american self-criticism: stories of angel and bewilderment”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 49-74. web. recibido: 15 de septiembre de 2019; 2ª versión: 15 de octubre de 2019. that rely on both historical events and fictionated stories, with the titles of: “under the paranoid style”; “the angry nation”, “hate: public limited company”, “images of anger”, “guilty, ashamed and redeemed”, and “the legacy of disenchantment”. key words: united states, history, stories, culture, disenchantment, anger under the paranoid style in the mid-sixties harper’s magazine published an article by richard hofstadter with the suggestive title of “the paranoid style in american politics”. at this point, in the 21st century, we could think that nothing told by hofstadter would call our attention. we perfectly know how mccarthyism worked in the fifties and how the cold war acquired, in its ideological dimension, a toxic conspiratorial tone that permeated and decomposed american society. however, it is useful to re-read hofstadter’s text, since it helps to recover certain aspects that seemed non important at the time of its first edition but that nowadays would certainly acquire some relevance. hofstadter stressed that american politics had always been acted as theater scene for angry minds –mainly those very conservative groups who take their anger to the extreme of paranoid style. long before mccarthyism, the political decisions of the administrations attended to this paranoid feeling. the permanent sensation of territorial vulnerability in the first decades of the 19th century favored the growth of the navy, the building of coastal bastions or the trade agreements that helped to protect the american ships in the mediterranean sea from berber piracy. the slave riots and run aways from the plantations also increased paranoia. white people in the slave states were afraid of the possibility of being slaughtered by a slave at any time while they were sleeping. in the emerging midwest -the old spanish louisianasoldiers and entrepreneurs felt behind them the shadow of the indians. fear of the unknown in the nineteenth century took the form of the runaway masses of irish migrants: papists who spoke gaelic and were meant to ruin the precious american democracy through the devilish alliance with the vatican. there was a broad record of circumstances that caused fear and, consequently, political decisions inspired by a paranoid worldview. american politics had always been acted as theater scene for angry minds –mainly those very conservative groups who take their anger to the extreme of paranoid style. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 51 the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet fear of the unknown in the nineteenth century took the form of the runaway masses of irish migrants: papists who spoke gaelic and were meant to ruin the precious american democracy. 52 in the aforementioned hofstadter paper several cases of the early american paranoid reaction are collected, such as the popular hostility towards the illuminati and the masons since the 1820s, or towards the catholics since the 1830s, with the massive images of aberration and hate. in relation to the panic caused by the alleged subversive actions of the bavarian illuminati -linked in america with the french revolution and with a such bad press in the young republic-, it is to be highlighted that these illuminati had developed a significant rationalist and anticlerical illustration due to the german adam weishaupt in the united states (1776). at the end of the century the illuminati approached the freemasons to outline their society model: a highly rational utopia. the text that influenced popular hostility the most towards enlightenment was written and published in 1797 in edinburgh by john robison, under the title of “proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governmets of europe, carried on in the secret meetings of free mason, illuminati, and reading societies”. thus, the clergy felt very concerned as they realized that the enlightment and the freemasonry was a full-blown attack to the sources of protestantism. but hostility towards these trends happened essentially in new england, among the most conservative sectors. from the pulpits and newspapers, jeffersonian democracy was pointed out as a vehicle for these “anti-christian” ideas; in the background, the conflict between the jeffersonians (profrench) and the federalists (pro-british), the later being accused of radical jacobinism by the president. was the united states being the victim of an international plot supported by the illuminati, jacobins, and jeffersonians? this issue already refers to a feeling of a clear paranoid sign that accuses a political trend of treason to the interests of the nation. and it is that in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century, the united states would live an authentic conspiracy mania that could be noticed in the popular classes –these voting segment expanded during the jacksonian democracy-, especially in rural areas. the anti-freemasons were also hostile to the restraint of opportunities for ordinary people or to the “aristocratization” of public life. despite the strength of freemasonry in the stage of setting up, it was understood that freemasonry conspired against the essences of the republic. freemasons created a system of government in parallel to everyone’s system: drawing among its members a loyalty outside the federal system and the states. seen this way, behaving like a mason was meant to be punished. so the street claimed jail and death penalty for the freemasons. the anti-masonic defined masonry as the most abominable and dangerous institution the humanity had ever known: a “hell’s master piece”. catholics stood above the freemasons in their status as traitors to democracy. the supposed plot of catholics against american values began its journey in the thirties popular mentality and anti-catholicism eventually became a way of understanding the nation, linked of course to the general hostility against the waves of catholic immigrants reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 53 -irishin the central decades of the 19th century. in 1835 two books argued that a “new” danger against the american way of life had arisen, morse’s foreign conspiracies against the liberties of the united states, and lyman beecher’s plea for the west. morse was none but the inventor of the telegraph and in his book he claimed that there was a conspiracy that couldn’t be defended by the country’s ships or armies. morse said that the aforementioned conspiracy came from the catholic and austrian government of metternich, which launched its jesuit missionaries across the ocean to infiltrate and destroy american society. lyman beecher, harriet beecher stowe’s father, said in plea for the west that protestantism was engaged in a life-and-death war with catholicism. the aggression, also in this case, seemed to come from europe, as this continent sent a myriad of catholics to the us in order to undermine its republic and its strength. the migrants brought violence and populated the prisons, obtained the resources for the local poor and, being so many, controlled the vote in some areas. in the stories of these and other authors, the morbid images were surprising. priests and nuns were described as villains, licentious and murderers; there was even talk about debauchery in convents and monasteries, or about the public danger that one and the other represented for communities of goodness. on the cusp of paranoia, in 1836 the nun maría monk published awful disclosures, a kind of autobiography about the author’s libertine and criminal life. this chapter of the 19th century paranoias can be closed without concluding. and things would not improve in the twentieth century, when people were frightened by a whole string of fears that had black people as agents, outsiders or foreigners with their large families and their contagious diseases, socialists, or even the cosmopolitan americans, some of them called themselves ‘pacifists’. also women with voice, vote, literate and with a paid livelihood. it was interpreted that each of these subjects was a “strange” body in the perfect anatomy of the republic. lyman beecher, harriet beecher stowe’s father, said in plea for the west that protestantism was engaged in a life-and-death war with catholicism. the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 54 the american culture intend to mean: “we have not been defeated but betrayed”. the perversion that arises from the thinking -unfounded and paranoidthat things are perverted because of betrayal has caused memorable excesses in the history of american power. however, it has also made visible the struggle of those who are hypothetically guilty of treason for wanting to disassemble “the system”. a recent book, if this be treason: the american rogues and rebels who walked the line bettween dissent and betrayal, shows the effects on history of the thin line between the lack of affection towards the prevailing code and betrayal (duda). dissent can be treason, or not. this duel for the honest america is very delicate, a traditional matter of controversy that has been perfectly reflected in the fiction stories (coale). the book of daniel by e. l. doctorow, whose release in 1971, coincided with a stage of hopelessness and turbulence in american society, shows the reader the fictional adventures of a central character within a plot that might be pure history (jeong). daniel isaacson is a young man, son of a couple executed in the postwar period on charges of conspiracy to spy on the government and having passed sensitive information to the ussr. it is easy to find out in this plot the reference to the case of the rosenbergs (clune), the married couple executed by the federal government in 1953. through his own experience, daniel runs into a whole cast of characters coming from a frightened and paranoid society. he faces the critical questions of what it is to be a good american or if a citizen can be a patriot being disloyal to the administration. may be an alter ego of isacson, doctorow reasons that every man must become an enemy of his own country and that every country is an enemy of its own citizens. nevertheless, he does not establish any causal link between both sentences. even if one is linked to a country, countries are not persons. so, the fact that “my” country is related to other countries does not mean that i am. how to understand that governments, if armed, are willing to give their citizens to death just for their benefit? how to understand betrayal within the people’s common sense? betrayal is a crime defined by the constitution and consequently no one can be convicted of treason without the forced testimony of the witnesses or its own confession. the novel refers to the work of nathaniel weyl, betrayal: the story of disloyalty and betrayal in american history, pure controversy about what it means to be a good american or a bad one. weyl, a writer and relevant economist in his time, is also well known for his conservative positions in the fifties, despite having recognized himself as a member of the communist party in the thirties (in 1939 he left the party), a young activist at columbia university and a member of the self-appointed ware group, a cell of the communist party in washington dc, linked with soviet intelligence. weyl became as well famous for testifying against alger hiss, a former left-wing colleague accused of spying in 1950, who was a state department official and who was finally convicted for perjury in 1950 and sentenced to forty four months of imprisonment. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 55 the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet betrayal is a crime defined by the constitution and consequently no one can be convicted of treason without the forced testimony of the witnesses or its own confession. 56 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 57 the angry nation the american system, which in its initial conception can be valued as meticulous, shows traces of change in the expression of criticism and the desire of self correction. so, somehow the good american is the one who shouts the clumsiness of the system and intends to straighten it. the workers, the entrepreneurs, the students, the pioneer women, the minority groups... those that are definitely least favored by the administration in each period, do not just rest meditating at home. they express their frustration and anger at the lounge activism or in the street, through philanthropy or arts, with their voices and actions. the perception of this factor in the american society leads charles duhing -in a recent text for the atlanticto argue that america has always been an angry nation, and that unease and anger are classic trends in united states history. in the begining of the revolution, the enormous discomfort against certain colonial habits of the english administration was expressed. surely, disminishing the war of independence to an effect of people’s anger is an exaggeration that cannot be historically hold. but not because of its weakness as an historical cause, it is less certain that, in fact, the first revolutionary movements in the united states harbored much of popular helplessness and unease at the inflexible wall that was the british system. it has been detected how disappointment, rage and even hate are conditioning the way of doing in american politics. a vibrant example has happened with the appointment of judge brett kavanaugh as a member of the supreme court of justice in 2018. throughout all the procedure, attitudes of rage and histrionic rhetoric coming from defenders and detractors of the judge could be seen (hemingway & severino). the breakup in public opinion was measured by the intensity with which goodnesses and evils of the candidate the workers, the entrepreneurs, the students, the pioneer women, the minority groups... those that are definitely least favored by the administration in each period, do not just rest meditating at home. were shouted. the american authors handle the phenomenon of emotional support to a political candidate regarding people’s frustration and resentment. but also, being it refered to more delicate issues at the heart of the process: for example, the brutalization of people in terrible childhoods or life traumas. although not always for the better, the thought that collective anger can be a powerful lever for social change comes to mind. anger -psychologists argueis one of the clearest forms in people’s communication because it broadcasts a lot of information about the individual. a 1977 study -at the university of amherst, massachusetts, suggested by james averillbased on data from the greenfield 18,000 inhabitants, the average american (if there exists an average american!) was shown in a permanent state of irritation and defensiveness. everything seems to indicate that americans have always been irritated by their political system, with which they remain angry or suspicious. in order to understand the collusion between personal anger and the social movements, social and scientific branches also point out that the phenomenon of the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 58 the average american (if there exists an average american!) was shown in a permanent state of irritation and defensiveness. emotional voting in elections are due to frustration and resentment. anonymous american’s rage is a behaviour at which travelers, journalists and writers have paid attention. recently, slogans such as “jews will not replace us” or “white lives matter” have been heard, some others urging to defeat the “fascist liberal democrats”, the protesters on the street asking those enemies to be replaced in institutions by “people like god commands” (nice guys). these are the alt-right movements pride on the white ethno nationalism and the socalled western civilization. but certainly neither the alt-right movements nor presidencies as the donald trump’s have invented the use of anger to make politics. in the nineties, the american policy had in the newt gingrich -head of the republicans in the house of representatives and nominated to the presidency for his party in 2012a pioneer in the use of histrionics, rage, and even intimidating messages (packer). about the current intimidating rhetoric, historians have seen some parallelism with several precedent states of affairs: for exemple in the 1850s (freeman). paradigmatic in this field, the thirties showed the world that the social rage that overflowed the codes, was also part of the american style. in the field of fiction, the book the grapes of wrath by john steinbeck (1939) dived into the daily routine of universal issues such as war, totalitarianism, hunger, unemployment, despair... the anger exposed by steinbeck was reduced to the substratum of proper names, experiences; it was tangible, human, much more real than the anger of the faceless people taken the winter palace in 1917. the dogma of american democracy was irrelevant to the starving americans. nor was there any interest in defending universal causes as the self-determination of the people and nations that were a target of discussion in the international interwar scene. until reaching the narration of anger, steinbeck had taken the path of despair in us. he covered -helped by the superb work of the photographer dorothea lange (spirn) to whom the government commissioned to make a photographic report between 1935 and 1936 (quirke)the crisis of farmers migrating on foot to california due to the effects of the dust bowl (gregory). during the depression famine and dust storms had primed with the agricultural population of the midwest, in the states of oklahoma, kansas, texas, nebraska, south dakota and colorado. a wave of migrants, homeless people, itinerant ones of all ages, sex and condition, systematically moved westward, leaving behind them their belongings first, and then their lives. children are born dead, grandparents pass away while walking, those who live starve themselves to death, the dignity of migrants is stunned by pain and fear, finally by absolute helplessness and shame. john steinbeck describes the situation in seven articles for the san francisco news. this work form a book entitled the harvest gypsies (steinbeck 1936). those immigrants who go to the “haciendas” -says steinbeck-, are first used to serve the californian agricultural industry, and then rejected: unnecessary ones, they become homeless. even though in their pain, they are also hated by the local population: because they are dirty and ignorant, they bring diseases and insecurity. the american optimism cracks when it comes to considering the behavior of power. when anger rises to the category of social fury and some kind of rebellion erupts, the offense of power to the people takes the form of a moral truth. such situations have occurred in matters of race and civil rights, in the abolitionism during the first half of the nineteenth century (harrold), or in the civil rights movement between the 1950s and 1970s (burrogh). also in the anti-nuclear and environmental protection campaigns in the east and in california from the sixties to the eighties: transversal activisms regarding the ideological and social origin of the activists, even though the conservative media have characterized them as “liberal” or lefties movements. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 59 most times american vote against an option, not in favor. one recent example has been carried out by the citizens opposing to trumpism in the mid term, 2018. anger is seen in the voter’s reactions to state legislative elections in many occasions. a relevant percentage of the population considers this institution systematically harmful with their particular interests. voting in anger is channeling through the vote the feeling of affront and the desire of revenge from policies that we believe to be harmful for us. getting angry and showing myself as such is easier than deciding which option is the least attentive to my interests. but the anger vote usually gives ephemeral or pernicious results. in carnegie hall, february 1968, in reference to the radicalism that distilled people’s fury, martin luther king addressed the audience warning that “being angry is not enough”. hate: public limited company throughout contemporary history, popular anger takes its shape in groups and political parties whose purpose is to destroy the current system. fascisms, dictatorships, cesarisms, authoritarianisms, etc. are usually the culmination of mass movement processes guided by populism -but not only this: revolutionary governments as well. populism, the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet fascisms, dictatorships, cesarisms, authoritarianisms, etc. are usually the culmination of mass movement processes guided by populism. 60 apart from the nuanced definitions handled by political scientists, is sometimes not so easy to discern. josé maría lassalle (lasalle) suggests that today there is a “sociological right” that lives “frightened by the cultural changes of the 21st century” in addition to “a transverse apoliticism that brings together a multitude of discomforts against the hegemonic intellectual left”. the fear of change and transversal apoliticism demand “moral order” and mostly a range of simpler political options. the sociological right would have experienced a deep discomfort with postmodern images: pluralism, heterodoxy, relativism, fragmentation, identities... this could be interpreted as a reprehensible expression of the prevailing disorder. americans, following populism or sociological right, voted in 2016 with a large percentage in favor a candidate who, like them, felt excluded from the current system. however, “trumpism” should not be considered as a historical exception; it founds its dogma on bringing the “plebs” to the very heart of the political regime obviating as much as possible the institutional intermediations of democracy, pretending to lighten the weight of the legislative power in favor of the executive. the leader “understands” the needs of the people and pretends to produce laws bypassing debate and consensus. this is not new, nor is it that populism flattens the intellectual horizon of citizens by nullifying their expertise to overcome the distance between what is wrong and what is right, what is morally reprehensible or what is not. once the political correctness has fallen, the abundance of media –mainly through social networksand the speed with which messages are spread accelerate the transition to violent forms: without biting our tongues, without distance of reason and moderation, losing empathy and tolerance. when it is the group who defames or insults, this action becomes a powerful weapon that breaks coexistence. maintaining the forms, the second half of the twentieth century society has raised taboos about some differences such as skin colour, clothing style, language, religion, sexual orientation... sociological right-wing parties, brutalized, have expressed their disgust and immediacy in political action: steady hand beating the problems -most of them being not temporary and that cannot be solved through specific actions. the paradox is that the postmodern condition of immediacy is empowering the ideological profiles that precisely detest postmodernity. i will evoke that trump’s hand gesture underlining vigorously two words: “right now!” the most recent american sociological right-wing party appeals to the fantasy of a world prior to the digital revolution, a recognizable place in history to the american hegemony. however this self-proclaimed party calls for a closed and clear order in which national facts can only be interpreted in the category of myths. the chimera shows the bluenecked america, the industrial america that imposes its patents and products on the rest of the world, coinciding with the more youthful stage of trump’s life: a man in his old age who resists recognizing the current world, and who makes no effort to empathize with that large portion of citizens who have not voted for him. the american alt-right movements surfaced a decade ago in local politics, and are by no means an updated form of american conservatism, which dan t. carter already analyzed in his book the politics of rage. george wallace, the origins of the new conservatism, and the transformation of american politics (carter). there is not a direct link between recent sociological right movements and more or less recent past radical conservatisms. the alt-right emerged around 2008 mainly in postmodern sites like twitter. the groups make use of social networks and television reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 61 the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet the most recent american sociological right-wing party appeals to the fantasy of a world prior to the digital revolution, a recognizable place in history to the american hegemony. 62 channels to attract new members: both young people living in the virtual world and their grandparents who do not separate from television and who mishandle the internet. since its inception, they have been shaping their slogans taking the ongoing events as targets to harass: one day they it may be the refugees from syria, another one the black lives matter movement, the feminist movements or the lgbti activism. the alt-right prides itself on the common ethno white nationalism and the so-called western civilization, but it should not be confused with a specifically southern or midwest expression: that of the angry impoverished people, separated by the system from all the goodness and benefits of their country. each expression of the alt-right has got its peculiarities, although all groups agree on the fact that the classical republican party does not represent their interests, and that it has betrayed them. the slogans shouted by the members of these groups in their public rallies and demonstrations do not express specific demands, only anger and resentment (milburn & conrad), especially against those who are neither angry nor resentful. no one has explained these movements -historically speakingwith the logic of changing the demographic and social configuration of the country. the american whites have lost positions in the control of the structures that manage power, and consequently they felt displaced, demoralized and “dispossessed” of the united states, a country they consider they have the right to rule. in fact, this perception has emerged cyclically in the country. as the extreme right movements did in the 1920s, these groups of outraged citizens proclaim the right to an insurgent activism, on the idea that the current political culture does not defend but hurts their interests, making them strangers in their own country. the alt-right was accompanied by attitudes in favor of the self-defense rights, and the particular use of weapons invoking the second amendment of the constitution. in colleges and university campuses -for example the riots in charlottesville, in the state of virginia (august 2017)it was not unusual to hear young people chant frivolously: “hail trump”, “hail our people” or “hail victory!”. the documentary entitled alt-right: age of rage, by adam lough (2018) is a credible account on the nature of this movement, whose name was coined in 2008 by one of its most popular leaders, richard spencer. jared taylor with his book racial consciousness in the 21th century (2011) invokes the creation of an ethno racial state; or the american renaissance magazine, now renewed into a website, which defends the idea of a white community pride. after a decade of intense activism, analysts suggest that the alt-right is declining due to internal divisions that make a dent in the strength of its actions. in addition, the arrival of answering groups, the antifa or antifascists, also has an impact on the supremacist movement. the american antifa, inspired by the thirties anti-fascist movements in the europe, has been object of attention in crucial foreign media such as the guardian. the bbc channel at the beginning of 2017 claimed that a battle between two opposed poles reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 63 was taking place in the united states: antifa v alt-right (yates), and the supremacist leader spencer himself recognized that the antifa was seriously undermining them. both positions, alt-right and antifa, have reminded people of episodes that took place in the thirties and that nobody wanted to be reminded of. after the start of the trump presidency, supporters and detractors of the new president literally stuck in the street, and there were hundreds of detainees for their violent actions throughout the country. with the citizenship severely divided, many analysts would rate the year of 2017 as one of the darkest eras remembered in the united states due to hate and violence (roberstson). in short, as the analyst fareed zakaria warned in 2017, the trump presidency lead to an emphasis of the social polarization. in a kind of little virtuous revival, citizens seem to seek their place in society by defining themselves through personal identity elements such as race, gender, sexual orientation... wealth and poverty accompany these characterizations, but are not substantial when it comes to the understanding of the situation. in the last decade, americans -especially young peopledid not define themselves the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 64 by a political choice. social classes are no more clearly denoted. however, cultural distance between non-university rural space and university and professional urban elites can be observed. the problem –as zakaria pointed outis that identity, culture, or creeds are not “reasonable” aspects, or a matter of negotiation and social commitment. the administration could negotiate about material matters or economic differences, and agreements aimed at social peace. the investment in resources fitted the solutions in a range of possibilities from zero to ten. satisfactory action plans could be achieved in the middle of this scale. but this is not possible when identity comes the matter of the negotiation. at this point, the positions have irreducibly developped. in the last decade, americans -especially young peopledid not define themselves by a political choice. social classes are no more clearly denoted. however, cultural distance between non-university rural space and university and professional urban elites can be observed. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 65 images of anger over the decades, actions linked to social frictions have diversified their forms. americans have for example burned their flag more often than we usually imagine if we take into account that this country displays a flag in every corner because us americans love their colors. the constant dialogue between acceptance and rejection with this symbol is one of the symptoms of their identity. in the act of burning the american flag -protected by the right of free expressiona radical complaint which would be defined as anti-american was raised. in november 2016, after trump’s victory, at the sight of a country in hands of a leader considered by many people dishonest, quirky, liar and a lot of other nasty things, the streets of the united states were filled with frightened citizens. we recover the archives of the country’s press editing images of large groups of people around a burning american flag. the staging of this national disgust was to attack the most efficient symbol of americanism: the flag. this action expressed the feeling of disaffection and helplessness in which a remarkable part of nation find themselves after trump’s victory. the number of riots that included the vexation of the flag increased. students from hampshire college, massachusetts, withdrew the national flag of the institution, an example that was followed by other schools all across the country: “if my flag represents “this”, it is no longer my flag: shame on us!” the war of the flags spread like wildfire when the reaction of the groups considered the self-defenders of national symbols broke out. some devastating slogans in the style that crowned the head of the washington post on november 9, such as “democracy dies in darkness”, helped to justify the “anti”outbursts. defenders and critics with these angry actions invoked similar arguments. the triumphant america and the loser one reproached each other for the lack of morality and respect, as well as for behavior unworthiness. if for some individuals the trump presidency was moral and aesthetically ugly, for others the burning of the flag was dishonest, a treason to the nation. in both positions there was a kind of panic, but only the defenders of the sacred sense of the flag (welch, 2000) above the individual right to free expression criminalized the protest actions of the losers at the polls. the united states has been an inspiring nation for the youth all over the world that, even if censoring the presence of the united states outside its borders, has imitated those rebel styles with which young americans have fully engaged activisms against the system. the getty images archive keeps images of americans of all ethnicity, gender, and condition rallying for the defense of civil rights (speltz) and burning the symbols of the homeland. burning flags was a national sport in the years of struggle between unionists and confederates; throughout the nineteenth century, the followers of political foes burned partisan flags. some years later, in 1967 a united states flag was burnt in central park. and american pop art in the fifties -jasper johns (israel)used the flag at will. later, in the eighties, the artist dread scott (remember that dred scott, without the “a” was the name of the slave who, in the 1850s, took a pulse to the entire american legal system for the recognition of his free man condition), displayed an american flag on the floor of an exhibition asking the public what was the correct way to display a flag (1989, school of the art institute of chicago) (vile). the advertising companies that began to promote the products of modern america at the beginning of the twentieth century placed the (very colorful) flag on the product label, where they thought it would have a favorable effect on sales. it is worth to recall that, on the matter of how and where the flag can be deployed, there is a protocol in the united states. this issue is so important that there is an extensive literature on the controversies about the misuse of the american flag. in his book, burning the flag: the great 1989-1990 american flag desecration, robert justin goldstein investigates the controversy that, between 1984 and 1990, went into court. eluding the details about the particular case of the flag burned in dallas (1984), the fundamental question was whether to lash out against the flag was acceptable (and consequently legal) as a form of political protest. in 1989 the supreme court recognized that burning the flag constitutes a merely cultural act, a form of discourse and not a violent or a criminal gesture, thus giving arguments in favor of those who defended the right to express themselves according to the dictates of the culture of the protest. guilty, ashamed and redeemed we are used to thinking that americans approach to universal moral values from the peculiarity of the so-called american values. from this perspective, the us american “subjectivity” has won the battle to the universal values. but also, american history has revitalized a type of individual conscience that, tormented by shame (stearns, shame: a brief history) and blame about the damage committed by administrations, seeks the way to promote empathy with the heirs of victims and tries to recompose the moral damage with current actions. the history of collective feeling of shame in the united states shows highs and lows. the illustrated revolution in america at the end of the 18th century highlighted human dignity. benjamin rush stated that “it is universally recognized that shame is a punishment worse than death”. throughout the nineteenth century, the virtue of shame was abused, to the point that it acquired a relevant position in private space under the guidance of puritanism, of course not in the field of public and institutional activities. the ominous slavery institution remained for a long time and, once done, the american nation preferred not to assume any kind of regret or shame. afterwards, during the hightlights of the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 66 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 67 the american project –the gilded ageself-confidence and arrogance prevailed. according to the scholars, in the splendid decades of pax americana -1940s and 1970sthe lowest levels in the citizenship tendency to feel shame were appreciated. scholars stated that nevertheless, from the nineties, the american society would have significantly increased that feeling of shame. nowadays, the shame’s revival (stearns, “does american culture shame too much –or not enough?”) suggests that us americans discover a certain empathy with the harms of others, especially those related to the reprehensible actions of their ancestors. actually, the feeling of guilt and shame is perhaps more rooted in the catholic culture than in the protestant one. we perfectly know that protestant ethics eludes both feelings, guilt and shame, when the damage emanates from actions over which the individual has no control. this is obvious in the case of the ominous past of the powers, which in the united states clearly refers to the original american populations, massacred or cornered in the indians reserves during the 19th century. however, there is also a feeling of responsibility due to an unhealthy heritage, especially in response to those government actions that injured human rights in their most universal aspects. this kind of attitude involves many us citizen activisms inside and abroad the country. this progressive activism (inspired by the thinking of the unnatural disorder or the world), that blamed of unethical the administration actions, was known as folk politics. this activism rallied the criticism of the government’s warmongering attitude or the bankruptcies of the constitutional legacy of civil rights. the term folk politics, which became very popular was coined by nick srnicek and alex williams to refer to a type of protest that, in their opinion, came ineffective to modify things. the protesters did not understand, they said, the real and complex nature of the problems that aroused them. today, protest movements, continued srnick and williams, are isolated, without a logical structure or clear objectives american history has revitalized a type of individual conscience that, tormented by shame and blame about the damage committed by administrations, seeks the way to promote empathy with the heirs of victims and tries to recompose the moral damage with current actions. of change in the style of those of the twentieth century. somehow, the culture of the recent american protest resembles those of the last third of the nineteenth century. however, the atomization of critical movements within the country also manifests the style of doing things in the current times: fractured, if compared with those of the late twentieth century. the issue of inherited guilt (pettigrove) -away in almost in most epochs of the historysneaks into american public debates with more or less intensity depending on the nature of times. attempts have been made to close the historical processes by requesting the forgiveness of the still alive victims, for example of japanese-born americans interned in camps during world war ii (presidente reagan in the us congress in 1988). this process was followed by an economic endowment of more than a billion and a half dollars to compensate the victims and their heirs. furthermore, the responsibility for the extermination of the indians has been a recurrent topic from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, having achieved some kind of recognition of the damage that, without satisfying the descendants of the victims, tends to close the issue. but it does not happen the same with slavery: a the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 68 wound is still open (davis). in 1998, during a tour in africa, president clinton repeatedly apologized for the slave trade. but on clinton rained all kinds of criticism in the united states: for apologizing in countries such as uganda or rwanda, which had not been a source of export of slaves to north america, for acting on the basis of the political interests of the united states in african countries, for not apologizing directly to the community of afro descendants in the united states, for not remembering that slavery was also then a plague in many areas of the african continent... certainly, for decades the black community in the united states has been demanding the recognition of inherited guilt and the subsequent reparations. in 2007 the virginia legislature adopted a resolution of apology for slavery, which was followed by other historical slavery states: arkansas, florida, connecticut, maryland, new jersey, and attempts have been made to close the historical processes by requesting the forgiveness of the still alive victims, for example of japanese-born americans interned in camps during world war ii (presidente reagan in the us congress in 1988). reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 69 north carolina. but most important, the legislative chambers passed resolutions asking for forgiveness about the role played in the slavery maintenance processes during the first decades of the 19th century. of course, these acts of formal request for forgiveness have never been verified by any executive branch. the recent apology, during the presidential campaign in 2015, of the democratic candidate bernie sanders, is surely the result of a virtuous ethic but also of a political opportunity. the important question is that it exemplifies the collective unavoidable feeling of guilt of an entire country. as a way to collective redemption, people are assuming the ominous ancient events they hardly know. public actions intended to ask for forgiveness tend to deal with matters that do not correspond to the actions in question. for instance, reagan apologized for the collective hysteria that took thousands of japanese-american citizens in concentration camps, but he did not do so for the civilian deaths resulting from military actions during his tenure such as the nearly three hundred passengers of an iranian flight who lost their lives due to a us missile. the obama era (2008-2016) was the opportunity to address discursively the question of the recognition of the harms and to ask for forgiveness, but the geopolitical relevance was not alien to this peculiarity of the stage in question. on the contrary, obama did not apologized in his visit to japan in 2016 for the facts of annihilation of the civilian population because of the launching of nuclear bombs on hiroshima and nagasaki; the total amount of victims is unknown but it is thought to be about one hundred and fifty thousand people. therefore, although with exceptions, the united states does not reconsider the political and military decisions taken in times of war, as jennifer lind explained in sorry states: apologies in international politics. in relation to individuals, the american citizen may offer finance and life in the service of humanitarian causes. it is observed that those citizens apologize for belonging to a country overflowing with resources, for feeling immensely favored by a fate that they believe they do not deserve, or for feeling the punctual vital restlessness unavoidable for people overwhelmed by everyday lacks and dangers. in a good novel published just over a decade ago, returning to the earth, the author, jim harrison, drew a character that is precisely the embodiment of the american unselfconfident but also capable of loading with all the negative actions of the american history. david is an apprehensive man who emerges from sadness to provide material supplies and devices, bought with his inherited assets, to those who illegally cross the mexican and continue northward. but faith in the authenticity and sense of this humanitarian cause falls apart when david proves that, by integrating other activists into his project, a huge ngo emerges, and consequently, it becomes to work more efficiently, “in the american way”, as a company. david feels defeated in his interest in correcting the global evil just by doing the right thing, by doing something good. the legacy of disenchantment disenchantment, hopelessness, lack of faith in themselves... no one better than americans to tell the great deception of the american dream. pessimism is part of the tone in the american cultural legacy: the disaffection for the group to which one belongs, the self-destructive air of the characters, the warnings, the conspiracies and prophecies, the hidden organized crime, the insignificant heroes… just a disgression. despite the weight of this narrative tendency that underlines the disappointment, not americans but canadians are those who better embody the rhetoric of defeat and loss. this thesis is well developed in the work of seymour martin lipset, continental divide. the values and institutions of the united states and canada. american identity has incorporated the dogma that the country comes from the “winners”: the uprising settlers against the english tyranny. meanwhile the canadians founded their country on the basis of the legitimists loosers that fled to the northern british colonies, in nova scotia and new brunswick. two classics with a very different literary profile, both nobel prizes for literature, give us solid examples of the cultural weight of american moral dejection. when in the early twentieth century sinclair lewis dared to denounce the very unimpressive daily life of the midwest in his book main street, describing the abulia and the vital poorness, the public opinion understood he was little less than committing treason. lewis had little success among the readers of his time, but nowadays we appreciate in the book the harsh exposure of purely american stocks, mistakenly imagining that the author radiographed americanity in its purest state. decades later, i turn again to the work of john steinbeck, in this case with the title the winter of our discontent (1960), which clearly expresses the feeling of helplessness in the face of the great lie of the american dream in the fifties. in the society portrayed by steinbeck nobody and nothing is what it seems to be; money is the essence of each other’s interest, immigrants cheat on the administration, vendors bribe for getting a customer, and even friends and siblings denounce each other in anticipation of a reward. envy, jealousy, lies… all these impoverish the human quality of relations between relatives and comrades. where is the social optimism that it used to be in america at the end of the second world war? where is the morality that corresponds to american democracy? but in the same way that the american licks his wounds, he narrates the titanic efforts to get out of the hole, to overcome frustration and anger. literally speaking, as if the attack on the twin towers in 2001 had been a transcript of vesuvius eruption that took pompeii and herculaneum ahead, in the cultural images about the horror of 9/11 we find out this idea of an inadequate and finalized world from whose ashes a different america will arise. the unjustifiable attack could also be seen as an opportunity to amend the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 70 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 71 mistakes. in jay mclnerney’s novel, the good life, the reconstruction of new york city from the attacks is proposed as a window, an opportunity to improve the unsatisfactory lifestyle of manhattan people: the wasteful and obscene abundance conceived in the nineties. the feeling of rebellion implies becoming aware of oneself, in an intimate way first, then in comunity. and this critical, radical or delicate attitude, perhaps labelled as anti-american (huguet), deeply differs from conventional regenerations. in the disgust for the us america in progress, dystopia unfolds with many curious examples of the americans self-critical attitude. i will just mention colson whitehead’s book, zone one. the central character in this book, named mark spitz, cleans the streets of manhattan, and while doing so he goes back to the past. in that place there was an instant when human civilization jumped through the air -humanity as a whole, or humanity as the american civilization?, we may wonder. immersed in self-pessimism, in white noise (don de lillo) one can clearly see the critical feeling about what we have become. in de lillo’s story, the action takes place at the east coast, in the north of new york. in this dystopia there is no longer a “clean” place in america where to take refuge from the environmental catastrophe that lurks. when the average citizen contemplates the television screen, his attention is captured, says de lillo, by a constant flow of words and images, graphics and particles. this image of america becomes even more devastating when de lillo says that people suffer from cerebral wilting and predicts that a catastrophe is needed from time to time to interrupt the ceaseless bombardment of information. and all of that in 1985, when digital revolution had not appeared! a decade earlier, in 1976, sydney lumet directs network (itzkoff), a satire on the dark world of television. being selected in 2000 for preservation in the national filmography registry, the movie presents the system -televisionas corrupt, terrifying, and unforgiving. no one can emerge victorious from the contact with it. there is not a great difference with the edgard allan poe’s tales, which precisely subverted the triumphalist discourse of success and prosperity, of full selfconfidence in the ability of american society to transform itself (tally). america does not work for everyone, because in fact it has never been of great use to those who could not know how to take advantage of it. finally, in the traditional national literature of losers and defeated since the great depression (hearn), the united states is no longer a country of opportunity, a place that drives the ragged social foundations toward the tops of abundance and well-being. on the contrary, it is a stark country in which the best that can happen to those who arrive with their hands in their pockets is to realize in time that america deceives them, and to be in a hurry to return home. to close this article, quoting dos passos in his manhattan transfer is perhaps to mention the evidence, a testimony that nevertheless continues being very useful to understand the self-criticism in america. in dos passos novel, the america imagined by migrants is just a postcard. the real america are the humiliating medical inspections before leaving the ship that takes us to its coasts, the devious officials we do not understand, the infected neighborhood near the port that, perhaps, we will never reach, the working hours –if there are jobsdemolishing people for unsatisfactory wages... america does not work for everyone, because in fact it has never been of great use to those who could not know how to take advantage of it. the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 72 averill, j. r. anger and aggression: an essay on emotion. new york: springer-verlag, 1982. print. burrogh, b. days of rage: america’s radical underground, the fbi, and the forgotten age of revolutionary violence. new york: penguin books, 2015. print. carter, d. t. the politics of rage: george wallace, the origins of the new conservatism, and the transformation of american politics. baton rouge, louisiana: lsu press, 2000. print. clune, l. executing the rosenbergs: death and diplomacy in a cold war world. new york: oxford university press, 2016. print. coale, s. ch. paradigmas of paranoia. the culture of conspiracy in contemporary american fiction. tuscaloosa: the university of alabama press, 2019. print. davis, a. m. “apologies, reparations, and the continuing legacy of the european slave trade in the united states”. journal of black studies. 45: 4. (2014): 271-286. print. de lillo, d. white noise. new york: viking press, 1985. print. doctorow, e. l. the book of daniel. new york: random house, 1971. print. dos passos, j. manhattan transfer. new york: harper & brothers, 1925. print. duda, j. if this be treason: the american rogues and rebels who walked the line between dissent and betrayal. connecticut: guilford, 2017. print. duhing, ch. “the real roots of american rage. the untold story of how anger became the dominant emotion in our politics and personal lives –and what we can do about it”. the atlantic. january/february 2019. print. freeman, j. b. the field of blood: violence in congress and the road to civil war. new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 2018. print. garcía, o. j. & r. magnútóttir. eds. machineries of persuasion european soft power and public diplomacy during the cold war. berlin, boston: gruyter oldenbourg, 2019. print. references goldstein, r. j. burning the flag: the great 1989-1990 american flag desecration. kent: the kent state university press, 1996. print. gregory, j. n. american exodus. the dust bolwl migration and okie culture in california. new york: oxford university press, 1989. print. harrison, j. returning to the earth. new york: grove press, 2007. print. harrold, s. american abolitionism: its direct political impact from colonial times into reconstruction. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2019. print. hearn, ch. r. the american dream in the great depression. santa barbara: greewood press, 1977. print. hemingway, m. & c. severino. justice on trial: the kavanaugh confirmation and the future of the supreme court. new york: simon & schuster, 2019. print. hofstadter, r. “the paranoid style in american politics”. harper´s magazine. november 1964: 77-86. print. huguet, m. “el americano antiamericano”. the conversation.com. 10 june 2019. web. israel, s. m. jasper johns: allegory of the american flag. new york: purchase college state, university of new york. art history board of study, 2003. print. itzkoff, d. mad as hell. the making of “network” and the fateful vision of the angriest man in movies. new york: henry holt and company, 2014. print. jeong, s. representing the rosenberg case: coover, doctorow and the consequences of postmodernism. seoul: seoul national university, american studies institute, 1994. print. lasalle, j. m. “vox o la brutalidad política”. la vanguardia. 19 january 2019. print. lind, j. sorry states: apologies in international politics. london: ithaca, 2008. print. lipset, s. m. continental divide. the values and institutions of the united states and canada. new york: routledge, 1990. print. mclmerney, j. the good life. new york: knopf, 2006. print. milburn, m. a. & s. d. conrad. raised to rage: the politics of anger and the roots of authoritarianism. cambridge: the mit press, 2016. print. packer, g. the unwinding. thierty years of american decline. new york: farrar strauss and giroux, 2013. print. pettigrove, g. “apology, reparations, and the question of inherited guilt”, public affairs quarterly. 17: 4. (2003): 319-348. print. quirke, c. “‘these things are a pressin’ on us’: dorothea lange as government photographer, 1935-1936”. dorothea lange, documentary photography, and twentieth-century america. reinventing self and nation. new york: routledge, 2019. print. roberstson, a. “alt-right: age of rage is a snapshot of one of 2017´s darkest moments”. the verge. 14 march 2018. print. sennett, r. “lo gratuito conlleva siempre una forma de dominación”. el país semanal. 18 august 2018: 47-51. print. sennet, r. the culture of the new capitalism. connecticut: yale university press, 2006. print. speltz, m. “an activist´s view of the civil right movement”. the iris behind the scenes at the getty. 26 october 2016. web. spirn, a. w. daring to look: dorothea lange´s photographs and reports from the field. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2008. print. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 73 the us american self-criticism. stories of anger and bewilderment montserrat huguet 74 srnicek, n. & a. williams. inventing the future: postcapitalism and a world without work. london; new york: verso, 2015. print. starobin, p. “the angry american. social rage as a measure of the country´s moral and politica well-beign”. the atlantic. january/february 2004. web. stearns, p. “does american culture shame too much –or not enough?” the conversation.com. 7 november 2017. web. ---. shame: a brief history. illinois: the board of trustees of the university of illinois, 2017. print. steinbeck, j. the winter of our discontent. london: penguin, [1960] 2008. print. ---. “the harvest gypsies”. san francisco news. 5-12 october. print. tally, r. t. jr. poe and the subversion of american literature: satire, fantasy, critique. london, new york: bloomsbury, 2014. print. vile, j. r. the american flag: an encyclopedia of the star and stripes in us history, santa barbara. los angeles: abc-clio, 2018. print. welch, m. flag burning: moral panic and the criminalization of protest. new york: aldine de gruyter, 2000. print. weyl, n. treason: the story of disloyalty and betrayal in american history. washington d.c.: public affairs press, 1950. print. yates, w. “america´s extremist battle: antifa v alt-right”. bbc trending. february 2017. web. zakaria, f. “eeuu ya es un país absolutamente polarizado… y ésta es la razón”. el gps global. el confidencial. 26 june 2017. print. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 91 flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city beatrice melodia festa università di verona / università di bari abstract even though teju cole’s debut novel, open city, has often been analyzed within the spectrum of themes such as racialization and ethnicity, its relevance in the post-9/11 canon is worthy of attention. as such, this contribution seeks to examine the salience of september 11 and the role of the protagonist, as post9/11 flâneur, considering how cole’s novel reframes the political and transnational consequences of 9/11 drawing from flânerie to offer a wider viewpoint on the national and interracial implications of the attacks. as the article aims to show, the narrative adopts flânerie as a strategy to ponder on the post9/11 phenomenon memorializing the attacks in new york and consequently reterritorializing terrorism in brussels to engage in an international perspective. aligning with the contention that post-9/11 narratives have been concerned with revising the city as the origin of a discussion on the attacks, the essay aims to show how cole leans toward a universalist view of the event so that the novel engages with the transcontinental impact of 9/11. this article's ultimate intent is to consider the flâneur as the thread that guides to a broader challenging discussion on the significance of 9/11 respatializing the consequences of the terrorist attacks beyond the united states. keywords: post-9/11 novel, flâneur, terrorism, memorialization, collective mourning. despite two decades went by, the significance of 9/11 as a cultural and national tragedy implies a global sense of trauma. over time, however, more nuanced and socio-historical perspectives about 9/11 and its impact on america and the world have emerged. even though literature and cinema have addressed the emotional and psychic consequences of the terrorist attacks, the gravity of that day was documented by the media whose coverage later evolved to inflict a devastating sense of loss deemed to become a historical legacy. even after the immediate shock of 9/11 had decreased, concerns over terrorism remained at higher levels all over the world finding its fullest expression in the growing body of literature defined as the beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 92 “9/11 novel” or 9/11 fiction (keeble 5).1 in that sense, a crescent number of literary texts have represented the difficult and problematic aspects related to the tragedy. thus, one question emerges. if the enduring power of 9/11 as a global tragedy is clear, what does define a post-9/11 novel? the point has been raised by critics and scholars who, in the aftermath of what is known as “the post-9/11 moment,” faced the rousing examples of narratives illustrating the traumatic effects of the tragedy. drawing in part from arin keeble’s seminal analysis, we can say that the corpus of novels classified as 9/11 fiction has cumulatively much to say about the implications and patterns of the wider and global response to 9/11 (5). that is to say that narratives considered part of the canon provide in-textual analyses of conflictedness, memorialization and traumatization, offering nuanced depictions of the cultural consequences of the attacks. in so doing, these novels internalize the effects of terrorism contextualizing the traumatic effects of the tragedy in post-9/11 scenarios. as keeble further notes, “9/11 novels when examined as documents or artifacts, unravel conflictedness providing a reflection of the ways in which society (in particular american society) has negotiated this struggle over the last decade” (199). if carefully read, the first literary success of nigerian american writer teju cole, open city (2011), can be labeled as a post-9/11 narrative or—as i aim to show— a novel that delves into the implications of september 11 from an interracial and borderless perspective. in open city, cole constructs a narrator who deals with the cumulative response to terrorism examining the transnational consequences of 9/11 through the practice of flânerie. setting the novel in the landscape of post 9/11 literature, my aim is to show how cole draws from the figure of the flâneur in new york to develop a universalist view of september 11, respatializing the question beyond america’s borders. my argument then runs in two directions; first outlining cole’s ambitious revitalization of the flâneur as a cosmopolitan character, and ultimately showing how the narrative departs from flânerie to engage in a political and global consideration on the matter of 9/11 touching on themes such as anti-american ideology and islamophobia. i. reterritorializing september 11: the case of open city on the whole, open city, centers on the figure of julius, a psychiatrist of german nigerian extraction,2 who roams the streets of manhattan as a voyeur of city life drifting through the united states and europe as he struggles with concerns such as identity, history, memory, and ultimately race. the novel is set in the aftermath of 9/11 (autumn of 2006), and the narrator is an immigrant living in new york, born in nigeria from a german mother and a nigerian 1 scholarship on 9/11 fiction is extremely vast and diversified. yet, for a preliminary discussion on 9/11 fiction, which for various reasons i cannot extend here, see arin keeble, the 9/11 novel: trauma, politics and identity: a critical study of an evolving canon (2014). 2 an autobiographical reference to cole. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 93 father. given his presence in new york as an immigrant, a cosmopolitan and a foreigner, as he engages in compulsive walks through the city, the protagonist’s itinerant experience becomes a cumulative investigation of complicated issues among which black discrimination, slavery, the american past and ultimately the enduring post-9/11 malaise. as the plot unravels, the narrative remains caught in a set of diffused preoccupations that become one of the most enigmatic aspects of a seemingly simple plot. throughout his nomadic journey, julius undertakes a mental and physical flight across continents (from america to europe and back), that culminates in a mental and psychological evasion that cole illustrates through a smoothly elegant prose. in this scenario, the protagonist is alternatively imbued with the complex aspects of different areas of the cities he has visited, struggling to connect the stories of the people he encounters with his personal observation of the areas and its vicinities (ameel 265). breaking down linguistic and cultural barriers, the protagonist dialogues and observes a sheer variety of ethnicities by conversing with people who, like him, are citizens of the world. while the cosmopolitan and transnational motifs are undoubtedly some of the central themes of the novel, an equally present but undoubtedly less obvious trope is related to 9/11 and the question of terrorism examined from a multi-ethnic perspective. with remarkable consistency, the novel provides a dualistic attitude on september 11 respectively illustrated in the first and second section of the book. considering its date of publication and the context in which the novel is set, 9/11 occupies a relevant role within the plot. nevertheless, the post9/11 malaise in new york is first depicted as julius walks and stops at the site of ground zero to recall the effects of the tragedy within the american context. in turn, halfway through the novel, the discussion of terrorism shifts the focus of narration from new york to julius’s encounter with moroccan immigrants in belgium and their conversation engages in islamophobic sentiments that culminate in a provocative statement on anti-american radicalism. by undertaking the examination of 9/11 as a prominent theme in open city, the analysis of julius as a flâneur proves its significance highlighting the novel’s revival of the archetype to engage in a discussion on 9/11 that sets the question of terrorism outside the united states. to state the obvious, attention to terrorism in literature increased after the attacks at the world trade centre and, following peter herman, after september 11 terrorism has become a critical concept in literature that reshapes the way we read novels set in the post 9/11 landscape (2018).3 susana araujo suggests, “9/11 literature should not be read exclusively in relation to us culture but from a transnational perspective” (araujo 1). most of the works devoted to 9/11 have considered the event prominently through trauma theory focusing on it as an exclusively national american experience. conversely, it can be argued that cole addresses the tragedy through a transcontinental approach that considers the city a palimpsest of american remembrance and as the starting point to look at the event from a transoceanic perspective as the 3 for a preliminary discussion on terrorism and literature see perter herman’s terrorism and literature (2018). beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 94 flâneur leaves new york re-examining the question in brussels. in effect, araujo further notes how it is well-known that “the terrorist arracks of 9/11 provided shocking images which the western psyche had to come to terms with” (1). it indeed was a historical event whose meanings and repercussions were discussed and debated all over the world and that inevitably induced an outpouring of fiction associated with it (araujo 10). in face of this, kristiaan versluys remarked that, thanks also to the visual media that shaped a collective sense of mourning, novels with characters who are not american demonstrated how september 11 has been a global event (65). yet, among post-9/11 narratives, novels have been concerned with revising and depicting the city as the site of collective grieving. in a combination between urbanism and the literary text, narratives have often portrayed new york as the place to initiate the discussion on terrorism and the site of remembrance in what has been mostly classified as the “new york novel.” as araujo additionally clarifies, these texts navigate and re-think the “eventfulness” (araujo 19) and the consequences of september 11 examining the attacks in light of historical, political, and social meanings, so that these novels reflect different trends and positions in relation to the urban memory of 9/11 (araujo 24) from a multinational approach.4 nevertheless, my classification of open city as a post-9/11 novel holds the narrative within that canon of american literature that—instead of directly revolving around the event itself—retrieves the possibility of a wider approach. ii. julius as cosmopolitan flaneur cole’s protagonist ventures alone into the streets of post-9/11 new york as a foreign character recalling the urban memory and the results of september 11. in this way, open city invites the reader to (re)focus on the urban space to explore the tragedy expounding a collective response to the event. that said, the narratology of the novel suggests open city does engage with the global impact of 9/11, for which cole leans toward a universalist or particularistic view. indeed, the novel’s criticism has recurrently considered the protagonist as a valid example of an early 21st century update of the figure of the flâneur (vermeulen 2013; hartwiger 2016; faradji 2022).5 from the beginning, cole’s protagonist frames his role as a contemporary flâneur, i began to go on evening walks last fall … these walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time … in this 4 novels such as moshin hamid’s the reluctant fundamentalist (2007) and joseph o’neill’s netherland (2011) approached the tragedy beyond american boundaries illustrating the consequences of 9/11 beyond its traditional us orientation. for a broader discussion on the topic see bohemer and morton’s work terror and the postcolonial (2010). 5 peter vermeulen’s essay “flights of memory: teju cole’s open city and the limits of aesthetic cosmopolitanism” (2013) and alexander hartwiger’s analysis “the postcolonial flâneur: open city and the urban palimpsest” (2016) provide a thorough investigation to contextualize the flâneur within the novel. a recent analysis can be found in sara faradji’s “a walk to forget: the postcolonial flâneur’s negating journey in teju cole’s open city” (2022). beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 95 way, at the beginning of my final year of psychiatrist fellowship, new york city worked itself into my life at a walking pace. (cole 3) over the centuries, interpretations of the “traditional” flâneur have taken increasingly different perspectives and scholarship has recurrently explored the ambiguity of this character. in his wide-ranging study, keith tester argues that “definitions are at best difficult and at worst a contradiction of what the flâneur means. in himself, the flâneur is, in fact, a very obscure thing” (tester 7).6 for some, this character is an emerging symbol of post-modernity; for others, the end of flânerie was marked by the erosion of collective experiences in public spaces, and other scholars consider flânerie as a private experience. charles baudelaire poeticized the figure of the casual wanderer in his oeuvre, giving centrality to the character for its apt ability to establish an intimate relationship between the city and his psyche. such view considers the reporter of street life as an artist, a nomad, who observes the urban landscape, merging with the crowd, looking at the metropolis from a detached position. drawing from these general assumptions, baudelaire poeticized the flâneur, seen as a spectator of city life witnessing the changes of the urban environment. with respect to this, in les fleurs du mal (1857), baudelaire maintained that “the flâneur is eventually looking for that quality which we call “modernity” (12). as such, the character soon became the reporter of the modern city. however, to sketch a more exhaustive portrait of the flâneur it is also necessary to consider walter benjamin’s interpretation. indeed, benjamin’s consideration of the flâneur is inextricably bound to the development of the department store that turned the idle wanderer into the prototype of the consumer. following this logic, benjamin argued that the traditional wanderer was detached from the city he walked, so that his strolling lost its introspective quality and the flâneur ended up wandering, seeking a new identity reconstructed through the urban setting. more broadly, in the french tradition, the 19th-century flâneur walked through the arcades of paris perceiving the desolation of the city with a certain nostalgia. overall, however, the flâneur acquires existential security from the spectacle of the teeming crowds, the visible public, or the metropolitan aspect of the city. despite its popularization and recurring literary presence, for its complexity this character remains generally elusive and quite ambiguous. in an attempt to sketch a general portrait of the american flâneur, dana brand contends that in any of its multiple interpretations, the flâneur becomes a model for the creative through his panoramic interest in the life of the metropolis (8).7 urban observer par excellence, born within the harsh landscape of the modern 6 among recent scholarship tester’s analysis is considered as the most extensive on the flâneur. reiterating the origin of flânerie tester offers a clear portrait of the flâneur developing a debate that goes beyond baudelaire and benjamin shedding light on flânerie as a contemporary and extremely modern practice. 7 in a short essay, i cannot hope to deal with the whole discussion on flânerie for it is out of the scope of this analysis. for preliminary discussion on the flâneur see tester (2015) and brand (1992). beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 96 city, the flâneur embodies the desire for human freedom encompassed by the individual imprisoned by territorial, ideological and professional constraints. transplanted by parisian galleries in the suburbs and large metropolitan shopping centers, “the figure of the flâneur seems to bear witness to the sense of despair and fragmentation of modernity, exemplifying the desire to experience new relationships with places and their inhabitants8 (nuvolati 2013, 3)9, a definition that can be easily applied to cole’s protagonist. to this end, if we associate the traditional traits of flânerie to the protagonist of open city, cole proposes a nonconforming version of the flâneur. julius rambles through the streets of new york city as an atypical urban walker strolling through the urban landscape observing the metropolis with the perspective of an immigrant and a cosmopolitan yet engaging in more than mere observation. to this end, the second half of the book respatializes the flâneur in cities such as brussel, where the protagonist is confronted with cosmopolitan characters and their views outside the united states. yet, another interpretation which deserves mention for its classification of cole’s protagonist as a flâneur, is that of alexander hartwiger. in his essay “the postcolonial flâneur: open city and the urban palimpsest,” hartwiger observes how another element that sets cole's flâneur apart from the traditional traits of the character, lies in its multicultural aspect. as said, julius lives in new york as an immigrant from nigeria travelling to brussel combining a background which is both european, african and, to a certain extent, even american. however, as the trajectory of the novel testifies, “in the configuration of the postcolonial flâneur, postcolonial then comes to signify more than a historical moment, and is committed to interrogating the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice” (hartwiger 7). in an arguably evident way, throughout the novel cole’s protagonist distances from the conventional traits of the flâneur. such thinking implies that, as cole’s flâneur takes readers along vivid walks through the post-9/11 city, the narrative moves away from the traditional parameters of flânerie.10 in her recent analysis, sara faradji explains that “julius beguiles readers as he takes them on a journey through a familiar city on a renewed perspective. he particularly entices a global readership … to develop a transnational relationship between the postcolonial writer and the global reader” (2–3). in so doing, cole revisits the traditional themes of flânerie creating an urban walker who becomes a citizen of the world or rather, a “man of the crowd,” shaping a global impression charged with a cosmopolitan eye. nevertheless, to classify julius 8 thanks to baudelaire and benjamin, the setting of the flâneur is especially paris. although over time the act of strolling covered many other cities of the world, even today it can be said that the french capital is the most suitable place for this type of practice. 9 my translation as others by the same author unless otherwise indicated. 10 here, i not mean to discuss the theme of racism which is one of the most evident of the novel, however, black discrimination is an ever-present concern that the novel addresses both in new york and in europe. for instance, as julius walks through harlem he perceives the burden of discrimination and later he is severely injured by a group of teenagers. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 97 as a multi-ethnic flâneur it is essential to consider that cosmopolitanism—a traditional theme of postcolonial literature—is often used as an effective narrative device to create empathy, acknowledging a shared sense of collectivism with readers. indeed, cole’s flâneur repeatedly shows compassion about racial violence, terrorism and historical tragedies (from 9/11 to the holocaust). in what is considered as one of the most seminal studies on the novel, peter vermeulen observes how cole renovates the figure of the flâneur turning him into a fugueur. he claims that “julius’s posture as a cosmopolitan flâneur is shadowed by the contours of more sinister and mostly forgotten nineteenth-century figure of restless mobility: the fugueur” (42), a dark counterpart of the flâneur. as the plot unfolds, cole develops a “narrative fugue” (sùnden 1) that becomes one of the central concerns of the novel; julius escapes from himself and from his past in nigeria and moves across continents in search of his true self.11 through this process, the novel draws the reader into the flâneur’s psychological introspections provided by his itinerant rambles through the cities he visits, at the same time depicting the fugue of the protagonist who avoids his past dealing with unresolved emotional conflicts as he leaves new york to brussels. critics such as philip aghoghovwia echo this position additionally reading cole’s flâneur as an elusive typology of interiority, considering the inner self as the principal modality by which the flâneur interacts with the cityscape (25). in this regard, aghoghovwia asserts that julius provides the reader with peripatetic histories of new york. in the process, he creates an alternative image to the officialese through which the cosmopolitan city and the multilayered lives of its citizen subjects, including julius himself, are foregrounded. julius’s activity of flânerie—of walking and thinking with the physical landscape of the city—is indexical of interiority in generative ways, especially because of the intersubjective consciousness that characterises this interior–exterior exchange (24). if interiority enables cole’s flâneur to narrate history and social consciousness, the function of wandering is to reflect on the palimpsest of the urban fabric of new york and, in the process of walking, to testify the historical and cultural changes that mark the current landscape of the city (27). in effect, from a rather broad angle, the journey of open city can be interpreted as the choice of considering the flâneur12 as the patient and attentive observer of the urban reality, which takes shape and transforms beneath his eyes inaugurating profound reflections of cultural, historical and social issues, across the urban grids. the protagonist explains, 11 a theme i purposefully decide not to discuss here is the importance of the past and identity as key tropes of narration. in new york julius is forced to recall his past in nigeria, a past affected by the traumatic rape he committed and he is trying to negate through his walking experiences which have a therapeutic goal. 12 however, it is important to make a difference between the flâneur and the dandy. more than observing the dandy perhaps likes to be observed even through his snobbish attitude is rather controversial (lanuzza 1999). beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 98 i wove my way through crowds of shops and workers, through road construction and the horns of taxicabs. walking through busy parts of town meant i laid eyes on more people, hundreds more, thousands even … (6) in effect, these critical approaches have demonstrated how cole flips the role of the flâneur from a 21st century perspective. supporting this claim, alexander hartwiger has further observed how “julius channels but also challenges the observant flâneur figure and in doing so inverts the point of view of the parisian flâneur moving away from the totalizing colonial gaze to a more critical one that recognizes the complex flows of capital and people” (in faradji 7– 8). to a certain extent cole “updates” the flâneur to the age of globalization, from new york city to brussels, to elaborate a historical disquisition on the consequences of 9/11 as a universal event. iii. new york as a site of remembrance edwin turner observes that “open city is not staged to be a 9/11 novel, nor does it dwell on that day. however, although 9/11 does not figure as prominent theme, cole captures something of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, and at the same time situates it in historical context” (2012). for this reason, i am not examining the character’s post-9/11 trauma (julius is an immigrant and he experiences new york as a foreigner who deals with a sense of personal trauma), but i am rather focusing on the flâneur’s ability to reconsider 9/11, first unravelled through the observation of new york’s urban landscape as the casual wanderer transcends america’s sense of grieving into a globally shared one. to analyze this concern even further, at a critical moment in the narrative julius begins an examination of the city’s despair toward 9/11 by his on-site observation of ground zero, “just below the street level, i saw the sudden metallic green of a subway train hurtling by, exposed to the elements it crossed the work site, a livid vein drawn across the neck of 9/11” (cole 57–58). when julius remarks on the tragedy through his sheer scrutiny of the site, he further asserts that “atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals” (cole 58). such a description suggests that through the flâneur’s self-reflexivity, cole illustrates the concerns of america’s national despair related to a post-9/11 ideology identified by an immigrant who is able to internalize america’s sense of collective grief. in this way, the experience of the flâneur is both individual and collective as he manages to participate in america’s cumulative mourning. in her study of the city since 9/11, hilary thompson remarks that if the attacks themselves appear designed to spread significance away from their particular place and time, one countermeasure that fiction with world citizenship in mind might take is to re-ground the event, to return to its epicentre. we see this, for example in teju cole’s open city (2011), the peripatetic narrative of a nigerian new yorker who is inexplicably drawn to ground zero yet seems as given to psychological deflection as reflection. (174) beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 99 this statement reveals or perhaps confirms cole’s intention to address the tragedy as a “national allegory” (thompson 174), suggesting that julius’s psychological rambles in new york might lead to the vulnerability of an exclusive national ethos. it is well-known that the attacks of september 11 brought a national sense of emotional preoccupation which from that day became america’s most prominent concern and feelings such as fear and shock were widespread in the us. moreover, edward casey equally reminds us that the consideration of the world trade centre as a place of memory renders the site “a container of experiences that contribute so powerfully to its intrinsic memorability. we might even say that memory is place-oriented or at least place-supported” (186–87). to read the novel in these terms also implies that cole entails the mourning of september 11 through flânerie as a place-oriented experience leading to an interpretation of the post-9/11 sentiment. benjamin bird insightfully identifies the representation of grief in post-9/11 fiction asserting that “post-9/11 texts frequently hint at the necessity for a process of mourning and self-examination” (561). in the section of open city set in new york cole insists—recalling post-9/11 scenarios such as those of foer and delillo—upon retrieving and examining national grief. as the protagonist admits looking at ground zero, “the site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased and rewritten” (59). in an interview, teju cole stated i tried to focus on a particular aspect of this historical moment: the failure of mourning. this is something i haven’t seen a great deal of in the writing around this disaster. and my view is that you write about disaster by writing around it. there’s a reticence necessary when you consider the suffering of others. (“palimpsest city”) this statement draws back to derrida’s observation on the symbolism of 9/11. for jacques derrida, “when you say september 11 you are inviting me to speak by recalling…the very impact of what is at least felt,13 in an apparently immediate way, to be an event that truly marks, that truly makes its mark a singular and, as they say here, unprecedented event” (85– 86). as derrida argues, the importance of what is “felt” is what gives meaning to the tragedy in a cumulative sense, so that the naming of 9/11 implies an immediate act of recollection and remembrance. if we align with barry schwartz for whom “collective memory is a representation of the past embodied in commemorative symbolism and historical evidence” (471), we see how in open city the flâneur’s observation of ground zero as a place of recollection becomes a way to engage in the historical knowledge of 9/11 and inaugurates a discussion on terrorism and its effects in the united states. in this sense, the novel provides the reader with an opportunity to access the tragedy through new york as a space of remembrance. through his contemplative observation of the urban landscape julius meditates on the consequences of the disaster from a national 13 emphasis in the original. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 100 perspective as he feels the void left by ground zero.14 in her appraisal of post-9/11 america, judith butler maintains that “what grief displays is the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways we cannot always recount or explain” (23). “i nurtured stoicism in myself and a determination to handle grief in the right way” (228) says cole’s flâneur. as butler further notes, by referring to mourning specifically related to september 11 as one of the most tangible examples of fear and anxiety, we might also consider the experience of grieving as a condition of human vulnerability. however, as the body is the primary site of vulnerability in post-9/11 new york, ground zero embodies both national trauma and global vulnerability.15 ingrid gessner endorses this view when she explains that ground zero and the world trade centre hold a special status in the hierarchy of remembering as america’s tangible and collective expression of grief architecturally constructed to become a permanent site of memory (4).16 aligning the ethics of this place with benjamin’s vision of the flâneur rambling through the arcades of the city, we can consider cole’s character as the post-9/11 flâneur who “is able to locate in the streets a ‘colportage of space,’ an unravelling distribution of social secrets paved over by time” (zuber 270). as such, the construction of the character as an effective narrative thread offers an alternative way to (re)consider 9/11 by observing the city. david zuber adds a response to this asserting that the narrative memorialization of 9/11 today typically deals with “before” and “after” scenarios at the site in new york city (270). to parse this in terms of the novel, the flâneur exposes the junction between the urban aesthetics of memorialization and collective grief. as the narrative poignantly discloses human vulnerability, 9/11 is elaborated through the philosophy of walking, an act that dictates the rhythm of narration creating an emotional trajectory in new york that leads also to the tragedy. in this 14 these observations chart a parallel between cole’s post-9/11 memorialization and freud’s psychoanalytic distinction between mourning and melancholia. in freud’s definition, “mourning is regularly … the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one” (243) and as he further notes, whereas melancholia enables a work of self-reflexivity, mourning originates from an external inhibition. in this way, if melancholia is an impoverishment of the self, on the contrary mourning comes from external factors, events and situations. in addition to this, freud explains how mourning can be classified as a temporal experience that allows the self to overcome grief to reach a state of normalcy (freud 237). 15 for a thorough discussion on mourning and violence in post 9/11 america see butler, judith. precarious life. the powers of mourning and violence. verso, 2004. in her analysis, butler considers the conditions of heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on the us suggesting that violence, arising as a consequence of post-9/11 despair, should be minimized to promote a global spirit of interdependency. 16 as gessner further points out, the construction of memorials relies significantly on issues such as nationalism and identity politics. for a fuller discussion memory’s dependence on nationalism and identity politics see gessner, ingrid. “the aesthetics of commemorating 9/11: towards a transnational typology of memorials.” the journal of transnational american studies 6, no. 4 (2015): 1-4 and said, edward. “invention, memory, and place.” critical inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 175–92. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 101 sense, cole’s novel considers the act of walking as a process of remembrance and commitment located in the cradle of a solemn remembrance of 9/11. whereas the novel’s criticism tends to conflate with cole’s illustration of a general sense of collective trauma (a term that in the novel entails different discussions), my reading of open city suggests that cole captures the post-9/11 spirit “seeking out the hidden history of the cityscape the flâneur walks” (durrant 620). in one of the novel’s opening passages, julius explains the city’s collective malaise as he states, “i felt that all of the human race were rushing, pushed by a counterinstinctive death-drive, into movable catacombs… all of us re-enacting unacknowledged traumas” (7). this passage motivates julius’s self-introspective incorporation of the post-9/11 spirit that comes only few chapters ahead when he claims the empty space that was, i now saw and admitted, the obvious: the ruins of the world trade centre. the place had become a metonym of its disaster: i remembered a tourist who once asked me how he could get to 9/11: not the site of the events of 9/11 but to 9/11 itself, the date petrified into broken stones. i moved closer. it was walled in with wood and chain link, but otherwise nothing announced its significance. (52) this reflection leads to the assumption that in its etymology, “commemoration” presupposes a communal process of remembrance. underscoring this point, edward casey has emphasized that “we remember through such a memorialization, which defies reduction to the separatist categories of “matter” or “psyche” – indeed to “self” and “other,” or even to “past” and “present” (184). implicit within cole’s reinterpretation of 9/11 through memorialization from a flâneuristic perspective is the belief that, as marita sturken has shown, “the question of memorialization of september 11 has focused on what is known as ‘ground zero’ in new york city […] making it clear that the new york site is the symbolic center of this tragic event” (375).17 as such, it might be easy to argue that in the narrative cole re-constructs the need of remembrance and the memorialization of 9/11 approaching the catastrophe through the flâneur’s recognition of national grief in the united states. as far as 9/11 is concerned, ground zero has become the site of a public drama activating the collective feelings of loss and despair which, through the 9/11 memorial then turn into collective memory.18 aligning with this, igor maver explains that, “cole speaks about violence, trauma, war in a way, indirectly describing not the external events, but rather the consequences of suffering upon one’s psyche, individual and collective memory” (4). nonetheless, in his recent reading of the novel, sam durrant observes how by deploying freud’s elaboration of trauma through the distinction between mourning and melancholia, the protagonist 17 additionally, stuken observed that commemoration presupposes the involvement of feelings such as “reenactment” and “recollection.” 18 for a study on memory and commemoration see burke burke, peter. “co-memorations. performing the past.” performing the past edited by karin tilmans, frank van vree and jay winter, amsterdam university press, 2010, pp. 105–18. burke’s study prominently focuses on the relationship between memory and performance as a strategy of remembrance. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 102 of cole’s novel diagnoses the anxiety and mimics it identifying with the city’s sense of nostalgia (622). it is significant then to say that memory, mourning and self-introspection, define the flâneur in his anguished approach to the post-9/11 scenario as he uncovers the spatial memory of the terrorist attacks as a postcolonial flâneur and outsider (see mueller 2021). following zygmunt bauman’s assertion that “it is the modern world which is the original flâneur” (139) we might conclude that cole’s relocation of flânerie in post-9/11 fiction re-considers the act of walking as a process of self-reflexivity toward collective memory. as bauman reminds us, today it is hard to resist flânerie since the modern world cannot but become the site of nomadic expressions representing that collective sense of disorientation that is deeply entrenched in postmodern reality (158). as open city demonstrates, roaming the city post-9/11 allows the flâneur to encapsulate the consequence of a post-9/11 ideology re-grounded by cole through the idle wanderer. in that vein , the narrativization of a post9/11 setting cole proposes is closely aligned to de certeau’s view, for whom people engage in walking, an elementary way to experience the city, making use of spaces that cannot be seen (92). iv. from new york to brussels: anti-american radicalism and islamophobia if this is perhaps the most evident connection to flânerie as the premise to begin a discussion on the consequences of september 11, the presence of 9/11 in the novel as a significant event has multiple facets. another complicated and perniciously influential reference to terrorism occurs in the second section of the novel. although the second part of open city switches the context from america to europe, the flaneur never loses his attitude as he roams the city and encounters people of different ethnicities and cultures observing the urban landscape and witnessing compelling discussions. in his quest for his heritage in brussels, julius meets two moroccan immigrants who share an anti-american view on terrorism. as he travels to europe in search of his estranged grandmother, julius’s activity as a flâneur persists as he walks observing the streets of brussels. the narrator reports, during my visit, the mild winter weather and the old stones lay a melancholy siege on the city. it was, in some ways, like a city in waiting, or one under glass, with somber trams and buses. there were many people, many more than i had seen in other european cities, who gave me the impression of having just arrived from a sun-suffused elsewhere. (97– 98) clearly, the second section of open city provides the reader with an opportunity to re-consider the consequences of september 11 through the flâneur beyond new york as the site of us national remembrance. as the scene switches to brussels, cole offers insights into the experience of dislocation pointing at a sentiment of anti-american radicalism from an islamophobic perspective. at a critical moment in the narrative, julius encounters farouq and khalil, two moroccan refugees who escaped from the oppressive monarchy in their native country. these characters open up a provocative dialogue on terrorism and islamophobia that beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 103 constitutes, as several critics have suggested, “one of the centerpieces of the novel” (mahajan in ameel 273). what emerges from farouq’s thought-provoking assertions, as a consequence of september 11, is an anti-american sentiment on the matter of terrorism. one of his most outrageous and horrifying statements from an islamic perspective lies in the contention that “for us [muslims], america is a version of al-qaeda” (121). to this, in his flâneur-like attitude, julius weighs a response that lacks a clear political engagement. after farouq’s disquieting claim, he observes that “that statement was so general as to be without meaning. it had no power as he said it without conviction. i did not need to contest it, and khalil added nothing to it. ‘america is a version of al-qaeda’” (122).19 this moment resonates with others in the fifty-page section on brussels when the flâneur’s wanderings lead him to witness “how radical islamic movements come to existence in the context of a western metropolis” (ameel 266). yet even more meaningful perhaps than the radicalism of this scene is the revelation of khalil and farouq’s pro-islamic sentiments, as they firmly embrace extremism and an implicit anti-american ideology, support the wellknown sunni jihadists hamas and hezbollah since as they declare “it is resistance, simple” (120). in what follows, khalil claims that “true, it was a terrible day the twin towers. what they did was very bad. but i understand why they did it” (120). in the post 9/11 city in novels, karolina golimowska argues that open city explains and imagines how “radical and islamic movements come to existence in the context of a western metropolis” (30). as known, the hijackers organized their operations in europe and subsequently, the rise of global jihadist movements beyond the united states has increased. although farouq and khalil distance themselves from the practice of terrorism, they prove to have stereotypical anti-american considerations on september 11. as a traditional flâneur, julius distances himself from their views observing and remaining somehow neutral to the question of terrorism. “i was meant to be an outraged american, though what i felt was more sorrow and less anger. anger and the semiserious use of a word like extremist, was easier to handle than sorrow. this is how americans think arabs think, i said to them both” (120), he states.20 julius refuses to engage in political discourse limiting to transfer the feeling of the consequences of the horrific event of 9/11 and its aftermath, in and outside the united states. constructing a transnational flâneur decentered from the american landscape, cole engages in a multicultural responsive reaction to 9/11 developing what richard gray terms “verbal impotence” (2), that is to say, an inability to take a position on the consequences of terrorism limiting instead to observation and introspective response. departing from flânerie as the narrative trope to observe ground zero as the site to begin a discussion on 9/11 that is initiated on america’s soil and touches on themes such as mourning and national trauma, as the novel 19 “contemporary commentators have pointed to the link between the radicalizing of the characters farouq and khalil in the novel, and the attackers of the november 2015 attacks in paris and the march 2016 attacks in brussels” (ameel 265). 20 emphasis in the original. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 104 moves to europe, the question becomes even more political. confronting cosmopolitan characters observing the urban landscape as a traditional flâneur, the protagonist serves as a textual device for mapping out a debate on america’s role through the lens of a pro-islamic sentiment. another salient passage occurs after khalil says he had disillusionments about america, as the country rejected his scholarly thesis as a consequence to 9/11 and as a prejudice against islamic and arabic people. farouq states “my thesis committee had met on september 20, 2001, and to them with everything happening in the headlines, here was this moroccan writing about difference and revelation. that was the year i lost all my illusions about europe” (128). in a previous passage, farouq maintains that “many americans assume that europe muslims are covered from head to toe if they are women, or that they wear a full beard if they are men, and that they are only interested in protesting perceived insults to islam” (119). as such, aligning september 11 with an anti-racist american prejudice, farouq once again expresses his hate for the west as his conversation with julius reveals the burden of muslims and arabic people toward the us. undoubtedly, as a consequence to the terrorist attacks, the united states saw a stark increase in discrimination, violence, and hatred toward muslims and middle eastern individuals. debra merskin notes that, by the time bush pronounced the state of union address in 2002—in which he considered islam as “the axis of evil” [with reference to terrorism]—”the enemy was fully constructed, infused by more than twenty years of media and popular culture images equating muslims with arabs as terrorists” (menskin 171). the prejudice against islam as a consequence of 9/11 is effectively captured in this passage, as farouq expresses his resentment toward america. surprisingly, relatively little attention has been paid to what cole might have meant with this provocative discussion on islamophobia and terrorism from an anti-american perspective. however, i believe the flâneur is the motif cole uses to initiate an extremely complex debate on the issue of terrorism, initially by observing ground zero as a lieu de memoire from an american perspective, repositioning radicalism and terrorism beyond the united states from a european islamic viewpoint. providing a conceptual framework to read the novel through the lens of terrorism, erica edwards advises that open city21 is a novel that explores the war on terror and respatializes terrorism from new york city—a visible site of national memory—to brussels as the place to discuss radicalism through islamophobia and an antiamerican political view. in so doing, critics have noticed how cole’s narrative constructs the new post 9/11 black novel as a literary text (edwards 664). to the extent that we read the novel in these terms, we see how open city addresses post-9/11 aesthetics and its consequences through a significant spatial dislocation of the flâneur to elaborate a national and international discussion on terrorism. in that sense, post-9/11 21 of importance in this discussion is also the title “open city,” a belligerent term used to indicate the declaration of a settlement that has abandoned its defensive efforts, perhaps a reference to new york after the tragedy of september 11. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 105 new york—where the flâneur embarks on his journey—becomes the site to develop an intricate set of political and emotional responses to the tragedy. yet, along with this discussion comes a consideration of the plight of transnationalism and terrorism in the post-9/11 narrative. scholars among whom richard gray explain that what is generally missing in novels of 9/11 and its aftermath is a strategy of deterritorialization (141). that is to say, postcolonial narratives on 9/11 bear witness to the encounter of southwest asians with america, in which the strategy very often, is to read the us through american wars waged on foreign soil as well as to show the reader what is to be american by exploring american spaces and places from extrinsic vantage points and thus have an advantageous approach for the aftermath of september 11. (gray 141) if this is indeed the case of postcolonial texts such as open city, on the other hand, albala razan observes that “anglo-american narratives, preoccupied with the private sphere, the national and the local, as they are, may seem hindered even irrelatively disabled in articulating a radical literary form in relation to the post 9/11 experience” (5–6). additionally, in her contextualization of the cosmopolitan novel, rebecca walkowitz explains that contemporary [post 9/11] writers have used the salient features of modernist narrative to develop a critical cosmopolitanism. this has meant thinking beyond the nation but also comparing, distinguishing and judging among different versions of transnational thought, testing moral and political norms; including the norm of critical thinking and valuing informal as well as transient models of community. (2) setting the discussion of september 11, from the memorialization on the site to a multiracial perspective of the event, cole widens the foreign experience of terrorism, drawn from the eyes of the flâneur in new york, and then peripherally extending the discourse through the character’s journey to europe to shed light on the transoceanic perspective of the east. as such, rather than merely focusing on the psychological consequences of 9/11 within the united states, open city chooses flânerie as the vehicle to inscribe the international effects of september 11 also through the lens of islamism and extremism highlighting the polarization between the east and the west, as the narrative wavers between america and beyond. v. conclusions this reading of open city has foregrounded how flânerie becomes a strategic narrative device to set the question of 9/11 and terrorism beyond the united states and how the flâneur, as idle wander, citizen of the world, is the thread that connects two opposing views on september 11; american and islamic. despoina feleki critically examined how the novel holds a special place in the canon of post 9/11 literature and it “can be also read as an attempt to reconcile the trauma not only caused by the terrorist attack on 9/11 but also by a guilty american past, beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 106 characterized by imperial policies and stories of invasion” (259).22 as seen, by using the flâneur cole ponders the resonances of 9/11 and on a more complicated and political imperialistic perspective on the implications of terrorism from ground zero as the site of collective grievance, to brussels as the place to elaborate extremist views on america and islam. for this reason, it needs to be recalled an observation teju cole made on september 11 in an interview for the hemingway society, he stated, i feel very fortunate to have written open city and to have been so well rewarded for it. the book began like this: late in 2006, i was finally ready to put down some words about 9/11, not as an explanation or study of what five years in the city after that event had felt like, but as an effective response. (catan hemingway society n.p.)23 this statement clearly indicates cole’s intention to propose an effective response to september 11 and in this sense, open city becomes an interesting web of transnational cosmopolitan experiments “also providing opportunities for a transatlantic and transnational engagement with us politics” (feleki 260). drawing from benjamin for whom the flâneur dwells between “days of celebration and days of mourning” (68) we see how for cole’s post-9/11 flâneur the salience of terrorism emerges as a pivotal concern that interplays with an external social experience produced by his walks in post 9/11 new york and it is further disentangled by his itinerant rambles in brussels, a cosmopolitan city whose inhabitants have clear anti-american radical views on the us and on the consequences of september 11. as the novel proves, we can easily relate the twofold process of flânerie to the narrative choice of approaching a multidirectional reflection on 9/11. from the act of walking, words and thoughts flounder to create national, spatial and collective reflections on 9/11 and its global political and european resonances. in such an interpretative approach, cole’s flâneur “engages in post-traumatic state of 9/11 that helps him fight against emotional numbness” (feleki 266); a concept that cathy caruth—as mentioned by feleki—defines as the need to move from trauma to a narrative, global and collective memory (quoted in feleki 266). as i have suggested throughout, the novel is rooted on the practice of flânerie as the illustration of a large-scale post-9/11 despair in new york and the protagonist sets his role as a typical postmodern flâneur for whom ground zero becomes the discursive framework to process the post-9/11 zeitgeist and its global consequences. as a novelist who wants to stage the dialectics of september 11 elaborated through the practice of flânerie, teju cole sees the flâneur’s wanders as a process of self-reflexivity as well as the origin of a globally shared reflection on the effects of terrorism. as such, the post-9/11 22 in their long dialogue with julius, farouq and khalil often refer to the question of imperialism and oppression from an imperialistic perspective as well as the control of europe on colonized territories. it is no coincidence then, that edward said is often mentioned. 23 emphasis mine. beatrice melodia festa| flânerie and the transnational deterritorialization of 9/11 in teju cole’s open city reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1678 107 flâneur, the postcolonial superhero, a little naive child-artist (nuvolati 23), reflects the interest in a more itinerant and collective discussion of the attacks. to recall art spiegelman, julius as flâneur perceives “the shadows of no towers” pondering on the multinational reverberations of 9/11 showing its consequences from the perspective of a foreigner who, even though not directly touched by the tragedy, enrolls in its 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september 11, edited by c. calhoun, p. price, & a.timmer, the new press, 2002 pp. 374–84. —. tourists of history: memory, kitsch, and consumerism from oklahoma city to ground zero. duke university press, 2007. tester, keith. the flâneur. routledge, 2015. thompson, hilary. “before after.” the city since 9/11. literature, film, television edited by keith wilhite, fairleigh university press, 2016 pp. 171–89. kindle edition. turner, edwin. “teju cole’s open city is a strange, marvelous novel that captures the post-9/11 zeitgeist.” bibliokept, february 22 2012. https://biblioklept.org/2012/02/21/teju-coles-open-city-is-astrange-marvelous-novel-that-captures-the-post-911-zeitgest/ last accessed, febraury 15 2022. vermeulen, peter. “flights of memory: teju cole’s open city and the limits of aesthetic cosmopolitanism.” journal of modern literature, vol.37, no.1, 2013, pp. 40–57. versluys, kristiaan. out of the blue: september 11 and the novel. columbia university press, 2009. walkowitz, rebecca. cosmopolitan style: modernism beyond the nation. columbia university press, 2006. wayne, catan. “interview with teju cole, 2012, pen/hemingway award for open city.” hr blog, the hemingway foundation and society, september 27 2017. https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/interview-teju-cole-2012-penhemingway-award-winner. accessed 11 july 2022. zuber, devin. “flânerie at ground zero: aesthetic countermemories in lower manhattan.” american quarterly, vol. 58, no. 2, 2006, pp. 269–99. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 57 the gothic and national domesticity an interview with kevin corstorphine sofía martinicorena universidad complutense de madrid kevin corstorphine is a lecturer in american literature at the university of hull, and programme director in american studies. his research interests lie in horror and gothic fiction, both literary and popular, and he is particularly interested in representation of space and place, the environment, and haunted locations. he has published widely on authors including bram stoker, h.p. lovecraft, ambrose bierce, shirley jackson, stephen king, and clive barker. he was the co-editor for the palgrave handbook to horror literature, published in 2018. he is currently working on several research projects including us imperialism, haunted graveyards, and the use of dungeon spaces in gaming. keywords: american gothic, popular culture, haunted house, horror, interview. sofía martinicorena: the overarching theme for this interview is the idea of the gothic national domestic, so, for our first question, i wanted to mention amy kaplan’s notion of “manifest domesticity.” she uses it to discuss nineteenth-century literature and it allows her to play with the idea of manifest destiny. although she does not, in any way, engage with the gothic in her text, her proposal is relevant for our purposes today in that it explains how the nation is construed as “a domestic space imbued with a sense of at-homeness” (111). this homely sense is always considered in opposition to an alien, threatening outside world, tying in with your own definition of the gothic as “something foreign and threatening as well as a destroyer of civilized values” (corstorphine 2). words like “foreign” or “civilization” immediately take us to the realm of citizenship, nationhood and belonging. considering that you have written that “horror is everywhere” (1), i wanted to ask you about the specificity of the us gothic. how has the gothic genre helped either to create or to debunk ideologies of the domestic versus the foreign? kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 58 kevin corstorphine: that’s a very interesting question and one i have been trying to pin down. in terms of the us as “home” versus “the foreign,” what we’ve seen a lot in political discourse lately is the demonization of a couple of specific foreign groups. first, with mexico, it’s about the anxieties around the border wall, which is such a blatant symbol of defining “us against them” and almost laughably obvious as a physical symbol. second, anxieties over immigration from islamic countries with trump’s famous “muslim ban.” both of these are linked to discourses of “savagery” versus “civilization” and to the symbolic threat of the figure of the terrorist. trump’s famous decrying of immigrants as murderers and rapists coming either from mexico or through mexico from south america plays into this narrative, where you have this construction of the home territory, the domestic versus the invader. this is set up in a highly oxymoronic way, even contradictory when contrasting it to the founding of the us, because we’re dealing with an immigrant nation, we’re dealing with a melting pot of different cultures. thinking about your question, i keep coming back to the idea of the native american. even though in this case we’d be talking about the other within the borders, the western (the cowboy versus the indian) is the narrative that the us has given the world, and it’s a very flattening and simplifying narrative but still a very powerful one. it gives us this conflict between the strong, stoic frontiersmen and these forces of “savagery.” thinking about domesticity and the home, drawing back to those ideas of how early american culture deals with the legacy of displacing, killing, and stealing land from native peoples, brings up certain anxieties. it’s so foregrounded in american gothic that we keep coming back to the trope of the “old indian burial ground.” it’s one of those classic motifs that are (and this is what i love about popular gothic) almost so obvious that they don’t seem to bear analysis. but then, the more you do it, the more that comes out about what’s actually going on there. we have this typical story of someone moving into a property and investing all their hopes into it. in the amityville horror (1979), they literally call the house “high hopes,” then, they discover this horrific past linked to its former ownership by native americans and they become haunted by spirits and events from the past. that initial guilt is essentially how american gothic is often defined. i’m thinking about the work of critics like teresa goddu’s gothic america (1997) and leslie fiedler’s love and death in the american novel (1960). fiedler’s famous idea is that american literature is “bewilderingly and embarrassingly a gothic fiction,” (fiedler 29), which is resting on these twin anxieties about the injustices of slavery and injustices of the appropriation of native land. how does all this tie into the question of foreigners? it’s about the construction of a mainstream dominant culture defined against something else, something “savage,” something “uncivilized,” and how this opposition tends to reveal more about that culture than it is intended to. to illustrate this, we might think of stephen king’s pet sematary (1983). in this novel, there’s a line that i love where they’re talking about the land and the wife, rachel, says “honey, do we own this?” and the neighbour, jud, says “it’s part of the property, oh yes” and the husband, louis, has this thought: “which wasn’t quite the same thing” (29). so, who owns kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 59 land and who has the right to build and work on the land is absolutely foundational to the american project and to its fiction. i’m thinking as well about john locke’s theory that private property is land mixed with labour, which justified land grabs in the colonial period. that’s a haunting quality, that if you put your labour into a space or a place, it becomes somehow yours, but then, that’s actually a contested property, and that’s the doctrine used to take land from native peoples. it’s bound up with the kind of fear coming from guilt over history and this is also projected onto borders. it’s all in a stew that builds up this idea of the home as civilization and a specifically american kind of civilization. sm: you have touched on many themes that i hope we have the chance to unpack later, and i agree with everything that you said about the binary “civilization versus savagery” that articulates so many expressions of the gothic. i would like to move to a more general level and ask you how you feel about the triangulated relationship between pop culture, the gothic and the nation. what happens when we add the element of popular culture to this formula? kc: many of these texts that we’ve talked about have been very popular and interesting through that lens of pop culture scholarship. i mentioned as an example the amityville horror, and i’ve also been thinking a lot lately about where this intersects with thrillers as well. i just saw a new thriller movie called run (2020) about a wheelchair user who is trapped in the home. it’s sort of a version of rear window (1954) and it explores the suspicion that there’s something horrible lurking below the surface. this is not a movie specific to weird gothic fans or a little off-beat, it is completely mainstream as are some of the themes that we’re speaking about. i do keep asking myself these questions. in gothic studies, we talk very freely about anxiety and cultural anxiety, just as we do in lots of pop culture scholarship, but we don’t often put that under the microscope quite enough, and there’s a worry that we might talk too generally. how can we all be suffering all this anxiety all of the time? to illustrate this, for instance, we’ve seen a lot of controversy over statues in the us of confederate soldiers and white supremacists. we can see what’s the problem with them and where the hurt is coming from but, where it gets more interesting is when we trace this back to christopher columbus and the european discovery of the us. in this light, columbus is someone who is a criminal sailing out to conduct his own ventures, and who is guilty of the death and displacement of millions of people. the thing is that all of this is true and, even though most of us are aware, we turn a collective blind eye to it, we become comfortable with the colonialist myth even though it’s horrific from the point of view of the colonized. we are living in the bad timeline, so to speak, in the one where the bad guys have won and we’ve essentially built up a civilization out of this. all of these debates are very healthy to reassess our past and consider the stories that we’re telling ourselves. my point is, in regards to the gothic, that to think of the past in this way, particularly of the foundations of america, is both deeply gothic and deeply mainstream. kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 60 sm: i separated those three terms in my question (the gothic, the nation and pop culture) but i really do not think that you can consider the gothic without the popular culture element. it is part of the whole thing. we have been talking about the nation in general terms, following the metaphor “nation as home,” and now i’d like to focus on the inside of this home and talk about the regional gothic, which is one of the most pervasive ways in which the gothic is manifested in the united states. dominant us culture has tended to identify the national identity with certain regions or certain landscapes like the west, for instance, in the 19th century, or the suburban landscape more recently (especially since the post-war era). so, of course, these issues¾probably because they relate to very exclusionary processes of nation building¾have been treated in gothic terms. you mentioned teresa goddu before, who has argued that “the american gothic is most recognizable as a regional form” (3). thinking of the many iterations that the regional gothic has in the us, such as the new england gothic, southern gothic, or even frontier gothic, how do you think the gothic relates to questions of space, region and landscape in the us? kc: when i talk to people who haven’t studied the gothic, perhaps broader literary specialists, the first thing that has sprung to mind for many years is the southern gothic. that is the quintessential and established version of what the gothic is in the us, and it works so well for that, it’s like the freudian id, the dark secrets and so on. those themes of the past obviously play into this. we’re dealing again with the legacy of slavery, with poverty and inequality and with family secrets. this is manifested even in respected mainstream literature like a streetcar named desire (1947), where blanche dubois has her hidden past that she tries to gloss over and, then, her secrets are exposed, resulting in madness. so, with the southern gothic, it’s no wonder that it has elicited scholarly attention. however, there’s been a rise of more and more studies in the gothic lately. we’ve seen, for instance, the new england circle of writers brought to the fore and other exciting explorations of things like californian gothic and texan gothic, so this trend has very specific regional elements to it, but not necessarily always the deep south. coming back to southern gothic though—and i mentioned mexico earlier—, this idea of othering is somehow baked into the gothic from the start. with those original gothic novels, the classic criticism has always associated them with a protestant britain demonizing catholic europe, for instance, italy and spain are full of mad monks. europe is represented as this place of darkness and superstition that is associated with the past. in american literature, the south has absolutely worked like that in the eyes of the north. flannery o’connor talked about this. there’s a sense that southern gothic writers have had to play up to that image for northerners who are reading their books. it’s a specifically identifiable and appealing genre of writing and i think that perspective works very well. there’s this novel by nick cave, and the ass saw the angel (2003), that, despite being australian, it’s utterly american southern gothic in its mood and tone, and i think that shows that it’s a mode that can be transposed to kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 61 all kinds of other countries and places. locally, the us has also managed to establish genres, tropes and gothic modes that go beyond those regions themselves. sm: absolutely. i think the west is the most obvious example for this because of its transnational projection. people are talking about the global post-west, and how this region has expanded to a planetary dimension. kc: i just thought it’s really interesting to consider the revisionist western, which has that specific outlook, like cormac mccarthy’s blood meridian (1985). it is such a gothic novel in so many ways in its worldview that everything is bleak, nothing means anything. this comes back to what i was saying about the western frontier and this western narrative being exported to the rest of the world. i have no doubt that we’re becoming quite americanized in terms of these stories, but we also see regional resistance (and that’s a whole other topic). sm: i would like to ponder about the slippage that exists between the dominant culture and its identification with certain emblematic spaces, and other cultures or identities that are erased from these spaces. in your view, how does the gothic intervene upon this problematic identification between spaces and a national identity that is construed along specific and restrictive gender, racial and class lines? kc: we’re back to this classic discussion over whether the gothic is progressive in its politics or whether it simply demonizes the other and it is reactionary and a demonization of social change. i don’t want to duck out of that or sit on the bench, but i think that it does both of those things in different texts, or sometimes even in the same one. space and geography in terms of race, class and gender are so utterly fascinating in the way that they’re inscribed. i’ve been thinking a lot about how in america for example you hear a lot about “bad neighborhoods” or the phrase “sketchy” neighborhoods. we are aware that these refer to black neighborhoods, and that they are racist classifications. the ways in which space is being carved up in those racialized terms has always been gothicized. we might think here about one of those quintessentially racist, albeit important, films: birth of a nation (1915), and how it characterizes african americans as a dangerous force. but, lately, the gothic has really been revising this in fascinating ways. i’m thinking most obviously of the ballad of black tom (2016) by victor lavalle, which rewrites h.p. lovecraft’s fiction. in particular, “the horror at red hook” (1925), has an african american character who is a jazz musician and moves through different areas of new york, but it is in harlem where he feels safe. from the white mainstream culture perspective, harlem could be seen as a dangerous place to be, but this african american character is comfortably at home. as he moves out towards the suburbs into very white areas, suddenly, the space becomes threatening and dangerous. what’s so fascinating about it is that it really turns on its head the prejudice about non-white spaces as being threatening and dangerous. we can see this assumption in lovecraft very clearly, and lavalle shows this other perspective through an act of creative storytelling revising the story. matt ruff’s lovecraft kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 62 country (2016) does something very similar as well. ultimately, the gothic can demonize but it can also be a great vehicle to explore those very same themes from the opposite perspective, and there’s a lot of writing being done in that vein at the moment. sm: that kind of taps into my next question about imperial gothic and the interrogation of whether the gothic is actually progressive or conservative. as stephen king said, “monstrosity fascinates us because it appeals to the conservative republican in a three-piece suit who resides within all of us” (danse macabre 55). now that we have looked at the inside of the “nation as home,” the question remains of how the us as a nation sees its “threatening” outside. here, i’d like to turn to the imperial gothic as a term, which johan höglund has defined as an engine of horror (328). he takes his cue from patrick brantlinger who popularized this term to talk about british fears during the 19th century about the crumbling empire. i was wondering if you could talk about whether you see a correlation between this reality in nineteenth-century great britain and the current imperial situation in the us, or the situation of the us within the world as a global power. i am thinking especially of the mainstream film industry, which is quite prone to imperialist narratives, so, what are the fixations and obsessions of the us imperial gothic according to you? kc: yes, i don’t want to oversimplify in conflating these things but i think you’re right that the gothic brings together certain parallels. this idea that there’s a certain responsibility and that the us sees itself as the world’s policeman as britain did in the 19th century. kipling famously called it “the white man’s burden” to civilize the world in that often criticized quotation from a poem of the same name. but this has some other parallels, for instance, the film version of american sniper (2015), the autobiography of chris kyle, the most prolific us sniper in military history through his service in iraq. it begins with this powerful sounding and very interesting quotation to dissect where he says that “there are people in the world who are sheep, there are people in the world who are wolves, and there are people in the world who are sheepdogs.” this wasn’t actually from chris kyle to begin with, it was from a us military strategist. essentially, the idea is that some of us are just docile citizens going about our business, some of us are wolves (terrorists, criminals, etc.) and some of us are brave enough to take on this role of protector. this “sheepdog” needs to have the capacity for violence but to also buy into the values of civilization, which often suppress violence when appropriate. i think this analogy works very well to start the film with. there’s so much going on to unpack in there as to how you define what constitutes this view of civilization. for one thing, it’s quite a bleak view of civilization that we’re all sheep and we’ve kind of domesticated ourselves. another thing is that this shows how we’re, at least on some level, anxious about the freedom of other cultures and, historically within the us, for example, with native american peoples. but, both of those set up this very masculine and very presumptuous view that you need to be stoical, that you need to go out into the world and civilize it. kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 63 coming back to the gothic in imperial era texts, you see bad things coming back. you see these people being tainted. this is particularly obvious in heart of darkness (1899), where marlow comes back with the knowledge that kurtz has “gone native,” that he’s cut off heads and put them on sticks. he’s brutalized the native people and, yet, he somehow absorbed their most brutal aspects. marlow protects kurtz’s wife from this, and then, he has this vision that the thames has somehow become the heart of darkness. you see similar things in all types of authors from the time, like richard marsh with the beetle (1897) and the joss (1901), but we also see it in contemporary american narratives dealing with trauma, particularly, leading out of the gulf conflicts. to come back to american sniper, we learn in the film that chris kyle was killed by a traumatized veteran that he was trying to help. this whole story of the trauma of war returning and affecting the whole nation is what’s so compelling and so gothic about those stories as well. we see this everywhere. there’s a horror movie from the mid-80s called house (1986) about a vietnam veteran who is haunted by his friend, whom the main character wasn’t able to kill for mercy’s sake when he was wounded and suffering. he didn’t have the kind of courage to do this dark act, and, therefore, he’s haunted. you see it as well in house of leaves (2000) with the character of will navidson that’s playing on the real photographer kevin carter with the picture of the girl being stalked by the vulture but not helping. this idea that there’s something dark out there and that you might bring a piece of it back is a very compelling gothic element in that story. sm: as an example of these problems, i wanted to bring up 9/11, which is probably one of the most obvious examples that one can think of in terms of national and imperial gothic. 9/11 has been characterized as a gothic event many times, and, in a way, this has supported the bush administration’s racist narratives of the “war on terror” and everything that entailed. so, going back to the idea of “reactionary versus progressive” or “transgressive,” and given how prone the gothic can be to fuel reactionary discourses due to its power of othering, do you think that pop culture gothic can be used to offer cultural resistance to us imperialism? kc: yes, absolutely. we’re coming back to that idea of guilt in fiedler. the other narrative about 9/11 is that this is coming from us intervention in the middle east, going back a long way. the act is absolutely morally wrong but there’s a long violent history behind it. considering these narratives of trauma, i’m drawn to first blood (1972) and the rambo films, the third of which involves rambo helping the taliban to fight against the soviet union. there’s this sense that the chickens are coming home to roost. not that we want to justify any of this, but if america is worried that there are religious fundamentalists out to kill americans then it’s because of a situation created by american foreign policy, and we might make the same comparisons with the british empire with contemporary british fears about immigration and racial contamination. you might say, then, that if you don’t want to have a multicultural multi-racial society starting a global empire is perhaps the wrong way to go about that project. we can’t be too complacent in thinking of the gothic as just being fearful of othered things, or about kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 64 having a dark and gloomy worldview. there’s something valuable about cynicism and the gothic tells us that these narratives of patriotism, these very simplified jingoistic stories that we’re fed, they’re nonsense, and that if you scratch beneath that surface there’s always something else going on. so, there’s definitely capacity for resistance in that kind of gothic storytelling. sm: yes, i agree. i think it has the potential to be both. even though the gothic can, as you say, give hints about the absurdity of certain narratives, it can also be voyeuristic in that we are seeing the deconstruction of certain things, but that does not bring about any real change. open q&a session paul mitchell: i was thinking very much in terms of the movie don’t breathe (2016) by uruguayan filmmaker fede álvarez. it’s a home invasion movie, in which three young adult characters invade a man’s house and realize that he’s blind. it turns out that the house owner is a military veteran, so the movie is about what happens to the invaders when they’re in this house. considering the things you were saying about trauma and about linking that to issues of imperialism, american foreign policy and the role that veterans play within that the promulgation of that narrative, i wanted to ask how you respond to that movie within this context of the domestic space¾fundamentally, it’s about a home invasion, but it’s got this greater sort of political militaristic narrative about veterans and about the promulgation of american foreign policy. kc: i thought that movie was really interesting. it’s got that very satisfying narrative that the presumed bad guys have messed with the wrong guy. it’s bringing me back to those ideas of this necessity to be a sheepdog as mentioned in terms of american sniper. there was more to this though, because he was actually quite sadistic. he’s got a girl that he’s kidnapped and that he’s got tied up, so it plays with your assumption about who is the villain and who is the victim. it speaks well to that question about whether the gothic is progressive or if it is actually reactionary. it seems to be quite an interesting movie in the sense that it’s really complex and in terms of what it suggests about america and some of its attitudes. i think that’s absolutely fascinating regarding that sense that something threatening is elsewhere, that the violence and the darkness happen over there and that people are expected to (and often quite young people—we can get into quite a lot about the funneling of kids into the us military) commit acts of extreme violence for the right purposes. if we think of guantanamo bay, it is considered entirely appropriate if it’s in favor of a particular political military end, but it’s completely inappropriate in the domestic context. so, i love that idea that those very qualities that make this veteran a hero also make him a villain. i think this really brings together some of the stuff we’ve been talking about. kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 65 [nn]: we have talked about the political leniency of the gothic and how it can be progressive and transgressive, but also conservative. do you think the genre has a responsibility to be either? or can we take it as a form of art, in and of itself, without a second objective? can we still enjoy lovecraft regardless of the fact that he was a racist? kc: that’s a very important question for our times. i’ve already mentioned victor lavalle. in his introduction to the new annotated h.p. lovecraft (2019), he wrote about reading lovecraft and enjoying his fiction. then, realizing that he was horrifically racist, as an african american, he decided that he couldn’t enjoy this anymore. eventually, he came round to a perspective that is along the lines of being able to criticize someone and still appreciate aspects of their work. now, in some ways that’s not very contemporary. this is a huge issue and partly a generational thing but we have started to demand certain standards of creators and even stories themselves. i don’t want to endorse any evil narratives though, and there’s no doubt that i do enjoy gothic narratives that either satirize bad things or that put forward viewpoints i agree with, so there is a picking and choosing of where your own standards lie. i just don’t think it can ever be a completely morally responsible genre. fred botting, in one of the most foundational statements in this field, claims that the gothic is a writing of excess and it always has to cross boundaries, including those of taste. i think that’s why it’s important for us to take a critical stance. n: to build on that, do you think something is more artistic or intrinsically more valuable when it has a political or social message? for example, funny games (1997) versus a clockwork orange (1971). the first one presents violence without a context, while the second explores whether it is better, morally speaking, to have a choice to do good or to not have that choice. however, it doesn’t give you an answer, that’s on the viewer or on the reader to ponder. kc: both films are held up as works of art and they’re generally quite respected on that basis. i do like oscar wilde’s idea that all good art is perfectly useless and there’s an element of that in ambiguity. when i teach the gothic, my students get a bit annoyed sometimes about the ambiguity of hawthorne and authors like that. they often ask: “what did actually happened?” “what are we supposed to think about this?” well, that’s part of the medium and i think that’s great. the aestheticization of violence and of immorality is in itself interesting. paul mitchell: you talked about the ballad of black tom, and how it explores this idea of nonwhite spaces being dangerous, and that led me to think of the filmmaker jordan peele, specifically the movie get out (2017), and the way it does a very similar thing in its opening to what you’ve mentioned. i wanted to ask if you’ve got other examples of texts by african americans, women or other minorities who are using the gothic as a space to present an alternative and/or subversive vision of america. kc: that’s quite a broad-ranging question. in lavalle’s work, there’s these things that the protagonist does when has to adopt mannerisms of what’s expected of him to avoid racism, kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 66 which takes me back to representation of being african american in ralph ellison’s invisible man (1952) and other similar classic examples. but there, interestingly, the narrator says: “i’m not a spook from edgar allan poe or anything like that.” i also like the way that toni morrison has used the gothic. it is particularly compelling in beloved (1987) because it’s essentially a haunted house novel about the traumas of the past. lovecraft country is another one, matt ruff is a white author, and this is interesting if we think of the racial politics that we’ve been talking about, but there’s still plenty of things there to unpack. i definitely think there’s a lot going on in this area at the moment. the comparison between get out and the ballad of black tom definitely works, and that also evokes the complacency of liberal people. it fits with a lot of james baldwin’s writing about hypocrisy and about using african americans for your own ends. mónica fernández jiménez: you’ve mentioned hawthorne in one of your previous answers and i wanted to ask if you could elaborate a little bit more on your ideas about hawthorne as a figure of the american gothic. these foundational figures are very interesting and there are many themes and elements that can be explored but, how do you interpret the appearances of houses in his fiction, where there’s a strong connection with europe and the calvinist tradition? kc: that idea in the preface to the house of the seven gables (1851) that the mischiefs of the past are revisited on the present portrays the house as locus for guilt. the thing that gets me about hawthorne with those texts set in the early puritan period, such as the scarlet letter (1850) and short stories like “young goodman brown” (1835) and “the minister’s black veil” (1836), is that it appears as if these stories are contemporary with their events when, in reality, hawthorne is looking back to a period of about 150 years before he’s writing. hawthorne’s “young goodman brown” and herman melville’s “bartleby” (1853) are written very close together but one of them seems even more modern than it is, and the other one seems like it’s set in the medieval past and yet, they’re contemporary. we have a trend now for neo-victorian fiction that takes knowing look back. the most recent one that i’ve read and that i’ve found interesting is the essex serpent by sarah perry (2016). it dips into the minds of the characters and suggests that they couldn’t know what we know—that kind of thing is what john fowles does in the french lieutenant’s woman (1969). my point is that i think hawthorne is completely fascinating in terms of being one of the foundational authors of writing a history about that early period with the benefit of hindsight, with the knowledge and the weight of guilt that implies. there’s that biographical detail that his great-great-grandfather had been a judge in the salem witch trials and that he was kind of embarrassed by the religious fanaticism, superstition, hysteria and scapegoating. that mood has stuck with american gothic, that sense of the guilt about the past and how the past still lives on in the present (for instance, with slavery, as we’ve been talking about racial issues). there’s that famous faulkner quote that the past is not dead, it’s not even past and, for me, that’s what hawthorne does. kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 67 alejandro batista: you talked about regionalism in the gothic and about looking back. it seems that it has a lot to offer to the gothic in terms of exploring the past but, what about the future and future gothic authors? we are in a globalized world right now, and regionalism is somehow diffused and blurry. so, how do you see the future of the gothic in this regard? kc: that brings me back to the previous question about the slightly revised takes on the gothic we’re seeing from certain authors. i would recommend a novel by british author helen oyeyemi, white is for witching (2009), which is about race and the gothic. it deals with the expansion of perspectives across areas that we talked about earlier focused on race, class, gender and sexuality. the range of authors working in this field and using the traditional storylines of the gothic for their own ends is probably the most transformative thing that that we’re seeing. traditionally, to go back once more to that early gothic, it’s partly about people who see themselves as the mainstream dominant culture worrying about this weird crazy person over here, which is about that othering that’s at the heart of the gothic. but we’re starting to see some of those narratives turned around a little bit, and again, globalized. i talked about mexico as a us’s other, if we look at things like the recent mexican gothic and the ways in which people are using these narratives, there’s a reclaiming of the ghosts, spirits and monsters of these stories that have such different meanings in their native context. they’ve been completely misrepresented. this is potentially fun but there’s also a lot more potential to explore these myths and stories that the gothic draws on in a more authentic way. that seems to me to be the near future, a wider range of perspectives and viewpoints. works cited cave, nick. and the ass saw the angel. harper collins, 1989. conrad, joseph. heart of darkness. blackwood’s magazine, 1899. corstorphine, kevin. “introduction.” the palgrave handbook to horror literature, edited by kevin corstorphine and laura r. kremmel. palgrave macmillan, 2018, pp. 1-17. danielewski, mark z., house of leaves. pantheon, 2000. ellison, ralph. invisible man. random house, 1952. fiedler, leslie. love and death in the american novel. stein and day, 1960. fowles, john. the french lieutenant’s woman. jonathan cape, 1969. goddu, teresa a. gothic america: narrative, history, and nation. columbia u p, 1997. hawthorne, nathaniel. “the minister’s black veil.” the token and atlantic souvenir, 1836. —. “young goodman brown.” the new england magazine, 1835. kevin corstorphine | gothic and national domesticity reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1816 68 —. the house of the seven gables. ticknor & fields, 1851. kaplan, amy. “manifest domesticity.” the futures of american studies, edited by donald e. pease and robyn wiegman. duke u p, 2002, pp. 111-134. höglund, johan. “imperial horror and terrorism.” the palgrave handbook to horror literature, edited by kevin corstorphine and laura r. kremmel. palgrave macmillan, 2018, pp. 327-337. king, stephen. danse macabre. warner books, 1993. —. pet sematary. doubleday, 1983. klinger, leslie s. the new annotated h.p. lovecraft: beyond arkham. liveright, 2019. lavalle, victor. the ballad of black tom. tor, 2016. lovecraft, h.p. “the horror at red hook.” h.p. lovecraft: the complete fiction, edited by s.t. joshi. barnes & noble, 2008, pp. 314-331. marsh, richard. the beetle. skeffington & son, 1897. —. the joss, a reversion. f.v. white & co., 1901. melville, herman. “bartleby, the scrivener.” putnam’s magazine, 1853. morell, david. first blood. rowman & littlefield, 1982. morrison, toni. beloved. alfred a. knopf, 1987. mccarthy, cormac. blood meridian. random house, 1985. oyeyemi, helen. white is for witching. nan a. talese, 2009. perry, sarah. the essex serpent. serpent’s tail, 2016. ruff, matt. lovecraft country. harper collins, 2016. williams, tennessee. a streetcar named desire. new american library, 1947. films and tv series american sniper. directed by clint eastwood, warner bros, 2015. birth of a nation. directed by d.w. griffith, epoch producing co., 1915. the amityville horror. directed by stuart rosenberg, metro-goldwyn-mayer, 1977. a clockwork orange. directed by stanley kubrick, warner bros, 1971. don’t breathe. directed by fede álvarez, sony pictures, 2016. funny games. directed by michael haneke, concorde-castle, 1997. get out. directed by jordan peele, blumhouse, 2017. house. directed by steven miner, new world pictures, 1986. rambo. directed by ted kotcheff, orion pictures, 1972. rear window. directed by alfred hitchcock, paramount, 1954. run. directed by aneesh chaganty, lionsgate, 2020. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_final.docx laura álvarez trigo & anna marta marini | introduction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1843 1 introduction laura álvarez trigo & anna marta marini universidad de alcalá in the spring of 2021, when academic work was still mostly virtual due to covid-19 pandemic measures, we celebrated the foundation of popmec—an academic association dedicated to us popular culture studies—organizing a virtual conference on the gothic and its widespread presence in contemporary popular culture. with the idea of bringing a fresh approach to online events and the traditional keynote format, the 50+ shades of gothic: the gothic across genre and media in us popular culture conference involved a series of interviews with renowned scholars working in the field of gothic studies, who discussed various aspects of contemporary expressions and functions of the gothic in popular culture texts. the interviews were carried out between february and april 2021, and the original recordings can be found on youtube.1 given the kind availability of our keynotes, we decided to compile the transcripts—edited by the interviewees and interviewers themselves in order to give them a publishing shape—in this special issue. this collection follows the publication of reden vol. 3, no. 1 (2021), which contained a special dossier exploring the presence and different expressions of gothic modes in contemporary us popular culture. the fifteen interviews included in this special issue conversations on the gothic in popular culture cover various archetypes, paradigms, and expressions of the genre, including zombies, vampires, nature, and haunted house tropes. furthermore, they consider the importance of horror and gothic modes in tackling specific contemporary sociopolitical concerns, such as racial and ethnic issues, family and domestic spaces, and gender representation, all mediated by processes of othering and different portrayals of monstrosity. and, finally, they showcase contemporary scholarship on the gothic, concerned with understanding the evolution of the genre and its presence in different mediums including films, tv shows, comics, and videogames. above all, these discussions highlight how the gothic continues to be alive and well 1 popmec research “50+ shades of gothic | keynotes.” youtube, playlist. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=plupjs5dcmuvkvfwf_mj-gwk0s4bh0wnwl. laura álvarez trigo & anna marta marini | introduction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1843 2 in popular culture texts, as well as in the realm of academic research. each of the interviews includes a q&a session that was carried out with the audience members attending the interview virtual sessions. we have deemed important to include the public’s interventions as they elicit new lines of thought that undoubtedly add to the discussion. furthermore, the edited interviews are also accompanied by individual bibliography, which includes texts mentioned throughout each session. this special issue opens with an introductory interview with jeffrey a. weinstock, focusing on the gothic, as well as the relevance of popular culture and its suitability as a worthy object of academic inquiry. the following interviews are coupled according to macro themes they referred to: cyber gothic and posthumanism (xavier aldana reyes and anya heise-von der lippe), haunted houses and domestic spaces (evert jan van leeuwen and kevin corstorphine), the gothic in children’s literature and comics (michael howarth and julia round), nature, science fiction, and the ecogothic (christy tidwell and michelle poland & elizabeth parker), zombie and vampire narratives (kyle william bishop and sorcha ní fhlainn), ethnic bodies and boundaries (maisha wester and enrique ajuria ibarra), and the relation between the gothic and the anthropocene (justin edwards). as a conclusion, gothic scholar david punter discusses the nature of the gothic, the workings of horror, and the particularities of the american gothic tradition. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 69 children’s gothic an interview with michael howarth marica orrù independent researcher michael howarth is a professor of english at missouri southern state university and his main teaching areas are creative writing, film studies, american literature to the 1900s, british literature of the 19th century and children’s and young adult literature. he is also an author of both fiction and critical texts such as under the bed, creeping: psychoanalyzing the gothic in children’s literature (2014) and movies to see before you graduate from high school (2019), which is an analysis of 60 movies that he considers essential viewing for teenagers. he is also an author of fiction: in 2016 he published fair weather ninjas, a young adult novel, and in 2021 his first gothic novel titled a still and awful red. he is a member of the children’s literature association and the southwest texas popular culture and american culture associations, as well as sigma tau delta. keywords: american gothic, popular culture, children’s literature, ya literature, interview. marica orrù: i’d like to start with asking something about yourself before we get into the topic, so my first question is: when and in what way has your passion for the gothic started and, following up on that, how do you think feeding that passion has helped you to become the person you are today and also to pursue this particular career? michael howarth: i have had a very long and productive relationship with the gothic and it really started with my father. i didn’t realize how different i was until i started talking with other classmates of mine in elementary school, but my most vivid memory of being terrified and scared in a good way was when i was five years old and my father rented jaws and he said, “we’re going to watch this movie.” we sat down with popcorn and sodas and ice cream sundaes, we turned off all the lights, and we watched jaws. it was terrifying and wonderful, and i just loved it. my father was very liberal with the films he let me see. i was probably the michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 70 only kid in my kindergarten class who had seen john carpenter’s original halloween. of course, he made me wear a blanket over my head during some of the nude scenes, but that was really my first introduction to horror films and to the gothic. i remember in the early 80s when we would go to the video store to rent movies, my favorite section was always the horror section and while my father was roaming around looking for something to rent, i was looking at the covers of friday the 13th and american gothic and halloween. i read the descriptions on the back covers and let my imagination wander. it was wonderful. so, all of that was the impetus for what started me on this creative and critical journey of being interested in the gothic. my favorite season has always been autumn, and my favorite holiday has always been halloween. i’m excited when the leaves start turning different colors and it stays darker for much longer. i’m never happier than when it’s thundering and raining outside, when the sky is gray and overcast. that atmosphere is absolutely wonderful, and it’s probably because i appreciate the duality of good and evil that the gothic portrays, those negative aspects of humanity that to me are very realistic. and i also like the psychological and philosophical aspects of the gothic. sometimes, in realism, trying to present a message can come across as didactic or preachy, but when you wrap it in a gothic story it doesn’t feel so much like somebody is beating you over the head with a particular message. so when i was a kid, not only did i watch a lot of scary movies, but i also read a lot of horror books. i can particularly remember reading the scary stories anthology by alvin schwartz. not only are the stories creepy and fascinating, like “the thing” and “harold,” but so are the illustrations. i read that series over and over again. in fact, i just reread it a few years ago and those stories still hold up. the scary stories series was very popular and also banned in a lot of places. and if we know one thing about being a child or a teenager, it’s that if something is banned, then you can rest assured that almost everybody will read it because people don’t like being told they cannot do something. the word “no” almost always triggers some kind of resistance. my imagination was constantly whirling in lots of different ways with lots of different ideas. i would picture scenarios in my head and write creative stories. in middle school, i wrote horror stories all the time and turned them in for assignments because they afforded me a passion not just for gothic literature but for creative writing and for wanting to teach. it was through the gothic that i began to understand and appreciate the liberal arts, and this pathway of the gothic made me want to discuss and teach the things i was learning about, especially because it’s a genre that doesn’t quite get the respect it deserves. there’s a lot the gothic can offer us if we just allow ourselves the freedom to explore it. mo: do you think that growing up fully absorbed in these atmospheres and narrations of the gothic has influenced both your research and your fictional production? and since we’re talking about it, would you like to tell us more about your upcoming novel? mh: i started writing creatively when i was in middle school. in fact, i can remember very clearly that my seventh grade teacher was not a fan of horror and i wrote a lot of imaginative michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 71 short stories, everything from killer vegetables to a chocolate monster running loose in a candy factory. but the story that upset my teacher the most was a christmas story about a demonic santa claus who killed people. he had elves who were demons and they slaughtered people, and instead of garland hanging on the christmas trees it was the victims’ intestines. my teacher gave me an f because she said she was horrified. though she did compliment my writing style. in her scribbled comments at the end of the assignment, she told me i needed to write something more upbeat. so, the next story i turned in was an overly sentimental story about orphans finding a home on christmas. later, i remember my teacher talking to my parents about the types of stories i was writing, and my parents supporting both me and my creativity. they sat me down and said, “we know there’s nothing wrong with you. you’re just being imaginative.” that was a huge moment for me because i felt validated. i knew i shouldn’t feel guilty about loving this genre and all of its characteristics. it was writing those gothic stories and reading a lot of children’s literature that led me to focus specifically on children’s literature when i got my ph.d. and it was the gothic texts i read, like the secret garden and even some of the harry potter books, that made me start to wonder how the gothic can be used not just as a teaching experience, but as a way to help children and young adults gain a sense of their own self-identity. that’s one of the reasons why i wrote under the bed, creeping. i wanted to explore that connection between literature and the growth and development of young people because i love the idea of being able to talk about issues like class and power and gender in ways that don’t just feel preachy. then i wrote my young adult novel fair weather ninjas, which centers on a high school student dealing with a lot of past trauma, specifically the loss of his father. he thinks he’s a real ninja, which allows for some funny moments in the story. but there’s also a lot of pathos in the novel because those two elements—humor and pathos—are key parts of coming-of-age stories. but i had always wanted to write a story about elizabeth bathory who is a famous hungarian countess and is considered one of the most prolific serial killers in the world. she murdered about six hundred peasant girls during a ten-year period. she would bathe in their blood because she thought it made her skin look younger. that story fascinated me because under the surface this is really a story about a woman who is afraid of growing old, a woman who did everything she could to retain her power and beauty. there have been a lot of stories about elizabeth bathory, many books and films, but i wanted to approach it from a different angle. i wasn’t writing a biography, but a work of fiction that tackles the story from the perspective of a young woman who comes to the castle to work as a seamstress and begins to suspect that things in the castle are not quite what they seem. so there’s a mystery that unravels over the course of the novel. i tend to be working on multiple projects at any given time, usually a creative project and a critical project. that helps to keep me fresh. and if i’m not working on a chapter or an article, i’m at least jotting down ideas for future projects or outlining potential ones, or even creating a list of books i want to use for research. currently, i’m almost finished with another michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 72 gothic historical novel, and i am also working on some research involving the gothic in children’s films. in fact, i recently wrote an article on val lewton’s curse of the cat people, exploring how the film’s gothic elements can act as a philosophical mirror for children to work through various issues in their lives. mo: so, considering your studies on the topic obviously but also your personal experience, as we heard, in growing up as a fan of gothic stories, how do you think that gothic literature and more generally gothic elements in children’s literature can help a child in the process of shaping his or her identity? mh: sometimes, when we read gothic texts in my children’s literature class, students will ask, “is this appropriate for children?” and i always repeat madeleine l’engle’s famous quotation that states, “how can children appreciate the light if they’ve never seen the darkness?” which is a great quotation because if you try to show children only the happy and sunny times, that does not prepare them well for when they need to face the darker times in their life. as much as we don’t want to admit it, our lives are a mixture of good and bad times. there’s sadness, there’s depression, there’s grief, and there’s death. it’s unavoidable. if you live on this planet, then you’re going to have to deal with trauma at some point and preparing children and young adults for that is very important. i tell my students all the time that gothicism helps children deal with the problems they’re facing because childhood itself is scary. it’s a time when you’re making friends, losing friends, and being bullied. you’re living in a world controlled by adults, a world in which you have no power. for example, children are often told when to eat, where to go, and how to behave. they make few important decisions on their own. but gothic literature is all about power and control. in fact, some of the best gothic literature is about characters who are struggling to assert power over other characters, and even over other landscapes, that seek to control and manipulate them. gothicism also externalizes our internal fears, and so it takes abstract ideas like grief or anger and it puts them in concrete terms that children can understand. children, especially young children, have a difficult time verbalizing abstract ideas. they know they experience a certain emotion, and they know when they get mad or jealous or depressed, but they have a very difficult time articulating those emotions and expressing themselves in a way that gives them control over their own emotions. the gothic helps them to do that. if you look at where the wild things are by maurice sendak, that’s a book about dealing with anger, and it becomes very clear that the wild things symbolize max’s anger toward his mother, and in taming the wild things he’s essentially taming his anger. so, the book helps children to understand what anger means while also showing them how to deal with that anger and how to process it in a positive way. this is much different from how gothicism was often used in children’s literature, which was as a deterrent to bad behavior. if you look at carlo collodi’s pinocchio, you will michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 73 notice how different it is from the disney version, especially because the puppet is stabbed and hanged and beaten and caught in a steel trap, and almost eaten alive twice. that book is very dark because pinocchio goes through hell to become a real boy. the gothic elements in that book are used to scare children into behaving properly and listening to the adults and respecting adult authority. the problem with that approach is that it doesn’t allow for an intelligent and insightful conversation between either the child reader and the book, or between the child reader and the adult. this is because the child is so scared and often doesn’t want to talk about those issues and conflicts. there has to be a safe space, and i think we’re seeing a lot more of that now where the gothic is not used as necessarily a punishment. gothic literature and film are approaching issues of diversity a lot more than they have in the past. there’s a nice message in some of these stories that not all monsters are bad. in neil gaiman’s the graveyard book the characters that are normally associated as being evil are the good characters and the characters that are normally associated as being good are the evil characters. he completely flips the reader’s expectations and allows us to have a conversation about not just diversity, but how we label people and how we have certain prejudices. when we look at children’s gothic texts, we have to remember that these books were not written by children, and what’s fascinating about this idea is that you have adults making decisions about how they think a child should act and how they think a child should think and what types of character and stories they think a child will enjoy. to complicate these ideas, there are artists like roald dahl and tim burton who tell stories that are accessible not just to children but to adults. their stories, for instance, show how eccentric and strange adults can be in their own way of thinking and approaching the world, and especially how those adults approach the idea of childhood. the secret garden is another good example. it’s a book many adults can relate to because it’s about a parent coping with grief and dealing with a child who is sick. it’s about trying to reestablish a relationship with your child. but for children, the secret garden is about making connections with friends and discovering nature and exploring the unknown. so it’s clear there are always different layers in a book, and different ages can relate to different layers. in many ways, children’s literature, especially the gothic texts, are more than just a reflection of the frustrations and conflicts that can surface during childhood. they’re also a commentary on how children view adulthood. alice in wonderland is a great example because all of the adult characters in that book are crazy: the mad hatter the queen of hearts, the cheshire cat. poor alice wanders around looking at all these adults and thinking how weird they are and how their words and actions don’t make any sense to her. and that’s realistic. many times, children don’t understand why adults do the things they do. many of these gothic children’s books are important because they offer well-rounded characters that children can relate to and themes that children can understand, thus reminding child readers they are not the only ones who harbor some of these thoughts. michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 74 the gothic provides a safe space, meaning children can work through many of these themes and issues in the context of an engrossing story. they understand how other characters react to those issues, they understand the actions those characters make, the consequences those characters face, whether they’re good or bad, and they can learn from those actions. when children face similar situations in their own lives, perhaps they are more prepared because they’ve read about those situations in a book and had ample time to think about those unique situations. with covid being so prevalent at the moment, there is always the topic of vaccinations, and i bring this up because in many ways each of the books or stories or poems that children read is like a small vaccine. you can give it to children to prepare them for when they get older, for when they have to deal with similar situations in their own lives. literature, and even film, can adequately prepare them for dealing with lots of themes and issues and problems that the world might throw at them when they become adolescents and then adults. and isn’t that a huge part of a parent’s job, or any adult for that matter? to prepare children for the larger world they will someday inhabit? to teach them how to make good choices? and to move them away from constant dependence to confident independence? added to that, gothic literature also promotes a feeling of victory, which is especially important for an age-range that, as i’ve already mentioned, does not enjoy a lot of power and control. gothic literature often celebrates some type of victory at the end of the story. it might not always be quite the victory that the character or the reader wants, but it’s still crucial for child readers to see another person, even if he or she is fictional, learn and mature and achieve some level of success. those moments, which can lead to a sudden realization or an epiphany, are instrumental in shaping a child’s growth and development. i also admire how the gothic is honest when it comes to presenting a level of realism within a fantastic or supernatural story, meaning this is a genre that is not afraid to portray how the real world functions. whether we like it or not, the real world is not always fair. good does not always triumph over evil. we don’t live in a fairy tale, and gothic literature forces us not only to understand that idea, but to confront what scares us. it forces us to question what we can do to survive in such a world. a lot of times, people don’t want to admit they are scared of something or someone, but gothic literature creates that safe space in which readers can deal with those issues and then process a multitude of emotions. and if the reader becomes scared, then he or she can just close the book and return to the story at a later time when he or she feels more settled and comfortable. mo: yes, very true. as we already mentioned, you teach children’s literature at missouri southern state university. why do you think it’s important to teach gothic literature and also what would you say are the most common responses to the gothic themes from students who attend your classes? do you find that these responses have evolved during your years of teaching? and finally, do you think that could be a correlation between young people’s relationship with the gothic and great changes in our society? michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 75 mh: whenever i use gothic literature in my classroom, or even when i teach books that contain gothic elements, i always have some students who are a bit leery and question whether or not those elements are appropriate for children. and that’s a great conversation to have. there’s not one specific age where children are suddenly able to handle gothic elements, or to understand the symbolism and how those elements connect to the story and characters and setting. every child is different. clearly, i was an anomaly, watching jaws and halloween and aliens when i was still in elementary school. children can always handle a lot more than adults give them credit for and that’s something i constantly tell my students. i tell them it’s important to teach gothic texts because at some point in our lives we are all going to encounter the big bad wolf, in whichever form that takes. gothic texts can help to illuminate the way we view the world. they help us to learn what frightens us, and they help us to learn what fascinates us. what most children remember about the fairy tales they read are usually the scary parts and the violent parts and the gory parts. they’re somewhat fascinated by that dark side, as are most people, even those who are afraid of horror films. some people who watch horror films cover their eyes with their hands, but they still peek through their fingers. why? it’s because they are still intrigued by what is happening, and they are equally intrigued by the possibility of what could happen. therefore, the gothic becomes an important mechanism for learning how to conquer our own fears and how to keep them at bay, or how to communicate them to other people. it helps us to establish a sense of our own independence and thus develop our own self-identities. gothic stories help children explore their surroundings. if you want children to be engaged in literature, then you have to give them something to think about, and gothic literature always gives you something to think about. right now, we are seeing the gothic becoming more established. more children are reading gothic stories, and part of that reason is because of social media and streaming services. children nowadays are more in tune with what’s going on in the world, so they are not quite as sheltered as children in the past have been. more and more, it seems children are questioning how the greater world functions and how they fit into that world, and so many authors are writing gothic books that deal with social themes and issues that children deal with on a regular basis. children regularly deal with heightened emotions and a heightened imagination, two elements that are often prevalent in gothic texts. so it makes sense that children would gravitate toward a genre that contains many of the same levels of emotion and imagination which children often experience themselves. children are constantly finding themselves in power struggles, not just with their parents but with their friends and their communities, or even with how quickly or slowly their own bodies are changing. in gothic texts, they are able to watch those struggles play out through various characters and plots and settings. they get to live vicariously through other characters and test out what happens when they want to act like a character who succeeds, but then when a character fails they can ask also themselves questions about what that specific character could have done differently. interacting with michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 76 those gothic elements is important because it’s a reminder that such struggles and conflicts are an unavoidable part of life. but those hardships are also crucial in helping each one of us figure out who we are and who we want to become. we can grow from these experiences as long as we make good choices and learn from our mistakes. in my university classes, all the students in the teacher education program must take a class on child psychology, so by the time most of them enroll in my children’s literature course they have studied some aspects of psychology and are better able to grasp some of the gothic elements we read during the semester. as a professor, i like to focus on the choices and decisions the characters make, and how those characters change as a result of their decisions. when i teach literature, i try to emphasize the importance of universal connections because one of the great things about literature, and especially all of those well-written characters that live within the pages, is that regardless of what country a reader is from, regardless of their race or ethnicity, there is something about the characters’ behaviors and traits that strike a chord within the reader. readers enjoy connecting with certain characters, relating to similar passions and desires and interests and fears. so i always try to find ways that readers can connect to the characters and ask questions about how they are both similar and dissimilar to the characters in a given novel. one exercise i often ask my students to do is to write a paragraph about how they are like a specific character and then write another paragraph about how they are not like a specific character. then i will ask them to write about a good decision made by a character, as well as a bad decision made by that same character. questions like those really allow readers to explore the psychology of the characters. because then you can have a conversation that centers on the idea of what makes a good choice and what makes a bad choice. and then you can discuss the repercussions of those decisions. and every time we have those discussions in my classroom, we talk about what lessons children can gain from a particular text. because the first question you always want to ask when choosing a book to share with a child is: what do i want my students to learn from this text? what is my reason for teaching this text? and if you can answer that question, then you can provide a roadmap for the readers to follow. when i teach a text, i always begin by telling my students what concepts i want them to understand, and i ask them to focus on important themes in the text and how the main character changes from the beginning to the end, or how a secondary character is pivotal in the main character’s growth and development. what i love about discussing literature in the classroom is that every person has his or her own response to a given text because we are all different people, meaning we all have different life experiences. we’ve all made different choices, we’ve all succeeded, and we’ve all failed. we’ve all experienced happiness and sadness and pain, so whenever we read a text we tend to gravitate towards those characters and conflicts that we relate to personally. everyone has a favorite scene or character or line of dialogue, but the readers also disagree as to whether the ending is satisfying or the character has grown sufficiently over the course of the novel. michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 77 and those differences and similarities are what allow us to engage in those inspiring and interesting conversations. to really understand and appreciate a text you need to reread it a couple of times. we don’t have that luxury in a college classroom, but the closest we can come to that experience is having twenty different students read the same book and then have each of them share their own interpretation of the text. overall, the responses in my classroom have been largely positive whenever i have incorporated gothic texts into the curriculum, whether it be through novels or stories or poems. at the very least, my students have gained a deeper appreciation for the gothic and can now understand its importance. mo: i have one final question: in the epilogue of your book under the bed, creeping, which we have already mentioned, you write, and i quote, “children’s literature is for all ages.” can you explain what that means and why you think it is so important to keep this idea in mind when dealing with children’s books? mh: children’s literature is certainly taken more seriously as a genre than it was in the past. even still, there are people who think the vocabulary in children’s books is always simple and the stories are straightforward and not complicated. but children are very complex, and so the best children’s literature needs to be complex, too. once we start exploring children’s literature in my classroom, my students are always shocked by the serious issues and advanced vocabulary words that exist in those texts, not to mention the big themes and ideas. and i always share with them, at the beginning of the semester, one of my favorite quotations by the author philip pullman, who says, “there are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children’s book.” people tend to think that children’s literature deals with only the emotions that children deal with, but there’s really no emotion that is specific to children. if you’re a human being, then you experience anger and depression and happiness and grief. plus, no one ever escapes his or her childhood, which is one of the reasons why children’s literature is for all ages. we don’t just cut loose our childhood when we reach a certain age. our childhood is like a shadow that is with us throughout our lives. we may not always see it, and there are times when it might be bigger than it really is or more pronounced, but it’s always there. and the books we read as children, the conversations we have about those books, and the use of our imagination all work together to help shape our identities. we carry those experiences into adolescence and adulthood. stop for a moment and think about who you are as an adult and then ask yourself how your childhood experiences helped to shape your identity. at what point did you begin to separate from who you were as a child and start to make your own decisions and to act more independently? an important theme in children’s literature is the idea of home away home, in which the child starts off at home, is supported by parents, is dependent on adults and then must go off on his or her own and make choices on his or her own, whether those choices are good or michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 78 bad. the child character learns from those decisions, and oftentimes from any mistakes, and returns home at the end of the story changed and now more aware of his or her place in the world, as well as having a better understanding of how to make important decisions. when i wrote under the bed, creeping, i made a conscious effort to write it in a way that non-academics could understand it. i don’t want to target just one specific group of people. i would love for parents and teenagers to read some of these critical texts and connect with them to the point of saying, “i understand how this relates to me.” if you have kids and they’re interested in this type of literature, or if you’re looking for literature to use with them to get them thinking about certain issues or ideas that they might feel uncomfortable talking about with you, then why not read some of these critical articles and texts? they can help people to learn more about what specific books to use with children and students, as well as how to approach them in regard to discussing certain issues and ideas. as i read more and more children’s literature, and the accompanying critical analysis, i continue to be fascinated by how many details have been changed over the years, like cinderella’s stepsisters chopping off parts of their feet to fit inside the slipper, or the wicked queen wanting to eat snow white’s lungs and liver. i suppose adults believed those details would terrify children too much and warp their growth and development. but that’s a mistake because in changing many of those stories, they remove the opportunities for the main characters to make their own choices, which hinders that character’s maturity process. in life, we all have to make good choices and bad choices. we all have to understand and live with the consequences, otherwise there is no room for growth. how can children be expected to mature if someone else is always making choices for them? and let’s not forget that children are smart enough to know it’s just a story. plus, they enjoy those darker and more violent details. that’s one of the reasons why we are seeing the original versions of many of these stories becoming more popular and being read more and more to children. perhaps adults are understanding the positive aspects of gothicism and realizing that children can indeed handle a lot more than we often give them credit for. if i could give two or three book and film recommendations to someone who is interested in exploring gothicism in children’s literature and film, i would recommend the graveyard book by neil gaiman, especially if they are familiar with disney’s the jungle book, which addresses some of the same key themes and ideas. i would also recommend a novel titled peppermints in the parlor as well as a book geared toward middle-grade readers titled scar island that deals with bullying and grief and abandonment. in terms of films, i recommend paranorman, tim burton’s frankenweenie, and val lewton’s curse of the cat people from 1944, which deals with childhood trauma in a way that’s spooky but also very touching. these books and films are important because they use gothic elements, sometimes in fantastical settings, to explore realistic issues and conflicts that feel both personal and universal at the same time. michael howarth | children’s gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1817 79 works cited brooks wallace, barbara. peppermints in the parlor. simon and schuster, 2005. carroll, lewis. alice’s adventures in wonderland. macmillan, 1865. collodi, carlo. le avventure di pinocchio. libreria editrice felice paggi, 1883. gaiman, neil. the graveyard. harper collins, 2008. gemeinhart, dan. scar island. scholastic inc., 2017. hodgson burnett, frances. the secret garden. frederick a. stokes, 1911. howarth, michael. under the bed, creeping: psychoanalyzing the gothic in children’s literature. mcfarland, 2014. pullman, philip. carnegie medal acceptance speech, 1996. schwartz, alvin. scary stories to tell in the dark. harper collins, 2019. sendak, maurice. where the wild things are. harpercollins, 1988. films and tv series curse of the cat people. directed by val lewton, rko radio pictures, 1944. frankenweenie. directed by tim burton, walt disney studios motion pictures, 2012. halloween. directed by john carpenter, compass international pictures, 1978. jaws. directed by steven spielberg, universal pictures, 1975. paranorman. directed by sam fell and chris butler, laika, 2012. bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice: instituto franklin-uah as intercultural mediator for language assistants in spain reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 117 bianca vitalaru universidad de alcalá iulia vescan instituto franklin-uah 118 bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice: instituto franklin-uah as intercultural mediator for language assistants in spain bianca vitalaru universidad de alcalá iulia vescan instituto franklin-uah asic research has shown that some differences between educational aspects of spanish and american culture, such as perceptions about on roles, attitudes, communication, teaching methods and even expectations, can manifest into actual academic difficulties for american language assistants in spanish bilingual schools. this paper will focus on describing the elements that, when analyzed, outline the role of instituto franklin-uah as an intercultural and academic mediator between two cultures and education systems (spain and us) and the context that justifies the different measures taken to attend to the particular needs or circumstances of the agents involved (students, teachers and academic advisors). two perspectives will be included: a) a historical one, related to instituto franklin-uah’s background and context related to bilingual teaching; b) an analytical one, focusing, on the one hand, on the perception of the agents involved and, on the other hand, on the actions that have turned instituto franklin-uah into an actual mediator between its students and the schools where they act as language assistants. ultimately, the paper underlines the difference in terms of the perception b ab st ra ct * vitalaru b. & i. vescan. “bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice: instituto franklinuah as intercultural mediator for language assistants in spain”. reden. 1:1. (2019): 117-152. web. recibido: 31 de octubre de 2018; 2ª versión: 04 de marzo de 2019. 119 of the same aspects by the groups involved and the need for measures to improve the communication process between american las and spanish lead teachers in bilingual schools. key words: intercultural mediation, language assistants, instituto franklin-uah introduction instituto franklin-uah (if-uah) has offered, for more than ten years, a program of master’s degrees that train american students and, at the same time, place them in bilingual schools in madrid (spain) to act as language assistants (las). in this context, if-uah has balanced and adapted to the needs of the agents involved (in this case, american students-las and spanish teachers) in order to provide an effective training and teaching environment in bilingual schools. at the same time, if-uah has worked to help its students anticipate and counteract potential challenges they might face during their training period and in the actual teaching environment in spain. on the other hand, specific basic research (vescan & vitalaru 2017; 2018; vitalaru & vescan 2017)2 has shown that some differences between the spanish and american cultures considering educational aspects, such as perceptions on roles, attitudes, communication, teaching methods these aspects can result into actual academic difficulties for english-speaking/american3 language assistants (las) in spanish bilingual schools. in this context, instituto franklin-uah has played an essential role from two points of view. first, as an institution that offers a postgraduate teacher training opportunity for english-speaking las. second, as an intercultural mediator between the englishspeaking students/las and the bilingual schools who rely on those las as important agents in the implementation of their bilingual program that the spanish regional ministry implemented in the madrid region in 2004. if-uah has balanced and adapted to the needs of the agents involved in order to provide an effective training and teaching environment in bilingual schools. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 2 there are very few studies that focus on aspects related to the la’s activity or role in spain. one that is of particular interest is espigaresespigares’ graduate final paper (2017) the effectiveness of assistants to improve foreign language development in education, which focuses on showing the positive effect las have in the learning of english. 3 the program is addressed to native english language speakers although the majority of the students in the program are americans due to the fact that instituto franklin-uah is a research department at universidad de alcalá that focuses on american studies. 2% of students in the program come from canada, australia, new zealand or the uk. most of the times, as the practicum advisors’ reports at instituto franklin-uah show (section 5.2), students require assistance and support from the university academic advisors in order to face the challenges the reality of professional teaching in spain, to avoid misunderstandings and even deal with anxiety. in fact, in the context of the general gap between academic expectations and teaching in the field practical requirements, as linda darling-hammond points out, “the teaching practicum is important for bridging the gap between what student teachers have learnt in the program and the reality of teaching practice in schools” (cited by azkiyah & mukminin 2017). this importance is why las who lack specific teaching practice in spain tend to experience a certain anxiety associated with teaching practices, at least at the beginning of their training process. in fact, in the ‘teach & learn in spain (tls)‘ program itself, 90.5% of the total 105 students in the 2016-2017 cohort lacked specific teaching practice before enrolling. this implied a certain level of stress that required mediation from if-uah university advisors, as shown in the latter’s own testimonials. moreover, the exposure to a different culture, which is reflected in the educational 120 and communication settings as well, can potentially result as or increase the amount of cultural shock experienced by students-las who are not properly exposed to the differences involved in living in a new country. according to the theory of culture shock, moving to a different country, in a different ethnic and cultural environment and distant from familiar behaviors, images and expectations, can cause feelings of loneliness, helplessness, anxiety, frustration, and symptoms of depression (oberg 2006: 142-143). culture shock4 is a key concept in fields such as psychology, anthropology, and intercultural communication, and is commonly used in “orientation and reentry training” in “education abroad” and in a “corporate context” (la brack). in view of this context, this paper will focus on describing the elements that, when analyzed, outline the role of instituto franklin-uah as an intercultural and academic mediator between two cultures and education systems (spain and the us) and the context that justifies “the teaching practicum is important for bridging the gap between what student teachers have learnt in the program and the reality of teaching practice in schools”. (linda darling-hammond) bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 4 originated in the 1950s by cora dubois and expanded by finnish-canadian anthropologist, kalervo oberg (la brack). 121 moving to a different country, in a different ethnic and cultural environment and distant from familiar behaviors, images and expectations, can cause feelings of loneliness, helplessness, anxiety, frustration, and symptoms of depression. (oberg 2006: 142-143) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 the different measures taken to attend to particular needs or circumstances. for this purpose, two perspectives will be included: a) a historical one, based on research about the origin of the institution, which has operated at the universidad de alcalá since 1987, and its specific training program for las in madrid in the context of the bilingual education program in spain and european policies regarding teaching and learning foreign languages; and b) an analytical one, focusing, on the one hand, on the perception of the agents involved and, on the other hand, on the actions that have turned instituto franklinuah into an actual mediator between its students and the schools where they act as language assistants. theoretical framework intercultural mediation: definitions and perspectives the term ‘mediation’ can refer to two perspectives that are significant in this study as both of them involve the knowledge of communication and cultural patterns and background to have an effective outcome. one of the meanings is specific for the legal settings and refers to the “voluntary and confidential process” in which a “neutral third party” helps disputants come to an agreement that is fair and acceptable for those involved. understanding the cultural background and characteristics of the parties involved and even communication factors is, thus, key for the professional mediator to achieve a successful outcome (sgubini & simon 2006; people’s law dictionary). in the general sense, mediation is defined as “a tool that helps to ‘bridge the gap’ between differences, and this requires knowing and respecting the culture of people that you meet” (sgubini, 2006). in fact, mediation can be used whenever communicative and cultural obstacles occur, especially if we consider that each culture has its own communication methods and strategies depending on a variety of factors that form its historical and social development: communication methods vary from country to country, depending on the historical development, legal systems, and ethnic and cultural background of each area. the key to make mediation successful globally is to understand the cultural effect on both business negotiation and communication techniques (sgubini 2006). intercultural mediation, on the other hand, is studied from three perspectives (cohenemenique 2003, as cited in díaz pena et al., 2014: 6): 1. situations in which a third party makes a complicated communication possible or facilitates it. 122 bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 2. conflictive situations in which a mediator helps the parties agree and solve the conflict. 3. transformation process in which the mediator promotes important social or structural changes (e.g local policies). other significant definitions underline its characteristics as a process of particular social relevance: • a “process that contributes to improving communication, the relationship and the intercultural integration between people or groups of people from a territory and that belong to one or several cultures and that have different cultural codes” (grupo triángulo 2007). • “an intercultural mediator […] is an operator in charge of facilitating communication between individuals, families, and community as part of measures to promote and facilitate the social inclusion of immigrants” (catarci 2016: 128). • the mediator promotes “the removal of cultural and language barriers, the development of a culture of openness, inclusion and the advocacy of rights, and observance of the duties of citizenship” (catarci 2016: 128). finally, eugenia arvanitis (2014: 3-4) discusses mediation from three perspectives that show its central role in “an inclusive and pluralistic society” as: a process that helps “negotiate differences in a cohesive society” in an effective way, a “reflexive and dialogical process” that provides the opportunity for intercultural exchange and a process where “the devolution of social, personal and cultural responsibility takes place in the context of civic pluralism.” in terms of mediation’s main functions, they can be indexed into three types based on cohen emenique’s classification (1994, 2003)5, which has been extensively used by many authors that researched or analyzed the topic6. although it has mainly been applied to communication with foreigners in public services (european project time project partnership 2016: 22) and has specifically been explained with examples from the healthcare settings based on several studies (díaz pena et al. 2014, 7-9)7, mediation can be applied to any field where cultural differences influence a conflict (urruela bolaños 2012: 121): 1. preventive, with the purpose of preventing potential conflicts and misunderstandings by answering questions and clarifying aspects and context apart from translating message in a contextualized way, adapted for the agents involved. in this context the mediator also helps with administrative formalities. 123 5 see a more detailed new version in cohen-emerique (2007). “intercultural mediators: bridges of identities”. interculture, 153, p. 7-22. 6 the following studies include several references. 7 see a more thorough analysis in díaz pena et al., 2014. reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 124 2. rehabilitating, in which the mediator is a consultant for both parties to help solve a conflict between public service staff and foreigners by eliminating cultural barriers. 3. transforming, referring to social mediation in general, which focuses on changes in regulations to include intercultural aspects; or in the mediation between associations, healthcare services and foreigners’ communities (díaz pena et al. 2014: 7-9; european project time project partnership 2016: 22). combined, they reflect the pre-requisites that public policies on intercultural counselling entail in general: equality, inclusion, active participation and an intercultural goal (giménez 2010: 37 as cited in díaz pena et al. 2014). thus, it can be said that the mediator is perceived as an educator him/herself, since he/ she “plays an educational role” (catarci 2016: 129) and requires a solid linguistic and cultural knowledge base, as well as “adequate communication, relationship and conflict management skills” (130). generally, the abilities required to be an effective mediator are specific to the application of several principles and practices in intercultural mediation settings, so as to “create an operational intercultural space of mutual understanding, empathy and collaborative ethos using culturally appropriate behaviors”: flexibility, tolerance, hope, respect and reciprocity, inquisitiveness to learning (townsend 2002: 4). finally, in the education context, authors such as bilgehan (2012: 1125) highlight the potential that communication has in solving conflicts in the context of mediating in education settings: “mediation education is based on focusing the communication skills on resolving problems and involves negotiation and conflict resolution education as well”. it necessarily includes a negotiation process, through specific meetings aimed at resolving difficulties and strengthening collaboration. finally, a specific strategy recommended for training programs in universities to make mediation effective “include[s] the griefs of world nations in the training process” (1126) since empathy is key for solving (political) disagreements and conflicts in general. thus, redefining each party’s perception of the conflict and creating a new story that is acceptable for both parties, as well as “sharing each other’s griefs” and “owning other’s grief for a while” are essential for solving situations of disagreement. the mediator is perceived as an educator him/ herself, and requires a solid linguistic and cultural knowledge base, as well as “adequate communication, relationship and conflict management skills”. (catarci 2016: 129) bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 125 redefining each party’s perception of the conflict and creating a new story that is acceptable for both parties, as well as “sharing each other’s griefs” and “owning other’s grief for a while” are essential for solving situations of disagreement. (bilgehan 2012: 1125) reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 in the region of madrid, the local government started to implement the bilingual program in public bilingual schools run by the department of education and the education department of the region of madrid in 2004. 126 bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan the bilingual program and european policies: bilingual schools in spain & madrid two aspects are particularly relevant in the context of this paper and for explaining the actions taken to implement the use of language assistants in bilingual schools: a) the linguistic policies developed in 1995 by the european union focusing on the improvement and diversification of language learning and teaching within the education systems of the eu. its original goal was to: “provide a basis for reflection on how the educational systems themselves can continue the construction of a europe without internal frontiers, and strengthen understanding between the peoples of the union” (council resolution march 31, 1995). as stated in the above named law, the emphasis was, for the first time, on promoting the qualitative improvement of language knowledge, focusing especially on the development of communication skills and on increasing the diversification of the languages taught from school to higher education as a strategy to offer eu citizens the opportunity to become proficient in several of the eu languages. for the current analysis, it is important to underline the fact that the law actually establishes a high priority in eu actions on the beginning of foreign language learning during childhood and specifically mentions the need to encourage learning in primary schools (council resolution march 31, 1995). the council resolution also emphasizes the need to promote actions directed towards the contact with native speakers of the languages studied through programs such as, for instance, mobility programs or language visits. the stress on bilingual teaching through “the teaching of classes in a foreign language for disciplines other than languages” and the provision of an exchange of teaching staff that are native speakers are extremely significant as they explain the current situation characterized by the teaching of content core subjects (“content and language integrated learning” or clil) and the use of language assistants, some of them through the ‘teach & learn in spain’ program at instituto franklin-uah. b) the implementation of the bilingual programs in spain, particularly of the bilingual program in the region of madrid, our main focus, based on the basic principles established by previous european policies. in the region of madrid, the local government started to implement the bilingual program in public bilingual schools run by the department of education (ministerio de educacion) and the education department of the region of madrid (consejería de educación e investigación) in 2004. since then, the public bilingual schools are required to have language assistants (auxiliares de conversación) (orden 162/2011, de 21 de enero). moreover, this requirement was extended to the charter and private schools in 2008 (orden 9932/2012, 30 de agosto). linares and dafouz (2010) provide a detailed description of the clil programs/projects in the madrid region and some of its outcomes and challenges. 127 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 in accordance with the before mentioned european policies and regulations, the main goals of the bilingual program are twofold: to improve the communicative skills of students in schools and to provide cultural references related to english speaking countries through contact with english language native speakers and by implementing mobility programs for teachers and students (education department of the region of madrid). method as mentioned in the introduction, the objective of this paper is to describe the elements that, when analyzed, outline the role of instituto franklin-uah as an intercultural and academic mediator between two cultures and education systems (spain and us) and specific details. the two following perspectives will be included: a) the historical perspective, related to instituto franklin-uah’s background and context related to bilingual teaching. the main research method is the systematic review of the main theoretical background that is relevant considering the if-uah’s activity and context regarding the bilingual program in spain. further information will be included in section 4. b) the analytical perspective, focusing, on the one hand, on the perception of the agents involved and, on the other, on the actions that have turned instituto franklin-uah into an actual mediator between its students and the bilingual schools where they act as language assistants. for this perspective, the following methods are used to gather data: b.1. analysis of regulations and guides that were designed by the ministry of education and the regional government in order to regulate the role and responsibilities of the las (in madrid) were analyzed from a qualitative point of view considering the reference to roles and responsibilities in the classroom (section 5.1.1). b.2. questionnaires sent to las from the 2016-2017 cohort as a mid-term assessment during the month of february, aimed to gather information about their perception regarding several concepts related to what we defined as ‘role’, ‘communication’, ‘culture’ and ‘perception of difficulties,’ among other aspects (section 5.1.1). b.3. questionnaires sent to lead teachers at schools, as mid-term assessments of las and that were analyzed from a qualitative point of view. the analysis focuses on the lead teachers’ perspective regarding the las’ role at school and their performance regarding the collaboration with the teacher, preparing classes, teaching cultural aspects, improvising, creativity, or being proactive (section 5.1.3). 128 bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan the objective of this paper is to describe the elements that, when analyzed, outline the role of instituto franklin-uah as an intercultural and academic mediator between two cultures and education systems (spain and us) and specific details. 129 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 b.4. a qualitative analysis of university practicum advisors’ observation reports. this analysis focuses on a selection of the most common causes of difficulties that required mediation in the academic course 2016-2017, with 59% of the students identifying the following as the most common needs for mediation: class management strategies, class management collaboration, collaboration in planning, planning meetings and giving feedback to students. finally, the observations will be based on both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through the different tools described and a proposal regarding possible solutions will be made. instituto franklin-uah and programs: description historical perspective and context the historical perspective offers a deeper understanding of the analytical analysis of the gathered data. the historical context regarding the origin and goals of the instituto franklinuah’s program provide an insight into the shaping of this institution as a cultural mediator, which promotes an intercultural dialogue between its students and bilingual schools where they act as language assistants. instituto franklin-uah (if-uah) is a research department at universidad de alcalá, which has a multidisciplinary focus and serves as a cooperation platform through the celebration of conferences and events, publications, research projects, collaboration agreements between colleges and universities and the organization of training programs offered for north american students. it was originally founded in 1987 by the president of the universidad de alcalá at that time, manuel gala, who was also chosen as the first director at instituto franklin-uah. the original name of the institution was cenuah (centro de estudios norteamericanos) and its goals were to foster links between spain and the united states and to establish actions that would promote the exchange of knowledge between both countries. its name changed to instituto universitario de estudios norteamericanos (iuien) and finally, in 2009, the name “benjamin franklin” was approved by the academic board; since then it has been known as “instituto franklin-uah” (if-uah website a). the name was mainly chosen as it represents the multidisciplinary nature of the institution in the same way benjamin franklin shapes a multidisciplinary person as politician, inventor and writer. in fact, benjamin franklin was also known as the first ambassador of the united states in spain, who initiated the first spanish teaching course in the us in his philadelphia languages academy (if-uah website a), promoting spanish language and culture. when founding and creating the curriculum for the philadelphia languages academy, benjamin franklin had an innovative idea: to promote “an education that stressed practical skills that would serve students regardless of the line of work they took up” (penn university). following its mentor’s model, if-uah offers a practical perspective for its study abroad programs by offering both hands-on training and practice and, at the same time, focusing on the reinforcement of bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 130 131 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 the relations with the us. the main academic programs offered are ‘study abroad program’ and ‘teach & learn in spain’ master’s program. they both represent if-uah’s main goal to focus on the promotion of knowledge between spain and the united states. this paper will focus particularly on showing the role the second program plays in the context of the mediation nature of the ifuah itself. ‘teach & learn in spain’ master’s program the ‘teach & learn in spain’ master’s program was created in 2008 by instituto franklinuah. the objective of the program, as stated on if-uah’s website (b), is “to offer native english speaking students the opportunity of studying a master’s degree and be a language assistant in a bilingual school of the region of madrid.” the program combined, until recently, four master’s degree courses (one academic year duration) with the acquisition of practical teaching experience as a language assistant in bilingual schools in the region of madrid: • master in bilingual and multicultural education • master in international education • master in teaching • master en aprendizaje y enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera (in spanish) students in the program need to complete an amount of 30 credits throughout the academic year for their teaching practicum experience in bilingual schools in madrid as language and culture assistants (if-uah website b) through the bilingual school program implemented by the spanish regional ministry in 2004-2005. in terms of the type of schools where they act as las, there are two options in the program: charter and private schools (18 hours or 25 hours/week) or public schools (16 hours/ week). the program has had a total of 826 students since its origin in 2008 and the number of students has increased gradually from 28 to more than 60 students in the consecutive the next five consecutive academic years (except in 2011-2012, when the number was slightly lower) and to an average of 110 between 2014 and 2017. finally, it had 159 students in the last academic year, showing a fivefold increase compared to the initial interest in this program in its beginnings (figure 1). instituto franklin-uah and intercultural communication: analysis and results perception of roles and communication “the single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place” (george bernard shaw cited by bookbrowse) 132 a previous study (vescan & vitalaru 2018) showed that there is a difference regarding the perception of the role of the language assistants in bilingual programs in madrid in the ‘teach & learn in spain’ master’s program, each one associated with the agent involved: american/ english-speaking language assistants (las) and spanish lead teachers at schools. on the one hand, we observed that the role of the language assistants is not equally defined and perceived by the agents involved in the bilingual program and, on the other hand, that this perception is due to the differences between the education systems involved, which are reflected in several aspects. in fact, several observations based on the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data from regulations and guides, questionnaires to las, school’s assessment reports on las’ activity, and university practicum advisors’ observation reports reflect the aspects that are differently perceived as part of what is considered ‘role’ and ‘responsibilities.’ the program has had a total of 826 students since its origin in 2008 and the number of students has increased from 28 to an average of 110 students between 2014 and 2017. bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan figure 1 students in the ‘teach & learn in spain’ program. 2008-2018 the data analyzed in the current paper comprises students from the 2016-2017 cohort, which consisted of 105 students with a specific profile, as explained in section 5.1.1. 28 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0 2008-2009 64 2009-2010 67 2010-2011 58 2011-2012 61 2012-2013 60 2013-2014 108 2014-2015 116 2015-2016 105 2016-2017 159 2017-2018 año académico nú m er o de e st ud ia nt es 133 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 first of all, it is important to clarify the meaning of the concept of ‘role,’ since, in spite of its outward simplicity, when discussed in the context of education, it seems to be quite subjective and difficult to define. when analyzing this concept, we will be using two criteria: specific contentrelated functions, referring to the type of content taught as well as skills developed, and class responsibility, referring to the extension of control and limitations over the class and students. ‘communication,’ on the other hand, is used to refer to the process used to discuss details about the content, methods, type of exercises, functions during lessons and to provide feedback or impressions after the class on a systematic basis. analysis of current regulations the current regulations significant regarding the functions and role of las can be observed in table 1: a deeper insight into aspects such as the level of responsibility regarding planning, decisions regarding content taught, skills to be developed, assessment and class management (table 2) shows that the la has responsibility in four of these aspects and no responsibility in terms of planning, assessment and class management. first, it is important to mention that ‘planning’ as a concept used by the authors in table 2 refers to the taking of responsibility for the development of the syllabus, lesson planning and evaluation. this task is not actually the las responsibility as stated in orden 2670/2009, de 5 junio. second, the main observation we can draw from the analysis of the current regulations and guides in table 2 is that they are rather limited as to the specific information that can help students-las and teachers understand the extent of their functions and responsibilities. table 1 basic regulations laws and regulations guides agreements between: spanish ministry of education and british council (1996) spain and usa (1995 and 2005) guía del tutor. ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte programa de auxiliares de conversación en españa 2017-2018 guía del auxiliar. ministerio de educación, cultura y deporte programa de auxiliares de conversación en españa 2017-2018 spanish language and culture assitants program: guidelines for teaching institutions in the united states and canada 2017-2018. mecd orden 2670/2009, de 5 de junio, por la que se regula la actividad de los auxiliares de conversación seleccionados por el ministerio de educación y por la comisión de intercambio cultural educativa y científico entre españa y estados unidos de américa, en centros docentes públicos de la comunidad de madrid. boletín oficial de la comunidad de madrid. orden 161/2011, de 21 de enero, por la que se modifica la orden 2670/2009, de 5 junio source: vescan & vitalaru (2018) 134 particularly, the content-related function mentioned in section 3, as expressed in orden 2670/2009, de 5 junio and guía del tutor, 2017-2018 (2018) focuses on the teaching of cultural aspects, representing english speaking countries: language & culture and developing students’ oral skills. as far as the second parameter, which we tagged as ‘responsibility,’ the reference is twofold although basic: on the one hand, to assist the lead teachers in the classroom and, on the other hand, not to take full responsibility in the classroom and no responsibility in terms of assessment (evaluation and grading and preparing or correcting exams), discipline, planning or the final year report. we may say that in the case of both parameters the tasks are quite general and open to interpretation for both agents. ‘cultural aspects’ can refer to a variety of elements (more or less related to the topics of the course subjects) and ‘assisting’ the teacher depends on several factors such as the type of subject and specific requirements considering the variety of subjects taught in english as part of clil (from arts to sciences), the teacher’s experience and work method, knowledge of co-teaching strategies, planning strategies, communication system, to name a few. bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan table 2 basic aspects and laws aspects responsability yes/no specific aspect it refers to (orden 2670/209, de 5 junio) planning no teach yes to assist the lead leachers in the classroom collaborate with teachers in creation of teaching materials content yes to teach cultural aspects yes to represent english speaking countries: language & culture bring them closer to geographical, social, cultural and economic aspects skills yes to develop oral communication skills correct grammar and pronunctiation assessment (evaluation, grading,exams) no discipline no source: vescan & vitalaru (2018) 135 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 this means that, in order for collaboration to be effective in terms of teaching a class in which both teachers and assistants feel that they have fulfilled their role, these elements have to be considered by both agents prior and during the program. in light of the above mentioned synthesis and bearing in mind the data provided by all stakeholders involved in the teaching experience in the tls program (language assistants, lead teachers and university advisor’s feedback), a more specific analysis which provides a deeper analysis has been included in section 5. starting from the current regulations, specific examples regarding the different difficulties experienced by the groups involved have been provided: • the differences in the perception of la’s role at the school and in the classroom. • different interpretations of related regulations. • differences of communication styles rooted in cultural differences between both systems in an education context and more specifically in the classroom collaboration. analysis of 2016-2017 students’ profiles and their perception in this section two aspects will be discussed: on the one hand, aspects related to the students’ profile and, on the other hand, to the results of the questionnaire that gathers information about their perception regarding different aspects. first, the profile of the 2016-2017 students is essential to understand the context regarding training and needs. therefore, aspects such as admission criteria, the field of their previous training (bachelor degree major), prior teaching/education training, and student teaching practicum experience will be briefly discussed. regarding the admission criteria, the following criteria are essential: academic achievement, previous experience or interest in education settings, university studies related to teaching or languages, and additional training related to intercultural communication. considering the students’ previous degrees or training, the fields are quite varied, as shown in figure 2. as observed, the fields with a higher percentage are language and communication, with 28 (31%) students in the three programs (15 in mabe, 9 in maie and 4 students in mat); social studies, with 13 (14.4%) students (7, 3 and 3 students in the same respective mas); health sciences, with 10 (11.1%) students (3, 3 and 4 students); anthropology/history, with 9 (10%) students (5, 1 and 3 students); and education, with 8 (8.8%) students (5 in mabe and 3 in maie). moreover, considering prior student teaching practicum experience, only approximately 10% of the students completed one, specifically those who majored in education. therefore, as mentioned in the introduction, in the teach and learn program itself, 91.2 % of the total 105 students in the 2016-2017 cohort lacked specific teaching practice before enrolling. in this context, the second research method used to gather data for our analysis was a questionnaire with 25 questions sent to las in the academic year 2016-2017. its objective was to provide quantitative and qualitative information about aspects such as the students’ impressions about their experience at the schools up to that point, the teaching methods used, their expectations 136 about relationships and collaboration with the lead teachers and staff, positive aspects as well as challenges and possible improvements of their experience at the schools. its specific focus was on their perception regarding several ideas related to what we defined in section 5.1 as ‘role,’ and ‘communication,’ as well as their perception of difficulties. the analysis of this paper focuses particularly on the following elements: • how information was provided by the schools. • information about la’s roles and responsibilities. • feedback provided to teaching strategies. • responsibility: classroom management/discipline. • la’s perception of potential causes of the difficulties/differences. the results from the academic year 2016-2017 showed that, in spite of the general good results for 74 of the students (70%) in terms of the communication between teachers and assistants and their task completion, the perception of that communication process was very different for the teachers and las involved. in fact, there seemed to be a gap between the la’s expectations considering the communication system and the actual manifestation of their role, which affected their level of satisfaction with the completion of the task. specifically, results from the academic year 2016-2017 in the ma in bilingual education reflected that, although most las had been given information at the beginning of the school year by the schools, only half of them bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan figure 2 students’ profiles in the three programs students degrees profiles by master’s 2016-2017 16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 a d g j b e h k c f 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 a d g j b e c i 1 2 3 4 5 6 9 10 a g j b e k c f 1 2 3 4 5 7 8 9 mabe maie mat bilingual ed or education international relations/political studies arts/fine arts language/communication anthropology/history unknown health sciences/psycology journalism humanities/interdisciplinary social studies law/business/economics a b c d e f g h i j k 137 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 had received specific information on aspects that would facilitate coordination with the teacher, such as their role and that of the teacher, the system that would be used for communication during classes, and the planning of sessions and meetings for feedback, among other aspects (vescan & vitalaru 2018). if we compare the three ma programs taught in english, we can observe, in figure 3, that the results are similar, showing that an average of 52% received more or less specific information on these aspects orally from the teacher and/or from another member of the school staff (64%) and 46% through written materials (brochures, leaflets, syllabi). figure 3 mas in english 2016-2017 information at the beginning of the course 51% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% oral information teacher 48% 57% 66% oral information staff 56% 71% 54% written materials 56% 29% 11% other 12% 0% ma teachingma international educationma bilingual education moreover, the results to the question on aspects that need improvement considering the three mas show the students’ perception as to the success in the communication process. figure 4, below, shows two of the aspects they listed within this topic, planning system and communication. in all these programs, ‘communication’ and ‘planning’ were chosen as deficient from a list of six aspects8 by more than half of the students in each ma, with 76% and 77% for ‘communication’ in two of the programs and with 68% and 71% for ‘planning’ in the same programs. the total number of students who completed the questionnaire in each program is of 35, 25 and 14 (in the same order from figure 4), which means that 53 students (72%) of a total of 74 underlined ‘communication’ and 48 (65%) underlied ‘planning’ as deficient. this suggests that expectations regarding roles were quite different and more specific than one would believe. an example of a comment from an ma in international education student (table 3) gives a clearer idea of the specific expectations students had particularly about the definition of their role and knowledge of the teacher’s expectations. 8 class management, disciplining, teaching methods and other. figure 4 communication and planning needs. students’ perception mabe planning system and communication 35 participants maie planning system and communication 25 participants mat planning system and communication 14 participants-public schools las only 138 further examples of comments included in table 4, in this case, from the advice for other las section of the questionnaire, show their impressions about the communication system in general. they encourage future las to be proactive, ask questions and not expect to be informed as specifically as they might be used to in the education system of their home country. finally, a specific question from the same survey allowed us to underline the perception las had regarding the causes of the difficulties they experienced due to cultural/educational differences. the high percentages in figure 5, below, suggests that, in fact, the most frequent causes in the same three master’s were related to the la’s role (43-80%), the teacher’s role (56-64%), communication (50-80%), general expectations (50-74%), and specific expectations (43-64%). bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 76% 68% communication planning 50% 42,86% communication planning 77,14% 71,43% communication planning table 3 comment student ma in international education. (questionnaire to students, 2016-2017) in general, it was a good experience and i had a good relationship with the teachers. the staff and the teachers were nice and very welcoming, they made us feel comfortable at the school. the only problem as i mentioned various times it was unclear what their expectations were and they did not communicate on a regular basis what they wanted me to plan or prepare. i believe with more effective communication and more prior planning the lessons would of been smoother and more valuable. i also had new substitute teachers come in throughout the year with made it more difficult to adapt to the teacher’s expectations, since it was various individuals. individuals who also seemed to be unclear of my role as an assistant. 139 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 table 4 advice for future las be prepared for a lack of clear communication from staff. if you have a pending question, make sure to ask the staff instead of waiting for them to tell you. take initiative! yes, you have to be proactive in your job. they will really appreciative you. set up clear expectations from the beginning, ask a lot of questions about your role and define your role with them. request meeting with the coordinator and follow up, because she won’t. ask for what you need until you get it. ask questions to the teachers, coordinators, everyone. if you don’t ask, nothing will be told to you. be relaxed and go with the flow because the school is in a difficult area and many of the students and families have difficult home situations. listen to the students’s ideas on how they want to learn. they’ll probably be vague, like “videos” or “games”, but each class is different and it is up to you to work with the teacher to bring and interesting lesson. analysis of lead teachers’ perspective two other sources of data for analysis were the school/lead teachers’ assessment of las’ activity at the schools and the university practicum advisors’ observation reports. each of them will be briefly explained to show their main focus. the results from the quantitative analysis of data from teachers showed that they seemed to believe that the basic information that the las needed to carry out his/her task was, in fact, provided at the beginning and during the course. the assessment that teachers normally provide to the university advisors for each la focuses on aspects related to the fulfilment of his/her tasks/role and the acquisition of specific skills. considering the accomplishment of tasks, teachers said that they highly valued both the teaching of cultural aspects as specific for content taught and skills related to planning, communication, initiative and creativity, which they seemed to expect from the la without actually stressing their importance verbally. thus, when we analyzed academic achievement for students in the ma in bilingual education by levels (excellent, good, average and poor) (vescan & vitalaru 2018) we observed that a high percentage of las (65 and 79%, respectively) had excellent and good levels of achievement for all the aspects included in the assessment report: collaboration with the teacher, preparing classes, teaching cultural aspects, improvising, creativity, being proactive (figure 6). the aspects that were most highly valued apart from content were attitude-motivation (73%) and communication through aspects such as collaboration with teachers (73%) and communication (73%), included in the report. on the other hand, skills that showed initiative and autonomous abilities were also highly valued through the following aspects: being proactive (73%), figure 6 teacher’s assessment. good and excellent results 73% proactive 76% motivation 65% creativity 67% skulls 73% improvising 65% leadership skills 73% collaboration with teacher 52% new ideas 79% cultural aspects 59% teacher alone 69% prepares classes 73% communication with teacher 90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% figure 5 causes of difficulties from the las’ perspective ma international education 2016-2017 ma bilingual education 2016-2017 ma teaching 2016-2017 140 bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan 80% 75% 50% 25% 0% 56% 64% 48% 20% 48% 64% 68% 20% assistant’s role teacher’s role general expectations (skills, kwnoledge of each part involved) way of giving/structuring the instructions assistant’s expectations regarding information and templates/models to follow communication otherteacher’s expectations regarding creativity, individual initiative from the assistant academic requeriments 68,57% 75% 50% 25% 0% 54,29% 74,29% 65,71% 34,29% 51,43% 48,57% 80% 22,86% assistant’s role teacher’s role general expectations (skills, kwnoledge of each part involved) way of giving/structuring the instructions assistant’s expectations regarding information and templates/models to follow communication otherteacher’s expectations regarding creativity, individual initiative from the assistant academic requeriments 42,86% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% 64,29% 50% 35,71% 28,57% 42,86% 42,86% 50% 14,29% assistant’s role teacher’s role general expectations (skills, kwnoledge of each part involved) way of giving/structuring the instructions assistant’s expectations regarding information and templates/models to follow communication otherteacher’s expectations regarding creativity, individual initiative from the assistant academic requeriments 141 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 improvising (73%), preparing classes (69%), leadership (65%), proposing new ideas and teaching independently (52% and 59%) (vescan & vitalaru 2018). these results suggest that, although not openly expressed to students, most spanish teachers perceive high communicative skills in the assistants and seem to assume that the communication process is effective in both directions9. moreover, they expect a high degree of autonomy from them, which contrasts with the las’ own expectations of clear-cut, specific instructions about the entire communication, coordination and teaching process. if-uah as mediator: university practicum advisors university practicum advisors’ perspective finally, the university advisors’ observation reports on the la’s individual classes also provided qualitative information based on their direct observation of 62 students of the program (59% of all the students) while assisting teachers as las in bilingual charter or private schools during the first five months of the program. they provided specific feedback to each la after each class specifically about teaching methods and attitude as a twofold strategy: first, for raising the la’s awareness about the teaching process and thus, help him/her improve practical knowledge and, second, for diminishing the gap between the two education systems involved, in an attempt to compensate for the lack of specific feedback from the lead teachers at schools, which las usually expect. at the same time, they drafted an observation report for each of the sessions they attended during the same period. the observation report for each student measured teaching procedures and behavior, attitude and strategies used to organize teaching and manage their class during specific classes. from this point of view, some of the difficulties shaped in the feedback provided to las by the advisors were related to different teaching aspects and to classroom management (eye contact), using demonstration and body language to provide explanation during class time, control of the academic learning time and the duration of each task, and different strategies that are effective for providing instructions to spanish students. in this context, we can say that the advisor’s role is essential from two points of view. on the one hand, the advisor becomes a mentor that explains and employs strategies to help raise the student’s self-awareness and improvement of pedagogical strategies throughout the program while acting as la in schools. in general, the supervisor’s observation reports and feedback notes reflected the pedagogical challenges for las in their teaching practice. by using this strategy, it provided the university advisors with a tool to improve the communication process between spanish teachers and las and the effectiveness of their collaboration in the teaching practice. on the other hand, the advisors’ reports are particularly relevant for the types of difficulties mentioned by the student or teacher and they reflect a need of mediation required from the advisor to prevent a potential conflict, help the student improve or solve the problem. 9 from this point of view, we are aware that this research has its limitations and that this aspect would have to be confirmed through a specific survey to teachers. 142 taking into account the background information provided before and of the advisors’ perception of ‘roles’ and ‘communication,’ it can be said that both concepts are essential for the program to be successfully completed by students. thus, the advisors make sure that the roles of the agents involved (in this case, advisors, teachers and students) are clear from the first orientation session and that the communication with the advisor is constant throughout the program. some examples will be discussed in the next section. university advisors provided specific feedback to each las specifically about teaching methods and attitude in order to raise his/her awareness about the teaching process and to diminish the gap between the two education systems involved. bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan university practicum advisors as intercultural mediators at a specific level and as seen in the previous section, practicum university advisors act as intercultural and academic mediators between the students-las and the lead teachers from the schools where they act as las. therefore, they play an essential role in facilitating the communication process and providing context to possible difficulties by performing different tasks: a) informing las about their tasks before starting the teaching practicum. b) staying in contact with the las and guiding them through the process as well as keeping informed of the la’s difficulties. c) assessing the las’ activity during and after their teaching practicum, especially when they face difficulties. the different types of elements that make that process possible are the orientation and observation sessions, feedback meetings, mid-term school assessment, the end-of-term evaluation (vescan & vitalaru 2018), and constant contact during office hours. in order to provide examples of the topics that required mediation and their perception by the parties involved, a selection of the most common causes of difficulties that required mediation in the academic course 2016-2017 were analyzed: class management strategies, class management collaboration, collaboration in planning, planning meetings, and feedback to students. the analysis included the topic, the perception of the same aspects by each group, the difficulty involved, the feedback provided by the advisor to both groups and outcomes. 143 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 part of the analysis was included in different tables (tables 5-9). an explanation about each aspect follows. in table 5, we offer a synthesis of one of the most common topic that caused difficulties in the collaboration between the las and the lead teachers: ‘classroom management’ and ‘discipline/ class management strategies’. as observed, the two different perspectives regarding this topic caused miscommunication the way that the pupils’ behavior should be managed in the classroom. the university advisors offered feedback to both las and lead teachers and helped in finding a common agreement about the strategies put into practice in the classroom. table 5 examples and analysis. class management strategies topic/ responsability las’ difficulties lead teachers’ perspective university advisor’s feedback class management & discipline strategies • obtaining authority in tho classroom as they were not familiar with strategies used by lead teachers. • found out that each teacher has it’s own strategies • general practice of lead teachers raising their voice louder to their students • a need to immediately correct negative behaviors in the classroom even if raising their voice is necessary. • a common strategy in spanish classrooms. communication difficulties raise when las and lead teachers have different perspectives regarding the strategies that are more effective for behavior correction in the classroom. feedback for both agents: in spain: generally accepted to raise the voice in order to get the group’s attention. la: feels uncomfortable as in the us the perception is different. solutions: both teachers and las: found a common understanding in order to be more effective in the classroom. established some common strategies e.g. using attention grabbers, a voice signal in order to get students attention as “class class” and the class would answer “yes yes” or they would call the class “i loly moly” and the class would answer “guacamole!”. outcome: teachers would not need to raise their voice louder constantly in order to get students attention. la: comfortable. moreover, collaboration in the classroom is differently perceived by both las and lead teachers. this is the result of the difference in focus considering the two countries involved. while the teacher training programs in spain do not focus on co-teaching strategies, in the us it is a common practice. in table 6, both perspectives are summarized and a common strategy is established through the feedback received from the university advisors: bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan table 6 examples and analysis. class management strategies topic/ responsability las’ difficulties lead teachers’ perspective university advisor’s feedback class management & discipline collaboration • establishing discipline individually as they expect specific instructions regarding rules. • expecting constant support and collaboration in the implementation of disciplining strategies. • authority and leadership in the classroom is lost when discipline is not implemented individually. • if they provide consistent support in class regarding class management and behavior control, they would take part of las’ authority in the classroom. a dialogue regarding cultural differences in the way two educators are expected to collaborate in the classroom is necessary. feedback for both agents: • in spain, in teacher training programs co-teaching strategies are not a focus in the curriculum and lead teachers are not familiar with these strategies. as a result, they have a common belief that when two educators are in the classroom, they need to teach individually in the benefit of class management and discipline. • co-teaching is more common in the us and there is research (peery, 2017) that proves that there is an academic and behavioral improvement in students when co-teaching occurs. outcome: awareness; some feedback provided when necessary; specific strategies depending on the circumstances. another common challenge that the advisors identified is related to planning, collaboration, and meetings. in tables 7 and 8, we can observe that there are different cultural perceptions regarding the planning of collaboration. from the la’s perspective, pedagogical planning requires more support from the lead teachers, while from the lead teachers’ perspective it is considered an individual task. thus, they expect a proactive attitude and more individual work from las. 144 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 furthermore, in table 8, we can observe that there is certain lack of time for actual meetings. on the other hand, the different perception of the dynamics and content that should be discussed during the meetings affects the impression that it gives to its participants. in this case, the university advisors provided feedback to both las and lead teachers helping them to establish common strategies to foster collaboration more effectively. in table 9 we can observe a summary of the different insights about the correction of english mistakes in the classroom and that commonly create a conflict between las and lead teachers. the university advisors helped to establish a dialogue regarding the differences in the perception of error correcting and pointed out the need to balance different error correction strategies that would facilitate the most effective collaboration in the class instruction. table 7 examples and analysis. planning collaboration topic/ responsability las’ difficulties lead teachers’ perspective university advisor’s feedback plainning collaboration • receiving the specific information about the content they have to focus on in their teaching. • expecting collaboration and specific details in order to plan effectively. • planning is an individual task rather a collective task with other teachers. • students must show creativity, proactive behavior and autonomous skills. lack of collaboration when planning can cause apparent lack of coordination and affect content taught and methods used by la as well as students’ behavior and attitude in the classroom. feedback: lead teachers: las’ expect: • a planned and guided collaboration to happen before the programs starts and during the course. • information regarding the next session’s content beforehand so they can plan effectively. las: lead teachers expect them to: • be able to improvise or to plan some activities individually without requiring their constant guidance. • bring suggestions or ideas regarding the content. outcome: meeting to discuss the content of next sessions; las are more comfortable when improvising if necessary. 145 146 if-uah and strategic measures for diminishing cultural gaps after the specific analysis of circumstances that required mediation from if-uah university advisors explained in the previous section, this section focuses specifically on describing the measures taken by instituto franklin-uah to facilitate communication and training. its actions, developed over the years, can be considered actual mediation acts, since their purpose was to provide context before the actual experience and whenever necessary in order to facilitate effective interaction between the agents involved. ultimately, it can also be said that those actions were also aimed at preventing culture shock in a teaching context in spain. a brief description of each follows: bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan table 8 examples and analysis. planning meetings topic/ responsability las’ difficulties lead teachers’ perspective university advisor’s feedback planning meetings • expecting to have specific meetings for planning content purposes. • not attending regular meeting of the staff. • if forced to attend regular meetings, a conflict aroused. • meetings should provide dates or general information of school events. • planning is an individual task. • no especific meetings for planning content purposes. not planning meetings on a regular basis specifically for organizing content can be a cause for misinterpretation and conflict. feedback: teachers: • las need to have specific meetings to plan together. • in the us system, it is common to use planning meetings for lesson planning. • it is more common for teachers or educators to co-plan. las: • in spanish schools: meetings organized for general information and socializing with the rest of the staff. • teachers plan more individually. • teachers expect las to be more proactive in meetings and in getting the information from lead teachers regarding the lessons plans. outcome: more frequent and specific meetings; more socializing. 147 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 1) initial workshop for las on differences between american and spanish education systems since 2008. the topics that have been approached (gradually) ever since are the following: it is important to mention that this workshop started as a basic general orientation session. however, it has been adapted based on the las’ reaction to class experience each year and on the information provided through surveys by both las and teachers regarding ways of expression and communication styles in educational settings. on the other hand, the coordinator has focused more and more on the definition of aspects that have proved to be problematic: roles, expectations and responsibilities in terms of specific ideas, such as “functions,” “methods and strategies,” and “specific tasks”. clarifying aspects related to “communication” has also become a priority. thus, ideas such as who initiates encounters and how, who plans meetings and how often, if a specific procedure should be followed, among others, are also discussed with las at the beginning of the course. table 9 examples and analysis. feedback to students topic/ responsability las’ difficulties lead teachers’ perspective university advisor’s feedback feedback to students • providing feedback to their students by using the expected correction techniques commonly used by teachers. • preferred using self-correction or peer correction techniques. • expecting las to correct immediately. • believing that students would not learn english correctly and will not improve their mistakes if the teacher would not point out immediately. over-correction can be a source of misunderstanding and create conflict. feedback: teachers: • las believe students will lose their motivation speak english if there are over-corrected. las: • lead teachers preferred them to correct pronunciation or grammar immediately. • teachers believe that this would avoid students making the same mistakes over time. outcome: found a balance between using different correction mistakes strategies by combining peer correction, self-correction or instant correction in soma occasions. 148 2) workshop for main teachers and las on co-teaching (first edition in 2017). the different models of co-teaching are presented and shown with examples and, in mixed discussion groups, both categories reflect and discuss them based on possible applications. on the other hand, they share both difficulties and previous experience applied to different courses. the specific topics included in the syllabus are: 3) feedback provided to las individually after observing them in class regarding both teaching aspects such as attitude, method, class management, among others, and cultural aspects that caused difficulties. bridging the gap between expectations and teaching on the field practice... bianca vitalaru iulia vescan table 10 topics workshop for las specific characteristics of spanish education system in primary and secondary education. role as la and expectations from teachers. role of main teachers and own expectations. information of planning regular meetings for discussion. cultural differences in general. discuss aspects related to classroom management based on hypothetical situations. discuss planning on a weekly basis/establish frequency. cultural differences in general. table 11 topics workshop on co-teaching regulations regarding role of the language assistants. culture shock and cultural differences at school. co-teaching strategies. examples on how to collaborate in the classroom. lesson plan and activities for language assistants. 149 reden revista española de estudios norteamericanos / noviembre 2019. volumen 1 4) workshop for lead teachers on american students since 2008. the topics discussed include: table 12 topics workshop for lead teachers introduction to the objectives of the ‘teach and learn in spain’ master’s program. introduction to culture shock and its symptoms. cultural differences between us and spain. 5) constant contact with the la during the practicum as an opportunity not only to stay informed about the process but also to avoid possible misunderstandings and compensate for the lack of specific feedback regarding las’ teaching practice, which they tend to expect from the lead teachers. this is also an opportunity for the la to receive feedback (written or oral) from the coordinator. finally, if we consider the three functions of the mediation process discussed in section 2, we could say that all the examples above show both rehabilitating and preventive actions from ifuah as, at some point, each was necessary to facilitate (further) communication and collaboration. moreover, the actual changes that affected the if’s instructions policy and specific measures taken over the years to raise awareness and improve the situation can also be considered as a transformation process although at a very basic scale. conclusions and final implications as seen throughout our research, some differences between the spanish and american education systems and particularly different perceptions regarding roles and communication not only reflect how culture can affect the perception of basic daily actions but also how it can result into actual training difficulties for the different groups involved. the different perspectives and groups that provided the data helped us draw conclusions about the types of challenges involved and their potential causes. more specifically, the results from questionnaires to las from the academic year 2016-2017 showed that, in spite of the general good results for three thirds of the students in terms of the completion of their task and communication between teachers and assistants, the perception of that communication process was very different for the two stakeholders involved. in fact, it suggested an actual gap between expectations and experience. this refers mostly to the communication methods used, which show a certain lack or uniformity regarding systematic procedures of information and feedback in the different stages of the teaching practicum process. on the other hand, the analysis of lead teachers’ assessments suggests that, although not openly 150 expressed to students, most spanish teachers perceive high communicative skills in the assistants and seem to assume that the communication process is effective in both directions. moreover, spanish teachers expect a high degree of autonomy from las, which contrasts with the las’ own expectations of clear-cut, specific instructions about the entire communication, coordination, and teaching processes from the spanish teachers. in this context, it is important to underline the essential role that the practicum university advisors and instituto franklin-uah itself play in the effective communication process between spanish teachers and the ‘teach and learn in spain’ american las in bilingual schools. in fact, as seen through different examples and reflections, if-uah’s actions are threefold: 1) preventive, by facilitating the communication process, providing context to possible difficulties; 2) rehabilitative, by solving conflicts; and 3) transformative, by changing basic regulations in the ‘teach and learn in spain’ program’s policy, information in the syllabi, guides, leaflets and, in general, influencing the actions of both the program and schools. thus, based on the analysis of changes and factors that characterize the program as well as our experience in the program, it can also be said that instituto franklin-uah itself plays a fundamental role as a mediator. in fact, if-uah acts as an intercultural and academic mediator between the education systems of two cultures, by identifying cultural differences, preventing misunderstandings and possible communication problems and solving difficulties that occur. if-uah has had more than 800 students in the tls program since its beginnings in 2008, who were specifically trained not only to teach students at schools but also to identify cultural differences and challenges on their own and be able to face those differences, always with the support and understanding of their advisors. all of the actions taken by the program are designed to help students understand cultural context, and, ultimately prevent las from suffering from culture shock, which underlines if-uah’s mitigating nature. in turn, these students help promote the cultural interchange in a dynamic and more comprehensive way as intercultural ambassadors and even mediators in their countries of origin or workplace. finally, we would like to draw attention to the different perceptions of the same aspects from the groups involved, how those perceptions can actually result in anxiety and stress, and the need for an actual intercultural mediator that understands, clarifies context, and prevents misunderstandings. the actual description of an effective communication system as well as a specific definition of roles, tasks and their application considering the intercultural background of all the agents involved is a gap in the current policy of the program in the region of madrid. our experience shows that these aspects should be part of what we envision as a ‘cooperation system’ which involves a specific knowledge of intercultural aspects and different collaboration strategies in the teaching instruction process in schools. although this research is limited considering the amount of data analyzed and the depth of the analysis carried out, it can serve to raise a deeper awareness on the topic and to provide some ideas for the implementation of practical solutions adapted for the groups involved in the near future. bridging the gap between expectations and 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christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 100 the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic an interview with christy tidwell michael fuchs university of oldenburg christy tidwell is an associate professor of english and humanities at the south dakota school of mines and technology, and she is one of the leaders of the ecomedia interest group at the association for the study of literature and environment and the digital strategies coordinator at asle as well. christy is the co-editor of the volumes gender and environment in science fiction (lexington books, 2018) and fear and nature: ecohorror studies in the anthropocene (penn state up, 2021) and a special issue of science fiction film and television on creature features. her essays have appeared in journals such as extrapolation, interdisciplinary studies in literature and the environment, and gothic nature. she has also contributed to volumes such as posthuman biopolitics: the science fiction of joan slonczewski (palgrave, 2020), fiction and the sixth mass extinction: narrative in an era of loss (lexington books, 2020), and creatural fictions: human-animal relationships in twentiethand twenty-first-century literature (palgrave, 2016). keywords: gothic, popular culture, ecohorror, anthropocene, science fiction, interview. michael fuchs: i will start by asking a seemingly simple and straightforward question: could you define ecohorror? you know, the first thing that most people will probably think of when they hear “ecohorror” (if they can think of anything) will be revenge-of-nature films such as day of the animals (1977), alfred hitchcock’s the birds (1963), and the ruins (2008). that is, films in which animals and plants attack humans. is this also in line with your understanding of ecohorror, or is there more to it? christy tidwell: revenge of nature is definitely a big part of what counts as ecohorror and what people think of as ecohorror. as a result, this is where many scholars writing about ecohorror start. however, i tend to have a broader understanding of ecohorror. in an isle article, stephen rust and carter soles lay out a broader definition of ecohorror, which centers on the idea that these are narratives about the harms that humans have done to the natural christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 101 world or that might promote ecological awareness or that might blur the lines between human and nonhuman (rust and soles). at that point, the definition becomes quite capacious because, suddenly, texts become ecohorror that one would usually not see as such. nevertheless, ecohorror is a different way of looking at texts—finding ecohorror in horror texts that might generally not be considered ecohorror or finding markers of ecohorror in texts that are not necessarily horror. for example, there are a number of movies and novels about pollution, many of which are not necessarily horror. however, they illustrate this idea that ecohorror tells stories about the harm done by the human world to the natural world. nuclear fallout is a similar example. godzilla is a monster, for sure, but we created it. or climate change. godzilla (1954) and climate change fiction also showcase how traditional genre boundaries begin to blur in this context because i have a hard time separating science fiction from ecohorror. think of films such as snowpiercer (2013) and the day after tomorrow (2004): these are science fiction films, but they have elements of ecohorror, too. or even a classic example such as the texas chainsaw massacre (1974), which is less about nature fighting back and more about how what we have done to animals and the rest of the world comes back to get us. in this particular case, ecohorror then is also closely connected to carol clover’s idea of urbanoia (115). there is so much that could count as ecohorror that i could go on for a while, but i seem to always return to rust and soles’s definition because it opens up the question of defining ecohorror in some really interesting ways. mf: this idea of “opening up the field” ties in with an article that you contributed to the latest issue of gothic nature. in that article, you read nightmare on elm street (1984) as ecohorror; that is, as the type of film that, to quote from your article, “does not immediately declare itself to be ecohorror” (“the ecohorror of omission” 85) but that nevertheless reflects on our interactions with the natural world. ct: i honestly felt a little strange about that article up until it was accepted and published, because i argue that nightmare on elm street can be read as ecohorror even though no one ever views it as ecohorror. and there is, in fact, no obvious reason to look at the film in that way, but one day i found myself thinking about the elm street of the title and asking, where are the trees in this movie? what kinds of trees are in this movie? the more i dug into it, the more i found it really interesting to consider the ways that the trees are, in fact, absent. “elm street” stands in for something larger than just the trees, particularly in twentieth-century us culture. but i ultimately argue for what i call an “ecohorror of omission”—an argument that is really more about the silence about environmental harms than their presence in these texts. there are lots of texts and practices that we could look at in this way and we would find practices and ideologies that are just below the surface: the history of deforestation, planting certain kinds of trees, and dutch elm disease (and how we have dealt with that or failed to christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 102 deal with that). and there are some interesting connections between that movie and its gothic sense of itself and the haunting of the trees. mf: indeed, this emphasis on what remains unsaid or unseen is much-needed and in line with lawrence buell’s notion of the environmental unconscious—this idea that the physical world is repressed, forgotten, and/or distorted in a literary text (18). and mark bould’s book anthropocene unconscious argues, in ways that are similar to your argument in your article on elm street, that cultural artifacts do not have to address global warming explicitly in order to be about global warming and/or the anthropocene. there’s just so much interesting work being done at that intersection of ecohorror, the ecogothic, and sf. i would like to return to something that you mentioned earlier—the entanglements between humans and nonhumans. as we know, both horror and the gothic are transgressive genres (see botting). and if you go back to the roots of the american gothic, you have the narrative (or even myth) of the puritans going into the wilderness, which is often framed as a confrontation with nature. in an article on mira grant’s parasite (2013), which was published in the isle special issue that rust and soles edited that you mentioned earlier, you express concern about this binary thinking when looking at ecohorror, and instead highlight the entanglements between humans and nonhumans (“monstrous natures within”). could you briefly elaborate on how that idea plays into your scholarship? ct: binary thinking is really common in ecohorror. if the animals are the enemy and we are separate from them or if the plants are the enemy and we are separate from them, that is worth paying attention to because it says something about how we see ourselves and our relationship with the natural world. simon estok’s idea of ecophobia is useful for thinking about these oppositions and even for looking at examples such as how jaws (1975) has had real-world impacts on the way people see and treat sharks. these binaries reveal our fears and how we respond to them. however, if we only focus on this aspect, we ignore a lot of what’s going on in ecohorror. after all, there are all these places where we are crossing the lines between human and nonhuman in much more interesting ways. to return to rust and soles’s definition, the third point that they bring up is that ecohorror “texts and tropes […] blur human/non-human distinctions” (509–510). sometimes that looks horrific. think about a film such as the fly (1986). when jeff goldblum’s character seth brundle transforms into brundlefly, that’s not a good thing. the film blurs the lines between human and nonhuman, but it doesn’t turn out well. and the movie does not want us to think that it’s going to turn out well. but then there are other texts in which things are more complicated. for example, in mira grant’s parasite series, the line between the parasites that get into the characters’ bodies and the characters themselves is harder to see. the sense of self and personhood becomes really fuzzy in these texts. the article i’ve written for the sfftv special issue you mentioned is about another text with a more complicated attitude toward blurring these boundaries: christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 103 blood glacier (2013), a film that didn’t get a ton of attention. in short, the film is about climate change and glaciers melting in the european alps. as the glaciers melt, a kind of bloodred microorganism is set free that infects other beings and creates mutant hybrids. although this is really scary, part of the film is about embracing the mutant or the mutation. the film thus draws our attention to questions such as “what is our role in this?” and “why do we think we’re so special?” these texts open up lines of connection even if, ultimately, a lot of these texts also close them down. there’s a lot of that tension in ecohorror, where you start to think “maybe the monster is not so bad” or “maybe i sympathize with the monster,” but then the generic structure requires it to be killed at the end. stacy alaimo has written about the “muddled middles” of horror movies (“discomforting creatures” 294), where we have sympathy for the monster. and that’s where the emotional response is being generated and where the real work is being done. i have been very influenced by this idea because i tend to watch these films in this way, too. mf: i am so glad that you’ve mentioned blood glacier. you know, the film is set in the border region between austria and italy and austrians were involved in the production, from actors to the director, and i happen to be austrian—and there is not too much austro-horror around. interestingly, what you were just saying also connects to the other interview that i had for our series, with kyle bishop on zombies, because, for example, a video game such as the last of us (2013) also suggests that the infection (with a parasitical fungus in that case) re-unites humans with nature. you first need to get over that gap between the human and the nonhuman before you can really embrace the nonhuman. let’s turn to the volume fear and nature, which you co-edited with carter soles. the cover looks awesome, and you assembled a lineup of great scholars, such as dawn keetley, robin murray and joseph heumann, and bridgitte barclay. could you tell us a little bit about the genesis of that entire project? how did it get started? why such a volume now? ct: some of this is just because carter and i are friends and we go to the asle conference every other year, and we end up presenting together and talking about ecohorror. at one of those conferences—maybe four or five years ago—we were just talking with steve rust and thought, “maybe this should be our next thing?” you know, we were just hanging out, having dinner, and then it became a real project. so, some of it was just that we thought it would be fun. and i really enjoyed the process of co-editing gender and environment in science fiction with bridgitte barclay, so i was ready to embark on another co-editing project. although there is a lot of work coming out about ecohorror and the ecogothic recently, when we started this project, there was less of it and there had not been any edited collection that focused on ecohorror. indeed, ours will still be one of the first. there are a couple of monographs that deal with ecohorror and a couple of edited collections that have been really influential, and these are more focused, such as dawn keetley and angela tenga’s plant christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 104 horror (2016) and katarina gregersdotter, johan höglund, and nicklas hållén’s animal horror cinema (2015). so, we saw a real opening for us to get something out there and to present our ideas about ecohorror. carter and i are very much on the same page and have influenced each other on how broad ecohorror can be. we are really invested in looking for those places where we can connect that conversation to films or texts that might not be immediately obvious. and, as we note in the book’s introduction, we’re living in ecohorrific times. this feels like something we cannot escape—how frightening the real-world news is and then how popular culture takes up those fears in various ways. mf: great point. in view of “how frightening the real world is,” elizabeth parker and michelle poland also note in their introduction to the latest gothic nature issue that we’re living in an age of ecohorror: there are all the images of wildfires, there’s covid, there’s biodiversity loss, etc. without picking apart the concept or the term now, let’s accept that we are living in the age of man, the anthropocene. part of the assumption of naming the current age the age of man is that humankind will vanish sooner or later. human extinction is implicated in the concept of the anthropocene. returning to your point about the interconnections between sf and ecohorror and your interest in the jurassic park/world franchise, what do these films tells us when read as ecohorror, in particular in the current moment? ct: i am obsessed with jurassic park (1993) and the whole series. and, in fact, dinosaurs and popular culture, generally. i am very slowly working on something bigger about that topic, but i also do have a chapter out about jurassic park and jurassic world (2015) in fiction and the sixth mass extinction, in which i argue that jurassic park and movies that are very much like it address our fears about our own potential extinction by displacing them. and this is also another place where the genre issue comes up because jurassic park is both science fiction and horror. it is a creature feature, which is science fiction and horror combined. you have these elements in the film that are very science-fictional, which ask, “what if we could do this?” but then you have these elements that are very horrific: “oh no! what if this happened?” so, there is this tension between the hopeful potential of questions like “what if we could bring back species after they’re extinct? what kind of hope does that give us for the sixth mass extinction that we’re living through or for ourselves in the future?” and the consequences of those questions. when we bring those species back, they turn out to be a real problem. we do not actually have as much control as we think we do, which undermines a lot of that hopefulness with fear and anxiety. jurassic park is so fascinating to me because it’s a big studio movie, it’s very polished, and it seems like it should know what it’s saying, but there’s so much conflict in these different ideas about animals and about extinction and about human control and science that it ends up being one long argument inside of itself that never quite gets resolved. the role of sympathy, which i’ve mentioned before with respect to some of the other monsters, is really important, too. it’s hard for me not to sympathize with the dinosaurs when i watch jurassic park christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 105 and all of its sequels. you see this coming through even more in the jurassic world movies. there’s a lot of room for sympathy for the dinosaurs—for example when we see cute little babies and, in fallen kingdom (2018), the scene in which a brachiosaurus dies. this is a really interesting extension of that initial kind of argument that jurassic park puts forward. mf: it’s also interesting that in jurassic world (2015), the indominus rex adds a new dimension. you have a creature that’s on the one hand this artificial creature—there’s all of this discourse in the film that this is not a real dinosaur but something else—but on the other hand, it’s an animal. and it’s this creature that goes on a killing spree. and fallen kingdom then turns things around, with the brachiosaurus scene in particular, as you indicated, evoking extremely strong emotions, sympathy. of course, it’s the magic of film—the way that the music accompanies the visuals and all—but it nevertheless works. i can definitely understand the excitement for the jurassic park franchise. ct: indominus rex is so interesting because it is set up as this monstrous villain, but at the same time indominus rex gets kind of the godzilla effect—yes, it’s monstrous and it’s going on a rampage, but chris pratt’s character makes the point very early on that any animal would go a little insane if you kept it in the cage like this and didn’t let it connect with anything. mf: again, the humans are to blame and the real problem. you mentioned jurassic park and jurassic world as these big studio movies, but you recently finished a special issue on creature features, which are thematically sometimes similar but in other respects the polar opposite because these are usually b-movies. of course, there are people who claim that jurassic park is just a big-budget b-movie. anyways, what led to your interest in b-movies? do creature features convey any particular messages pertaining to human-animal or human-nature relations? what makes them worth looking at for scholars in the environmental humanities who might not watch horror movies, let alone b-movies? ct: bridgitte barclay—who co-edited the issue with me—and i have been fascinated by creature features for ages. in part, they are just fun—if you’re into that sort of thing. they are not fun for everyone in the same way, but they are a place where you can just embrace a little bit of campiness and not expect everything to make sense and enjoy that. but this level also feeds into what is the more serious argument here: the distinction between b-movies and studio productions. b-movies are messier in pretty much every way, from production to the ideas and ideologies that they represent. in part because of this, they are more revelatory of the underlying ideas in a culture. there’s not necessarily an effort to make a big argument in a bmovie—and if there is, it’s pretty shallow most of the time. as a result, you can see the underlying assumptions and values bubbling under there. thus, b-movies reflect cultural trends in a way that bigger studio movies sometimes have a harder time doing because they’re more intent on polishing things up and figuring out how they’ll make the most money. christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 106 looking at, for instance, 1970s environmental science fiction and ecohorror, there is simply so much there, and a number of scholars have been writing about these movies. each one individually may not be super-rewarding for film analysis (some more so than others), but when you get this kind of collection that we’re editing, it shows patterns and also manages to connect these films to studio films. i’ve got posters in my office for night of the lepus (1972) and frogs (1972). these movies are not good, but they’re fascinating and reflect contemporary anxieties and fears about pollution, the balance of nature, and all the changes in us environmental legislation that were ramping up at that point. in night of the lepus, the monsters are giant bunnies, and, in frogs, it’s a whole range of swamp creatures that don’t fit together. ultimately, the humans are revealed as the monsters because they created the problems. the bunnies are really likeable— they are just bunnies. you can also see patterns in the early twenty-first century, such as syfy channel movies and films produced by the asylum. what jumps out to me is the prehistoric. there are a number of films that ask the question, “what would happen if this thing had just been dormant for millennia or even millions of years or was revived?” dawn keetley’s article for the sfftv issue deals with that topic, as does my essay about blood glacier, and bridgitte barclay explores creature from the black lagoon (1954), which does something similar. it’s a recurring theme. and building on nicole seymour’s bad environmentalism, i would argue that if we don’t pay attention to these types of films, comics, video games, silly tv shows, and all the things that we don’t think of as “high art,” then we miss out on a lot of the conversation taking place in culture. mf: absolutely. since you’re teaching at a type of school that is not necessarily that wellknown in europe, what is it like to teach humanities, in general, and the texts that you teach, in particular, at that type of school? and since you seem to be interested in the connections between science technology and popular culture—has teaching at this type of school influenced your thinking in a certain way? ct: teaching humanities at a school such as the south dakota school of mines & technology, where our students are all studying science and engineering, is quite different from my previous experience, which was at a big state school in texas. in part, the difference is that students here don’t see themselves as writers or humanities people or as readers. thus, some of my job is to bring them on board. some of them are the stereotypical engineer types who really want the answer and it needs to be logical, who are like “you need to show me the steps.” as a result, it’s a little harder to have some of the kinds of humanities conversations that you might have at different universities. the flip side of that is that they’re also really happy to be taking these classes because it’s a break from doing math and building things. they enjoy getting into some of the stories and getting to think about these big ideas in a way that their christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 107 other classes don’t ask them to. it’s definitely an interesting experience, and i’ve found over time that there are some things that i would love to teach that just won’t fly here. it’s just not for them, but there are other things that i don’t have to sell them on. some of the texts that i love teaching and love talking about, such as jurassic park and godzilla—they’re all over that. if i can connect the text to what they’re into, they’re really on board. as far as the second part of the question: honestly, not really. i was already working on feminist science fiction and feminist science studies in my dissertation. maybe it has broadened my understanding of what i would like to include in these conversations, but what shaped what my research looks like more has to do with connections with people at conferences. then i come back and try teaching these things, and my students help me think through some ideas—as they always do when you’re teaching things that are related to your research. i think i came into this job because i was already working in that direction. open q&a session trang dang: thank you very much for the fascinating talk. you mentioned the entanglements between humans and nonhumans in ecohorror and ecogothic and how these relationships in these texts are very much complicated. i wonder whether you could talk a little bit more about how films and literature complicate these relationships? ct: i’m going to give a rather general answer because i haven’t prepared an example: i’m building on the idea of trans-corporeality (alaimo, bodily natures). stacy alaimo argues that the line between human and nonhuman is not an actual line. rather, we’re embedded in the nonhuman world, and it’s embedded in us. the useful thing about this idea is the recognition that this can be both harmful and helpful. some kinds of trans-corporeality, some connections between us and an other are damaging. for instance, alaimo writes about different kinds of sickness, which are harmful, but other kinds of connections are helpful, such as organisms inside of us helping our bodies work; or connections with other creatures outside of our actual bodies that mean something to us and help us see the broader world differently and act differently. to return to blood glacier—because it’s the freshest in my mind—some of the kinds of blurring the lines are very harmful. some characters die horribly because of the mutations that are introduced by breaching that boundary between human and nonhuman. however, the film ends with the birth of a little mutant puppy sort of thing that is legitimately weirdly cute and there is some sort of an emotional connection established between some of the human characters and this mutant creature. however, the movie ends abruptly, which is why we don’t get to see what would happen. nevertheless, there is this sense that, maybe, this would create a different way of seeing the world and of being in the world. td: the quick second question is: you mentioned the dinosaurs in jurassic park and noticed how ecohorror texts often engage with images and figures of deep history such as cthulhu or christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 108 mythical kind of figures. i wonder if you could talk a bit more about why ecohorror could engage with those kinds of figures? ct: my answer will have more to do with dinosaurs than lovecraft, but i think they connect. one of the reasons why we keep coming back to this is connected to my answer about jurassic park and our own fear of our own extinction. the gothic is part of ecohorror, and in the gothic the past often haunts the present. environmental takes on the past tend to emphasize what we’ll leave behind. so, this is about transferring what we already know about the prehistoric past, what’s left, and what’s lost into trying to imagine how we might be leaving traces or what might be lost. i highly recommend david farrier’s book footprints: in search of future fossils (2020) because he does that kind of work. he speculates about what marks we’ll leave behind based on the knowledge we have now. as far as the lovecraftian element is concerned, when i think about lovecraft in this context, it’s less about deep time and more about the cosmic sense of confronting something bigger than us. the lovecraftian dimension is very much connected to the anthropocene and climate change in that it is something that one person cannot do much about, and it can feel overwhelming as a result. it’s this big process that is ongoing. similarly, lovecraft’s elder gods are something that just completely dwarfs humans. we can’t individually do anything about that. so, it’s a little bit less direct maybe than deep time, but there’s a similar logic. td: absolutely. i think that’s what’s happening—making us reflect on kind of our deep relationship with nature that we always have. thank you very much for your answers. very interesting. ct: i found the most recent color out of space (2019) adaptation really interesting to think through as an ecohorror film. sladja blazan: i really like what you said about your teaching. i think it’s super-important not to always preach to the converted and to talk to people who don’t spend so much time thinking about the narratives that we tell each other and how they work. in part, we’re probably in this mess because we didn’t do that enough. i have a question about this sense that more and more narratives center on embracing the mutant and, connected to this, this sympathy for the predator—the dinosaur, for example. is that social activism? after all, most of these narratives return to an original order—that seems highly problematic. do you share this fear? ct: yes. i do share that fear and anxiety. and it’s something that we tried to address in the introduction to fear and nature because ecohorror is not activism. it’s not actually doing anything. looking at, say jurassic park, yes, there is this sympathy for the dinosaurs and all that— and that’s all well and good, but when the movie’s over, it has this comforting effect of returning to your life, where you don’t have to worry about this anymore. christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 109 i do want to believe—although i have no evidence for it at this point—that these patterns that i was talking about not only reflect the anxieties we have but could have an impact on what we think is normal. if we have enough stories asking us to think differently about our relationship to the nonhuman, over time those add up to something. however, looking at one movie, it’s hard for me to see that as making that big of a difference. sb: no, certainly not one movie. i was thinking in comparison to, say, the 1950s, where plant horror was a huge topic and there were all kinds of monsters that grew out of an anxiety about the then-current world order and pressing fears. apparently, now we have environmental problems, so horror addresses this issue. do we really tell these stories differently than we did in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s? ct: i think that’s an excellent question. part of where i’ve wound up for right now is thinking that there’s some hope for some change but maybe not incremental. teaching is where you’re more likely to have an impact than making these movies. there are some scholars, such as matthew schneider-mayerson and alexa weik von mossner, who are doing empirical research into what kinds of impact these films might have. they are doing some really cool things, and i hope that we’ll find more useful evidence about what makes a difference or what does not, to help people think through these things and actually change patterns of behavior. anna marta marini: when you were talking about jurassic park, i was thinking of movies such as splice (2009), in which we construct another being for our own benefit and then it gets out of hand. splice is very much about humans projecting their own needs, issues, and emotions onto nonhumans. so, next to this sympathetic, empathetic, and/or cute sense of human engagement with the nonhuman that you mentioned, do you think that these projections see the nonhuman in human terms? and does that contribute to the horror? ct: maybe. splice is a great connection to make because it’s a frankenstein story—and so is jurassic park. many of these stories are going all the way back to frankenstein, in which you already have this tension between being sympathetic to the creature and being horrified by it. who’s the real monster here? all those kinds of questions have a long history in science fiction, the gothic, and horror. just to stick with the jurassic park example, there are moments in which the film asks us to see humans and dinosaurs as being very similar, but i’m not sure if that’s horrific in those in those moments or not. some of them may be, such as the moment when the great white hunter is killed by the velociraptors. it’s horrific that they’re clever—the velociraptors are very scary because they can, for example, open doors. but then there are other moments. for example, i see the t. rex at the end in terms of mimicking human triumph—celebratory, standing up, and roaring in a “this is my island” kind of way. and they keep coming back to those christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 110 visuals. that doesn’t seem horrific to me because the music is very like triumphant. a lot of these movies simply want to have it both ways. amm: i really like narratives that offer identification and then there’s a twist so that the monster, in the end, does not behave the way that we believe it will. for example, in the girl with all the gifts (2016), in the end, she does what she wants to do because she is the vanguard of a new lifeform. she doesn’t do what the humans expected her to do. that’s scary. we assume that the non-/posthuman is going to behave in a human way, but then it doesn’t. ct: that points to one of the ideas that keeps coming up in my writing, which is human control—the human expectation of having control. we really want to be in charge. and we want the rest of the world to do what we expect it to do, but it keeps on not doing that. you’re right—that’s where a lot of the horror comes from. i was thinking about in what ways they seem more human but in what ways do they behave as expected when they don’t—yes, that is frequently set up as horrifying for the human audience because it undermines our sense of ourselves as the pinnacle of everything and the endpoint of evolution. alissa burger: i love every single text that you talked about, so i had my own little bingo card here while i was listening. what i specifically wanted to ask about is the b-movie aspect of it. i have a chapter coming out that i co-authored with a biologist. we team-taught a course on the biology of monster movies and the biology of b-movies. what we ended up writing about was syfy original films and all that ridiculousness. i’m wondering: is that a productive avenue? now, the biologist i worked with is a very special biologist. he’s a lot more fun than a bunch of the other scientists who would go, “no, i don’t do that.” but from your experience, both where you teach and with your own research, and going back to that question of how we can make a difference—is that maybe one way? ct: do you mean teaching the actual science behind it? or getting science students to think about these things? ab: really any of that. the approach we took in our class was that we watched the films and i talked about horror from a cultural studies angle, then he gave them research questions, and they would have to research questions about how feasible the different things were and such. a lot of them were science students because it was a technical college, but a lot of them were also taking it as a gen ed. so, they were gaining research skills and scientific literacy, but the fun stuff. ct: it depends on what you mean by “productive.” in terms of getting students to think critically about what they’re taking in and to do that kind of research, that sounds like a fun way to do that. i’d be curious to know how the students responded to it. concerning some of the bigger questions about what kind of social difference might this make—that’s always hard to answer. one thing i’m thinking about is whether it matters if the science is right in b-movies; christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 111 and if it matters, why it matters. i don’t have an answer to this. my approach to b-movies has been “it doesn’t matter—just do what you’re doing and as long as you’ve decided what you’re doing, we’re good.” maybe the bigger question is about how people watch them: if people watch these movies and think that is how science works, then addressing that would be important. works cited alaimo, stacy. “discomforting creatures: monstrous nature in recent films.” beyond nature writing: expanding the boundaries of ecocriticism, edited by karla armbruster and kathleen r. wallace, u virginia p, 2001, pp. 279–296. alaimo, stacy. bodily natures: science, environment, and the material self. indiana up, 2010. botting, fred. gothic. routledge, 1995. bould, mark. the anthropocene unconscious: climate—catastrophe—culture. verso, 2021. buell, lawrence. writing for an endangered world: literature, culture, and the environment in the u.s. and beyond. belknap, 2003. clover, carol j. men, women, and chain saws: gender in the modern horror film. princeton up, 1992. estok, simon c. “theorizing in a space of ambivalent openness: ecocriticism and ecophobia.” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 203–225. farrier, david. footprints: in search for future fossils. 4th estate, 2020. gregersdotter, katarina, johan höglund, and nicklas hållén, editors. animal horror cinema: genre, history and cinema. palgrave macmillan, 2015. keetley, dawn, and angela tenga, editors. plant horror: approaches to the monstrous vegetal in fiction and film. palgrave macmillan, 2016. parker, elizabeth, and michelle poland. “we live in ecogothic times: gothic nature in the current climate.” gothic nature, no. 2, 2021, pp. 1–12. rust, stephen a., and carter soles. “ecohorror special cluster: ‘living in fear, living in dread, pretty soon we’ll all be dead.’” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 21, no. 3, 2014, pp. 509–512. schneider-mayerson, matthew. “the influence of climate fiction: an empirical survey of readers.” environmental humanities, vol. 10, no. 2, 2018, pp. 473–500. christy tidwell | the anthropocene, nature, and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1818 112 schneider-mayerson, matthew. “‘just as in the book’? the influence of literature on readers’ awareness of climate injustice and perception of climate migrants.” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 337–364. schneider-mayerson, matthew, alexa weik von mossner, and w.p. małecki. “empirical ecocriticism: environmental texts and empirical methods.” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, pp. 327–336. schneider-mayerson, matthew, et al. “environmental literature as persuasion: an experimental test of the effects of reading climate fiction.” environmental communication, 2020, 10.1080/17524032.2020.1814377. seymour, nicole. bad environmentalism: irony and irreverence in the ecological age. u of minnesota p, 2018. tidwell, christy. “monstrous natures within: posthuman and new materialist ecohorror in mira grant’s parasite.” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 21, no. 3, 2014, pp. 538–549. tidwell, christy. “‘life finds a way’: jurassic park, jurassic world, and extinction anxiety.” fiction and the sixth mass extinction, edited by jonathan elmore, lexington, 2019, pp. 31–48. tidwell, christy. “the ecohorror of omission: haunted suburbs and the forgotten trees of a nightmare on elm street.” gothic nature, no. 2, 2021, pp. 84–109. weik von mossner, alexa. “green states of mind? cognition, emotion, and environmental framing.” green letters: studies in ecocriticism, vol. 22, no. 3, 2018, pp. 313–323. weik von mossner, alexa. “popularizing climate change: cli-fi film and narrative impact.” research handbook in communicating climate change, edited by david c. holmes and lucy m. richardson, edward elgar publishing, 2020. films and tv series blutgletscher [blood glacier]. directed by marvin kren, allegro film, filmfonds wien, filmstandort austria, 2013. the fly. directed by david cronenberg, brooksfilms, 1986. godzilla. directed by ishirō honda, toho co.,1954. jurassic park. directed by steven spielberg, universal pictures, amblin entertainment, 1993. jurassic world. directed by colin trevorrow, amblin entertainment, legendary pictures, 2015. nightmare on elm street. directed by wes craven, media home entertainment, 1984. splice. directed by vincenzo natali, dark castle entertainment, 2009. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx laura álvarez trigo and erika tiburcio moreno | introduction reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.2057 1 stem in us popular culture: assessing gender discourse, stereotypes and mainstreaming laura álvarez trigo universidad complutense de madrid / ie university erika tiburcio moreno universidad carlos iii de madrid / universidad complutense gender representation in popular culture has been widely studied and discussed during the past decades. while women and girls have come to occupy a more varied set of roles and many contemporary popular texts are far from the traditional “male gaze” (mulvey), quite a high percentage of the damaging stereotypes that have built many media tropes are far from behind us. popular culture products have explored and shown alternative models to hegemonic ones. sarah connor, ellen ripley, or leia organa revealed distinct attitudes that seemed to defy the patriarchal order. beyond these visible attitudes such as strength, determination or leadership, her figure also questioned her femininity through her physique (ripley, connor), or perpetuated traditional one through mothering reasons (connor, leia) (tasker). current female character building poses its own particular challenges, as 21st-century heroines need to hold up to a set of standards that are not always complementary (bernárdez rodal). over the last two decades, the presence of female protagonists in popular culture has been evident. in fact, the irruption of the fourth feminist wave during the 2010s and its denunciation of violence against women in all spheres of life (sexual, digital, labor) has been fundamental in the creation of female characters. still, as silvestre cabrera, lópez belloso, and royo prieto (2021) explore, this great advance in feminist issues also requires an analysis of what the advances and characteristics of the characters of our century really are. the objective of this dossier is to offer an overview of different contemporary approaches in us popular culture to the inclusion of gender and sexual diversity in stem-related narratives. the title of the dossier “stem in us popular culture: assessing gender discourse, stereotypes and mainstreaming” tries to open up the discussion to both positive and negative takes on contemporary narratives that feature female characters on stem-related environments, such as students, workers, or even fans of genres that had traditionally been erroneously associated with male audiences (i.e., science fiction and superhero comic books). with all of this in mind, this number includes articles dealing with tv shows, literature, comics, and movies, speaking to the many mediums that conform popular culture in order to laura álvarez trigo and erika tiburcio moreno | introduction reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.2057 2 illustrate all the areas in which women and young girls can potentially have an important role as stem experts. in “good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019),” andrea sofía regueira martín (universidad de zaragoza) explores the history of the representation of nerd teenagers in 20th-century cinema, noting a clear absence of nerd girls and evidencing a gender gap and a clear gap in the pool of role models for spectators. regueira martín looks at how booksmart (olivia wilde, 2019) subverts the stereotype of the nerd focusing on two female protagonists, sorority, and internal change. in “with great power comes gender diversity: superpowers and stem stereotypes in marvel comics,” igor juricevic (indiana university south bend) analyzes gender representation by looking at the portrayal of stem-related skills in marvel comics. the author shows how there is a clear gender bias for marvel characters up to the 1990s, how it has changed after 2000, and explores possible future advances in education based on those changes in popular culture. “of monsters and women: two female characters and trans/posthumanism in hbo’s lovecraft country” by alejandro batista tejada (universidad de sevilla) explores how the gender-swapping of two originally male characters evokes a new posthuman state in the 2020 screen adaptation of lovecraft country. the analysis centers on how their processes of “transhumanization” represent different trends as seen through the lenses of posthumanist theory. finally, in “redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice,” tana-julie drewitz (university of duisburg-essen) examines how the protagonists of the two aforementioned novels approach power struggles in a way that is not found in traditionally white, capitalist, and patriarchal narratives. drewitz shows how these characters’ female identity and posthuman condition are key in how the novels move away from such conventions. ultimately, what these four studies bring to the fore is not only the current state of gender diversity and different kinds of representation of women in stem-related narratives—the nerdgirl, the superheroine, and the cyborg—but also they speak to us about the possibility of better and varied forms of inclusion. works cited mulvey, laura. feminism and film theory. routledge, 2013. rodal, asunción bernárdez. soft power: heroínas y muñecas en la cultura mediática. fundamentos, 2018. cabrera silvestre, maría, lópez belloso, maría, royo prieto, raquel. “the fourth wave in audiovisual content: a true achievement of feminism?” international journal of communication, no. 15, 2021, pp. 416–38. tasker, ivonne. working girls. gender and sexuality in popular cinema. routledge, 1998. 4 reden 4.2 (2023) | book reviews 91 gendered defenders: marvel's heroines in transmedia spaces edited by bryan j. carr and meta g. carstarphen (2022) troy michael bordun and prapti sarkar1 carr, bryan j. and meta g. carstarphen, eds. 2022. gendered defenders: marvel's heroines in transmedia spaces. columbus: the ohio state university press. new suns: race, gender, and sexuality in the speculative. viii+214 pp. $119.95 hc/$36.95 pbk and ebook. keywords: superheroes, gender studies, marvel, transmedia, book review. doi: 10.37536/reden.2023.4.2159 since henry jenkins’s (2006) effective analysis of the components of transmedia storytelling, scholars continue to build on his work. marvel comics, and the marvel brand in general, is one such site for scholars to further develop and understand transmedia entertainment. indeed, stan lee, the face of marvel from the 1960s through to his death in 2018, always envisioned superheroes flying out of comics pages and onto large and small screens (howe 2012). in bryan j. carr and meta g. carstarphen’s gendered defenders: marvel’s heroines in transmedia spaces, the contributing authors each take one of marvel’s superheroines and consider her appearances across comics, live action and animated films, television, video games and, in the occasional chapter, as a cosplay character. according to the editors, the goal of this volume is “to ask what marvel’s superheroines can teach us about our culture (popular and otherwise) and how these teachings reflect the real, lived experiences of women” (10). this is pressing for the editors and contributors given that the marvel “ecosystem encourag[es] fans to follow their favorite characters and stories from one media to another” (5). with this transmedia thesis in mind, most contributing authors nevertheless skip a detailed analysis of the concept of transmedia storytelling—chapters 6 and 11 engage with jenkins’s peer-reviewed scholarship while chapters 1 and 8 cite the student handout on transmedia storytelling available on his blog (jenkins 2007). to start with the book’s subtitle, gendered defenders: marvel’s heroines in transmedia spaces does not advance 1 this research was funded by a sshrc explore grant, university of northern british columbia. reden 4.2 (2023) | book reviews 92 theories of transmedia storytelling and aesthetics, recalling jenkins’s observation in 2006 that “we do not yet have very good aesthetic criteria for evaluating works that play themselves out across multiple media” (jenkins 2006, 96–97). the volume could have attempted, however brief, to resolve this issue in the field. the authors instead turn to other theoretical frameworks, sometimes upwards of seven in a chapter, to investigate a transmedia superheroine. the book is composed of four parts and thirteen chapters. part 1 provides introductory analyses. to start with, carr and carstarphen explore the significance of superheroes in our culture and what these heroic myths mean to consumers and fans. the authors then define and redefine transmedia—the most sustained discussion in the book—and explain how marvel’s transmedia ecosystem works. in their overview of the book, carr and carstarphen refer backwards to their preceding remarks, an odd addition that they could have omitted. carr’s following chapter provides a historical overview of marvel’s relationship with its female fans and its reluctance to sell to them. in the concluding chapter of part 1, carstarphen develops the idea of “trans/linear feminism” (28), or the choice that female readers make to read marvel superheroines in a distinctive way from male readers. he claims that the narratives of superheroines are emblematic of a larger narrative about the lived experiences of real women. the first part, then, succinctly introduces the central themes that will be discussed throughout the book. in part 2, the authors bring feminist theories to read marvel superheroines. in chapter four, j. richard stevens and anna c. turner trace the complex—and lengthy—history and evolution of captain marvel as a feminist icon. through textual analyses that read a bit like plot summaries, they argue that the character of captain marvel is a site of constructed feminism, ever-changing to fit the feminist needs of the moment. captain marvel is explored again in chapter thirteen, where annika hagley observes how the character is presented as an individual with trauma in the 2019 film captain marvel. back in chapter five, kathleen m. turner-ledgerwood uses standpoint theory to read agent carter as a transgenerational and transmedia feminist. similar to the previous chapter, much space is devoted to tracing the history of the character. chapter six, then, problematizes the costume of the superheroine as a form of gendered control. amanda k. kehrberg uses judith butler’s theory of gendered performativity to identify jessica jones’s rejection of the superhero costume as a rejection of the performance of both her gender as well as her superhero identity. kehrberg’s contribution is the standout chapter: it has a sustained discussion of a particular aspect of superhero identity and cleverly applies theory to focus on jones’s costume. in summary, although the above authors’ engagement with feminist theories seems cursory at best, this section of the book does a decent job of tracing the feminist evolution of the superheroines. as often happens with edited collections, some chapters could be slotted into other sections. maryanne a. rhett’s study of islamic feminism and ms. marvel is better suited reden 4.2 (2023) | book reviews 93 to part 2 on feminism instead of part 3 on “otherness [and] the body.” this would also eliminate the division of superheroines in the book by race—parts 2 and 4 focus on white heroines while part 3 focuses on superheroines of colour. as a historian, rhett uses their strengths to locate the character’s feminism “on the edges of kamala khan’s narrative” (109). rather than thinking alongside one of the waves of western feminism, rhett reads ms. marvel author g. willow wilson’s conversion to islam to situate kamala within the long history of islamic feminism, particularly in egypt. rhett provides close analyses of the comics to determine how history informs kamala’s pakistani american muslim feminist identity. the other chapters of part 3 are less successful. rachel grant assesses representations of shuri, sister of t’challa/black panther, in ryan coogler’s film black panther (2018), nnedi okorafor’s comic series shuri (2018–2019), a couple of online news publications, and five tweets. grant mobilizes in broad strokes feminist theory, intersectional theory, postcolonial theory, afrofuturism, discourse analysis, and “technocultural analysis” (95), and all-too-brief explanations of these frameworks take up half the chapter, a pattern we note throughout the volume. grant employs textual analyses of the film and comics and concludes that a few twitter users like shuri because she is a role model for girls, and/or has an anticolonial bent, and/or just like the character because she is “badass” (99). next, in a baffling contribution, stephanie l. sanders considers misty knight, a police officer and later crimefighter with a bionic arm. while sanders provides some googled remarks about the character and her origins, the focus is a story about knight’s stint as a diversity officer at new york universe-city college of liberal arts (ny-ucla). i believe sanders conceived this story as a thought experiment, but this is unclear. sanders first devotes time to under-developing gloria anzaldúa’s concept of “spiritual activism,” then reads her fan fiction through this theory. part 4 does not have a strong through line among the chapters but has some of the most consistent examinations of transmedia characters. julie a. davis and robert westerfelhaus examine black widow through two lenses. first, they assess how black widow conforms and deviates from robert jewett and john shelton lawrence’s notion of the american monomyth. as the authors note, her outsider status—an important part of this monomyth—is emphasized by a moral compass different from superhero colleagues, the acquisition of her powers through training rather than luck or technology and, in some versions of black widow, she stands apart from humans because she had also taken the russian supersoldier serum. these differences from male heroes does not alter widow’s sexualization, even in the g-rated animated series the super hero squad show. next, mildred f. perreault and gregory p. perreault inform readers in three separate sections about potts’s background in the mcu and the second half of the chapter provides a detailed list of potts’s transmedia appearances. the sections serve as quick summaries of where and how potts fits into the plot of the media under discussion with few if any reden 4.2 (2023) | book reviews 94 arguments rooted in four or more theoretical frameworks that are detailed in the first half. the authors find that the character “often aligns with the story progression and cultural norms expected in the marvel universe” (167). carrielynn d. reinhard’s contribution follows a similar transmedia analysis with squirrel girl, devoting much space to listing where one could find the character and how she fits into those stories as reflection of “corporate feminism” (187): squirrel girl inspires but does not empower. the editors and most of the contributors of gendered defenders are professors of communication studies and media studies but the chapters’ lack of interest in scholarship from comics, film, and television studies limits what this volume can accomplish for transmedia studies. there are a few novel insights into superheroines, but the short length of the contributions—between 12 and 18 pages, including several pages worth of citations—, the chapters’ often sloppy structure, the authors’ poor summaries of theory, and their repetitions of points, plots, and quotations did not produce deep and sustained analyses. the scholarly style of the book is a barrier to this work and the volume may have been better with the general audiences’ approach employed in [superhero] and philosophy books published by wiley and open court. works cited howe, sean. 2012. marvel comics: the untold story. new york: harper perennial. jenkins, henry. 2006. convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press. jenkins, henry. 2007. “transmedia storytelling 101.” pop junctions, 21 mar 2007. http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 145 vampire and monster narratives an interview with sorcha ní fhlainn anna marta marini universidad de alcalá sorcha ní fhlainn is a senior lecturer in film studies and american studies at manchester metropolitan university. she specializes in gothic studies, horror cinema, popular culture, and american studies indeed. her work is focused in particular on vampire and monster narratives. she has published a long list of essays and several books, among which the collections our monster skin: blurring the boundaries between monsters and humanity (2010), the worlds of back to the future: critical essays on the films (2010), clive barker: dark imaginer (2017), and her monograph postmodern vampires in film, fiction and popular culture (2019). keywords: american gothic, popular culture, vampires, horror, teratology, interview. anna marta marini: given your body of work, i would like to start by asking you: how has the gothic used bodies to express the crossing of boundaries, to express othering, abjection, fantasy, repulsion, mores, urges, and all sorts of anxieties related to corporal reality? do you think there is an element of fascination as well, intrinsic to the gothic exploitation of bodyrelated topics? sorcha ní fhlainn: it’s a really interesting question, i think that the body is a text to be negotiated in the gothic on a macro level, in terms of gender, sexuality, identity, all of these things and then also at a micro level—whether it’s a microscopic disease, the terror of the unknown, abjection and transformation—everything from the kind of violent sense of othering that we see in the gothic, all the way through to the transformational aspects of it through fantasy, sexuality, things like that which we see in authors such as barker for example... so we see this throughout the gothic in a way that documents the body as text, and the transformation of the body. the body is never really complete especially in the sense of the gothic because we find that transformations are occurring all the time, whether it’s psychological, sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 146 psychosomatic, sexual... the body is something that is never fully finished and there’s something always a little bit disturbing or a little bit abject about it, a little bit undone. i think because of that the text—the body as text—is always a site of fascination to which we return and that can be whether the body is very beautiful or other, or strange. it can be vampiric or zombie-like. you find it’s always on this level of spectral where this arc of change, i suppose, and it just depends on how far-reaching and how horrifying this body presents itself. so, when we see this in terms of monsters, in particular, it’s always about how we identify or find the limits of their bodies or how their bodies differ from what we imagine is the ‘normal body’, our own body, our own experience of the world. so you can see that the body is sort of the foundational text for us all whether it’s skin and surfaces, you know, or as i say sexual, sexual reproduction or asexual reproduction, we find the gothic is lurking somewhere at the edges, to challenge us and our perceptions of it. the gothic is always in dialogue with various other aspects of bodily expression—as i say—corporeality, sexuality, and indeed that idea that there’s always this tension between the idea of evolutionary advancement, development or change, and how that is so psychologically challenging for us. amm: you have been working in the field of monster studies and monsters are often used as symbols of horror, interfering with concerns and issues related to science, technology, metamorphosis, and the impossibility to control oneself. so, why monsters? how does your interest in monsters raise? snf: i suppose it goes back a long time as all these things do... every gothic scholar will tell you that something happened to them in their childhood, in some way they encountered a book or they came across a story that just changed their point of view and for me... i was not a child who loved all monsters. i was always interested in different points of view, i always loved the fact that there were different ways of looking and reading perspectives like the rashomon effect. there were various ways to tell a story from different points of view (as is the case in the larger landscape of history) and so that was my “gateway experience” into gothic studies because there’s an instability—a core instability—there; who is the true monster depends on who does the looking and who tells the story. so if you’re looking at something classical you might have the band of vampire hunters who are seeking out to destroy the vampire because he’s a vampire... we have to kill him, that kind of thing... but from the vampire’s perspective, he’s been persecuted and he might not see himself as a villain... we don’t see ourselves as villains in our own stories, we see ourselves as heroes. when you switch that and the subjectivity changes, you get fascinating variations or different versions of the tale. so, who is the monster and who is the hero always depends on the position of the storyteller, or what subjective position is privileged in the tale. so, for me, when i was starting to read vampire fiction in particular as a teenager, what always struck me was that the “monster” was the storyteller... so that to me was immediately fascinating because they’re always much more interesting than the human protagonists. the human protagonists are generally quite normal, sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 147 bland, usually patriarchal, usually upholding particular sort of privileges and points of view, but the monster didn’t—s/he was transgressive and alluring. the monster had that violation of power, so that’s what captured my imagination pretty much from the get-go. we see this in post-modern literature, essentially, and we find that there’s so much more depth and so much more breadth in the perspective of the vampire, the zombie, and so on. it is much more interesting than rooting for van helsing, you know, as we know what van helsing’s up to anyway. i’ve always been tied to that concern around subjectivity, because again we have, at some time in our lives, all experienced the sense of being outsiders. whether that’s in primary school, whether that’s in cliques or communities, or whether it’s because we feel it’s to do with our politics or our accents or our skin color or whatever it might be. we’ve all understood that sense of othering—it’s a very human feeling so we all can identify with the feelings of the monster at some capacity, and then we can all—especially with the way it’s constructed in cinema and literature— empathize with the monster. there’s a pathway for many readers and viewers. i think that that’s very seductive and very inviting in the gothic, as we are all both heroes and monsters in our minds one way or another and we all can understand and have that empathy. amm: could you maybe illustrate a few examples of fictional monsters, either your favorite or the ones that you think are more relevant or archetypical. snf: the one i would always go to—my go-to one—would always be vampires because i think that when you’re looking at a case like dracula’s, a really good example of a monster that’s hunted down, and is never fully understood. he’s always represented in the novel at least as something that is monstrous and stands in for so much of the anxieties and the fantasies of the fin de siècle. but when we’re looking at revisions of dracula that come later, in the 20th century, or indeed even concerning other vampires... i’m thinking of the anne rice vampires for instance, and various other iterations, we see that we are positioned to align ourselves with the monster. the monster is much cooler, much more interesting, usually much sexier, and definitely—as we get to the end of the 20th century—sympathetic in a way that monster hunters tend to be represented as zealots in comparison. these vampires are not necessarily purely evil, but rather complex characters who are in some way gothically informed whether they’re immortal or they drink blood or whatever it might be. i’m not saying they’re free from guilt or free from their own sense of transgression. but there’s definitely a sympathetic edge and that’s a powerful transformation at work. vampire cinema overtly sympathizes with the vampire. it overtly shows that vampires can be monstrous, but they indeed can be damned and in that damnation, we can empathize with that sense of guilt and the horror of having to live through pain and self-afflicted pain. similarly, the zombie’s gone through that same transformation—even though purely sort of as a cinematic trope or cinematic character—where we initially see them as the abject horde. we initially reject them for that reason but then when we start to see what they represent about our own sense of our lives—whether it’s that we’re sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 148 all living under varying degrees of capitalistic enslavement—then we start to see that we are in actuality the zombies. we are the drones, we’re the ones who are forced to work, and the true horror of it is that even death doesn’t release us. we’re going to be working even after death. so, there are these ways as i said, subjectivity really helps us kind of identify through that sort of monstrous nature. teratology makes you feel like you are always looking out for the person who’s most subject to the machinations of capitalism or the machinations of those in power. amm: and what about a monster like frankenstein’s? snf: absolutely! the creature, in particular, i think, has been so sympathetically recouped. particularly in the novel when you see sort of the horror with which dr frankenstein treats him, but then we see that it’s the innocence of the creature, the lack of understanding of the consequences of what he does, but also the fact that he is just left abandoned entirely, we get this sense that how we are perceived by others can make us monstrous, even though we do not see ourselves in that capacity. he is a creature completely of sympathy and i think usually—particularly in terms of queer and sexuality studies—a lot of people identify with frankenstein’s creature because he is not necessarily deemed acceptable by others even though he knows no different. so, he challenges concepts of the boundaries of ‘normality’ or the boundaries of an ‘acceptable’ existence. the novel and films also address anxieties about science, about how can you be a “god” or what’s your position as a human who dares to steal the promethean spark. when you give life to something, of course, it’s always scary, isn’t it? and i think the fact that it’s done irresponsibly— for the sake of being able to experiment on it — is highly unethical and to abandon it when your progeny needs you the most, there’s something unspeakable about that. all of our monsters are very much extensions of our psychological understanding of the world because we’ve all gone through variations of these very deep-seated and often cathartic emotions. amm: your work has delved in particular into vampires in the american imagination and popular culture. how would you explain the topics related to the representation of the vampire through history in american culture? snf: i must say from the outset that when i was conducting my study, my research on vampires, the most plentiful source of anglophone vampires originated in the united states. when i started to undertake the study a long time ago i noticed that most of the vampires— once they started to speak, once they had that subjectivity—what they said and stood for mapped on very closely to a shift in american cultural understanding of and suspicion on the president of the united states. one thing i discovered was that the second vampirism started to go global (through a british-american production, the fearless vampire killers, directed by roman polanski), it started to flourish outward and spread across nations; it broadened our understanding of vampires being everywhere as opposed to just being in the castle in sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 149 romania. you have hammer in the uk, which started drawing to a close because it was still stuck in replaying that older sort of adaptations of the gothic texts, polanski’s film reimagines those trends by satirizing those tropes and conventions. the american vampires of the 60s and especially the 1970s contemporize the vampire, so you get these new vampires that come out as vampirism spreads and becomes popular. you have rice—her ‘articulate vampire’ cohort—then you have george romero’s classic film martin, and you have other reinterpretations of dracula, and they all deal with anxieties around american political discourse... whether it’s stagnation in the economy, whether it’s the president and the lies of watergate and uncovering nixon as this sort of arch enemy of the people. other times, it’s the idea that sexual liberation, drugs, and rock and roll are great now and it might lead to a viable and promising future for women and minorities... and you have all these new vampire texts that kind of negotiate this terrain: again blacula does this during the blaxploitation period, through to the comedy love at first bite in the disco era. so, we see the vampires then start to embody and take on anxieties of the age and do this in a way whereby we can see it etching itself onto their more frail and often mortal bodies. vampires start to look sick, they start to die, especially in the 1980s... they get younger because again the financial impulse in the 1880s is of course through mtv and youthful audiences. so, you know, we get rock star vampires like timmy valentine and lestat who articulate the economic edges of 1980s culture. overall, it’s a very bad time to be a vampire under reagan; a lot of vampires tend to die off or explode or are punished and must go to ground... no vampire survives the 80s unscathed. by the 1990s, they start to split apart and multiply, so it finds purchase in the two-faced nature on display in 1990s american culture, with clinton’s public disgrace (among many others), we literally see this... and then this doubling in buffy through spike and angel, and louis and lestat in the film version of interview with the vampire. it starts to take on this cultural echo and it works its way through the vampire narrative, whether they speak it or whether they embody it. vampires also display more openness towards lgbtq+ rights and radically move beyond embodying an aids narrative in the 1990s. they are very accurate cultural barometers. amm: and i guess, the vampire—as you were saying for example the 80s vampires—there is an underlying theme of corruption as well. snf: yes, the vampire starts to die because their body corrupts, they are frailer than before. i’m thinking in particular of fright night and in the lost boys, we see this sort of explosiveness and fragility in some capacity. with near dark, it’s more of a tragedy, that they’re a lost tribe that cannot be sustained in contemporary america, whereas i think with the nuclear family structures that you see in fright night and the lost boys there is this rule that if you transgress—whether it’s sexually or morally –the sin is etched into your body or taints your soul. so, it functions as a warning, and has very serious consequences in terms of declaring “you sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 150 will not be worthy of inclusion in any kind of hopeful future for the country.” 1980s vampires bear the brunt of republican political policies. amm: how does the vampire connect specifically with sexuality and themes that are related to sexual anxieties? snf: the vampire occupies this lovely duality between sexual desire and abjection. they bring forth or indeed act out or upon repressed sexual desires within the culture—whether that is any kind of lgbtq+ expression, or forbidden trysts outside of marriage or patriarchal control—it’s always about offering that gothic encounter with something or someone seductive yet dangerous and transgressive. if you transgress beyond the realm of fantasy and you cannot be recuperated either morally physically or whatever, then this damnation will happen to you. if you fully transgress over to the “dark side”—whatever that might be, such as drinking blood or same-sex relations— once you transgress too far, you’re lost to a gothic and dangerous existence in these texts. this is a conservative reading, of course, and that’s not to say that characters do not or should not relish in their gothic desires. contemporary vampires are more beautiful than anyone could compete with, that’s the point. the point is they offer the realm of fantasy and escape, they are in some ways beyond the limits of sexuality. i’m thinking in particular of shows like true blood for example, that definitely foregrounded this position. vampire sex in true blood can be read (as is often presented) as both monstrous and magical, as dangerous and fulfilling. they can offer you everything and this is the point but do you really want the fantasy of the eternal immortal boyfriend who is also incredibly beautiful looking and just has that nasty little habit of not being able to go outside in the daylight? the point is that it’s a fantasy but it’s dependent upon what desire is being served. it’s a balancing act. i think that vampire sexuality onscreen has become a lot more explicit and is becoming more inclusive in terms of lgbtq+ relationships and representations on screen, and long may that continue! vampires now have to find another way to express their transgression. they’ll have to find another way to represent that gothic intrusion because we recognize that inclusivity is just and right so that can’t be a marker of excess anymore because it’s normal. however, it’s likely that vampire bodies will still engage in horrifying modes of dying and disintegration. amm: thinking of the presence of vampires in popular culture in recent years—and let’s say maybe from the turn of the century up to the present—how have the vampire archetypes and tropes been adapted to the current times? snf: we’ve had a continuation of adaptations and texts coming in from the 20th century into the 21st century, with interpretations of dracula for example. we have vampires who mourn their position in the world or wish to be accepted and integrated especially if you’re looking at something like true blood. the most interesting vampire texts i can think of in the last 20 years or so look at vampires overtaking the world … i’m thinking for example of daybreakers, sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 151 which was a really interesting film because it looked at the vampire as a completely capitalist body draining the global economy to the brink. the fact that the vampires are running out of blood is well situated as a commentary on our petro-future, of running out of oil, and natural resources. so, it has that ecological anxiety that we naturally would expect in the 21st century, which isn’t new but it is something that is done in a very interesting and timely articulation, nearing an end state that we can no longer survive. so, all of us are vampiric in our consumption practices in the contemporary world. vampires are always up to date. in some recent examples then we find there’s no catharsis, that there’s something quite banal about being immortal for 500 years. so we’re getting closer to the vampire but we understand that their allure is a mirage, so i think that’s very interesting to see how the next turn in the vampire narrative will occur. that said, i’m enjoying the fact that there are so many sorts of “interviews with vampires,” today like what we do in the shadows; that film and tv series in particular is very savvy and aware of vampire history and at the same time they represent the fact that they’re showing different types of vampires across film and literary history. they are updating representations of vampire women too, which deserves more scrutiny. in what we do in the shadows, i think nadja is one of the most interesting characters i’ve seen on screen for years in terms of female vampirism. there are lots of ways that they can bring together all these gothic tropes and make them exciting in contemporary culture. amm: often vampires have been coupled with werewolves. in recent years there have been examples in which vampires crossover with zombies, as it happens in the tv series van helsing. so, how does the vampire stand next to other monsters that are so present in popular culture, you think? snf: the vampire will always stand on its own. i think this is the case because the vampire is foundational in gothic fiction going back to polidori and oral traditions before that. and that goes back to oral history, goes back to the narratives around the wandering jew who disappears and reappears, the terror of the stranger in the village, or the undead revenant who returns after death. there are loads of different ways we can articulate vampires as they’ve remade themselves across the centuries. it’s interesting that you bring up zombies because i think contemporary vampires and zombies owe an enormous debt to richard matheson’s i am legend from 1954. the text is about a vampire plague and is superb, an absolutely incredible and very influential novel, but then gets adapted into a zombie text under george romero… and that brings us those images that we’re so used to, of zombies acting as a terrifying, all-consuming horde. vampires very rarely act in large groups, they don’t tend to like each other, they tend to be quite self-centred and full of their own opinion… so the fact that matheson’s vampire hordes are transformed into all-consuming zombie hordes works much better as a metaphor for the masses. again, this is not only because of that capitalistic impulse they voraciously feed, but also because they’re not subjective—at least not at that point in their visual history—they are consumers and they are there to literally force back any sort of sense sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 152 of progress beyond consumption and fleshy appetites. i think a lot of credit is owed to matheson in that respect, and romero’s update of the zombie makes it feel very contemporaneous. vampires are subjective, and, despite being deeply abject creatures, they still have the veneer of beauty; it is easy to identify why we may want to be vampires, rather than zombies i don’t want to have my abject state written all over my body announcing my decay, nor that i’m still working beyond death or that i’m enslaved in some capacity beyond death. whereas with vampirism you kind of go “well they usually tend to be the more privileged of the gothic monsters,” they’ve access to time, wealth, power, influence. they can travel. there’s a hell of a lot of good to be said about the vampire existence in comparison, i think. amm: and of course—as you were saying—there’s this kind of vampire romance that it’s already present in the gothic text of the past centuries but it has evolved in the past two decades, thanks to transmedia series such as twilight and similar texts. snf: vampire romance—especially in the vampire literature sense—goes back a lot earlier and in particular it underwent a huge renaissance in the 1970s… if the vampires are not romancing each other or in thrall to a specially chosen human—or quarrelling with each other in the case of rice’s sprawling vampire chronicles—you also have characters like saint-germain by chelsea quinn yarbro in her st germain series—and that again is a huge sprawling series whereby saint-germain is a traveller across human history, partaking in human affairs before he disappears again. essentially, he’s intervening and saving women and is a potent and fabulous lover, he’s also a gemmologist, he’s a specialist in diamonds… so really he had it down long before we got edward cullen on the scene. edward cullen just physically embodies it, in that he literally has got diamonds in the skin or at least the reflection of it as such, so he is the embodiment of that wealth… whereas saint-germain shares his wealth and knowledge. so, there’s a very interesting romance around being provided for, being made safe, and then of course the sexual safety of that, while also enabling women to access their sexual desires both unabashedly and fantastically through vampire literature. open q&a session laura álvarez trigo: my question really builds upon many things that you’ve already mentioned and i was thinking specifically about the ethics involved in watching these vampires, in terms of how we empathize with them. so, on the one hand, there’s these things that you were mentioning—as the dichotomy between the spike type and the angel type, or louis and lestat, and this kind of the “good vegetarian vampire” type of character—but there’s also what we do in the shadows that you’ve mentioned… these characters have zero empathy, zero interest in humans, but we still—as audiences—we like them. so my sense is that maybe we really are fooled by this sexual attractiveness and this richness, and we just completely overrun all kinds of morality as audiences… and is this something that specifically happens with sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 153 the vampire for some reason? is this a monster that we tend to empathize and like more for these reasons? snf: i think that with something like what we do in the shadows, the one thing i should have mentioned earlier as well is that vampires tend to look like us [except for their teeth] and— unless they’ve transformed into something abject and horrifying by the end of the third act— they usually tend to look like us. so, they’re easier to empathize with on that level or to be seduced by. we’re not seeing tentacles or anything that’s too confrontational, certainly not early on anyway. there is that seductive element and i think that that makes it easier for us to either be seduced by it or indeed to empathize with it on some level—they are driven by very human emotions (love, lust, greed, fear, power, etc.). it depends of course on how far-reaching their transgression is because if you start killing children and puppies on screen no one’s going to empathize with you no matter what you look like. so, there is a certain element of the seductive charm and being able to draw you in as a viewer, but in terms of seeing what they’re like up close or, you know, in texts like what we do in the shadows we kind of still want to be like them. maybe it’s not falling in love with them so much as we are led to consider, “that looks like tremendously good fun to have those kinds of powers, that kind of disregard for human nonsense that rules our lives, the proprietary boundaries of rules that govern our behavior,” and that limiting sense of having to give in to social expectations… they don’t have that and that’s a very freeing thing. we see this as a sort of a sense of gaining a new form of freedom, because what are the consequences, really, when you’re immortal? i think that’s the secret element we enjoy, and some monsters give it to us more than others or they represent those possibilities more than others. lat: the fact that it plays morally with how we would actually like to just be able to kill someone because we are vampires and we have that type of freedom. snf: yeah, it’s a frightening question to us. this has been answered to a certain extent already in horror cinema, when you think of something like the purge films, for example. it delves into this idea that even if murder was legalized for 12 hours in a year… how many people would actually do it? i think a lot of people would if they thought they could get away with that. i think that’s quite frightening how far-reaching that desire may be. mónica fernández jiménez: i’m thinking of the european tradition of the vampire transplanted into the american hemisphere, as one of the most famous works about vampires, dracula, has been analyzed under this idea of the return of the colonized. so, i was wondering if there’s something like this related to vampires or all the kinds of monsters in the context of the american hemisphere, related to this sense with the european entrance into the americas. are there any sort of anxieties in any american works dealing with the return of the repressed? or the early colonization of the american hemisphere, anything of that sort that you can think about? sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 154 snf: i think that there are two ways to look at it… one way is that, you know, looking at dracula the novel for a moment and seeing it as it’s written by an irishman moving to england at a time when ireland is under the rule of the british empire. at the same time, the novel is published during a profound period of cultural change and innovation alongside a renewed push for irish freedom, which is eventually secured. so, we have the anglo-irish context that you can definitely read into the novel dracula because stoker didn’t go anywhere near transylvania… so this novel is a superimposed reading onto another national context. concerning the americas, though, what’s interesting is that dracula as a text migrates to the united states through stoker’s play and film adaptations, so it’s really through german expressionism, through nosferatu. so, it goes in through the arts and this is something that happens with several artists escaping persecution in europe, creative minds that brought their stories with them to the united states and informed the american cultural experience of the united states. the return of the repressed often erupts in vampire stories as powerful vampires often originate elsewhere, and wreak havoc as immigrants in the american heartland—it enables the us to tackle ideas about having porous boundaries and borders while also addressing the fact that america is a nation founded on immigration. films such as cronos deal directly with mexico’s spanish history and then contemporizes its dracula/frankenstein tale as a crossborder conflict with the united states while examining the supernatural origin of its vampirism as part of colonial expansions, first from spain and then the neo-american colonialism expressed through corporate power. we have this tension going on in the american imaginary between the supernatural that shouldn’t exist and then, at the same time, the rational doesn’t go far enough to explain what’s happening. this tension is there, but the vampire tends to wander in through cultural reproduction and film devices to articulate the unsayable and to address the horrors of anxiety about the past and its eruption in the present. so i see it as assimilation into the american melting pot, which includes the history of european culture and different european forms of art, stories and colonial history. but usually, the vampire stands in for something that does need to be addressed and excised from the national imaginary (representing that which is deemed unacceptable and must be abjected), then it slowly finds its way back in… then we start to sympathize with the vampires and start to hate the rules that we live under, again around the 1970s, because we realize those who rule us are corrupt. this is how we change that shift and we start to believe in the vampires’ narrative and subjective account more than we believe in the american president. sara gonzález: my question was more along the lines of what laura asked before, sorry to make you switch topics back and forth like this. i was wondering, maybe not as much in a gothic line, but i was wondering what you thought about this shift that we’ve been seeing lately in these romance stories featuring monsters other than the vampire. so for example i was thinking about the shape of water, or also in some video games that you romance perhaps aliens or even zombies, other creatures like this. i was wondering what you thought about sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 155 that and if you think this also goes kind of along the lines of this sort of fantasy that you mentioned before, or if you think it works differently because the monster is also different? snf: we can kind of push vampires to one side for a second because i think they have their own internal rules and logic, and they do tend to look a bit like us. i think in terms of other creatures it’s more about empathy, isn’t it? it’s more to do with the idea of emotionally connecting with the character, i mean, certainly in the shape of water it’s about empathy and suffering and being silenced. in the case of the creature, it’s the fact that it’s something to be captured and studied and to be treated with cruelty rather than to be empathized with… something that’s human and lost so, again, the human impulse on the audience is to empathize with that. to me, it’s about finding a shared or a kindred spirit, even if that necessarily is not of the same species as you. there is a sort of love and i suppose the love is more of a found and shared understanding. only a couple of weeks ago i was teaching aliens and you know, the alien queen to me is the most incredible, beautiful, gorgeous creature on the screen. i mean it just because she represents a sort of a matriarchal power that, in your most fiery feminist self, want to see on screen. in that sense, she is considered archaic and monstrous, but to me onscreen she is beautiful because i want to understand and promote that sense of feminist power. so, that’s more aligned with the idea of the ideological drive. again, like all cultural readings, it shifts from text to text, but i can see what you mean…, i always think zombies are a bit troubling because they are us rendered nightmarishly abject, whereas the alien queen never looks like anything other than what she is—she’s the queen of the species! the vampire is very clean and closed off, they don’t tend to putrefy or anything, they tend to heal immediately (or die quickly and horribly). but zombies once they start to putrefy and fall apart and we get beyond the comedic point at which they fall apart, there is something troubling about it because we are confronted with the image of abject death. was there an example you had in mind? sg: maybe—when i mentioned the zombie—i was thinking about warm bodies. snf: yeah, it was kind of like a twilight sort of a thing but it featured a zombie instead of a vampire, he is so beautiful, he does not change throughout the movie at all. there was a chewing gum commercial, i don’t know if this came out in europe but i remember it was huge in ireland and in the uk in which the gothic aesthetics of the vampire and the zombie were mixed up—you’d kiss the zombie guy/girl after they have had a breath-freshening chewing gum because they are still gorgeous—so undeath is aestheticized as something that can linger on and be infused with capitalist and sexualised impulses quite openly. but then that shifts again when you think of walking dead, it’s very abject and very cruel in some respects… but i think something like warm bodies and twilight, they render undeath it a lot safer than a lot of the texts do. sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 156 mónica garcía morgado: i remember that when i was 16 and i was watching twilight or read the books and then the vampire diaries, i always felt a disgendered side of the narrative, seeing female vampires being concerned with motherhood instead of men. is that changing at present or do you feel it’s still maintained? i’m thinking of the vampire diaries for example, when caroline is transformed into a vampire she thinks about motherhood, something she desires and she thinks she will never attain and at the end of the story, well, she becomes pregnant but it’s not really a biological pregnancy. is that still something present in contemporary narratives, this is concerned with motherhood or is it changing? snf: that’s really interesting. i’m thinking again of what we do in the shadows where we have a baby vampire but not the idea of caring for it. it’s more just that you’re spreading the influence or spreading the vampiric power to somebody else, but you’re not necessarily taking on the role of motherhood so you’re creating but not caring for your progeny. the other problem as well—and this is something i have to say—is that i noticed a lot of vampire texts are associated with and focus predominantly on male voices and male experiences. it was only after i had completed the study did i fully realize there weren’t that many female vampires that articulated any overt political thrust in this study i did. female vampires and reproduction depend entirely on where they source their power. if you look at something like the hunger it’s about the idea of outliving your spouse or your sexual partner and continuing on your lineage without them. high-society vampires are typically very solitary, and they’re not looking to necessarily make more of anything because that threatens their sense of wealth and security. they like to have their own sense of using up someone else and moving on, especially in the case of the hunger. i don’t think making vampires, making babies, and the reproductive cycle of vampires is always consistent… a lot of them seem to mourn the loss of being able to make a child when they’re turned as the process of being transformed into a vampire is largely concerned with death and fearing one’s own end. i haven’t seen much in the way of vampire women longing for babies outside of a particular text or two. i know, for instance, if you forgive me as it’s not a direct source for vampire progeny, but i remember the thing that kind of struck me the most was if you got to the very end of true blood. the very last shot of true blood in the tv series was when sookie is seen with an unknown person whom we never know and she is heavily pregnant. so, the idea is that all this sex with undead bodies that she thoroughly enjoys for the seven seasons of the show, it’s ultimately a dead end and reproductively null and void. there’s no human life, no vitality in those relationships (beyond her own sexual awakening), so for her to have some sort of human future, the show positions it so that she has to be with what we assume is a human man. vampire reproduction can be seen as a perpetuation of a more capitalism, more need, more procreation and hunger. is there another example you have in mind or are there any other examples you can share with me? mgm: the vampire diaries case i find it quite interesting because motherhood is constantly appearing for the female characters. besides caroline, there is hayley, she’s a vampire and she only becomes pregnant because she’s also half a werewolf, so she can be a biological sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 157 mother. i know there’s a new series now called legacies about the baby that is now grown up i was just wondering that because when i was 16 i was always getting these messages somehow about how women have to be upset about not having the option of becoming mothers. that was mainly the root of my question if it is changing or not. snf: you’ve made me think of it differently—some male vampires are desperate to have progeny, but they can’t find a way for it to work. and there are loads of examples of this but one of the ones that i think is very interesting is poppy brite’s lost souls novel where sex with a vampire and a human woman results in just the most horrific destruction of the female body. so, there is this sense of vampire progeny cannot be borne by humans because it destroys them. and again we saw that in twilight didn’t we? so, we have that kind of sense of monstrous pregnancy, monstrous reproduction. but then also going back to the vampire romance for a moment, in the 1970s we have this reclamation of the female body and reproductive rights… we have the pill of course in the 1960s and of course, its use being normalized… and then we have roe vs wade in the early 1970s in the united states, you tend to find that it is more focused on bodily and sexual autonomy. you can just have sex and enjoy yourself. there’s this idea of liberation from the role of motherhood and that becomes a choice rather than a potential trap for some people. so, it does enable female liberation too. mgm: the impression is that male vampires want a legacy, right? they want a continuation of their power but in these teenage-focused narratives, i feel like women are not as concerned about legacy or the continuation of their names, but rather the private individual motherhood. taryn tavener-smith: would you mind providing your insight into the move towards metaphoric vampires who do not drink blood, for example, but who are parasitic in other ways? i’m thinking in particular about david mitchell’s slade house vampires, who drank victims’ souls to maintain immortality. snf: i confess i have not read slade house yet, and it has been on my list for some time! some vampires do consume other things other than blood. one of the most interesting metaphorical ones i have come across in recent years—and there was a good film adaptation of it actually— was the sequel to the shining. the book, doctor sleep, looks at the idea of evaporated souls that you are consuming the souls of children in pain. this idea of being able to torture the soul out of a small child and then this older group of people can literally inhale this life force… and this is how they live, it’s a really interesting update on it. it’s most certainly back to that vampiric narrative and it kind of combines elements of the shining, the previous novel, but at the same time you have little elements of salem’s lot coming out from king’s other work. so, it brings it together in a way where you eat souls and consume things other than blood to maintain your immortality. that is something that i think is quite exciting, especially when we think of drinking blood as something central to vampirism. it’s nice when you see a little bit of difference, i have to say, and i like the idea of metaphorical vampires in the sense that sorcha ní fhlainn | vampire and monster narratives reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1825 158 you have energy vampires—colin robinson for instance and what we do in the shadows— who leave you depleted or robbing your vitality from you, and we have all met people like that, haven’t we? so, you know, there are lovely ways that it works itself out beyond the literalization of blood-drinking; for example, there are other vampires that drink tears in african lore, or that drink away sickness in asian culture. so, we have the sense of vampires exist and morph and change with the cultures they inhabit, but they do move beyond drinking blood alone. there is repeated anxiety around blood and bodily fluids (whether they are consumed or are considered scarce and dry up) when it comes to vampires—your bodily fluids are integral to your existence as a human and yet, in our gothic folklore, it can also sustain something else in an immortal fashion. it’s a deliciously abject note to end on! works cited brite, poppy z. lost souls. delacorte press, 1992. king, stephen. doctor sleep. scribner, 2013. matheson, richard. i am legend. gold medal books, 1954. mitchell, david. slade house. sceptre, 2015. shelley, mary. frankenstein. lackington, hughes, harding, mavor & jones, 1818. stoker, bram. dracula. archibald constable and company, 1897. films and tv series daybreakers. directed by michael and peter spierig, lionsgate, 2009. fright night. directed by tom holland, vistar films, 1985. the hunger. directed by tony scott, metro-goldwyn-mayer, 1983. interview with the vampire. directed by neil jordan, the geffen film company, 1994. the lost boys. directed by joel schumacher, richard donner production, 1987. true blood. produced and created by alan ball, hbo, 2008–2014. twilight. directed by catherine hardwicke, summit entertainment, 2008. warm bodies. directed by jonathan levine, mandeville films, 2013. what we do in the shadows. directed by jemaine clement. madman entertainment, 2014. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 113 the ecogothic an interview with elizabeth parker and michelle poland trang dang nottingham trent university elizabeth parker is the author of the monograph the forest and the ecogothic: the deep dark woods in the popular imagination, published by palgrave gothic in march 2020. she is the founding editor of the open-access journal gothic nature: new directions in ecohorror and the ecogothic and television editor for the irish journal of gothic and horror studies. she has co-organised several conferences on space, place, and the relationship between the gothic and the more-than-human, has published her work in various titles such as plant horror!: approaches to the monstrous vegetal in fiction and film and transecology: transgender perspectives on the environment, and is co-editor of landscapes of liminality: between space and place. she has taught english literature and courses on popular culture at a number of universities across the uk and ireland, and currently works in equality, diversity, and inclusion at st mary’s university twickenham. michelle poland is the research impact manager at nottingham trent university, a role which involves supporting researchers across the institution to identify ways than can enable their research to make a meaningful difference in the world. michelle is a passionate advocate for the role research plays in enhancing our prosperity, health, and quality of life and is currently working towards developing impact from her own research on the gothic, ecocriticism, and the anthropocene. she received her phd in english from the university of lincoln in 2019, is co-editor of the open-access peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal gothic nature, and has published work in critical survey and green letters. keywords: american gothic, ecogothic, ecocriticism, gothic literature and film, interview. trang dang: you mentioned in the introduction to the gothic nature journal website that you bonded over your fascination with “the realities and representations of the ‘darker side of nature’ and particular love of the deep dark woods.” can you tell us a bit more about this elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 114 inspiration that drew you to establishing the journal, and about what you mean by the “darker side of nature” and the “deep dark woods”? elizabeth parker: in terms of the origins of the journal, it all began with the first conference i ever co-organised—which was back in 2014 when i was a phd student at trinity college dublin—called “landscapes of liminality.” noting the themes in the proposed papers, we started to group several of them, including my own, under the heading of “gothic nature”: a term borrowed from professor tom j. hillard. seeing that there were a lot that fit this remit, i started to think to myself “this could be worth doing an entire conference on…” so, come 2017, with the support of my amazing supervisor, dr bernice murphy, and a couple of other phd students, this is exactly what we did with gothic nature i. we were delighted to find there was significant interest and we were spoiled for choice when it came to selecting our speakers and were lucky enough to have the conference headlined by professor william hughes, who amongst his many accolades is of one of the editors of the seminal collection ecogothic (2013). it was here, amidst the buzz of this event and witnessing the real sense of community and excitement, that my idea for the journal took form. it was here, too, that professor hughes introduced me to michelle—a brilliant speaker who was working not only on gothic nature, but on gothic forests. flash forward a year or so and i found myself in the editing stages for the first issue of the new journal, in need of more hands on deck, and i then had an idea to contact the person i remembered as “the lovely forest woman.” and so i did—and the rest is history. michelle poland: and i’m very grateful that you did! working on the gothic nature journal is so enjoyable, and i am continually blown away by the quality and creativity of the articles, creative pieces, and reviews we receive. trang, you also asked what elizabeth and i mean when we talk about the “darker side of nature,” which is the overarching theme of the journal. essentially, we’re referring to the more frightening aspects of nonhuman world—both real and imagined—and human fears of or apathy towards nature, a phenomenon coined by simon c. estok as “ecophobia.” ecophobia underpins our (at least those of us living in industrial-capitalist societies) attempts to control, destroy, silence, and oppress the nonhuman world, and is arguably the unacknowledged and sinister driver of the anthropocene, a new geological epoch caused by the impact of human activities on the planet. we’re really interested in critically engaging with these fears of and for nature, and the way it shapes our perceptions, attitudes, experiences, and interactions with the environment. in the western cultural imagination, there’s a rich history of nature being variously constructed as monstrous, spectral, sublime, and uncanny—as spaces, in other words, to be feared. of course, the way that we conceptualize nature, and the stories that we tell about it, have a direct impact on our attitudes and treatment of it. it’s this relationship between our fears of nature and anxieties about the gothic-like environment we’ve unwittingly unleashed that interests us. the gothic, which is a mode that deals in fear, provides the critical tools to engage productively with this subject. elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 115 td: i’m glad you mentioned the idea of stories, and our fear of and relationship with nature, as that leads nicely to the second question. i’m curious about how you define the ecogothic, and am particularly interested in whether your experience of running the gothic nature journal contributes to your knowledge of the ecogothic. ep: let’s start with the term ecogothic. because the term is really quite new, there’s still a lot of discussion around its precise definitions. something we want to flag from the outset is the fact that these definitions are evolving, our understandings are evolving—so while we have our opinions about what it is and what it is not, these viewpoints are merely a part of wider conversations. furthermore, though the term “ecogothic” is new, the ideas that it deals with are not. in other words, if you boil it down to its very essence—the imbrications between fear and nature—this relationship is as old as humankind. essentially, with the word “ecogothic” what you have is two elements: the “eco” and the “gothic”. in its simplest and most central sense, then, the ecogothic is about bringing together the words “ecology” and “gothic”—and seeing what happens when we do this. it’s about looking at this juxtaposition: how does it make us feel? how does it make us think? what does it mean? it invites us to ask ourselves in what ways is nature already in the gothic and how does it function? and in what ways do we “gothicise” the more-than-human worlds arounds us? the ecogothic is all about unpacking these rich and tasty ideas. if you’re interested in a much more detailed history of the term and its evolutions to the current moment, i’ll give a shameless shout-out here to the second chapter of my book, the forest and the ecogothic, which provides this (and is hopefully rather more articulate than i am live!). the term’s history is often said to begin with two essays: one by simon c. estok and one by tom j. hillard. michelle already mentioned the term “ecophobia,” which is from estok’s essay, and essentially refers to our fears of nature. estok argues for the importance of addressing—and theorizing—our fears of nature. he contends that while we have much writing on our love of nature and the bucolic, idyllic sides of it, we desperately need greater attention to, and interrogation into, its darkness in the cultural imagination. for me, and many others, this invitation to “theorize ecophobia” was a call to arms. similarly, hillard in his essay talks about ecocriticism, and how it’s born from nature loving, and how it is astonishing that we haven’t looked as much to the darker sides of our relationships to nature and its shadowy underbelly. hillard, too—to my knowledge at least—was the first to coin this term “gothic nature,” for which we are of course greatly indebted. andrew smith and william hughes, of course, brought out the important collection ecogothic in 2013. in their introduction to the collection, they boldly state that the ecogothic is not a genre, but a lens: it is a way of looking things, it is a mode of deconstruction. it is, as they state, about positioning the ecological “beyond the wordsworthian tradition” (smith and hughes 3). there have also been specially themed journal issues and various other publications devoted to the theme of “ecogothic”—for instance, notable examples include david del elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 116 principe’s guest-edited edition of gothic studies in 2014 and dawn keetley and matthew wynn sivils’ ecogothic in nineteenth-century american literature in 2017. one final, but important note, is to credit a scholar named suzanne roberts. i stumbled across her unpublished phd thesis online, which is a brilliant and accessible read, which is an early and intriguing exploration into gendered landscapes and the ecogothic. in terms of defining the term “ecogothic,” something that i find useful is to contrast the terms “ecohorror” and “ecogothic.” are they similar? are they different? if so, how? something you will often see is the words “ecogothic” and “ecohorror” used interchangeably. finding this disorienting when conducting my own research, i deliberately spent a lot of time thinking about and trying to determine and unpack the distinctions between “ecohorror” and “ecogothic.” i started by considering “horror” and “gothic” individually. i think of horror as something that is quite immediate: to me, horror is tied to a sense of event, something is happening, something that is plot-driven and bound clearly to storyline. whereas the word “gothic,” on the other hand, makes me instead immediately think of setting, of ambiance, of atmosphere. i hear “gothic” and i see castles, convents, tunnels, hallways, various wildernesses, mountains, the sublime—all of that—and so for me that’s the really key part of the ecogothic…that environmental element. i think, too, the fact that gothic encapsulates fear and desire like nothing else is crucial. you get that interplay a lot with the ecogothic, where you’re dealing in binaries that may twist at any moment, where something is alluring and inviting, but it’s also terrifying at the same time… ecohorror, on the other hand, is a little bit clearer in the sense that fundamentally you have this idea of nature’s revenge. with ecohorror, no matter how superficially, there is a sense of raising environmental awareness. with ecohorror, you’re always going to have humans at the centre in some way: humans being attacked and being punished. this isn’t necessarily the case in the ecogothic: certainly, sometimes there are touches of ecohorror and nature’s vengeance, but we also have many texts in which it is the humans (rather than the nonhuman) that are backgrounded. i’m thinking, for instance, of examples like algernon blackwood’s story the willows (1907), peter weir’s film picnic at hanging rock (1975), and jessica hausner’s more recent film hotel (2004). in texts like these, humans can seem almost entirely irrelevant and the “motivations” of gothic nature totally alien and incomprehensible to the human mind. in a nutshell, the ecogothic is something i call in my book a “flavored mode.” i argue, in line with smith and hughes, that it is a lens, it is this way of looking at things, but at the same time it’s important to recognize that it carries trappings of genre. for when you look at what exactly the ecogothic often is used to look at, there’s this commonality of themes…. mp: it also took me some time to clearly understand the distinctions between “ecogothic” and “ecohorror.” to echo elizabeth, the most straightforward way to approach these terms is to treat ecohorror as a genre and the ecogothic as a critical lens. ecohorror refers to a branch of horror films defined by its various depictions and explorations of climate crisis anxieties, manifesting more often than not through nature’s vengeance on humanity. ecogothic, elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 117 meanwhile, is most productively understood not as a genre but a critical lens through which we can examine our troubling relationships with the nonhuman world, particularly our fears of and for our earthly home. the ecogothic provides us with the tools to explore the monstrous, sublime, spectral, and uncanny constructions of nature—and, importantly, the significance of this. critically engaging with ecophobia (with our fears of and apathy towards the nonhuman world) is crucial to navigating the complexities of the present ecological crisis, not least because many of our imaginings of gothic nature are, unnervingly, becoming a reality. you also find that science and media often adopt gothic language to communicate the ecosocial crisis, an area which is yet largely unexplored. the ecogothic provides a timely and important critical tool to interrogate environmental anxieties and to examine both the ecology in gothic and ecology as gothic. the wonderful thing about the subject of gothic nature is that there is so much potential for interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and impact. you asked a question about whether the journal helps us to better understand the ecogothic. the answer is: yes, absolutely! one of the things it’s helped me to notice is that there are at least four clear key areas of interest currently emerging. the first might be classed broadly as the “deep dark green,” encompassing all manner of unsettling plants, trees, woods, and wilderness. the second is the “deep dark blue,” including terrifying oceans to haunted shores. the third is the monstrous depictions of nonhuman animals, the body, and the horror of carnivorous and unsustainable appetites. and the fourth one is the uncanny future, wherein climate crisis is depicted as apocalyptic or dystopian. the discussions that sit in these spaces are rich and varied, but all are united in their ability to productively engage with the anxieties that arise from our realization that we co-exist, and are inextricably entangled with, the more-than-human world. ep: i would also add, on the point of our experience running the journal, that one of the most exciting things as an editor is to see essays come in on topics that i never would have thought of or recognized as potentially being ecogothic, but then being wonderfully convinced. for example, in issue ii, we had a standout essay from kateryna barnes, which was on inuit death metal throat singing—and inuit constructions of mother nature and how that rage comes out through music. so it’s been, for me, the most exciting part of the journal, i think, celebrating different voices and broadening the discussions. td: i think you’ve given us very rich answers and ideas to think with, and it’s definitely bettered my understanding of the ecogothic because i was slightly confused about what it really means. let’s dig deeper into this mode of investigating the relationship between humans and nonhumans, particularly in the context of american literature. could you comment on the origin of the ecogothic in america, and perhaps, on some of the aspects of american culture and politics that brought about its emergence? mp: of course! as elizabeth previously mentioned, the ecogothic as a critical tool was coined in 2013 by smith and hughes in their ecogothic collection so, in that sense, there isn’t an origin elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 118 story of the ecogothic in america to speak of. however, there is, of course, a rich history of wilderness in the north american imagination that’s central to much current ecogothic scholarship. many scholars argue that early north american gothic is entrenched in and informed by early european settlers’ experiences with the new world and its “dark and howling wilderness” (nash; murphy; keetley and sivils). in wilderness and the american mind (1967), roderick frazier nash identifies two key reasons why the early settlers feared the wilderness. the first is that wilderness poses a physical threat to their survival, from fears of attack by wild animals or native americans to the possibility that they might lose their sanity in an environment that they perceived to be unrestrained by civilizing rules of society. the second key reason is that, for many christians, the wilderness had connections to moral vacancy and was believed to harbor heathens, witches, and various other disciples of the devil. conquering the wilderness wasn’t just a matter of profit or security, it was also about the civilizing light of christianity overcoming the ungodly darkness of the woods. much early american gothic invokes these early european settler and puritan fears of the wilderness including, for instance, charles brockden brown’s edgar huntly (1799) and washington irving’s the legend of sleepy hollow (1819). nathaniel hawthorne’s work is particularly interesting because it both builds on north america’s ecophobic past (and present) whilst simultaneously challenging it. hawthorne had a great interest in transcendentalism and was acutely aware of the heavy deforestation that was taking place in new england during the 19th century, so he was not only exposed to early-conservationist discourses but was also witness to the destructive forces of ecophobia. if you examine closely texts such as “young goodman brown” (1835), “the may-pole of merry mount” (1836), or the scarlett letter (1850), you’ll find early examples of this tension between fears of wilderness and fears for the wilderness. this ingrained ecophobia and emerging sense of unease about the costs and consequences of anthropogenic activity is a tension that has become palpable in 21st-century america (and beyond). this, for me, is a particularly interesting springboard for ecogothic analysis in early north american gothic. ep: if you want a quick two-hour or so introduction to the sheer awfulness of experience and fascinating nature of the wilderness in this early settlement period, i think immediately of robert eggers’s film “the witch” from 2015… (#livedeliciously!) td: if that is the mood and popularity of american ecogothic literature in the past, do you think that the discussion about deforestation and ecophobia, this legacy, is still present in today’s american ecogothic literature? ep: i think very much so, yes. the popularity of these stories and analyses is growing. we’re seeing these ideas in different conversations and different avenues of popular culture as they become increasingly mainstream. there’s almost a sense of “zeitgeistineness,” and i think one of my favorite things about the ecogothic is that once you start talking about what it is, wherever you are, everyone has something to say on it. it’s not this niche, abstract idea that only a elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 119 few can connect with. i’ve found in social situations that it doesn’t matter what people’s backgrounds or interests are, everyone has thoughts, stories, and opinions on these subjects. people become animated and make me think differently…i think part of this popularity of these ideas, on a more depressing note, tied to a mass sense of collective guilt over our treatment of the environment. i think when you’re talking about the mood of the ecogothic now, i think it’s grim in some ways, but i also think it’s absolutely captivating—and promising—as well. mp: what i’ve noticed most about contemporary north american gothic is that it seems to have taken a step out of the deep dark woods and into the deep dark future. there’s a definite contrast between, on the one hand, early north american gothic which was preoccupied with and haunted by its ecophobic legacy, and, on the other, contemporary american gothic which seems to express and explore explicitly our eco-anxieties and fears of living in this new human-caused but not human-controlled geological epoch. the most prominent examples of this are jeff vandermeer’s southern reach and margaret atwood’s maddaddam trilogies. there’s also a novel that has just come through the post today for me, the cabin at the end of the world by paul tremblay (shout out to rebecca gibson for drawing this to my attention in her article in issue ii of gothic nature), which i’m looking forward to getting stuck into. these texts are eerie and unnerving because the events that take place are rooted in, to varying degrees, reality and they simply ask: what if we were to continue on this destructive path that we’re on now? on a separate note, i think it’s really important to stress that we’re both acutely aware that the american texts typically examined within this scholarship need to be more diverse and that the ecogothic needs decolonizing. kateryna barnes’s essay in issue ii of gothic nature, called “soundtrack to settler-colonialism,” (which elizabeth mentioned earlier) is a fantastic example of this. barnes explores the music of contemporary inuit artist and throat singer, tanya tagaq, and the way her music challenges dominant settler-colonial narratives about “survival against the hostilities of nature” being key to the canadian experience, most famously postulated in margaret atwood survival (1972). positioning tagaq’s music as a form of creative nonfiction horror, barnes demonstrates how the true horror lies not in nature itself, but in the monstrous violence of settler-colonialism on nature and indigenous peoples. as editors of the gothic nature journal, our aim isn’t to be gatekeepers of ecogothic scholarship, but to facilitate and encourage diverse topics, discussions, and texts that inevitably strengthen this scholarship. td: in addition to american literature, do you think the ecogothic modes are also manifested in american film? i’m thinking of the similarities and differences between american ecogothic literature and film here. ep: i think the very short answer is yes. how ecogothic fears function, play out, and are structured, is in many ways very similar across literature, film, and television. but of course, your experiences as a reader/viewer/listener etc. are going to be different in terms of affect and how elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 120 you “read” environments—and in terms of analysis, as you consider narrative choices made by an author, as opposed to visual or aural choices made by creators of different mediums. there’s a lot, for instance, that has been written on anthropocentrism and film. when you film nature, you often film it as landscape from an overview shot. you see this perspective again and again in horror, and partly that’s because it’s creepy, it’s vast, it’s unnerving, but it also puts us, as humans, in the position of that godly figure—looking down, able to own and see it all. there’s something interesting going on here… i work a lot with film in my writing and what i did in my book was to take the landscape of the forest as an ecogothic case study of sorts—so it was my way in to talk about the ecogothic more broadly. when thinking about film and the “gothic forest,” we can immediately recognise a cliché—this idea of being in the forest and scared is something featured in innumerable texts. something that i have found especially interesting, when thinking about the development of film and these themes and “clichés,” is to examine the evolution of what i think of as the “forest giants” so i’m talking about “the blair witch project,” “evil dead,” “twin peaks”— these massive, key texts that have really taken us into the depths of ecogothic wilderness in america. something that was really interesting and exciting to see over the last few years is that every single one of those forest giants got remade, revealing i think something in the current cultural and environmental moment, where people are wanting to go back to these texts and revisit them. there’s a lot to explore when you compare how we tell that story now to how we told that story then—perhaps especially with “twin peaks,” which almost cruelly denies today’s viewers that “return”… when the ecogothic manifests in film and television, it’s about bringing us back to that sense of bewilderment in the sense of the word’s origins—of being literally bewildered. these texts immerse us, they allow us to lose ourselves, from the safety of our homes. film is an incredibly powerful medium for achieving this. think, for instance, of something like “the blair witch project”: very little happens—it’s basically a lot of shots of trees and panicked torchlights—but it’s very evocative…it’s very bewildering. it captures that sense of viewing nature as a maze, as something to be lost in—rather than nature as something that we own and can control. mp: on the topic of films that might interest those working within ecohorror and the ecogothic, i think it’s important to briefly acknowledge the recent crop of folk horror films including, for example, robert eggers’s the witch (2016), david bruckner’s the ritual (2017), and ari aster’s midsommar (2019). folk horror studies is a new, exciting, and relatively uncharted territory. there’s a couple of essays in gothic nature issue ii by dawn keetley and alexandra hawk who critically engage with this new subgenre—from its unsettling ability to tell stories about devastating human impacts on the environment to how it can reveal and challenge the mutual oppression of women and nature in patriarchal, anthropocentric systems. elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 121 td: i have a special question for each of you, and i’m going to start with elizabeth. in your book the forest and the ecogothic, you mentioned that because today most humans in the western world live in towns and cities and predators that were once threatening to us are facing extinction, “there is little practical reason to be afraid of the woods” (parker 2). then, you go on to say that yet, “there is much evidence to suggest that we continue, indeed, to be ‘terrified by the wild wood’” (parker 2). this led you to pursue the questions of “why we evidently still fear the forest” and “what exactly it is that we fear, when we fear this environment” (parker 2). what answers have you found in asking these pertinent questions? and what do your findings reveal about the relationship between humans and nonhumans? ep: thank you. yes, in many ways, really this was my starting point for my book. when researching human fears of the woods i began by seeking literal, rational explanations. i asked, “do many people die in the woods nowadays?” and the answer is no. when you start looking at statistics, you’re much, much more endangered in a city than you are going for a walk in the woods. yet, there is primal fear that still takes you over, even though we know that most of the predators are extinct because of us or in danger of extinction. in the years i spent looking at this, my whole apartment looked like the home of a serial killer, because i was scribbling and mapping everything, sticking it on the walls, linking it together with thread. i probably frightened a few landlords, but never mind…! the conclusion to this work is what became the governing structure for my book. i found there to be the seven reasons why we fear the forest, and three main ways that these fears manifest—which i will quickly outline. i termed my seven reasons the “seven theses,” in homage to jeffrey jerome cohen’s seven theses in monster theory (1996). the first is that the forest is against civilization. we fear it because we define civilization in contrast to the forest. civilization has been built “out of” and in defiance to the forest. we destroy the forest to create the agricultural, the urban, the settled…you’ve got this sense of porous boundaries that are always being threatened, which is of course very much at the heart of the gothic. i think with forest foliage, this is amplified in the image of something that is always creeping, growing, and encroaching… secondly, the forest is tied to the past. i think something quite important about the effects of the forest environment is that when you’re in it, unless you’re a trained expert in reading the signs, it’s very difficult to tell what era you’re in—there’s no obvious reason to the common woman or man why it would look particularly different now, being dropped into the woods, than it would 500 years ago. this sense of timelessness is potentially quite eerie and we worry that in getting back to nature, as though it is something behind us, we may at risk to regress. the third reason we fear the forest is because it is a space of trial. this is something you see again and again in fairy tales, and fairy tales are very much tied in with our fears of the woods. an awful lot of particularly western fairy tales are, of course, set in the forest, and often the trial, the task at hand—as seen in horror films too—is to survive, both physically and mentally. a film that demonstrates this beautifully is jesse holland and andrew mitton’s elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 122 yellowbrickroad (2010). here, a range of psychological, cultural, and geographical experts are taken into the woods as pinnacles of society and—spoiler alert—they do not survive their trial… the fourth reason is that it’s a space in which we are lost—this is, of course, a big one. this is something that comes to mind straight away when you think of the woods: think hansel and gretel, little brother and little sister… think of that primal fear of being away from family, from settlement, from all that you recognize…. the fifth reason is that the forest is a consuming space. this is tied to the idea of being lost in this sense of threat that the forest is somehow going to consume or eat you—that maybe if you die, you will be taken in and imbibed into the very environment. there’s an awful lot in imagery, in literature and film, of mouths of forests and mouths in forests coming to get us all, about massive monsters… the sixth point is that the forest is tied to the unconscious. in many psychological works, the imagery of the tree, with its main form above the ground, but the roots concealed below, is a prevalent metaphor for our conscious and unconscious elements. you’ve also got a section in freud’s famous essay on the uncanny, where he at one point defines the uncanny as the feeling of returning to the same point in the woods again and again. you think you’re walking in a straight line, but you keep coming back and you’re walking in circles in the woods— exactly as in “the blair witch project” and many other texts besides… finally, the forest is an anti-christian space. there’s this sense or fear that the forest is a space where there’s either no god or the wrong god or gods—or even the devil himself. there’s also a big tie between the forest and paganism, and this idea of christian terror of human sacrifice in the darkness of these revered wild spaces and blood-drenched groves. a key point to note is that the forest—as with many key spaces in the ecogothic—is a binary space and so for each of these seven reasons to fear the woods, there are seven reasons behind its enchantment. every time you’ve got an example of it being gothic, dark, and frightening, you’ve also got an example of it being light, inviting, and magical. for each of those seven theses, you’ll also have counter examples, where you’ll have the hugely christian forest, which is god’s domain, or a wood in which you find, rather than lose yourself, or in which you are rewarded, rather than tried. this duplicity is something that always haunts and enriches this environment—and many other gothic environments too. in terms of the three ways in which the forest manifests as gothic, these are as follows. firstly, when the wood itself is animate. there’s a line in “evil dead,” where after that famous scene in which one of our heroines is molested by a tree she runs to her companions and cries something to the effect of, “oh my god, the woods, the woods,” and someone says to her, “what’s in the woods?” and she says, “no, there’s nothing in the woods. it’s the woods themselves.” it’s really interesting to look at this idea of the woods themselves as somehow animate and filled with intent, and to explore whether it in fact is the woods themselves, or some other—often demonic, or human, and often female (!)—infection. the second way the forest elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 123 manifests as gothic is as home to our monsters. it manifests through the dark, creepy things and creatures coming and getting us, chasing us, wanting to eat us… then, finally, the third way the woods manifest as frightening is revealed in the idea that it’s actually humans in the forest that make it dark, that make it gothic. it is good, or at least a neutral space until we infect it and make it ominous. in terms of what my work has revealed about human/nonhuman relationships, something that i found myself coming back to a lot was an idea from smith and hughes’ introduction to ecogothic about our fragmentation and estrangement from nature and the emotions that come with this. we’ve gone from being “forest dwellers” to being “apartment-housedwellers,” as jay appleton (1996, 29) says, and though this is not everyone’s experience, it’s an idea that holds considerable traction in the popular imagination. there is that sense of loss and homesickness there, of being separate from something that maybe we shouldn’t be so separate from. i was actually telling michelle recently that i watched a documentary that some people might have heard of, called “my octopus teacher,” recently on netflix. it follows the story of a man who is suffering from depression, and he goes into the sea every single day, and he builds this relationship with this animal that we traditionally see as a monster, that we traditionally see as massively alien and “other.” i found myself getting really emotional watching it, and then, when i read reviews, lots of other people had felt the same—with some even deeming it “the love story that we need right now…” and i really feel that. the last thing i want to say is that there is hope in the ecogothic, in confronting and exploring these feelings of fragmentation. fear is so important—and promising—because fear has the power to displace cynicism. if you’re safe and at home and you’re thinking a forest isn’t particularly frightening, you’re like, “oh, statistically it’s not dangerous, it’s fine,” watch “the blair witch project” and walk into the woods and i challenge you not to feel even a little uneasy. fear makes us think differently about spaces, and so can make us think differently about nature…so my biggest interest i think in the ecogothic is the idea that maybe, just maybe, this is a way to reenchant nature and reconnect ourselves to nature. td: the next question is for michelle. i’m interested in the intersection of the cultural debates on the anthropocene with the ecogothic. it seems that the language some contemporary scholars use to expound the concept of the anthropocene invites a strong sense of horror, dread, and trauma. timothy clark (2015), for example, considers the anthropocene “bewildering” and “destructive,” and calls it a “crisis of scale and agency,” “disorder,” and “hopelessness.” as a result, there is understandably a concern that this sense of overwhelmingness and despondency might cause either climate change denial or climate change paralysis, where you just don’t know what to do about the ecological crisis anymore. considering that the ecogothic explores humans’ fear and horror when encountering a dark and monstrous nature, do you think that the ecogothic, in this context of the anthropocene, might risk preventing us, in some way, from tackling climate change effectively? elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 124 mp: i think that’s a really interesting question. given that the ecogothic is a mode that helps us to critically engage with our fears of and for the environment, i’d argue that the ecogothic provides us with a unique set of tools with which to address the horrors of the anthropocene, and therefore enhance understandings about how we can better live in this new world. public understanding of and reaction to climate crisis is very slowly improving, i think, but to date, it can still largely be characterized by everyday denialism, inertia, inaction, overwhelm, bewilderment, and paralysis—all of which are rooted in fear. if we can better understand how to connect the knowledge and skills of the gothic nature community to the “real world” by helping the public to critically engage with these fears, the ecogothic has exciting potential to meaningfully contribute to mitigating the effects of climate crisis. you mentioned timothy clark; his book ecocriticism on the edge (2015) completely changed my understanding of the anthropocene and how we experience it. i’d absolutely recommend it to anyone, particularly those working within the parameters of gothic nature. clark considers how the concept of the anthropocene confounds our sense of time, space, scale, proportion, and, most unnervingly, ourselves. the sheer unreadability and unthinkability of the anthropocene dislodges our anthropocentric way of thinking and goes part way to explaining why everyday denialism and inertia is so alluring. clark argues—and i agree— that it’s no longer enough for ecocritics to simply identify ecological tropes in literature and he challenges them/us to take up the seemingly impossible but hugely important task of interrogating these enormous issues. the ecogothic is particularly well-suited to taking up this challenge. it provides a lens through which to critically think through the horror, terror, bewilderment of the anthropocene-related phenomena so that it is less horrifying, less terrifying, and less bewildering. by making issues such as climate crisis and mass extinction events more digestible, the ecogothic might have an admittedly small but significant role to play in mobilizing the public into action. to echo elizabeth, “there is hope in the ecogothic.” td: it’s compelling to think of the anthropocene and its impacts as catalysts for us to do something before it’s too late. that leads me to the last question of the interview, which i hope to end on an optimistic note. could you share your opinions on the future of the ecogothic in terms of its popularity and impacts upon academia and the wider society. what direction do you think that the ecogothic would take in the future, given the ecological and socio-political issues that we’ve been through for the past years and especially covid-19? ep: this makes me think of an essay in the first issue of gothic nature by tom hillard, where he compares our reactions to what’s going on with climate crisis and the developments of ecocriticism to an ecohorror film. he basically asks what if we’re in a film right now, what if our reactions to climate crisis are different points of the film—and if so, which point of the film are we up to? his essay is called “the body in the basement” because what he argues is that we’re at the point in the film where we’ve been slowly feeling like something’s a bit creepy about the cabin we’re in, something’s a bit wrong, and maybe we need to find out elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 125 what’s going on… then someone says “there’s a weird sound about in the basement”. so we’ve gone downstairs and there’s a body. we don’t know, necessarily, how it’s died, but we know it’s dead and that we’re probably next. hillard contends that we’re at the point in the movie now where we’re looking at the corpse a bit dumbstruck, and maybe looking at each other, and—going back to what michelle was saying about paralysis—this is where we are right now. for me, this rings true. in terms of the future of the ecogothic, i think part of what we’re going to see is more and more texts, and more and more discussions, as this becomes increasingly mainstream and of interest and relevance to everyone. i do think it’s going to get bigger, and i certainly don’t think it’s going away. in terms of key themes moving forward, there are a couple i want to mention. you referenced covid-19 there—and this is something that we talk about quite a lot in the introduction to issue ii because there’s obviously huge environmental factors when you’re talking about covid-19. i think with the pandemic, it’s a really interesting one because in some ways it’s really specific, and in some ways it’s terrifyingly vague. of course, fascinatingly, there’s something very gothic about all the rumors of where covid-19 came from, with the idea of somehow ingesting the bat, an animal that’s something of an icon of the gothic mode. secondly, and i know michelle’s talked about it very eloquently already, i do want to emphasize this point that we really do need to decolonize the ecogothic. this is something i really want to see happen and something that i’m throwing out into the universe is the fact that we’re very interested in having some guest editors come in and do a special issue of gothic nature on decolonizing the ecogothic in future. the diversification of both content and contributors working in these exciting fields is something we really are keen to support. mp: i wholeheartedly agree. to return to covid-19, i think there’s an intriguing relationship between the pandemic and the ecogothic, particularly the origins of the virus. covid-19 emerged out of the shadowy borders of civilization and is a product of the hazardous intermingling between people, livestock, wildlife reservoirs, and zoonotic disease that characterizes the environments of illicit wildlife trades and markets—if that’s not a gothic environment of our own making, i don’t know what is. the tale of covid-19 is filled with all sorts of other ecogothic tropes, from exposing the porosity and “trans-corporeality” of our own bodies to the horrors of excessive carnivorous consumption (bat soup, anyone?) (alaimo). there are a couple of things i’d like to add about the future direction of the ecogothic. firstly, i think the direction of travel is that it’s going to be increasingly interdisciplinary. the new wave of ecocriticism is inherently interdisciplinary and is effectively engaging with research coming out of the environmental humanities and sciences. i think the ecogothic will similarly evolve. to echo clark, it’s no longer enough to simply reiterate well-known assertions that the gothic challenges romantic ideals of nature. the recent gothic nature publications and events are testament to this new direction of travel; they often add original contributions to scholarship by effectively demonstrating the value of an ecogothic perspective to elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 126 all kinds of literary, historical, philosophical, scientific, and political discussions of the current eco-social crisis. the second new and notable direction that i hope the ecogothic will take—and somewhat related to this potential move towards increased interdisciplinarity and collaboration— is to consider how the research coming out of the gothic nature community can make meaningful difference in the world beyond academia. for example, how might we improve conservation policies for traditionally feared and “unloved” gothic animals, such as toads, insects, and bats? (mckee). in what ways can we help to protect the dwindling “deep dark woods” that are not only essential to our ecosystem and quality of life but to our cultural history and heritage? how can we share the critical tools of the ecogothic to help the public to engage with their engrained fears of, and explicit fears for, the environment? this, for me, is the future of ecogothic. works cited alaimo, stacy. bodily natures: science, environment, and the material self. indiana university press, 2010. appleton, jay. the experience of landscape. wiley, 1996. atwood, margaret, maddaddam: a novel. nan a. talese/doubleday, 2013. atwood, margaret. oryx and crake: a novel. nan a. talese/doubleday, 2003. atwood, margaret. survival: a thematic guide to canadian literature. anansi, 1972. atwood, margaret. the year of the flood: a novel. nan a. talese/doubleday, 2009. barnes, kateryna. “soundtrack to settler-colonialism: tanya tagaq’s music as creative nonfiction horror.” gothic nature, no. 2, 2021, pp. 62-83. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/4-gn2-articles-k-barnes.pdf. blackwood, algernon. the willows. borgo press, 2002. brown, charles brockden. edgar huntly, or, memoirs of a sleepwalker. penguin books, 1988. clark, timothy. ecocriticism on the edge: the anthropocene as a threshold concept. bloomsbury, 2015. cohen, jeffrey jerome. monster theory: reading culture. university of minnesota press, 1996. estok, simon c. “theorising in a space of ambivalent openness: ecocriticism and ecophobia.” isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 16, no. 2, 2009, pp. 203–225. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isp010. estok, simon c. the ecophobia hypothesis. routledge, 2018. freud, sigmund. the uncanny. penguin books, 2003. elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 127 gibson, rebecca. “all you need is love?: making the selfish choice in the cabin at the end of the world and the migration.” gothic nature no. 2, 2021, pp. 110–130. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/6-gn2-articles-r-gibson.pdf. hauke, alexandra. “the wicked witch in the woods: puritan maternalism, ecofeminism, and folk horror in robert eggers’ the witch: a newengland folktale.” gothic nature, no. 2, 2021, pp. 37– 61. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/3-gn2-articles-a-hauke.pdf. hawthorne, nathaniel, and brian harding. young goodman brown and other tales. oxford university press, 1987. hawthorne, nathaniel. the scarlet letter. signet classic, 1988. hillard, tom j. “‘deep into that darkness peering’: an essay on gothic nature”. isle: interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment, vol. 16, no. 4, 2009, pp. 685–695. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isp090. hillard, tom j. “gothic nature revisited: reflections on the gothic of ecocriticism.” gothic nature, no. 1, 2019, pp. 21–33. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/hillard_2133_gothic-nature-1_2019.pdf. irving, washington. the legend of sleepy hollow. wildside press, 2004. keetley, dawn and matthew wynn sivils. editors. ecogothic in nineteenth-century american literature. routledge, 2017. keetley, dawn. “dislodged anthropocentrism and ecological critique in folk horror: from ‘children of the corn’ and the wicker man to ‘in the tall grass’ and children of the stones.” gothic nature, no. 2, 2021, pp. 13–36. https://gothicnaturejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/2-gn2-articles-d-keetley.pdf. mckee, lorraine. “love the unloved: deconstructing attitudes of fear and indifference towards protected and under-studied uk species using the lens of the ecogothic.” gothic nature iii: online symposium, 2020. murphy, bernice m. the rural gothic in american popular culture: backwoods horror and terror in the wilderness. palgrave macmillan, 2013. nash, roderick frazier. wilderness and the american mind. yale university press, 1967. parker, elizabeth. the forest and the ecogothic. palgrave macmillan, 2020. principe, david del. “introduction: the ecogothic in the long nineteenth century.” gothic studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–8. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/gs.16.1.1. smith, andrew and william hughes. editors. eco-gothic. manchester university press, 2013. tremblay, paul. the cabin at the end of the world. harpercollins publishers, 2018. vandermeer, jeff. area x: the southern reach trilogy. 4th estate, 2018. films and tv series the blair witch project. directed by daniel myrick and eduardo sánchez, haxan films, 1999. the evil dead. directed by sam raimi, renaissance pictures, 1981. elizabeth parker & michelle poland | the ecogothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1822 128 hotel. directed by jessica hausner, coop99 filmproduktion, 2004. midsommer. directed by ari aster, nordisk film, 2019. my octopus teacher. directed by pippa ehrlich and james reed, netflix, 2020. picnic at hanging rock. directed by peter weir, b.e.f. film distributors, 1975. the ritual. directed by david bruckner, netflix, 2017. twins peaks. directed by mark, frost, david lynch and sabrina s. sutherland, lynch/frost productions, 2017. yellowbrickroad. directed by jesse holland and andy mitton, points north, 2010. the witch. directed by robert eggers, universal pictures, 2016. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 129 zombies and the american gothic an interview with kyle william bishop michael fuchs university of oldenburg kyle william bishop is professor of english at southern utah university, where he has been teaching since 2000. he teaches courses about american literature and culture, fantasy and horror literature, film studies, and english composition. kyle is the author of american zombie gothic: the rise and fall and rise of the walking dead in popular culture (mcfarland, 2010) and his second volume on the zombie is called how zombies conquered popular culture: the multifarious walking dead in the 21st century (mcfarland, 2015). he is also the co-editor of the book the written dead: essays on the literary zombie (mcfarland, 2017). keywords: american gothic, popular culture, zombie, horror, interview. michael fuchs: you have been publishing on zombies for fifteen-plus years. your first publication called “raising the dead: unearthing the non-literary origins of zombie cinema” was published in the journal of popular film and television in 2006. has it become boring to study zombies? or is there something new you continue to discover when looking at new films, new media, new iterations of the zombie? kyle william bishop: from time to time, i do get a little saturated. if you look at my publication history, there’s kind of feast and famine. i have to take little breaks now and then because i feel there come moments—and i think all scholars experience this—where i feel like, “okay. i’ve said everything i have to say. i don’t have anything else to add.” then a year goes by and somebody makes a new movie or i read a new book or i go to a conference and i go to a session and i listen to some papers and it sparks some new ideas and gets me kind of excited. but i think i’m in a position in my career—luckily—where i don’t have to do everything. i can wait until the right opportunity comes along. i can take little breaks and then, when i come back to it, it’s something new, it’s something fresh that i want to do. i feel that as a kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 130 scholar who’s entering into the latter half of their career, my obligation is a little bit more on the mentoring and editing side of scholarship than the writing side—the first line of scholarship, if you will. i have been invested more as a general editor with mcfarland in trying to assist new scholars putting together new works. just this morning, i received a proposal from someone who has a book manuscript on the walking dead. so, there are still things to say, but i’m very comfortable with the fact that i don’t have to be the one to say them all. i can just be involved in the process. that said, i did write something new for a conference this year. i was a little surprised because i didn’t know if i had anything new to say, but thanks to some new films, i have a new idea. it just has to work that way from time to time. mf: so, what’s that new idea? do you want to say a few words about your recent work? kwb: i’m really invested in the portrayal of fatherhood in zombie fiction. for years, parenting took a bad rap in zombie movies. parents were often horrible: they killed their children or their children killed them, and films didn’t explore the underlying issues. as i grow a little bit older, and being a father myself, i’ve become more interested in fatherhood and issues of paternity. in the last few years, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in heroic father figures, not only in zombie films but post-apocalyptic narratives more generally. my thesis is that more and more of the creators of these narratives are fathers and that’s what they’re invested in. but i think there’s a little bit more to it than that. i do like the heroic father in horror films as something of a counterpoint to the monstrous mother, which has been very thoroughly established over the decades. so, i’m teasing out what that means and if these zombie films have something to teach us beyond “shoot him in the head.” it would be nice if this genre that i love so much had some value beyond entertainment. mf: you’ve already hinted at the fact that zombies and monstrous mothers are these embodiments of horror. this interview is part of the session on gothic bodies—bodies in relation to othering and the gothic. can you elaborate a little bit on the significance of zombies, or zombified bodies, to the gothic and horror? why are they so important as particular gothic bodies and particularly horrifying bodies? kwb: of all the literary and movie monsters that we celebrate, zombies are the most gothic, even more so than vampires and ghosts. even though ghosts have the longest pedigree in terms of the gothic, zombies are so gothic because they present their antiquation; they don’t appear as they did in life, they appear as they do in death. often, ghosts appear in some kind of idolized or idealized form or they appear as they did the moment of their demise. vampires are so idealized, especially recently, where they become almost angelic or god-like. zombies are corpses. they remain corpses and in a lot of the narratives, they continue to rot and to kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 131 decay. so, it’s this ever-present, unavoidable reminder of mortality that is at the heart of so many gothic narratives. the zombie then incorporates the key concerns of the gothic and presents them in a way that cannot be mastered. zombies have this deadness to them. of course, that works in freudian terms—and i use a lot of freud in my scholarship— because zombies are literally the return of the repressed: they are the dead that come back. we don’t want to think about death, so death returns to us. now, vampires do that, too, but vampires do it in a way that reminds us of our bestiality, our mortality, our sexuality, but not so much our corporeality and not so much this the sense of the grotesque, which is often key to the gothic. the zombie is grotesque. i prefer manifestations of the zombie that are visibly dead. another piece that i’m working on right now is about zombie passing. zombie passing is interesting because of the parallels to the racial tradition of passing, but those types of zombies aren’t as gothic. if they can pass as living humans, they don’t have this tangible quality. the other key feature is that the zombie becomes so atavistic, so ferocious, so feral. this is another thing that the gothic reveals: the fantasy that we as humans are civilized. a lot of post-apocalyptic narratives—notably cormac mccarthy’s the road (2006), any of the road warrior films, etc.—explore this question that when push comes to shove, we are monstrous creatures: we will tear, rend, and bite and fight for survival just like animals will. because zombies, particularly post-romero zombies, are presented as cannibalistic flesh eaters, it reveals this repressed secret. in terms of jerrold hogle’s understanding of the gothic, particularly in terms of freudian psychoanalytic theory, that’s what the zombie really is: it’s an antiquated body that reveals the repressed truths of our mortality and our monstrosity. it puts us on a stage that reveals anything. indeed, zombies can be whatever they need to be. the whole premise of my second book is that they are metaphorical monsters—like all monsters, as jeffrey jerome cohen reminds us—but they get to do it with a little bit of flexibility that the other monsters don’t always enjoy. that flexibility is always gothic at its heart. mf: that’s a very important point—the deadness that’s embodied by the zombie confronts us with our mortality, more so than other gothic creatures, but zombies are also “flexible,” as you put it; they reflect their times. these are topics that reverberate through both of your monographs: your first book focuses more on the history of the zombie up to the twentieth century, and the second book on the zombie surge that hit us post-9/11. as a matter of fact, you open your first book by stressing that all cultural production speaks to a given society’s dreams but also its anxieties and that the gothic plays a very particular role in this context. could you maybe list three key american zombie texts and what they tell us about the cultural moments that they emerged from? kwb: i think everybody in zombie studies would agree that the night of the living dead (1968) is where george romero shifted everything permanently. prior to 1968, zombies manifested in narratives that were true to their origins in haiti, where they were enslaved. they were kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 132 servants of other, more malevolent powers. they didn’t do a whole lot and so the fear wasn’t of zombies, the fear was of becoming a zombie. by fusing the zombie with a little bit of vampirism and a whole lot of middle eastern ghoul mythology, romero came up with his ghoul, which others retroactively named the zombie. it created this creature which was more than just a kind of a postcolonial figure of racial enslavement and became the embodiment of unchecked modern desire; an empty desire, which is key. romero was responding to a cultural anxiety that had been brought to the fore because of the vietnam war (not exclusively, but primarily). vietnam was the first war that was televised. the american people were seeing images of death and destruction on a level that they never encountered before. romero drew on existing narratives such as the birds (1963) and invasion of the body snatchers (1956), and he created a creature that would remind people of their mortality, of their fragility, but also play on current social issues and concerns about the literal assault on the family—the assault on the traditional home—and also to engage in issues of race and racism and the shifting attitudes towards race in the united states. romero went to his grave saying that he never intended it to be a film about race relations, but by casting his lead as a black man, he irrevocably did just that: he had a black hero, but he had a black hero who didn’t always act particularly heroic and simultaneously confirmed and overturned racist assumptions about a black man. the film became a touchstone moment and a turning point in horror narratives because it was so raw and so basic; at the same time, it made so many sophisticated comments about society in 1968—not coincidentally the year the united states production code was retired and filmmakers were allowed to really push the envelope. romero had people eaten on camera. it was pretty revolutionary and pretty shocking. that film changed the zombie for the next 40 years. most of the zombie films you see in america and a lot of the ones you see in england and in italy followed romero’s lead, with these infectious-like vampires, cannibalistic-like ghouls, but a new type of zombie that continued to explore the idea of loss of agency but did so in a much more visceral way. the next one that we have to really look at is the walking dead because the walking dead is a huge phenomenon that has transcended romero’s humble intentions. the walking dead was a successful comic (2003–2019), but when it became a tv series on amc (2010–), it just exploded—it broke records left and right. it was the type of narrative that most would have doubted would ever succeed in a public forum. up until that point, the zombie was a b-movie, vhs-watch-it-in-your-basement, late-time television creature, but with the walking dead, it really went mainstream. it gave birth to video games and spin-off shows. this whole world of the walking dead, this apocalyptic world, is a romero world. the zombies are romero zombies. they’re flesh eaters, they’re contagious, they’re slow-moving, and they’re only dangerous in large numbers. what really is important about the walking dead in terms of building on romero is that the true monsters of that franchise aren’t the zombies. the zombies are helpless victims. they’re doing what comes naturally; they’re animalistic, they’re atavistic. what’s really scary kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 133 about that gothic landscape are the humans, the humans that will do anything to survive. a zombie has no sense of morality because a zombie has no agency; humans do. the humans in the walking dead are really terrifying: they’re ferocious, they’re vicious—both the protagonists and the antagonists, which is what makes the narrative so compelling. because what you would have to do to survive that scenario is you would have to become a monster yourself. i’ve written about that referencing nietzsche—this idea that the one thing you want to avoid when fighting monsters is becoming one yourself. the walking dead shows that that’s impossible. true monstrosity can only be confronted by equally severe monstrosity. here, it’s important to note that the walking dead really took off on the heels of september 11—national trauma, televised violence. it makes sense that we get this first big bubble of the zombie with vietnam and the zombie renaissance on the heels of september 11. now, you asked for a third, and this is where i want to be a little bit more unexpected. i’d like to talk about maggie (2015) because maggie is a movie that kind of got ignored. it’s an independent film. what makes the movie so interesting is that it stars arnold schwarzenegger—and he did this film for free. he loved the script so much that he wanted to give it a shot because it does put him against type he’s supposed to be. he plays a simple small-town farmer who isn’t a juggernaut like the terminator; he’s not a highly trained military offensive; he’s just a dad. he’s a dad who’s trying to survive in a new world in which a zombie plague has ravaged society. it becomes a movie that is much more about family and it’s much more about individuals than it is about the apocalypse. it’s a pretty quiet film with a small cast and you only see a handful of zombies throughout the entire movie. of course, the point is that the title character, maggie, played by abigail breslin, is a zombie. the scenario of this film isn’t so much romero as kind of a 28 days later (2002) situation where zombieism is a plague. it’s an infection and the zombies spend weeks transforming. it takes about six weeks for someone to fully die from the infection and to come back as a zombie. so, society has set up a quarantine system, they’ve set up detention centers, and they’ve come up with a system for euthanizing the dead before they become a threat for the living. these issues resonate perhaps more so now than when the film was made because we do have a plague and we do see the mistreatment of those who are infected and we do see the incarceration of the innocent. all of that really resonates and perhaps maggie is a more important film now than it was when it came out. but at its heart, it’s a film about a dad who loves his daughter who’s terminally ill and who refuses to accept that. it’s a touching film; it’s quiet, it’s sensitive, it’s sad, and it’s not an action-adventure horror film like so many of the other zombie movies. it’s important because it represents the types of narratives that the zombie figure can tell. mf: you’ve raised two points in your answer that i’d like to continue with: the zombie renaissance and the meaning of the zombie in our pandemic times. let us first focus on the first couple of years of the twenty-first century. as you indicated, the national trauma caused by kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 134 9/11 definitely had an impact on the proliferation of the zombie figure in the united states; were there other reasons for this zombie revival? in particular, the zombie spread across the globe in the early twenty-first century, so what happened in addition to 9/11 to allow the zombie to become this global phenomenon? kwb: 9/11 really helped kick off the viability of these narratives. you do get a number of films right out of the gate and then a lot more to follow and that did expand a little bit more globally with the war on terror that the united states perpetuated. curiously enough, horror films and zombie films are not only catalyzed by warfare, they also appear during economic hardship. so, the 1930s—definitely in the united states, but you get to see it on a global level, as well—were a huge decade for horror. it wasn’t because of war; it was because of economic depression. the great depression did resonate worldwide and did have a global impact. the united states film industry started making a lot of horror films because—in super-reductive terms—when times are tough, you want a narrative about people for whom times are tougher. it kind of makes you feel better; it’s very cathartic. one of the things that really kicked off the zombie renaissance was the global economic collapse. of course, we also have become a much more global world than we were in the 1930s or in the 1960s and 1970s. that’s one of the reasons why zombies were able to proliferate so quickly: everybody was kind of struggling in the first few years of the twenty-first century and because of the internet, because of globalization, it was much easier to share stories. it was much easier for people to access the films of other countries, to access comic books, and video games. the video game market is hugely important to the zombie renaissance because zombies have been flourishing in video games since the 1990s. they make such a great foe because you can shoot people and not feel guilty about it. but we also got really nervous about infection because right after 9/11, we had swine flu, we had cow flu, we had avian flu, we had weaponized anthrax—all that happened in just a couple of years. we had problems with immigrants, we had problems with refugees, we had militarized conflicts all over the place, and that level of diverse trauma and anxiety came together to produce a potent world for a horror revival. ignoring zombies for a moment, it’s interesting to me that almost every major horror film from the 1970s was remade during the first decade of the twenty-first century. the time was right and it was the parallels to the 1970s: the economic hardship, the warfare—it really came together again. what made the zombie particularly essential for this moment was its versatility. vampires are still around, but vampires had shifted. vampires are still monsters, but they’re more often than not romantic heroes, if not superheroes. the zombie is also on that trajectory, but initially in the twenty-first century, it was the figure we could use for whatever we needed to use it for. that’s really the thesis of my second monograph—the idea of the zombie as a multifarious monster. it’s a meaning machine that can mean whatever the filmmaker or author or video game designer wants it to be. kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 135 i’ve been thinking a lot about zombie films as a genre but the fact that the zombie shows up in other genres makes me think that maybe it isn’t a genre at all. it’s an element, it’s a monster, it’s a trope, it’s a thing that can be added to almost any story, genre, or tradition. if you look at what we’ve gotten over the last twenty years, you still mostly have zombie horror films, but you see zombie crime dramas, you see zombie action-adventure films, you see zombie superhero comics, you see zombie sitcoms, you see zombies that are mostly political satire, you see fan films on youtube that are better than romero’s first movies were. the zombie shows up all over the place now and you see really great zombie films outside of the united states. as i’ve been trying to survey the key zombie films of the last two or three years, the majority of them are not from the us, which is really great and really important. frankly, the best zombie films right now are coming out of asia and a number out of australia for reasons that i haven’t quite figured out. us zombie production is still going strong but there’s a lot of recycling and there’s a lot of riding the walking dead horse. internationally, we’re getting more interesting zombie films and they’re evolving because the zombie is like any other animal—it has to evolve and adapt or it’s going to die. i do talk about zombies in terms of darwin a lot. they need to be able to be more than they are. the zombie gets to do that easier than other monsters because they don’t have hundreds of years of tradition. they don’t have a gothic literary tradition the way that the vampire does. to me, “zombie” has become a shorthand. everybody knows what a zombie is, so anybody who wants to tell a zombie story can start there. but since zombies aren’t real, they can go any direction they want to and audiences will buy it. i just finished santa clarita diet (2017– 2019), which i had put off because i didn’t think i’d like it very much. i loved it! it’s not a particularly gothic version of the zombie, but it’s a great use of that creature to tell a certain story. that’s why i’m excited that we’re still seeing new original creative works to explore global issues of anxiety and fear but also catharsis. mf: you just provided a perfect transition: global issues, global anxieties. we’re experiencing the first truly global pandemic in a century—a pandemic that was, according to quite a number of scientists, long overdue. do you see another zombie boom coming up in the next couple of years, triggered by covid? kwb: yes. i think we’re going to see a surge in all infection narratives. in so many ways, at its heart, the zombie story is an apocalyptic story. it’s a viral narrative. i can imagine that there’s a number of screenwriters and authors who’ve been quarantined who are looking out their windows, who are looking on the tv, and they’re seeing real-life plot elements and story devices. i think we’re going to get a covid version of the zombie. at the very least, people are going to be more invested in these narratives because they’re going to feel like they’ve been through it. now, obviously, we haven’t because the coronavirus isn’t a zombie virus. the death toll is nowhere near as high as in most post-apocalyptic narratives, like the stand (novel kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 136 1978; miniseries 1994; miniseries 2020), but it’s enough that people have woken up to our fragility as a society. it’s a rough time to be a citizen of the united states because we entered this pandemic with such arrogance and now, we’re the country that has been hit the worst. we’re the country that has the most fatalities because we botched it. the amount of death people have experienced, maybe not firsthand but definitely secondand thirdhand—pretty much everybody in the united states knows somebody who died and that’s similar in other countries around the world—you can’t have that kind of national and global trauma without having art reflect it. if we saw a surge in horror narratives because of september 11, what are we gonna see from this, where the death toll is astronomically higher? starting in the next year, once productions can start to work again, once people can go back to work, we’re going to see a ton of these: we’re going to see a post-apocalypse, we’re going to see infection narratives, we’re going to see exposés, we’re going to see docudramas that are going to try to reveal what went wrong, and we’re going to see zombies. we’re going to see lots and lots of zombies, and i’m pretty excited about that. if we can do it differently, if we can do things that are new and exciting and change the script a little bit. it’s now americans’ turn to take cues from other countries and to do more than just remake foreign films but to actually make new films with new narratives. i’m feeling pretty optimistic that the zombie isn’t done. we have a collective global trauma that needs therapy and horror films are the best therapy out there. horror narratives are there and so people are going to get to work if they haven’t already. mf: and, of course, we will read past horror films and zombie narratives in a different way, as well. since you have already been speculating about the future of horror and zombie narratives: you mentioned that you expect filmmakers to take new paths and do things differently in the future, but let’s turn to the scholarly side. especially in your role as editor of the zombie studies series for mcfarland, where do you see the field of zombie studies going in the next few years? is there something particularly exciting that you see emerging? kwb: this is such a great question because i wish i had all the answers. i don’t know if i have another zombie book in me, but i definitely know that zombie books are continuing to be pitched and promoted and developed. i was an external reader for a zombie monograph last month and, like i said earlier, i just received a proposal for a manuscript today. as we continue to get more and more zombie narratives, we’re going to find new ways to approach those. as literary production increases, so does scholarly interest. having been a graduate student twice, i know that grad students are always desperately trying to find something new to do, something new to say, and they’re going to increasingly look at contemporary trends and contemporary narratives. so, for example, as you just said, reconsidering existing zombie narratives through the lens of a post-covid world is going to afford a host of different readings, as scholars will ask, “okay, but what happened when it really took place?” kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 137 people are going to continue to try to explore the zombie from new critical perspectives. race has been done substantially in terms of zombies, but not much on gender, not much on parenting, not much on queer studies or disability studies. in particular, the zombie as a disabled body—that’s going to become increasingly more relevant. but it’s globalization that i think is key. the italian zombie tradition is fascinating and very extreme and that hasn’t really been done. there’s so much happening in asia that hasn’t been explored thoroughly. the idea of the zombie surfacing in previous colonial nations like australia hasn’t been touched too much. zombie-like folklore and mythologies hasn’t been developed very much. i’ve written a little bit about the opti gånger in norway, but not a lot has been done with the draugr up in scandinavia. not much has been done with some of the chinese or the japanese versions of the zombie. we’re going to see more. there’s more to be said. there’s more to be explored: globalization, the international exploration, the folkloric origins—there’s still a lot to be said. people still have things to say about the walking dead as a specific text. and i think there’s still plenty to be said about the zombie as a whole. probably the most important thing to me right now is zombies as protagonists, zombies featuring in comedies, zombies that are more sympathetic and more emotional—these are the things we haven’t explored as much. i’m fascinated to see what other non-horror zombies are out there and what they mean because the zomedy can be just as important for cultural study as the horror zombie—although scholars generally discount comedy, anyway. zombie comedies are saying things that are super-interesting that could be explored in more depth. i don’t know if i’m going to do it, but hopefully somebody out there listening will. send me and mcfarland a few manuscripts to check out. open q&a session mónica fernández jiménez: i’d like to ask you a question, trying to link your talk to my interests. you mentioned the caribbean origin of the myth and the creature. i was wondering if you have looked at artworks from the caribbean, by caribbean creators. kwb: that’s a great question. my friend sarah lauro’s the transatlantic zombie (2015) is the book on the caribbean zombie narrative. she is an amazing scholar. she’s quite much smarter than i am. she travelled to haiti to do a lot of research firsthand, which i haven’t done, and she’s been able to explore a literary tradition that’s a little bit richer than i think any of us initially thought. with my work, i did touch on it a little bit, but i kind of worked on a kind of secondary level, through the scholarship of zora neale hurston and some other key haitian scholars, where i did look into the origins of the idea of the zombie and haitian life. the zombie is kind of a misinterpretation of voodoo culture and voodoo rituals, but i mostly looked at how that was translated into the cinema of the united states. i have looked at some of those short stories but there are more and they’re more recent that deal with the caribbean zombie and the zombie as a victim of a nefarious agent. i don’t feel super-qualified with it and that’s why i’ve kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 138 stepped back a little bit. and then when sarah published this book and i read it, i kind of said, “well, i’m out because i can’t compete with that.” but i don’t think that she’s done all the scholarship that remains to be done. and there are narratives that could be explored through the lens of zombie scholarship, such as wide sargasso sea (1966), which could be read as a type of zombie narrative—not a literal zombie narrative. a then other, more overt zombie stories that have come out of the caribbean, particularly out of haiti, but also in places like florida and louisiana that have a strong creole culture. i am not super-well-versed in it but if you haven’t read the transatlantic zombie, read this and it will give you a launching point for stories to read, authors to follow, and new scholarship to produce. since sarah wrote that, i’m pretty certain there have been a number of those types of narratives produced and published. mfj: i was really thinking about wide sargasso sea—it maybe takes a different form that we can analyze through zombie scholarship. thank you very much. kwb: awesome. the zombie is used as a metaphor so often that i think zombie scholars need to embrace that and zombie scholarship can be about more than just zombies. the metaphor is so widely reaching, it’s a reason why we call things “zombies” that aren’t. i think that the scholarship can go that direction, as well. anna marta marini: you talked about different kinds of zombie narratives and i, for one, really enjoy what i call “incognito” monster narrative. i really like it when monsters need, want, or can hide their monstrosity and pretend that they are “normal,” which happens more often with vampires, but it happens with zombies, too. i really liked, for example, the girl with all the gifts (novel 2014; movie 2016). i binge-watch series like izombie (2015–2019) and santa clarita diet. i’m thinking maybe the glitch (2015–2019) and the returned (2015–) also fall into this category. so, do you think that there is a change in the zombie or undead narrative/dynamics/messages when the zombie or the undead is, to an extent, passing as human? kwb: i think that’s a cycle that we get with monsters. it’s all building on the vampire tradition because even if you go back to polidori’s the vampyre (1819), the power of the vampire as a monster is its ability to pass as a human, to walk among us—and that’s what’s so terrifying about dracula: the idea that this eastern european monster would dare invade europe and that it could walk the streets with impunity. for a long time, the zombie was so markedly visually different from the human that there was no mistaking it, but that narrow focus on the zombie limits the stories that can be told. you’re absolutely right, in the twentieth century, we didn’t have the passing zombie at all; in the twenty-first century, we’ve shifted because people love monsters and then they love monsters so much that they don’t want to other them; they want to become them. they want to embrace the monster and they want to be able to love the monster more. the zombie is following in the footsteps of the vampire, particularly as treated by anne rice where we’re kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 139 going to make the zombie a little bit more identifiable, more sympathetic; give it more access to the human experience. when i first started my research, i did not like that trend and i really resisted it because once you give a zombie a voice, once you give a zombie consciousness and agency, that seemed fundamentally opposed to the origins of the zombie as depicted in haitian mythology. but i’ve changed my mind. all the texts that you just mentioned are really fascinating: izombie explores a lot of interesting ideas about what would it take for a monster to be human, to retain humanity, and to function within society and how do you differentiate between monsters that are monstrous and monsters that are trying to be less monstrous. i really enjoyed santa clarita diet because the passing in santa clarita diet is easy. it’s probably the easiest of the narratives because once they arrest the decomposition, they still look and act human. they just have this kind of secret side to them. the best narrative that has explored this is in the flesh (2013–2014), where zombies have the ability to pass but have to confront whether or not that is right for them. the resistance to passing is perhaps more interesting to me than the passing itself, but i think that’s where we’re going to get some really interesting stories because then we have to ask ourselves what is monstrosity. human monstrosity can be manifested in zombie narratives by the uninfected humans. you can get narratives in which the zombies are, in fact, more humane than the humans. and then you get the narratives where there are different types of zombies. that’s one thing i haven’t mentioned yet: increasingly, we’re getting stories where there are at least two very different types of monsters. you get it in colson whitehead’s zone one (2011), you get it in warm bodies (2013), you get it in girl with all the gifts, which is amazing—it’s a fascinating narrative where the book is much better than the film; but the film also has a lot of interesting things happening in it. so, the idea of the monster-monster versus the human-monster versus the human-human monster, i think that’s super interesting and i think there’s a lot to be said and i think there’s a lot to be done with the zombie-vampire comparison. you usually don’t get both in the same story; you do sometimes but you rarely get them together. crossovers would be worth investigating. amm: you know, that would have been my third question because there are a few crossovers were you don’t really know if they are zombies or vampires. they act a bit like zombies, a bit like vampires—is that a trend? kwb: it’s a trend, but it’s also the origin because night of the living dead is an adaptation of i am legend (1954). romero was working with vampires conceptually when he started. romero accidentally invented the zombie, but he started with the vampire. what he did is he’s like, “the communicability of the vampire is super-cool and the idea of a monstrous apocalypse is super-cool,” but drinking blood wasn’t enough for romero; he wanted them to eat everything—which is the ghoul. the lines are being blurred increasingly. when you look at the most recent version of i am legend (2007), with will smith, they’re basically zombies but they’re photo-sensitive like vampires, which brings us to minecraft (2011), where the zombies kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 140 don’t act like zombies at all; they act more like vampires. i don’t know why the skeletons are photo-sensitive, but that’s another issue. we are going to get more crossover. we’ve had vampire-werewolf crossovers since the universal days. it would be interesting to see whether zombie-ism is vampirism. how are they similar? how are they different? in a lot of ways izombie is a vampire narrative, not a zombie narrative. those zombies are vampires. they have to eat to survive, they have to eat to stay young, or to look normal, to maintain their humanity, but it builds on the john russo version of the zombie, which is braineating only; vampires are blood-drinking only; in santa clarita diet, she eats everything with gusto. are we going to see different variations like that? absolutely. the more monsters fuse and cross and meld, the more interesting things get. the taxonomy of monstrosity is going to become increasingly challenging, but you see the same thing in genre. genre is increasingly difficult to identify. monsters are going to become the same; they’re going to follow the same trajectory, which is cool for scholars, but it’s even cooler for fans. amm: moving to a rather different question: you mentioned italian zombies. why do you think they’re so extreme? i’ve watched so many and my favorite italian zombie movie is cemetery man, dellamorte dellamore (1994). it’s so weird and quirky. what do you think about the italian zombie tradition? kwb: italy had the cannibal film tradition. italy was not limited by the production code restrictions the united states was limited by. so, some of those early italian cannibal films are just shocking. that was the foundation upon which they built their zombie tradition. and the second thing is fulci. he ripped off dawn of the dead (1978). he made an unofficial sequel to it by calling his first zombie film zombi 2 (1979), which is hilarious. but he was building on an established italian cannibalist tradition. fulci wanted gore that substantially transcended romero’s gore. even after the production code, romero had to make films for a us audience which was limited by the mpaa rating system. fulci didn’t, and fulci had a built-in audience that expected gallons and gallons of blood and flesh-ripping and all these horrifying moments. back in 2006-2007, when i watched all the italian zombie films i could get my hands on, it was pretty shocking. there was a learning curve for me to accept that different paradigm. that would be my short answer: it’s the pre-established cannibal film tradition in italy followed by fulci’s single-handed vision of where the zombie would go. other filmmakers in other nations have followed his lead more than romero’s, as it is this sense of true grotesque barbarism and an embrace of the atavism that you get from some gothic narratives. the italian gothic is different from the us gothic in many ways. laura álvarez trigo: you briefly mentioned the role of zombies in comedy movies. this is something that we’ve seen for several years, with films like shaun of the dead (2004), but also more recent movies like anna and the apocalypse (2017), which is not only a musical but also a christmas movie, and also the dead don’t die (2019). i was wondering whether the zombie is a monster that lends itself to be used in these ways of dealing with fears through comedy, kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 141 through laughing? these movies are not necessarily less scary or less gory. they’re very dire; many of these comedy zombie movies have very bad endings—everybody’s going to die. the comedy doesn’t mean that they’re happier in any way. kwb: i think it’s a great question. i’m glad you mentioned anna and the apocalypse, which is a really great film because it tries to be everything; it’s every genre at the same time. comedy and horror are so closely related because fear response and humor response become manifest similarly. we cry when we’re scared, but we cry when we’re happy. we can laugh when we’re scared. the zombie comedies, the zomedies, can still say important things and they can still help us wrestle with anxieties and fears. they can still be gothic. the gothic comedy isn’t new to zombies. this idea of “we’re going to turn it on its head and we’re going to explore it through comedy.” what is essential for any comedy is familiarity and that’s why early zombie films weren’t particularly comedic or early zombie comedies weren’t particularly successful. in order to parody something, you have to have an audience familiarity with the rules and the tropes and the conventions that you can turn them on their head. while there were comedies in the 1980s such as i was a teenage zombie (1987), which is not great, and the return of the living dead films (1985–1993), and they’re pretty comedic, but they’re still in the romero tradition. then you get something like dead alive (1992) by peter jackson, which is just off-thewall, no-holds-barred, and then you get to shaun of the dead. shaun of the dead is probably the first really sophisticated zomedie because it plays with the expectations, it plays with the tropes; it’s able to make jokes because the audience knows the joke is inside. but the ending of the film is tragic, it’s awful, it’s traumatic, it’s traditional. narratives like anna and the apocalypse are the same way: the first half is a comedy, a musical comedy, and it’s funny, and it’s silly, and we make fun of the zombies, and we make fun of the people surviving, and we may even make fun of the people who get killed. but the second half of that film is pretty dark and it turns relatively tragic and the music shifts. the musical quality and the subject matter shifts. frankly, i was a little surprised because i thought it was going to be pretty silly up until the end, but it had a bleak ending. to me personally, the final musical number missed. it’s hard to maintain what it was trying to maintain. the zombie comedy is really an essential part of the creature’s development. we’re at a point where enough people are familiar enough with zombies that we can make fun of them but not in a way that’s dismissive. we can make fun of them in a way that we’ll laugh but also think about it; and we’ll maybe think about it for a few days later. comedy has tremendous power for cultural awareness and cultural therapy and cultural change, but in a lot of ways, it’s harder. a zombie horror film’s easy. i’ve seen a bunch of them, low-budget ones, uninspired ones; they’re still effective; they’re still scary and startling. zombie comedies are hard because sophisticated comedy is hard; otherwise it’s just jokes. it’s the satire and the irony and the sophistication that we need to see more of. not a lot’s been written about zombie comedies, so that’s another area where scholars have more work to do. kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 142 paula barba guerrero: i am particularly interested in the role of nostalgia in post-apocalyptic fiction. i was wondering if you could comment on the relation between the zombie and this almost mythical return home, which is particularly relevant when thinking of trauma and memory. is the nostalgic zombie a thing? right now, i can only think of colson whitehead’s stragglers in zone one, but i am sure there are other examples of this type of return to the familiar home, which in a way humanizes the zombie. kwb: that is a great question. nostalgia is essential for gothic narratives. the gothic is all based on nostalgia. walpole was nostalgic to a fault—that’s what gave rise to the gothic originally. but there is a nostalgia in zombie films that’s really tragic and it’s really painful. on the one hand, romero has always explored the idea of nostalgia among his human survivor characters; the idea that the people trapped in a zombie apocalypse are understandably longing for the pre-zombie world. think of dawn of the dead, where they so meticulously try to recreate normal life inside that shopping mall, as they make a home; they build a house, essentially. they have fun, they play, they do all the things they normally would do, but it’s only the men. francine gets that it’s not going to go back to that; it’s not going to be normal again. we get that increasingly in zombie narratives where people try to hang on to normalcy, to hang on to the past. but the point you raise, which is so great, is this idea of the zombie as the nostalgic figure. colson whitehead explores it quite a bit; the girl with all the gifts film does an interesting play on it, with the zombies going about their business in tragic ways—i’m thinking of the woman who’s pushing her baby coach. it’s just gut-wrenching and really sad. some more recent films have played around with it quite a bit, as zombies talk. in the film alone (2020), which is the us version of the south korean film alive (2015), the zombies just wander around and make noises and they repeat phrases from their existence, which i find really disturbing— this idea that even though they’re dead, they can’t quite let go of the life they once had. cargo (2017) is really disturbing, as well, because you have zombies that are infected to the point where they lose their cognition, but they still kind of go through the motions. it’s an important thing to explore—the idea where the dead can’t be completely freed from their existence. we’re seeing more of that. i am a hero (2015) is a great japanese film that i really like; a lot more than i thought i would. they speak and they act but they can only do what they had when they died. they hang on to this last moment of existence. that’s where the zombie becomes such a powerful metaphor for modernity. how many of us are doing it, particularly with covid? we just go through the motions, hoping that things will get back to normal at some point. i find myself doing that at work—"well, time to grade the papers.” with zoom and with everything that we’re coping with, we’re all zombies to a certain extent. we all suffer from substantial nostalgia right now. “i just want to go out with my friends.” “i just want to see a movie in a movie theater.” we miss the simple things that all sufferers of an apocalypse end up missing. the kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 143 goal is to re regain some semblance of that lost life—whether we’re human survivors or whether we’re zombie victims, we want to reclaim that. nostalgia is the motivating factor of zombie movies—you nailed it. the walking dead is about nostalgia: “let’s rebuild the government,” “let’s rebuild civilization,” “let’s rebuild trade and diplomacy,” “let’s rewrite the constitution.” what’s interesting to me is the zombie narratives that say “let’s return to what was” versus the zombie narratives that say “now is our chance to build something new” because too much nostalgia is dangerous. we’re going to see in our real world that life is not going to return to what it was before the pandemic, nor should it. nostalgia also always has to be tempered with pragmatism. the zombie narrative allows us to explore those risks more safely. works cited carey, m. r. the girl with all the gifts. orbit, 2014. cohen, jeffrey jerome. “monster culture (seven theses).” monster theory: reading culture, edited by jeffrey jerome cohen, u of minnesota p, 1996, pp. 3–25. hogle, jerrold e. “introduction: the gothic in western culture.” the cambridge companion to gothic fiction, edited by jerrold e. hogle, cambridge up, 2002, pp. 1–20. lauro, sarah juliet. the transatlantic zombie: slavery, rebellion, and living death. rutgers up, 2015. rhys, jean. wide sargasso sea. norton, 1966. whitehead, colson. zone one. doubleday, 2011. films, tv series, and video games alone. directed by matt naylor, lionsgate, 2020. anna and the apocalypse. directed by john mcphail, vertigo, 2018. cargo. directed by ben howling and yoland ramke, netflix, 2018. dawn of the dead. directed by george a. romero, united film, 1978. the dead don’t die. directed by jim jarmusch, focus features, 2019. the girl with all the gifts. directed by colm mccarthy, warner bros., 2016. i am a hero. directed by shinsuke satō, solar entertainment, 2019. i am legend. directed by francis lawrence, warner bros, 2007. in the flesh. created by dominic mitchell, bbc three, 2013–2014. izombie. developed by rob thomas and diane ruggiero-wright, the cw, 2015–2019. kyle william bishop | zombies and the american gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1824 144 maggie. directed by henry hobson, lionsgate, 2015. minecraft. developed by mojang studios, mojang studios, 2011. night of the living dead. directed by george a. romero, continental, 1968. santa clarita diet. created by victor fresco, netflix, 2017–2019. the walking dead. developed by frank darabont, amc, 2010–ongoing. warm bodies. directed by jonathan levine, summit entertainment, 2013. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 159 african american gothic and horror fiction an interview with maisha wester paula barba guerrero1 universidad de salamanca maisha wester is an associate professor in american studies at indiana university. she is also a british academy global professor, hosted at the university of sheffield. her research focuses on racial discourses in gothic fiction and horror film, as well as appropriations of gothic and horror tropes in sociopolitical discourses of race. her essays include “gothic in and as racial discourse” (2014), “et tu victor?: interrogating the master’s responsibility to—and betrayal of—the slave in frankenstein” (2020) and “re-scripting blaxploitation horror: ganja and hess’s gothic implications” (2018). she is author of african american gothic: screams from shadowed places (2012) and co-editor of twenty-first century gothic (2019). keywords: african american gothic, horror, black bodies, race politics, ghosts, interview. paula barba guerrero: in your article “the gothic and the politics of race” (2014), you explain that the popularity of the gothic genre is, in part, because of its function “as a discourse on the terrors of racial otherness and racial encounter” (157). specifically, you argue that gothic novels operate at different levels, sometimes producing discourses of racial otherness that serve to “shore up the normative” (157), but, other times, countering those hegemonic views via their depiction of horror (168). could you perhaps comment on the uses of gothic horror with regards to race politics, especially considering the treatment given by law enforcement to both black lives matters’ protestors and, more recently, to capitol rioters in 2021? 1 the work carried out for the writing of this interview has been funded by the spanish ministry of universities through a “margarita salas” postdoctoral research grant (ptrt, funded by the european union, nextgenerationeu), and by the spanish ministry of science and innovation (mcin, aei) through the research project “critical history of ethnic american literature: an intercultural approach vi” (ref. no. pid2019-108754gbi00). their support is hereby gratefully acknowledged. maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 160 maisha wester: i think you actually provided the best example of how gothic horror has really impacted racial politics and the treatment of racial minorities in the black lives matter movement, where people were peacefully protesting and officers showed up fully armed to the tooth and dressed as if they were entering war territory in contrast to the capital rioters who were clearly armed and prepared to take hostages and who were escorted into the capital by far less equipped police officers, and so there is a clear sense of how not just african americans, but even those who are fighting for the rights of african americans are read as not just disruptive but as violent, aggressive, hostile, monstrous as it were. but this is not the first time we have seen this; for instance, we also saw this back in the 1960s, with social groups like the black panthers and the “snicks”, the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc)— the name stresses non-violence—, and yet they were deemed terrorists, which is, in america in particular, a very pertinent and impactful kind of monstrosity. meanwhile you had explicitly violent white nationalist groups like the klu klux klan (kkk) going around lynching people left and right, even attacking white americans who sided with african americans, and they were not termed terrorists. there still is resistance to terming them terrorists. so, historically, this kind of inequity and the ways in which the idea of black monstrosity leads to it, even if it is not spoken, is so inherently a part of our ideology that it produces a profound disparity in treatment. and, thus, by the time we start thinking about individual black subjects, we can look at the kind of jim crow violence and lynching that african americans were subject to. african americans could not pursue any kind of judicial recourse for the violence they suffered. instead, it was deemed justified. but, what kind of person do you have to be to justify such an egregious and excessive assault on the body? when we talk about lynching we are not just talking about murder, we are talking about, usually, torture, murder, dismemberment, occasionally a bonfire. that suggests a level of monstrosity, because if you think about your stereotypical horror monster, you cannot just kill them once; you do not just stab michael myers and call it done; you do not just set freddy on fire and be gone; you have to subject them to a process of torture and assault. so, to see african americans subject to this suggests a similar kind of thought process. and i talked about this in terms of jim crow, but we should consider the ways in which contemporary assaults on black bodies by law enforcement and by private citizens are a continuation of that lynching ideology and treatment. what ahmaud arbery went through in georgia is just mind-boggling. and, so, yes, what we are seeing today in terms of race politics utterly exemplifies the ways in which we have been unable to think of minorities, particularly african americans for this discussion, but minorities in general, as more than other, as monster looming at the margins waiting to gain access. pbg: considering how these events show us where we stand in terms of racial justice and, as you just mentioned, how contemporary racial politics are partly impacted by some dismissive gothic conventions and negative stereotypes of traditional gothic horror, one could easily jump to conclusions and assume that the genre is not a suitable medium to call for intervention maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 161 and revision of our social performance. yet, in the aforementioned article, you warn us against these simplistic assumptions, upholding the impact of the african american gothic. you explain that whereas traditional gothic fiction imposes racial demands on those deemed other— often turning them into monsters—, the african american gothic articulates terror and, broadly, gothic tropes as counter-discourses, calling for a revision of the genre (168-170). examples of this could be toni morrison’s beloved (1987) or ann petry’s the street (1946), novels that illustrate the ambivalence and horrors of being black in the us. yet, you also mention writings by richard wright or alice walker, native son (1940) and meridian (1976), which some may not recognize as purely gothic. could you elaborate on these genre revisions and their overall impact on minorities’ representation; on the ways in which the genre and its most traditional tropes are reworked in some of these and other contemporary novels by african american authors to vindicate a historically discriminatory treatment? mw: we can go all the way back to the slave narratives with this, as i do in african american gothic, but these early authors really use gothic tropes, stylistic tropes, in a genre that otherwise might have been considered literary realism. so, for instance, if we look at your average plantation master overseer or slave catcher in the slave narratives, we have a kind of nightmarish villainy, a villainy that seems omnipresent and omnipowerful. it is just inconceivable how much authority they have to disrupt your life, how much control and power they have over you as an individual. you will also see the use of closed dark spaces. so, for instance, in much of bigger’s flight through chicago (even though it occurs across the cityscape) he emphasizes the darkness and the cloistered nature of the city; that it is not the space that is contained, not in terms of actual structures, but because of surveillance. but you also see this again in ann petry, in which her home, her apartment becomes a gothic-like maze. it is super dark, the hallways are narrow and dim, and she is easily captured there and cornered there by any man that would assail her. you also see endless escape capture cycles in these texts. so, it is on the one hand kind of literary realism, but when you look at the tropings, it is also a gothic nightmare. it does not depend upon the supernatural. and to some extent, even if you look at get out (2017), a film as recent as this, there is a similar sense of realism to that film. what is unrealistic, or seemingly unrealistic given the times we are in, is the excessive nature of that violence. the medical procedure they use is excessive, but not impossible. this is very possible to some extent. so, then, these early writers were in many ways talking about the ways in which horror is based on reality. they are simply taking what was subtextual in the genre and making it textual, and saying “no, we do not have to add a layer in order to make this terrifying, the reality itself is terrifying.” later writers, like alice walker and toni morrison, use more traditional gothic tropings, but not as the point of horror. so, if you look at walker and morrison, they have hauntings, they have people that suffer madness—well, the violence of rape is not just gothic, that is unfortunately and historically real and contemporarily real—, but these traditional supernatural trappings really provide more of a contrast to the horrors of real life. they act as a maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 162 measuring ruler to stack up what is happening in reality. one of my favorite points about much of morrison’s work is to call out how often ghosts appear in her stories and we do not pay attention because the reality she is depicting is so much more disrupting and terrifying that the ghost is. it is just kind of not bothersome, the least of our concerns. by the time you get to later writers like p. djèlí clark, who is author of ring shout (2020), tananarive due, or matt ruff, you find that they all embrace the notions of the supernatural terror as a source of fear. but, really, even here the supernatural communicates what is equally illogical and incomprehensible in real life, like the degree of the power and protection which white privilege grants. there was nothing like watching the white police officers in lovecraft country (2020) and thinking, well, no, that is just the workings of white privilege, and it does really seem like there must be some magic to make that degree of protection possible. but this takes us back to the capitol hill riots, which was surreal in and out of itself. and, so, watching that was a gothic moment for me as a person of color thinking “how in the world do you have that much power? are you one of those magicians from lovecraft country that you managed to make it to the state of florida unmolested and are now left free walking about the country, though you try to kidnap statesmen?” so really the supernatural just makes manifest what is already illogical and bizarre in our actual world. because, in some ways, to think about the kind of violence which the kkk is capable of, you have to wonder if they are not some sort of supernatural beast to be able to do that. and, so, these authors make that leap because it is what we were already wondering. pbg: to expand on this idea of the supernatural as a genuine representation of historical horror, i would like to discuss the ways in which the gothic genre can confront racism and reclaim historical experiences while correcting its own complicity in some racial institutions. i am thinking, for instance, of colson whitehead’s the underground railroad (2016), which adapts gothic tropes and introduces them literally—in the form of a speculative, literalized underground railroad—to retell the history of slavery through the eyes of cora, the protagonist. in this sense, i wonder if gothic and horror fiction can also reverse tropes traditionally ascribed to racialized bodies, which have consistently defined black individuals as threatening and feared monsters. you explore this in your book african american gothic: screams from shadowed places (2012), as well as in the aforementioned article (2014), where you speak of the “fear of racial others” and the fear of losing the integrity of the white body both literally and figuratively: as the protagonist’s corporeality that is sexually threatened in, say, frankenstein (1818), and also as the state that becomes allegorically contaminated by othered bodies, as is the case of some contemporary horror films and shows where racial bodies are portrayed as supernatural parasites—zombies, for example. in your work, you explain that this correlation is the result of the adoption of some gothic traditions by contemporary horror fiction (african american gothic 168; “the gothic and the politics of race” 1-32), offering a chronology of debts and inheritances that explains the continuation of xenophobic discourses in both genres. in which maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 163 ways is the representation of the racialized body relevant for the revision of the us gothic tradition and of horror fiction? why the body? and how can it be reclaimed as a site of vindication? mw: well, because the body is the primary site which we understand as impenetrable. we assume there is a degree of unassailability about the body. it is definite borders. there is clearly what is inside and what is outside, and we choose what to let that is outside into the body. it is our primary point of power, of maintaining borders. and, thus, any assault on the body then really threatens our sense of power and control over other borders in the world, such as for instance the home, the domestic space. we also like to assume we have a degree of authority over who comes in and who comes out of that border. it is not permeable. and, yet, what the gothic does time and time again is remind us of the permeability of bodies, borders, and boundaries. the question then is when should those boundaries be disrupted and permeated? and, to some extent, i think, when we think about minority gothic, the horror is on insisting upon the rigid boundary and the rigid border; of saying that there is always going to be an other; that there must necessarily be a place of population that cannot access the norm, the center; that there must always be an inviable body that we do not accept; and that this is natural. and, so, it is that notion of “the natural” that, i think, especially minority authors become concerned with, because in talking about the nation as a body, you may wonder to what extent won’t you go to in order to protect its boundaries, its borders. because, if the nation is a body, then, it should not be readily entered into. you should have ability to invite and reject, instead of thinking of the body as something which is ultimately permeable. i mean, we are living in the time in which bodies are clearly permeable and it is a source of horror, but there are times in which that boundary must be breached. this is what ideology is. and so, for minorities, that resistance to permeability becomes a source of terror because we are not just saying “well, there are clearly contagions that will destroy,” but there are also different ideas which now we want to read as contagions; ideas that are disruptive. there are different cultures and populations which we are going to now read as disruptive and contagious because they can destroy. so, if we look at, for instance, the work that the birth of a nation (1915) does—and i would like to read the original birth of a nation as a horror film—, we see that it was a horror film for white audiences up to a point where the klan enters and then, suddenly, it stops being a horror film, and becomes just a horror film for black folk. but part of the reason it was a horror film was because of this idea of bodily permeability taken to a national level. the body, the national body, was in trouble at the beginning of that film. what did we need to do? we needed to cleanse it of its minority contaminants, we need to exile them, essentially attack them, have our white cells attack them and re-marginalize them into an oppressed position. and so that was a film that very much also played with the notion of the literal body and the national body. what you see happening in the film, literal bodies are constantly under attack in the states of disrepair, in states of illegibility. and this is what made especially those bodies maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 164 which were eligible horrifying. and, so, we needed again to fix our borders. this, i think, is one of the reasons why the body is so significant, especially when we think about the racial gothic. not to mention the ways in which the body is our primary signifier of racial difference, the reason why we say “oh, well, we’re going to arrest you and beat you on the way to arresting you” or “yeah, sure, you’re going to kidnap a couple politicians, no biggie.” pbg: speaking of racial boundaries, what about immaterial bodies, like those of ghosts? disembodied, racialized specters are not a definite border either. they are permeable and liminal but can also claim and occupy space. they are haunted and haunting. you tackle this ambivalence in another article entitled “haunting and haunted queerness” (2007), where you argue that there is a connection between the need for boundaries and containment, and the processes of cultural identity formation and memory retrieval. you claim that in novels such as a visitation of spirits (1989), the grotesque is embodied as a haunting mechanism that allows horace—the protagonist—to re-appear as a specter, forcing his community to overcome ostracizing ideologies (1051). similarly, morrison’s beloved introduces the ghost as a figurative representation of the haunting memories of slavery. in a way, then, the haunting specter breaks taboos and opens difficult yet much-needed conversations. it functions as a legitimizing and reparative force. nonetheless, spectral and monstrous presences in contemporary horror films often vilify the other, introducing them as violent and deadly, led by a desire to transgress boundaries and take control of space. this is conspicuous in films such as jd’s revenge (1976), candyman (1992) or the amityville horror (2005), where the racial other is depicted as an evil specter capable of possessing bodies and occupying intimate space; a ghoul that needs to be hunted down. this could also be true of the house invictus (2019), where the spectral qualities of the ghost are transferred to the house and its inhabitants that restrain the protagonists’ movement and force them to mercilessly confront a deadly history. in these films, the specter haunts and is also h(a)unted. so, focusing on the h(a)unting/haunted dyad that the spectral body seems to bring forward, would you share your thoughts on gothic specters in contemporary gothic and horror fiction? in which ways does the spectral body correct or bolster official narratives, histories, and ideologies? which boundaries does the ghost trespass? and how does it differ from the supernatural materiality of the monstrous body that we have discussed before? mw: i think, especially in terms of their place in history and culture and the absence they might signify, that what these spectral bodies are really showing us are the ways in which we are still unable to confront our history. and, so, in a lot of cases the ghost also becomes an aspect, a component of the monster. so, for instance, the best example i have of this is the amityville horror, where you have these native american ghosts haunting the place and they are a product of this supreme villain and haunter jeremiah ketcham. even though they are his victims, they still are a component in his monstrosity and in the horror of the location and so what we see about these girls is that they are not figures of sympathy or empathy, they’re maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 165 figures of terror. why? because they are reminding us of a history that we really do not want to think about, and that we are still not ready to think about. and, in that case, it just really points to america’s difficulty with dealing with history. but i cannot just say it is america. we see it in the uk, we see it in a lot of western countries. this inability to grapple with the villainy they committed in order to achieve their current position, to say that our leaders were both virtuous—they did some really good things—and then they did some really awful things to get us here. how do we resolve that? and, then, how do we address those that have been the victims of our previous villainy? and, so, the ghost, then, even when it is a victim, also becomes a point of terror, especially when it is the ghost of a racialized body. another example of this is the skeleton key (2005), a movie i have been hating on for a long time, partly because of what the director said in the extras about presenting the story of the lynching of two of the black characters, who are the primary ghosts in the story. again, the entire horror stems from the fact that they will not let the history of their crime go, that they insist that we remember and deal with it. that is one of the problems with them. but he terms their lynching a “small crime” and i do not know how you look at any lynching and think of it as a small crime, considering its components. but that really just alludes to the ways in which we are not ready, or perhaps do not want, to deal with history and recognize it in its full ugliness and its murkiness. at the same time, when we think about minority films, the ghosts are also a way of refusing silence and subjugation. they are that memory that says “hey, hey, nah, nah, we’re not cool, don’t think we’re all progressive, don’t even think about calling us post-racial or color-blind society. we still got some stuff that you refuse to talk about much less recognized. we can’t get to a point of equality until you recognize the previous sins and begin to atone for them, because until you recognize them, you are going to keep doing them in different ways.” and, so, the ghost is a memory that reminds us that we have some stuff that needs fixing. we got some reparations to make—and i say reparations not in terms of payment, but in terms of fixing systems. so, i think, this is what the house invictus is really doing as well because it is talking about the ways in which—and again this is drawing back to about your previous question about the body—it is not just a house as a haunted space, but the body as a haunted space. because that film is about the ways in which a group of, in the film, black men but, in general, african americans are haunted, have been contaminated by this white supremacist ideology, which makes intra-racial oppression possible, so that we do to each other what races have done to us historically for generations. so, then, now what we are seeing are the ways in which the individual becomes haunted. it seems to be in a haunted house, but ultimately it is about what is going on in that person’s mind from the get-go. but the haunting can also be a way to disrupt, to say that there are other ways of thinking about and experiencing history. so, if you look at a book like phyllis perry’s stigmata (1998), we see that her haunting allows her access to history in a way that those who are not haunted do not have access. haunting, then, is not a point of terror. it is just a point of difference. and the problem, the source of terror, is that maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 166 other people refuse to accept her ability to embody and re-experience that history in ways that they cannot and insist that history needs to stay dead and gone, not something that we continue to contend with. so, the notion of the ghost really is complex. it can be really radical and revolutionary in its potential, but it really depends on how you use it. pbg: haunted houses, ghosts, monsters, all these representations of the gothic across media that we have been discussing suggest that there is plenty of room for new horror figurations dealing with those historical events that continue to be unspoken. they attest to the fact that the gothic genre is all-encompassing; that it allows us to consider plenty of situations, experiences, and stories from a different lens. so, in your view, what is the future of the genre and of its depiction of these racial politics of otherness? where do you see the future of the african american gothic compared to that of more traditional gothic fiction? mw: i definitely see african american and ethno-gothic in general are becoming far more popular. you are going to see more series like lovecraft country (2020). in fact, them (2021-) comes out today. you are going to see more black graphic horror novels, such as john jennings’s box of bones (2018), as well as voodoo culture. you are also going to see more blending of gothic and other genres, like music and afrofuturism. so, most of us are really familiar with childish gambino’s amazing video “this is america” (2018), which is highly gothic in its depictions. less well known but equally gothic is “bonfire” (2011), in which he is actually positioned as a ghost, re-experiencing his own lynching, but experiencing it as a narrative of entertainment for later campers. but, then, you are going to see more musical genres, i think, incorporating the gothic. you are going to see more songs like clipping’s “the deep” (2017), which is a blend of gothic and afrofuturism. it is gothic from a lovecraft point of view, so you belong to some ancient, underwater society and you are coming back to stage a muchneeded war on the surface dwellers. that is terrifying if you are not on the right side, but it is still necessary. so, who is the monster here? you are going to see a lot more, i think, in terms of afrofuturist gothic. afrofuturism has long held a gothic component thanks to authors like octavia butler, but i think we are going to see more authors like nalo hopkinson, linda addison, and chase burke coming to the forefront. i think we are going to see more independent black horror thanks to new technological access by folks like uche aguh, the director and writer of the house invictus, but there is also mariama diallo, who created this amazing hilarious short horror film called hair wolf (2018), of interest to those working on the politics of appropriation and gentrification. there is also frances bodomo, who is another short film director, of everybody dies! (2016). so, i think you are going to see more independent black horror and, hopefully, more non-minority writers, like matt ruff, trying to correct the racial dynamics in the genre. you will see them moving away from the likes of lovecraft and stephen king, to a more corrective gothic, a more corrective vision of what it means to be american, not just white american. maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 167 open q&a session paul mitchell: i just want to pick up when you mentioned a couple of things that i am really keen on myself: get out, the movie, which i just think is one of the greatest movies made in the us ever, and childish gambino’s video “this is america.” i just wanted to talk to you about those two. i do not know if you have come across the work of sheri-marie harrison, who has talked about the “new black gothic” (2018)—i think she works in missouri— and, basically, she sort of said something really interesting which i just wanted you to respond to: she sort of says that there is a kind of interesting new weapon in the new black gothic which is humor, and you just mentioned there at the end like a couple of examples, and i was just wondering your opinion on that, the use of humor actually as a weapon within the gothic as a way of coming back and a way of subverting some of those gothic ideas. mw: i think humor is actually really important in in terms of african american existence in general. so, for instance, the notion of “laughing keeps from crying” is one that has been long present african american tradition. it is best, perhaps, exemplified in smokey robinson & the miracles’ “tears of a clown” (1967), which is about the tradition of laughing at that which causes agony. i mean, in many ways and think of it as a gothic trope, but also as a real mechanism for surviving horror. it becomes a way of not letting horror destroy you at your soul; to be able to say that there are things here that are so ridiculous even as destructive as they are, you just have to laugh at it. it also becomes a way of intervening in the power of the supreme antagonist, the villain; and, if we think about this in terms of the ideology, of white dominance, especially in terms of the notion of differential treatment (that because of white privilege you get to be sir, always, and you get to be treated a certain way), then, of saying well, i am going to laugh at whiteness, because even as it is a point of destruction, it is stupid, it is ridiculous. this becomes a moment of seizing power, of saying you do not have complete agency over me, you do not have control over how i respond to you, you do not have such power that i can only quiver in terror, but i can choose to reject you and to call you out for what you are which is a silly child. i do not have to only react in ways that ultimately can reiterate your authority because, even in acting, responding solely in terror, we are still reiterating authority, it is just a violent authority. when we laugh at someone, we completely dismantle that authority. we say that you too can be critiqued and deserve critique. so, i think that historically laughter has a very real and significant point in african american community that is now being reintroduced to horror. there is a reason why it is only now just being reintroduced and that is because of how blacks have historically been the comedic points in horror films. so, this is one of the problems with the scary movie films (2000-2013), that they reiterate that notion of black death and violence to the black body as a point of humor. but if you go back to these earlier 1930s, 1940s horror films, the point of relief from terror is always some excessively terrified black body who is acting in comedic ways. and, so, there has been a hesitance to return to reintroduce comedy because of how fraught that relationship has been in horror previously. maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 168 alissa burger: you were talking about contagion and permeability of the body and, of course, we are all sort of wrapped up in this whole covid-19 post-, and, of course, one of the things that i think we have all had to grapple with is that the response to it is not equitable at all. it is definitely having more significant impacts on marginalized populations and i know, for instance, that when my school went online, there were some students who had access to internet and they were able to just keep on keeping on and other ones where it was a huge issue. we know that the availability of the vaccine is not equal across the world. and especially when we look at these things in parallel to other stuff that is going on racial justice-wise, other conversations that we are having—social justice conversations, political conversations—i think there is a really interesting, potentially gothic narrative moment, because there is not a lot of art being made right now. there is not a lot of filmmaking or television-making, so we are engaging with the gothic narrative maybe in real time, in real ways or different ways through news and coverage and those kinds of conversations, and i was just trying to figure out how might that sort of conversation fit with the contagion and the permeability and the parallel racial justice conversations. mw: the horrors of covid films always feels like “no, too soon. we are still in it. i just can’t.” but if you look at racial horror films, what we see is that there is not necessarily “too soon,” especially when we think about minorities that have been under literal systemic and bodily attack. and, nonetheless, we see them producing horror films that are just about grappling with this issue, even as we are in the midst of it. and, so, i think we can actually learn from ethno-gothic films on how to grapple with something that feels too soon, but which needs grappling with, because you are absolutely right. and if we wait on dealing with the disparity in terms of access to the vaccines, in terms of access to important, now life-sustaining, technology, it is because only those in need of these technologies would put their lives in danger going out to seek human contact. if we do not start to grapple with that so this is a conversation, that is quickly going to go away. we are going to see it quickly disappear in the postcovid celebrations because i cannot imagine how joyful it will be once we are like “oh, come, it’s just a flu.” we are very willing to focus on the good stuff and just completely forget any of that bad, that any of these problematic components existed, especially in the us. i think you are going to see it dealt with in terms of historic context because again this is not the first time african americans have been lower on the totem pole when it comes to receiving treatment and having their lives saved through medical industry. i think you are going to see a complicated representation because, especially when we talk about black hesitation to be vaccinated, there is also that awareness of how blacks have been historically abused by the medical industry, how habitually this industry produces cures that ignore conditions that are prevalent in minority communities, like “oh, you have high blood pressure and diabetes, we kind of forgot to look for that while we were developing this. sucks for you. you can’t use this.” so, you are going to see some commentary. i do not know if it will be in film. actually, p. djèlí clark just came out with a short story called “night doctors” (2020), which literally deals with maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 169 the question of medical abuse of black bodies historically. i think he is thinking about that within a covid context: what does it mean to be a black doctor and then how do you remedy this history of medical injustice towards the black body as now a soul black physician? what do you do? do you just know it and go on do you provide differential treatment? or do you enact vengeance? what do you do? i think we are going to see some interesting things coming out. i do not think black filmmakers are going to be silent on this, and i know spike lee is looking to adapt one of lovecraft’s texts for a film coming up. hopefully, he remedies his gender issues and hopefully he also thinks about what that narrative has to say about life mid pandemic for minorities. anna marta marini: as you were mentioning hair wolf, vampires vs. the bronx (2020) just came to my mind. and i was thinking, do you see renewed use of gothic tropes, like the vampire, in the production of black popular culture that is also applied to issues such as gentrification? most notably, there was a black vampire and there were already some cases, but do you think that now it has been used to address some issues that are very current and impending? mw: well, on the one hand, it has already been used to address issues, and my best example of this is ganja and hess, which is a black vampire film that does not ever use the word vampire, but it is entirely about the idea of social economic vampirism and the willingness to live as a capitalist essentially, which is to feed off the life of others, the labor of others. i think you are going to see more use and more turns to the supernatural and the notion of the monstrous. for quite a while, i think, depictions of monstrosity in black horror were quite fraught because, again, when we call someone monster is to set them up for destruction and label them a figure for assaults. and there are so many ways in which african americans have been consistently called monster throughout socio-political history. and, so, trying to figure out how to appropriate tropes of monstrosity without that consequence, how do you reclaim the monster from its damned place as a figure to be destroyed? i think we are seeing more of that coming out. in terms of thinking about how behavior informs monstrosity, the best example i can give is actually from nalo hopkinson’s collection skin folk (2001). she has a short story that i love to talk about called “greedy choke puppy” and it is the story of a soucouyant. but, while it seems to be the story of a single soucouyant, it turns out she is actually a descendant from a family in which all the women are soucouyants, including the grandmother who is there taking care of her now. so, clearly, they have managed to live and participate in community. what we discover in the story, though, is that what makes her a monster is not her difference, but her behavior, which is explicitly western consumerist, privileging beauty ideals of youth and whiteness. that is what makes her a monster, not the fact that she is a soucouyant. so, by the end of this tale, her grandmother says to her “you know, the way to live, the way to do this is by loving others, loving your community, loving your grandmother, loving your work. love is the answer.” she was very beatles “love is the answer.” this practice of continuing to maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 170 consume that you have been told is what you are supposed to do, that you have been told is who you have been told you are, is not the truth. and, so, i think that we are not going to escape the notion of monstrosity. we cannot ignore it. it is a label that is going to follow us. how do we appropriate it? how do we twist it on its head? how do we show that difference is not monstrosity, that it is behavior that is monstrosity? jewelle gómez, author of the gilda stories (1991), is another excellent example of this. she has an amazing lesbian vampire, who is pretty much a vegetarian for a vampire. she is super humanistic in her vampirism, but she is encountering humans that are far more monstrous than she ever could be or imagine being. and, so, in that case, her vampirism is a way to estimate, like, look you have something that has literally been about being a monster in traditional gothic and that is not the problem here. so, what do we make of the real problem? how horrifying is that? i sense that you are thinking a bit about guillermo del toro’s the strain (2009) because that is another excellent example where it is the behavior. because you do have hybrid vampires that fight on the right. you also have humans that are horrible. one of the primary vampires in the strain in particular used to be a nazi general and so he was a monster, and, if i recall, in the book setrakian notes that he was a monster before he ever became a vampire. so, i think you are seeing more emphasis on the behavior. difference itself is not marked as the source of terror. difference is just difference. we do not have to ascribe hierarchy or status to it. it is how you act—if you are normal, if you are mainstream, if you are the different, if you are the other—, it is ultimately how you act that defines your monstrosity. laura álvarez trigo: i was thinking about the british movie his house (2020) almost all the time that you were speaking because many of the themes that you brought up connect to this idea of movies about these immigrants from south sudan, if i am not mistaken, that immigrate to the uk and they are haunted by this demon/specter from their past. and i wanted to ask you if you could elaborate a bit on how these inspectors sometimes can represent their own identity—of this non-white people—when they immigrate to a white country, how did it represents their identity and they are haunted by it in the sense that they want to go back to their identity but also they want to keep it a little bit away maybe so they get integrated better or they are sort of passing in a sense. i was thinking also about sorry to bother you (2018), which also brings this idea of the passing with white americans speaking, and there is also some horror in that movie. so, i was wondering about how that horror, the specter, and the hunting comes from this struggle between going to my identity and trying to keep away from it to fit better in the system. mw: his house is wonderfully complex. it is not just about identity, it is also about the trauma: what do you do with the trauma it took to get here? it is an indictment of the social health system and the mental health system here, because clearly these are people that will obviously be suffering from ptsd. why don’t we get them immediate help when they arrive? there is so much to do with that film, so, i think, especially when we think about the creature that is maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 171 tracking them, it is a question that creates an embodiment both of gilts—because its promise is that if you let me have this body, i will return you, i will resurrect this lost person that you wronged grievously—and legacies—because it is also a question of what you bring with you, what you choose to bring with you and how you hold on to it. so, in terms of dealing with the ghosts of the young daughter that drowned, a question of “are you mourning? are you melancholic?” arises. there is a real sense of the ghost illustrating the need to be a mourner for that culture which you have had to leave. that is not lost, but, in leaving it, you can still survive. because one of the important elements of that film is that at one point the wife says: “well let’s just go back,” and it seems that maybe that is how terrible the horror is, how excessive the attacks are, and how ill-fit and unwelcome they feel here. but, at the same time, there is also this sense of “i have lost something integral to my bodily and spiritual integrity that i cannot exist without. and, having lost that, i am threatened with disintegration. i must reclaim it.” so, it is very much also about moving through and learning what it means to mourn and let go without utterly losing. so, in some ways, the ghost is a lesson in the difference between the supposed threat of assimilation versus acculturation. you do not have to assimilate and entirely lose. you can remember where you came from. you can practice the food culture. you can speak the languages. you can acculturate, but you do not have to lose who you were in making this move. you do not literally have to shed your skin. and i am thinking of that scene where, offering himself up to the demon, he slits his forearm open so that you can see the tendons and nearly the bone. that, for me, suggests a sense of utter bodily loss. i implies that, in coming here, i am falling apart. this place is literally pulling me to pieces. but what is also pulling me to pieces is the memory of what i have suffered, what i have been through, and what i have done to get here. that movie is just a study in psychology and social services. ultimately, it is the ways in which they are still nonetheless forced to reckon with this. they are trapped in this space. they are told that they cannot leave the house, which feels very covid-like. but, the film is also alluding to the injustices of the society they have immigrated to, because now they have been told that they can only exist there, as contained subjects, ignored and left to their own monsters. there is a kind of supreme villainy there, for that as horrible as the demon is, there are witnesses that could intervene and who refuse to do so. for me, that becomes one of the supreme sources of villainy in the film, and it is a very passiveaggressive felony. i think that is, perhaps, one of the horrors, because: do you attack us with passive aggressive systemic institutionalized violence? elizabeth abele: i was thinking about the figure of the ghost. you probably have many examples of this happening, but, in the shape of water (2017), you have at the forefront this mixed-race, mixed-species couple but, then, hidden in the subtext of the film is what was happening in baltimore at this time. so, again, we find this otherness where race is very important to what is being talked about while it is not being explicitly talked about. could you elaborate on the relevance of silences and absences? maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 172 mw: so, i think what you are seeing, especially when we think about the shape of water is a way to talk about how earlier films have guided us in rejecting otherness, any kind of otherness. i am seeing it as a supreme kind of alienation, but also, particularly about guillermo del toro, as the ways in which he also plays with notions of stereotypes to suggest that there might be some truth in the stereotype, but that it is more complex than what we reduce it down to. there is far more to it than it we can get in our little snippet. i think that he is also marking the ways in which we still fail to really fully contemplate even the place of the racial minority in history, their contributions in history, the ways they have always been historically present, contributing to american society—even as we are constantly vilifying and demonizing them. i think that what he is also doing in terms of thinking about racial history is teasing out the ways in which race produces violence among whiteness. one of the things we do not think about are the ways in which whiteness itself also suffers from this history of systemic racial oppression because of how it teaches individuals and systems to read bodies as objects, as disposable. we tend to think about it primarily in terms of race, but you can think of it— especially when you think about the shape of water—as status in terms of disability. are you a different? i am thinking about the time when you would have had the eugenics’ movement popping along, which would have said that she, as a mute person, does not get to have a job or a family, be gainfully employed, or entirely independent, because we do not want to reproduce this incorrect or broken whiteness. so, again, that idea of people who do not speak. i think he is calling out a large swath of whiteness that does not allow lower class, impoverished or imprisoned individuals to speak. you cannot speak if you are from the wrong gender or sexuality. then, in what ways has this history of racial disenfranchisement produced you as an other as well? who is also been defined as less than suitable, less insufficient, child-like? so, that is a really interesting film to think about, but del toro himself is just a really interesting figure to think about in terms of what it means to think about not just the minority within communities, within dominant american culture, but also what it means for dominant american culture to refuse and reject what we do and say. “if you do not utterly assimilate, you do not get to be one of us.” what are we losing? what is at stake that we are not really thinking about or seeing at all? works cited clark, p. djèlí. “night doctors.” nightmare magazine 98, 2020. —. ring shout. st. martin’s press, 2020. del toro, guillermo and chuck hogan. the strain. harper collins, 2009. maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 173 gómez, jewelle. the gilda stories. firebrand, 1991. harrison, sheri-marie. “the new black gothic.” la review of books, 23 june 2018. hopkinson, nalo. skin folk. warner books, 2001. jama-everett, ayize and john jennings. box of bones. rosarium publishing, 2018. kenan, randall. a visitation of spirits. random house, 1989. morrison, toni. beloved. knopf, 1987. perry, phyllis. stigmata. piatkus, 1999. petry, ann. the street. beacon press, 1985. shelley, mary. frankenstein; or the modern prometheus. penguin, 2003. walker, alice. meridian. pocket books, 1977. wester, maisha. african american gothic: screams from shadowed places. palgrave, 2012. —. “et tu victor?: interrogating the master’s responsibility to—and betrayal of—the slave in frankenstein.” huntington library quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, 2020, pp. 729–748. —. “haunting and haunted queerness: randall kenan’s re-inscription of difference in ‘a visitation of spirits.’” callaloo, vol. 30, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1035–1053. —. “re-scripting blaxploitation horror: ganja and hess’s gothic implications.” b-movie gothic: international perspectives, edited by justin d. edwards and joham höglund. edinburgh u.p., 2018, pp. 32–49. —. “the gothic and the politics of race.” the cambridge companion to the modern gothic, edited by jerrold e. hogle. cambridge u.p., 2014, pp. 157–173. —, and xavier aldana reyes (eds.). twenty-first century gothic: an edinburgh companion. edinburgh up, 2019. whitehead, colson. the underground railroad. doubleday, 2016. wright, richard. native son. harper, 1957. films, tv series, and music candyman. directed by bernard rose, tristar pictures, 1992. clipping. “the deep.” 2017. “everybody dies!” collective: unconscious. directed by noutama frances bodomo, 2016. gambino, childish. “bonfire.” camp, 2011. —. “this is america.” 2018. ganja and hess. directed by bill gunn, kelly-jordan enterprises, 1973. get out. directed by peele jordan. blumhouse productions, 2017. hair wolf. directed by mariama diallo, 2018. his house. directed by remi weekes, netflix, 2020. jd’s revenge. directed by arthur marks, metro goldwyn mayer, 1976. maisha wester | african american gothic and horror fiction reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1832 174 lovecraft country. developed by misha green, warner bros, 2020-2021. scary movie. directed by keenen ivory wayans, dimension films, 2000. sorry to bother you. directed by boots riley, annapurna pictures, 2018. the amityville horror. directed by andrew douglas, dimension films, 2005. the birth of a nation. directed by griffith. d. w., epoch producing co., 1915. the house invictus. directed by uche aguh, 55media, 2020. the shape of water. directed by guillermo del toro, fox searchlight pictures, 2017. the skeleton key. directed by iain softley, universal pictures, 2005. them. created by little marvin, amazon studios, 2021-. vampires vs. the bronx. directed by osmany rodríguez, netflix, 2020. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 190 the anthropocene and the gothic an interview with justin edwards trang dang nottingham trent university justin edwards is a professor in the division of literature and languages at the university of stirling. previously chair of english at the university of surrey and professor and head of english at bangor university, he was elected by-fellow of churchill college, cambridge in 2005. between 1995 and 2005, he taught at the university of montreal and the university of copenhagen, where he was appointed as an associate professor in 2002. he holds an affiliate professorship in us literature at the university of copenhagen and in 2016-2017 he was a fulbright scholar at elon university, north carolina. he is also a member of the peer review college for the arts and humanities research council (ahrc) and a trustee of the modern humanities research association (mhra). justin’s contribution to the study of gothic literature started with gothic passages: racial ambiguity and the american gothic, which examines the development of us gothic literature alongside 19th-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity. in gothic canada: reading the spectre of a national literature, he continued in the area by examining how collective stories about national identity and belonging tend to be haunted by artifice. keywords: american gothic, gothic literature, popular culture, anthropocene, interview. trang dang: i’m very honored to have justin edwards for our interview focused on the gothic in the anthropocene. given the ongoing criticism of the anthropocene as being anthropocentric, colonialist, and racist, i’d also like to hear about your position on the term “anthropocene” itself. justin edwards: first of all, thank you for inviting me. it’s a delight and an honor to be able to participate in this project. i noticed that you’ve got some fantastic colleagues from around the world and one of the great things about things like zoom and these kinds of conferences is that you can bring people together in a way that is, to a certain extent, carbon neutral and, of course, this does lead into questions of ecology and the anthropocene and the ways in which we conceptualize what the anthropocene is and how we have an impact on our planet. justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 191 to begin with the first part of your question, the anthropocene is a word that comes out of geology, and it is a term that refers to geological time originally and a shift in geological time. within geological circles, it marks a change in the ways in which the human being has mastery or control over ecology, the environment and the planet more generally. this, for geologists, can be found in the actual rock sediment so finding, say, carbon and methane and other things that are actually located in the stratosphere of the rock, then leads them to articulate this new form of time called the anthropocene. now, i mean that’s how it begins but then, of course, it moves into other aspects of study within the arts and humanities and social sciences and other areas, to describe the ways in which there is a shift in which the human as a subject or as a collective has a profound impact on the environment and ecology, and that might be through extinction, that might be through global warming and the ways in which we are using up natural resources and contributing to the potential destruction of the planet. the anthropocene, in a nutshell, is the ways in which the human being now has the potential to destroy, to impact, to change the planet, whether it be through climate, through extinction or other things like that. that’s a kind of thumbnail basic way of articulating the anthropocene. there is, of course, the contentious issue of when the anthropocene begins. some would say the anthropocene begins with the industrial revolution in the uk, in northern europe. the industrial revolution which then leads to the burning of coal. this marks the beginning of a transformation in which the human being is having a profound impact on the planet in a very negative way, through toxic emissions that then lead to things like global warming. so, the industrial revolution is one place that scholars say we can date the anthropocene to this time—the time of the industrial revolution. others locate it in the nuclear age, the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki, saying that is the beginning of the anthropocene—that’s when we really see the ways in which the human being can transform the planet in really profound ways and actually lead to complete destruction of environments, ecosystems, and planets, and it has a potential to destroy ourselves in the process. whatever the case might be, what we find is a transformation in the planet that accelerates tremendously throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century so that’s what some scholars call the great acceleration within the anthropocene that happens in the 20th century and goes into the 21st century. the ways which the human is negatively impacting the planet through fossil fuels, carbon emissions, methane, and so on and so forth, thus has an impact on things like climate and extinction. td: the debate around the anthropocene often centres on how the term is anthropocentric, colonialist and racist because it’s saying that humans are a powerful force able to change the planet and everything. where do you stand in those debates? je: that is a huge question and a huge debate and a fascinating one. in many ways, the word anthropocene obviously includes something which is anthropocentric about it. it includes the human within the very term itself, and as a result, this has led scholars to really critique the justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 192 idea of the anthropocene. the term leads to a kind of flattening out of all of humankind being responsible for this transformation or destruction of the planet. that word “anthropocene” does not locate the transformation in the industrial revolution or in the nuclear age of the cold war, which is very western-, europeanand northern-american-centric. the anthropocene as a word doesn’t necessarily call attention to those locations or sites as being responsible for this transformation that occurs. it suggests that people in india or people in southern africa are just as responsible for this transformation as those in the uk in the industrial revolution or americans who then develop the atomic bomb through the manhattan project. so, there’s a kind of flattening out of responsibility within the word “anthropocene,” rather than saying no, actually, it is certain areas within the globe or certain locations and certain practices that have led to this situation, and that becomes a very important critique of the term. on the one hand, it is an important critique because, whether it be the industrial revolution or the nuclear age, wherever we begin talking about the anthropocene, it’s very much a part of the north atlantic. it’s very much part of a wealthy elite region within the world, and becomes important for reflecting on it. however, there’s also the fact that, in order to address what’s happening with the anthropocene, we can’t just locate it in those places so we need to address it across the globe. how do we address it? obviously, those north atlantic regions need to step up and be more responsible in terms of dealing with the transformative effects of the anthropocene, whether it be extinction or climate change. there are many critiques to the word but i think the main one is the flattening out and saying that all human beings are responsible for this transformation when, really, it is a kind of industrialized northern european or north american area of the world that starts this process. it then gets picked up elsewhere, of course, but in terms of responsibility, that word “anthropocene” doesn’t necessarily articulate that which is responsible. td: i think the anthropocene doesn’t pay much attention to the nuances in terms of the degree of responsibility of human beings towards planet earth. so, it’s problematic but at the same time it’s a useful term to talk about how it’s human action that causes damage to the planet. je: we might make the analogy to the word “postcolonial.” it has always been contentious. that’s not to say that it’s not useful. it is a useful term and it’s being replaced now, of course, by decolonization and the decolonial, which is very good. but certainly, during the 1990s and early 90s that word ‘postcolonial’ was important but always interrogated so we need to do the same with that word “anthropocene.” others have proposed the capitalocene; other people have proposed the plantationocene, as being words that could potentially replace the anthropocene because they, in and of themselves as words, place an emphasis on the development of capitalism in the capitalocene, or the development of plantation slavery culture in the 16th century in the plantationocene. those words, if they were to be used as replacements for the anthropocene, then do call attention to the ways in which economic models, like capitalism justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 193 or like slavery and the transportation of africans through the middle passage to plantations in north america and other places in south america and elsewhere in the globe, then become important pivot moments in the transformation of the planet, the transformation in species, the transformation in land, the transformation in relations between people, but also between humans and plants, and humans and animals as well. those words are very important, and i think that we should not dismiss those words and we should think a lot about the use of that word “anthropocene” and use it alongside “capitalocene,” which calls attention to capitalism as being that which is responsible for this transformation that has occurred, or “plantationocene,” which then dates back to european expansion and imperialism and slavery. i think these words are all important and can be used and all must be interrogated as well; all must be used in their complexities. td: i totally agree. to move towards the relationship between the gothic and the anthropocene, in your recent talk on your forthcoming book titled gothic in the anthropocene, you said: “we live in gothic times.” could you unpack this a little by talking, perhaps, about how the gothic informs our understanding of this geological epoch? je: in many ways the gothic has always been about death, destruction, ruins, and in many ways, the current focus on ecology, the current focus on environmental crises, the current focus on environmental collapse, on species extinction, raises narratives that relate back to the gothic, whether it be the ruin of an ecosystem, or the death of a species, or the destruction of certain parts of the environment, that then lead us into a narrative terrain that we can then relate to that dark side of gothic, which has to do with death and destruction. to answer your question, i think the gothic offers us narrative forms and narrative strategies to be able to articulate the times in which we are living, the times which are crucial in addressing the large-scale mass extinction events, death, ruin of ecosystems, and the destruction of various parts of the world. the gothic gives us language and narratives in order to be able to articulate these things that we’re experiencing now and are going through, and that leads me to say that we live in gothic times. that also leads back to things like the destruction in the castle of otranto in the 18th century or the fall of the house of usher, to the ways in which we might consider the collapse of the castle or the collapse of the house in relation to the collapse of ecosystems or the environment. thinking about these things in analogous ways that the planet is our home, just like the castle of otranto might be the home for manfred, or the house of usher might be the home of the ushers, we can conceptualize these narrative forms within the larger context of a home or homely space that we inhabit within the planet. the destruction of that or the crumbling or the ruin of that planet is something that we can think about in terms of a gothic narration and the language that gothic has offered us. td: indeed, the gothic focuses on ruins, destruction, the collapse of systems, and how that brings death and suffering not only to humans but also nonhumans. that reminds me of justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 194 something i read elsewhere, which says that there are people who actually find the idea of catastrophes enjoyable rather than horrifying. could the gothic then, in some way, run the risks of romanticizing those catastrophes, and as a result, of failing to warn us about the consequences of ecological disasters altogether? je: that’s a really good and important question. if you take a novel which was then made into the film, the road by cormac mccarthy, for instance, what you have is a very popular novel, a very popular film, which is very much based on apocalypse. so, an apocalyptic narrative like that then becomes a form of entertainment. it becomes consumed on netflix or consumed as a novel or a bestseller, and that can lead to a situation in which the narrative then provides a kind of entertainment or even sensationalist dynamic for the reader that might romanticize. but more of a kind of sensational aspect exists within those kinds of apocalyptic narratives and those visions of global death and destruction and environmental collapse and apocalypse can be quite sensational, and when consumed as entertainment, as you’re suggesting, it can be very problematic. it can be enjoyable rather than actually getting us to really reflect on, or think about, what this might mean. the gothic has always been like this. this is not new to the gothic. the gothic has always been a popular form, going back to matthew lewis’s the monk (1796), for instance, going back to the castle of otranto (1764) again, going back to classic 18th-century gothic novels. they are popular and are often quite sensational. those sensational dynamics can be highly problematic when it comes to pertinent and relevant political issues, because it can cover over the politics or the pressing issues of the day through the entertainment and sensationless dimensions, which are contained within those narratives. your question is a really important one, as it relates to the anthropocene, as it relates to environmental collapse and apocalyptic narratives. but it’s always been there in the gothic, and that’s always a question that critics have asked. can the gothic be both sensational and have a positive, political dimension to it at the same time? can it be progressive and get people to think about the pressing political issues of the day, and at the same time have a sensational dimension to it? i’m not sure there’s a specific answer to that. i think we have to take it text by text. there are gothic texts that go back to the 18th century or now that do romanticize or sensationalize apocalypse or a mass extinction event or mass destruction. i think that’s certainly there and that’s always been there in gothic. but then i think that there are other texts that actually do force us to consider our position within this and do force us to think about the political dynamics of our place within the planet, as it relates to mass extinction events or mass destruction or the anthropocene more generally. it’s difficult, in other words, to make grand sweeping claims. we need to look at the texts themselves and that has a long history within the gothic. td: i think you’re right. i don’t think all texts romanticize the idea of death or ruins, and there really are texts that ask us to critique the issues of the present like those about climate change or other political and ecological issues. justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 195 je: it’s important to know that that’s always been there in the gothic. that sensational aspect has always been present within the gothic novel, going back to the 18th century, and whether you can be sensational and politically progressive at the same time, i’m not sure. but it’s an important question. td: moving the conversation towards the american gothic and drawing on your previous work on this area, i’m interested in how american writers from the 19th century to the present have utilised the gothic trope to tackle issues of race, class, gender, and the relationships between humans and nonhumans. would you like to comment on this and on how these issues are interrelated? je: the american gothic does differ from european forms of gothic in several ways. i would say that there is a strand that we could identify of american gothic that is unique from european forms in the 18th century. there’s been lots written on this, going back to leslie fiedler, teresa goddu, and others who have written about the uniqueness of the american gothic. there are certain things that they point to in terms of that american gothic tradition as being unique, and that is the presence of the exploitation of slavery and of slavery as being something that haunts the nation, things like genocide and ‘settler culture of the americas’ more generally, and that is contained within american gothic—the ways in which the colonial expansion leads to genocide of native peoples and leads to destruction of large groups that then contributes to a gothic narrative that is specifically american, or part of the americas. it’s not just us, and we find this in canada, we find this in brazil, we find this across the americas in gothic text. questions of race, questions of genocide, questions of slavery, are really present within an american gothic tradition that aren’t necessarily present within 18th century european gothic. there’s a long history of criticism related to that, going back to the 1960s with leslie fiedler. that’s one aspect of it, the other aspect of it is, of course, the land itself, and that brings us into the realm of ecology and the environment, the ways in which the american gothic deals with the so-called frontier, the so-called unsettled land, the dark forest of hawthorne, the dark forest of charles brockden brown and the threats of the land to the white european colonial settler, and that being really important dimension to an american gothic tradition that is unique from what we might refer to as the european gothic. race, slavery, genocide, colonialism and the so-called settling of the land then become really important in developing narratives that we can call the american gothic. the settling of the land is, of course, tied to slavery. it’s tied to genocide, but it’s also tied to the human relationship to ecological space. here again, the plantation becomes very important, and we can refer to that word ‘plantationocene’ within the americas as being very significant. we can talk about a tradition of plantation gothic in which what you have is a destruction of a particular ecosystem replaced by a plantation for cotton or sugarcane, which is then farmed by slaves. you have a coming together of labor exploitation, exploitation of people, slavery with a transformation of the land justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 196 itself, and that transformation of the land is a transformation in which it imposes a kind of monoculture. you wipe out diversity within the ecological system and then you create the plantation for the cotton or for the sugarcane or whatever it might be. in other words, you take out the diversity of the ecological space and you replace it with a monoculture, whether that be cotton or sugar or whatever the case might be. these things are intimately linked. the transportation of slaves, the exploitation of labor through slavery, then becomes linked to the transformation of the land, the ecosystem and the ways in which the human being then impacts that land. that’s something specific to the americas. we don’t find the same plantation cultures in europe, in the uk or elsewhere, geographically speaking, that we do in the americas. that’s one of the ways that the two come together—colonization, exploitation of people through slavery, but then also the imposition of a monoculture within an ecosystem that was once diverse. that’s one way of thinking about it. the other way of thinking about it also is in terms of what constitutes the human, and that was the debates around slavery that go back to the 17th and 18th centuries. what constitutes the human, what constitutes the nonhuman, and of course, the nonhuman argument then becomes a way of justifying colonization, and things like slavery and reducing human beings to the status of the nonhuman, to the animal that then moves from racist discourses into speciesism. i think that relates back to your question. they’re very much intertwined and linked. td: i think when we think about issues of climate change, we realize that the exploitation of nonhumans is very much similar to that of human labor, as some people would treat other humans in the same way as they treat nonhumans and so they’ll exploit and extract the labor of both. je: absolutely, we can’t separate these things. the ways in which we exploit human beings, the way we exploit natural resources, the way we exploit the land, those things are intimately connected. we find within a capitalist society, whether it be gender hierarchies or hierarchies in terms of white supremacy and racism, they are intimately connected to the ways in which we treat animals or ecosystems. we can’t say we’re just going to focus on one. they’re so interrelated and so interconnected that they’re systemic rather than things that we can tease out and say this is separate from that, this racism is separate from patriarchy, which is then separate from capitalism and exploitation. no, they’re all interrelated. td: the final question i would like to ask you is about the body in the american gothic. i think the body as a theme or feature of the gothic is very important to this particular genre. for example, there are corporate bodies, or the bodies of the exploited, or the bodies of the monstrous other. could you comment on how the gothic portrayal of the body contributes to our understanding of the human-human and human-nonhuman relationships in the context of the anthropocene? justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 197 je: another great question and another very large question but a very important one. we can go back to mary shelley’s frankenstein (1817) and look at dr frankenstein’s creature. what is monstrous about the creature that victor frankenstein creates is, of course, the body. it’s the visual. the monster just wants to be loved. internally, there is this desire for connection, this desire to link with others, but it is the body, the grotesque body, the body of monstrosity, that creates fear and anxiety within those around the creature so the body then becomes located in the gothic. we find this in dr jekyll and mr hyde (1886), that transformation from the civilized doctor into the brutal and savage mr. hyde. the transformation of the body and the body is essential to gothic narratives, going back to the 18th century. we can track that through to people like poppy z. brite writing today and others, in which the body becomes central to the gothic text. we can, as you’re suggesting, move beyond that to the corporate body, beyond that to the ways in which we might talk about biopower, a foucauldian concept of biopower, and the ways in which institutional bodies, whether they be corporate bodies or public bodies like institutions, whether they be hospitals or whether they be systems of education, schools, universities, the ways in which these bodies have a profound impact on us and the ways in which we might think about how the corporate body might form us, or how the biopower might form us through an education system or through hospitalization or whatever the case might be. those bodies then become exploited and changed and transformed in various ways. how does this relate to the anthropocene? the body is, of course, central to any conception of the anthropocene. it’s the human body that now has an impact on the planet and how we use our body, whether that be to drive a car or choose to get on an airplane or collective bodies to mine minerals or natural resources or whatever the case may be. so, the body is still at the center of the gothic narrative, as it relates to the anthropocene and to making choices about how we use our bodies and what we do with our bodies. nowhere is this more prominent than in what we physically consume. veganism, for instance, is a way in which we can conceptualize that relationship between the physical body of the individual and the anthropocene. choosing not to eat animal products, to have a plant-based diet, then becomes central to the ways in which we can think about methane emissions, the ways in which we can think about the treatment of animals, the exploitation of animals, the ways in which we use our bodies to avoid those forms of exploitation and those things that are going to further lead to the destruction of ecosystems. the body is still at the center of any gothic narrative that might be related to the anthropocene and to what we consume on a daily basis in our bodies that then becomes central to an ethical response to the anthropocene. but in order to be able to have that ethical response, we also need the gothic narrative. we need the narrative of if we don’t choose to act in this way, if we don’t choose to stop eating animal products, if we don’t choose to stop driving cars and getting on airplanes, then we are going to end up in ruin, we are going to end up in death and destruction. we need the gothic narrative in order to help us to conceptualize and to see that relationship between our own bodies and our justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 198 relation to the wider world, whether it be other animals, whether it be ecosystems, environmental change and ecology. td: i think you’re right about the question of consumption, of contamination that involves all sorts of human and nonhuman bodies, and the gothic narrative can be a really helpful tool to question and explore these sorts of relationships, especially when it plays with the idea of the uncanny, for example, or fear and anxiety. je: quite often, the gothic narrative is very much about the body consuming. the vampire consuming blood; the zombie consuming brains. we have this monstrous body in the vampire or the zombie that is consuming. i think we need to think about that for ourselves in relation to the anthropocene, about our daily actions of consumption in relation to that. i think the gothic narrative can help us to see that. open q&a session paul mitchell: i’m really interested in this idea that you mentioned in the forthcoming book about we’re living in gothic times and i was wondering, when you said that, if you’d agree that we’re actually living in posthuman times and that the gothic is a very useful tool to elaborate and to explore some of our experience of being posthuman. i was also interested in what you said about the differences between british and european and american gothic, and wanted to ask if you think that actually there’s a kind of coming together in the 21st century, that some of the preoccupations maybe of the american gothic in the 19th century, as you said, with slavery and exploitation, have become now very much part of the european gothic, and the other way around that the american gothic is now beginning to elaborate ecological concerns, which it perhaps didn’t do in its earlier manifestations. je: to answer the first part of your question, the gothic has always been about what constitutes the human. going back to bram stoker’s dracula (1897), the transformative human body of the count that appears to be human, to be harker, and then suddenly transforms into the bat. what does that mean in terms of the transformation of the human? that word ‘posthuman’—you’re absolutely right—it’s been used to describe things like zombification and it’s been used to describe the cyborg. it’s been used to describe all kinds of things, and i think that there are a couple of strands to posthuman narratives, some of which can be quite positive. to move into the posthuman could be moving beyond the political hierarchies related to patriarchy or racism or white supremacy. moving into the posthuman could have a utopic vision of leaving these things behind us, which we all, of course, want to do. the flip side of that is the posthuman as machines or that which is not human controlling us in some ways and that’s a much darker side to the posthuman. i think that there’s a gothic strand in that second part of the posthuman and the human losing touch with any kind of power over the technology that the human has created, for instance, and there’s definitely a dark gothic aspect to that. that answers the first part of your question. justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 199 the second part of your question is really pertinent. right now, i’m editing a collection of essays called global gothic, which follows on glennis byron’s book on global gothic. thinking about gothic just in terms of national traditions or regional traditions is something that we need to move away from, and a focus on the anthropocene or the capitalocene or whatever we want to call it is very much part of that thinking about ecological collapse. it’s not something we can do just within a national tradition of gothic literature, and nor should we. i think that those kinds of categories, of national traditions, are important for literary history and thinking about the ways in which a gothic tradition might develop in the united states from charles brockden brown and hawthorne and be distinct. but in a contemporary global world, those kinds of national divisions begin to break down and we see something that we can call a global form of gothic that there’s a mesh in which things are related and connected. pm: i’ll just follow up on what you were saying. i think what you said is really interesting, that the idea of the global gothic is becoming something that, as you say, academics now are beginning to consider. i get the feeling that gothic is becoming in a way more affirmative, that in the past, it’s been obviously associated with horror and shock, celebrating, as trang mentioned earlier, some of the more unfortunate things that happen. but actually, i get the feeling that the 21st century gothic is becoming a lot more politically aware and that it’s using some of those elements of shock and horror to make very important and affirmative political messages particularly about the anthropocene and about ecological issues. do you agree with that or do you see it in a different way? je: i absolutely agree with that. i think that gothic affords us a narrative form and language to really articulate the horrors of environmental collapse or ecological destruction, and that then can lead to an ethical response. once we can envision and articulate the narrative of ecological collapse and the death of humanity, it’s only then that we can actually begin to really fully understand what that means and then act appropriately, so i do believe that there is an ethics to contemporary forms of global gothic. like we’re saying earlier, we don’t want to make broad generalizations about the gothic. we have to take each text on its own merits, but i think there is a strand that you’re pointing to that is really important for thinking about the ways in which we can draw upon the gothic narratives and the language of the gothic to really help us to understand the crises that we’re going through now and once understanding them, act appropriately in terms of ethical responses. pm: something you said right at the beginning really made think. you were talking about the beginning of the anthropocene as a concept in talking about the industrial revolution and the nuclear age, and these kinds of very important moments historically, when we really started to impact upon the world and the planet. i was just wondering about the role of medicine, and if you have any thoughts about that, whether it is possible to conceive it as the beginning of the anthropocene in terms of our ability to fight disease, for example, and the consequences that have in terms of population growth that actually has had a massive impact justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 200 on some of the problems that we now experience ecologically. it’s not always necessarily related to things that we would consider to be historically negative events like hiroshima, but there is a much longer projection in terms of the development of the anthropocene which actually didn’t necessarily begin with nefarious ends, that actually it began with the intention to save people’s lives and to prevent suffering. would you say that it’s a justifiable sort of viewpoint? je: i think so, and it’s a very pertinent question in time of covid. medicine is something that can be conceptualized in terms of something that’s very positive, keeping people alive, and, of course, the anthropocene is quite often about that relationship between life and death and blurring the boundaries between life and death. medicine does that—medicine has the potential to keep people alive or indeed to kill people. going back to dr jekyll and mr hyde, the doctor develops the medicine that then transforms him and his body. the way in which we could conceptualize medicine as having a profound impact on the world around us, not just on the individual’s body, but how long the individual lives, things like overpopulation, as you’re suggesting, then become really pertinent in terms of these questions about the gothic and the anthropocene. overpopulation is something that we need to address in relation to the anthropocene, and medicine in many ways is contributing to that. i’m not saying that we should stop practicing medicine in order to call a large number of people. not at all. that’s not what i’m saying but because medicine transforms our relationship between life and death, and the gothic narratives have always been about that complex relationship between life and death and breaking down the barriers between life and death. natalia kopytko: i really enjoyed those points you emphasized. my question is whether the gothic is naturally or used to be claustrophobic. we’ve been talking about the recent time and the pandemic and so forth. do you think that there is a tendency to view the gothic now as not so much claustrophobic but claustrophilic because we asked to be isolated and to social distance? my other question deals with the urban spaces. you’ve been talking about the monstrosity of the bodies and so forth. do you think there is a relationship between the classical and urban setting in the gothic? when we discuss classical gothic, the settings are often mansions and castles, which are isolated from the rest of the country, but nowadays if you pay attention to postmodern tags, they tend to be more like urban gothic in that there are urban spaces—like the city—that are monstrous themselves, and they transform the body, the spiritual world of the characters. je: regarding the first part of your question about the claustrophobic dimensions of the gothic, we definitely see that—going back to the castle of otranto, the underground passages, the dungeons, the buried alive, these kinds of gothic tropes that we find in classical european gothic texts. but then when we come to american gothic, it’s more the vast spaces that then become fearful. it’s no longer the castle or the dungeon. it’s the threatening forest. it’s the threat of the frontier. it’s the huge spaces that are untamed that then become a threat. we justin edwards | the anthropocene and the gothic reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1834 201 move from a claustrophobic enclosed space to the untamed huge space that then becomes threatening within the early american gothic narrative. that’s certainly one of the distinctions and differences. that tradition of the urban gothic that really begins in at least anglophone literature in the 19th century, with texts by oscar wilde or robert louise stevenson. i just referred to dracula and dr jekyll and mr hyde as classic urban gothic texts set in central london, parts of it in soho, and the ways in which the city then becomes this gothic space. stevenson was writing around the time of jack the ripper and the ways in which the urban location, the urban space, can create a certain anonymity for people that then leads on into the 20th century and in gothic narratives about the serial killer. they’re usually within urban settings, and the ways in which the serial killer can then blend into the populist, the large or urban population, and that fear of the monster as being invisible, as being no longer frankenstein’s creature in which the monstrosity is inscribed on the body but within that urban gothic context. quite often, at least, in contemporary forms, there’s that fear of the monster being your neighbor, of not knowing that this person is the serial killer, of the serial killer walking beside you on the street and having no idea that this person is dangerous or monstrous in any way so there’s definitely a transformation there in terms of space. works cited weinstock, jeffrey andrew. spectral america: phantoms and the national imagination. university of wisconsin press, 2004. —. scare tactics: supernatural fiction by american women. fordham university press, 2008. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 175 the gothic and the ethnic other an interview with enrique ajuria ibarra anna marta marini universidad de alcalá enrique ajuria ibarra is a senior assistant professor and director of the phd program in creation and culture theory at the universidad de las americas puebla (mexico) where he teaches courses on film, media, cultural studies, and literary theory. he specializes in visual culture, cinema studies, gothic and horror. he’s the editor of the online journal studies in gothic fiction published by the cardiff university press and he has published extensively on topics related to the gothic, in particular focusing on transnational aspects and the mexican context. among his most recent publications there have been chapters in volumes such as 21st century gothic: an edinburgh companion (2019), gothic afterlives: reincarnation of horror in film and popular media (2019), and doubles and hybrids in latin american gothic (2020). keywords: american gothic, popular culture, latin american gothic, horror, interview. anna marta marini: i’d like to start by asking you: how did your interest in gothic fiction developed? and so, why do you think it is important to study the gothic? enrique ajuria ibarra: initially, i was more interested in the fantastic—or le fantastique in french—, a concept used more frequently to explore latin american narratives with supernatural events. tzvetan todorov’s classic definition claims that the fantastic is limited to a “hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event” (25). he relies on heavily on the perception of ambiguity. you never know if the supernatural event actually happened or if it was just an element of the imagination. i was interested in trying to figure out what the fantastic is and, eventually, i stumbled upon the gothic. i had heard about the gothic when i was studying united states literature. when i first read edgar allan poe, for instance, i started noticing similarities between the fantastic and the gothic, such as the presence of ghosts, the feeling of terror, and uncanny settings. now, i enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 176 prefer to use the term fantasy from a psychoanalytical standpoint. defined by jean laplanche and jean-bertrand pontalis as “the stage-setting of desire” (28), fantasy suggests a narrativization of desire impulsed by any form of expression that arises from the unconscious, and can thus admit anything supernatural, as an enticing wonder or as a revelatory terror. fantasy allows me to navigate the gothic and the fantastic, and additionally, helps me acknowledge magic realism too. what these three keywords specifically refer to in relation to the supernatural is very conflicting. magic realism has been the preferred term by latin american scholars when addressing these specific narratives. its literary origins can be traced to latin america, but the term was first used to understand the tensions between reality and the imaginary in post-expressionist german painting (parkinson zamora and faris 7). magic realism is typically associated with the real marvelous, a term coined by cuban writer alejo carpentier. he claims that faith in the marvelous is already inscribed in the cosmogonies that frame the perception of reality in latin america (86-87). the american continent is in itself full of wonders that have been assimilated in everyday practices and beliefs. therefore, any supernatural occurrence that could be perceived as supernatural does not elicit surprise or wonder in a latin american person. in this sense, magic realism becomes the literary and artistic expression of a cultural sentiment. in her comparative analysis between the gothic and magical realism, lucie armitt argues that gothic experiences happen mostly at “the personal level,” while magic realism encompasses “a broader cultural or national narrative” (231). in this sense, the former can be easily associated with the anxieties of the individual mind and the latter with the myths that conform the discourse of identity of a community. nevertheless, gothic can also be politically and socially engaged. it does not exclusively have to address the terrors of one single subject, but also of bigger social groups. if we incorporate elements of community trauma—which i have already written about on the devil’s backbone (2001), directed by guillermo del toro— then the gothic becomes an effective tool to address collective memory and social history, with “the insistent permanence of traumatic haunting” (ajuria ibarra, “permanent hauntings” 69). in the latin american cultural and historical context, it is important to establish a distinction between the fantastic and the gothic. the revision of classic works of latin american fiction through the gothic lens can therefore be quite revelatory. for example, juan rulfo’s classic mexican novel pedro páramo can be perceived as magic realist or fantastic, due to its supernatural elements. when you look at it through a critical perspective focused on the gothic, it reveals an obsession with the convoluted past of one single man, but that extends itself to a general historical and cultural malaise of the mexican nation. the novel is about the dead speaking in a ghost town called comala, and recurs to the gothic trope of the insistence of the past—or the past not letting go. the narrative questions the idea of the caudillo, an authoritarian man who rules a region or a country, and is sometimes a war veteran. the protagonist, pedro páramo, refuses to let go of his own obsessions, even after his death. his spectral enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 177 desire rules comala, turning it into a town of ghosts. whoever arrives is trapped there, suffocated by the weight of the past. the narrator, juan preciado, speaks of the lack of air due to the summer heat, paired with the strange meetings he has had with the townspeople during the night (117). the terror during this scene is derived from the oppressive environment and the pervasive feeling of death that looms over the place. the air feels heavy, and juan preciado dies of suffocation. i wonder how much of that heaviness in the air also has to do with the idea the ghost town. the past suffocates any living person who arrives to comala. with an example like this, i can see how the gothic has allowed me to think of other ways of understanding issues of identity and of our past history, particularly with mexican works of fiction, mostly film and literature. amm: you have worked on the relationship between the gothic and travel fiction, and the intrinsic crossing of borders and boundaries. boundaries that can be both metaphorical and material. so, how is movement—according to you—a key element in the gothic texts that you’ve been analyzing? eai: movement is essential to the gothic. we often associate the term with entrapment and claustrophobia, expressed in specific settings, such as the haunted house or the medieval castle. chris baldick calls it “the gothic effect,” characterized by “a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space” (xix). time comes back to creep up on you and it affects your own perception of reality, of your environment, of your own self, of your own identity. the effect is heightened if you feel trapped in an old and run-down building. however, it is worth noting that there is a strong relationship between the gothic romances from the late 18th and early 19th centuries and travel writing. for example, ann radcliffe, informs through travel how her characters perceive other environments, other countries, and other people. her novels, such as the romance of the forest and the mysteries of udolpho feature characters traveling across various regions in southern europe, contemplating valleys and mountain ranges and staying at medieval castles and ruined abbeys. travel is an intrinsic part of the gothic. therefore, i see the gothic as a confrontation between stasis and movement. you either have to get to the haunted castle, or the horrifying or threatening thing will come to get you. we can also notice this in bram stoker’s dracula. jonathan harker travels to transylvania, he gets eventually trapped in dracula’s castle, and then dracula travels to great britain. stasis and movement that can be easily associated with life and death, and the past, the present and the future. travel also involves an activity where you move from one location to another during a specific range of time. gothic makes use of this action to contrast it with moments of entrapment. gothic fictions may feature a sense of being watched in an enclosed space, but also the idea of being followed. in mary shelley’s frankenstein, the titular character is chasing his own creation across the arctic circle in his attempt to destroy it. the novel features several travel sequences, as frankenstein himself pursues his own personal desires enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 178 or is harassed and followed by the creature in order to fulfil his promise to create a partner for him. in frankenstein, movement is associated with paranoia, a persecution that is based the effects of scientific hubris. likewise, there are horror films in which travel and movement feature prominently. directed by victor salva, the film jeepers creepers (2001) features the road as the main setting. the plot focuses on a brother and sister who are traveling across the country, and are suddenly attacked by a mysterious looking truck. most of the action happens on the road, where a horrible creature wakes up every twenty-eight years to feed on the humans it hunts down here. the monstrous creeper survives on a repetitive cycle where human lives are being used up for nourishment. the film works with several spatial layers in terms of setting. the creature inhabits the basement of a church. the siblings decide to explore this church because they see the truck that was harassing them on the highway parked there. the brother climbs down to the basement and discovers the mummified past victims of the creeper laid out in a macabre tableau on the wall. the creature itself harks from a very ancient time, possibly a pre-recorded one, so it has no name. it is something unnamable, before our history. it hides underground, among the foundations of a building that symbolizes religion and faith. in this sense, how does the film narrative challenge the idea of faith when this ancient creature is there to consume you and devour you? if they had kept on moving all the time, if they had not stopped at the church to investigate where this creature came from, they would have reached the end of their journey and still been alive. instead, they made stops along the way to ask for help, prompting the creeper to kill more people. the narrative development is focused on stasis and movement and stasis is clearly associated with the monstrous encounter, horror, and death. travel also helps us think about landscapes, how we configure them in fiction and what their purpose is in a narrative. making a foreign land look exotic enough for the purposes of gothic and horror is something i have already explored in the film the ruins (2008), directed by carter smith. here, a group of american tourists decide to explore a mayan ruin off the beaten road, they end up trapped in the pyramid fighting off a flesh-eating plant that starts devouring them one by one. the film contrasts the safety of a beach resort with unexplored territory. while scott smith’s novel of the same name is located in an abandoned mine, the film chooses to shift location by setting it in an area where the american tourists would feel mostly alienated. the people they come across in the rainforest speak mayan only, so they are unable to understand each other. the characters end up isolated due to this lack of effective communication. the locals fail to get the message across, and the tourists never fully understand the real horror of the abandoned pyramid until they experience it in the flesh. in this case, the tropical setting, devoid of any inherent gothic characteristics, becomes gothicized through travel, movement and stasis to deliver a horrific experience of isolation, heatstroke, and being eaten alive by a plant (ajuria ibarra, “gothic re-constructions” 134). travelers can also bring their own fears and their own assumptions about othering. this way, they can exoticize and “other” any place. they can fill it with their own fears and terrors. enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 179 it is what happens in the shining, by stephen king. jack torrance brings his own demons into the hotel, and they resurface when exposed to the evil nature of the overlook hotel. this is what elicits the horror in the novel. in this sense, the idea of movement represented with travel makes us think critically if a setting is inherently gothic or if characters bring their own gothic concerns into these locations. furthermore, the gothicizing of a setting also discloses anxieties about the other. in the ruins, the gothic becomes part of the strategy for othering in this tourist nightmare. nature is truly monstrous. amm: and i think this leads us to another question. gothic fiction has also been used to delve into—as you were saying—transnational context and relations. so, how borderland—or south of the border—settings have been used to produce the us gothic narratives. how in film in particular there is this border-crossing theme for which the characters cross to danger, to the unknown, then maybe they—or at least some of them—will manage to go back home, to “civilization.” so, how do you think this has been used in general in us gothic narratives? eai: there is an obvious relation between travel and borderlands. what you mention about the dangers of the unknown, and the idea of home as civilization, can be identified in certain works of american fiction. in cormac mccarthy’s blood meridian, the main character known as the kid travels across the texas region, new mexico, and the borderlands with the us army and later on with the glanton gang. when the kid arrives with the army in chihuahua, northern mexico, the captain and his soldiers express very clearly how they view mexicans. they see them as people who are not civilized, as people who are “behind” socially. the text describes the city of chihuahua as this desolate place with very little evidence of prosperity. based on their homeland, the army believes that their actions are rightful: “we are the instruments of liberation in a dark and troubled land,” says captain white (37). throughout the narrative, characters cross the us–mexico border most of the time without realizing it. the idea of othering is not defined by a visible line. instead, people who travel away from home bring the other to unfamiliar locations. ray bradbury’s “the next in line” reveals the fear of being stuck forever in mexico. an american couple are traveling through mexico and they arrive to an unnamed town that resembles guanajuato. here, they visit the cemetery to see the mummies on display—and the woman is terrified. she is afraid of what would happen to her if she died and was left there, drying up and forgotten. she starts to get anxious about staying in the town while her husband is enjoying the picturesque place. then, the car breaks down and they cannot leave. while her husband keeps feeling at ease with the locals, she isolates herself in their hotel room, feeling more anxious each day. she finds comfort in reading american magazines that she purchased at a fountain shop. eventually, she dies of utter fear, but this fear is derived from the expectation and anxiety of being completely forgotten. in the end, she fades into darkness, constantly feeling suffocated. the following scene is just the husband driving alone on the mexican countryside enjoying himself after the car has been fixed. again, this short story deals with stasis enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 180 and movement: of vitality represented in movement, and the fear of being left behind, of not moving, of dying. it is suggested that she may have been interred in the town’s cemetery and if the fees are overdue, she eventually would become a mummy, abandoned and on display. a clearer example is the film borderland (2007), directed by zev berman. the plot is loosely based on true events, the matamoros killings that were done in the latter half of the 1980s by a drug lord called adolfo jesus constanzo. the documentary on the making of the film provides footage of the border police interviews when they were investigating the murders. this required a cross-border collaboration because a lot of people were disappearing on both sides of the border. constanzo developed a cult with elements of voodoo, palo mayombe, and some pre-hispanic motifs as well. they began sacrificing people to obtain good luck and success with their drug trafficking. many of the bodies were buried close to the border. when they were interrogated by the police, constanzo’s people acted very calmly, confirming without any shock that they had participated in sacrifices that also involved cannibalism and in the burials. the documentary reveals this idea of demarcation that geographically points to the united states as the civilized and safe place. here, there are rules that need to be followed. the fictional narrative acts as a warning: be aware of the country south of the border where there are no rules. the plot focuses on a group of american friends who decide to cross the border to mexico in order to engage in activities they would not dare do in their home country, like drinking and having sex. the film displays a stark contrast between american and mexican landscapes. the mexican town they visit lacks effective law enforcement. even though there is a police corps, officers are rarely seen on the streets and the characters notice no one does anything at the police department when they report one of their friends is missing. this friend has been kidnapped by the drug cartel, and his fate is to be sacrificed and to be consumed by the members of the cult. the main protagonist finds his friend’s mutilated body and recurs to violence to survive. everything happens in mexico. the narrative suggests that, once you cross the border, you are not only in the land of the other, but you can other yourself too. the protagonist asks himself if he would be able to kill another human being, but, given the circumstances, he must kill to stay alive. the geographical demarcation—which is completely symbolic and political—does not distinguish one country from the other, but it does have an impact on our sense of national identity. borderland chooses to represent mexico very specifically in terms of the production design. the shots are edited and tinted with very warm and rich colors, like gold and sepia, giving off a harsher and hotter climate. this is enhanced by high contrast illumination, suggesting a consistent dry, desert landscape across the land that ignores the various ecosystems within mexico. a similar setting can be seen in previous horror films, such as robert rodríguez’s vampire splatter-gore film from dusk till dawn (1996). in this film, two american serial killers kidnap a family and cross the border into mexico. they spend the night at an (in)famous bar managed by blood thirsty vampires, and they struggle to come out alive. at enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 181 the very end of the film, there is a panoramic shot of what lies behind the bar: it appears to be a mayan pyramid. this ancient structure delivers a gothic element to the film. even though the two american serial killers are violent men who do atrocious things, there is something more violent, more ancient, and more horrific on the other side of the border. the characters become prey to this supernatural evil. as the characters are killed off by the vampires, they turn into vampires too, threatening their own kin and their own families. this horror does not happen in the united states. amm: i absolutely agree, i see there is a pattern for which the american character crosses the border... there they can be violent, they can be uncivilized, but then they eventually go back to their home, and they go back to righteousness and order. and sometimes it’s also a crossing with some white savior trope, the american protagonists are going to save mexican characters, and then they go back to their land of freedom and “civilization.” eai: it is this idea of the american male character having the higher moral ground, yet he is tempted on the other side of the border to resort to violence to survive, just like it happens in borderland and from dusk till dawn. the foreign land is portrayed as morally different, something that happens commonly in the gothic romance. for example, matthew lewis’s the monk is about a catholic monk who becomes corrupt, and lives in madrid, where the hot weather partly instills his moral downfall. the gothic romance establishes a certain geographical standing that justifies the actions and choices of the other, whether they are monstrous because of their own proclivity to perform questionable deeds or because they are supernatural monsters and exceed the laws of man and nature. amm: changing topic, definitely guillermo del toro is one of the most known mexican directors in the united states. his extensive work can be taken as an example of how gothic modes can infiltrate different genres, how they can really be pervasive and the versatile, transnational, cross-genre, cross-media qualities the gothic can have. can you explain a bit how the gothic is present in his work? eai: guillermo del toro has always confessed his interest for anything related with pop culture, the supernatural, and monsters. he has also been concerned with the process of othering. del toro is really well versed in horror and speculative fiction, from many sources, mainly literature, comics, graphic novels, and film itself. i think he is one of the few film directors that has managed to incorporate aesthetic elements and formal aspects from across different narrative and media forms, and this is one of the reasons he is so popular. his film crimson peak (2015) explores the narrative structure of the gothic romance, and showcases his in-depth knowledge into this popular form of fiction. crimson peak is primarily inspired by classic gothic novels, such as jane eyre, by charlotte brontë, and wuthering heights, emily brontë, and by the mysteries of udolpho, by ann radcliffe. i can also identify a few nods to charlotte perkins gilman’s “the yellow wallpaper.” the list of references is longer, but enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 182 this is del toro’s film homage to the gothic. ideas related to sanity, faith, illness, and death stand out in crimson peak, and these are themes that we can also find throughout the rest of his work. del toro claims that he is a lapsed catholic, which means that he was raised in a devoted family environment. as he grew up, he started to question religious doctrines, and has projected his own concerns about them in most of his work. for example, in his first feature-length film, cronos (1993), protagonist jesús gris symbolizes messianic resurrection. with the aid of the cronos device, he achieves immortality: he dies and then he comes back from the dead, but only as a ravenous, vampiric creature that must drink the blood of other humans. ultimately, reason rules over his more intuitive cravings, and sacrifices himself to save his family. he gives up his immortality and perishes with daylight. a final white fade-out suggests this body and spiritual cleansing for the sake of his wife and his granddaughter. in the devil’s backbone (2001), the orphanage has a chapel, but the people who run the orphanage are republicans. both carmen and casares speak strongly against roman catholicism. they keep all religious figures and statues down, but every time someone decides to visit them, they have to keep up appearances and have the boys uncover and clean the figures for display in the chapel. in one scene, the children carry a big christ on a cross and explain to the newcomers that they have to set it up again, so any supporter of franco that shows up does not believe they are heretics or communists. del toro is particularly interested in questioning roman catholicism and its longstanding influence on identities, both individual and social. likewise, del toro also enjoys exploring the haunting return of the past, as we can see in the devil’s backbone and in crimson peak. it features prominently in other films, such as pan’s labyrinth (2006), and hellboy (2004) too. in this latter film, the eponymous protagonist is haunted by his own origin and upbringing. the narrative focuses on a personal issue: is hellboy going to become that monstrous creature who is going to bring about the apocalypse and the end of humanity? this is a very good example of del toro’s own notion and understanding of monstrosity. when monsters are involved, he presents us with well-rounded, complex supernatural creatures. he shows us a different side of the monster, one that is more human and vulnerable. conversely, his films disclose the cruelty of men, and this proves to be more horrifying. in the shape of water (2017), antagonist strickland is the one who sees the creature as something completely other; it is not from this world since it goes beyond our notions of reason and science. the story is set during the cold war, and strickland’s strict upbringing reflects a very heteronormative and modern thinking that results in hideous violence. through his behavior, strickland ends up being the monster. del toro had worked on a similar character development before, with captain vidal in pan’s labyrinth. vidal is obsessed with time and death, and his military training has reinforced a sense of masculinity bound by strict obedience and demonstrations of strength. he feels entitled to do atrocious things because of his rank, like when he crushes a peasant’s face with a bottle of wine, leaving the boy unable to breathe and chocking with his own blood. this sequence is a form of horror that reveals the enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 183 other side of human nature, a monstrous one that stands in stark contrast with the supernatural creatures that feature prominently in this film and in the rest of his work. in the shape of water, the creature appeals to the characters that are othered. elisa cannot speak, and is thus other. her neighbor giles is gay, and he is shunned at work and at the icecream shop when he attempts to flirt with the bar tender. giles is also othered and marginalized. this film summarizes many ideas that del toro has been developing about monstrosity and that we can notice since the beginning of his filmography. with cronos, it is the anxiety of being other with the gift of immortality. in the devil’s backbone, it is gothic haunting. ghosts, remnants of a traumatic event that happened in the past that keeps affecting the present, inhabit the orphanage. the bomb in the courtyard could be considered a ghost too. it did not explode and remained as something that could have happened but did not. it looms in the center of the courtyard to remind everyone of the civil war that is being fought outside the orphanage walls. from a roman catholic upbringing to his concerns about monstrosity, del toro proves with every film that gothic, horror, and the supernatural are powerful devices to speak about human nature and otherness. amm: mexican identity in the united states and its cultural production are characterized by a few recurrent uncanny aspects and archetypes, which are often drawing on mexican folktales and cultural heritage, on the catholic upbringing, that seems to be so fascinating for americans. what do you think are just a few of these stereotypes and tropes, and which are the most exploited according to you? eai: one of the key concepts that you mentioned is heritage. how do you define your own heritage? how do you shape your own identity in terms of your upbringing, where are you from, but also where your family comes from? i would suggest that hispanic americans are working through their own identity as being aware of their hispanic heritage—whether it is from mexico, central america, or any other spanish speaking country— and how they see themselves in the national dynamics of the united states. notions of territory, history, and social dynamics typically render certain groups as others, hispanics included. the idea of identity seems to be associated with the concept of origins. an acquaintance of mine came to a conference in mexico and she was very excited to meet her relatives for the first time. she is from california and studies in florida. she was excited because she felt that she would understand herself and her parents better when she traveled to mexico to discover this other part of her family’s history. additionally, folklore and tradition, which help forge a sense of social identity, must not be seen as things that are plainly passed on or inherited. it is also important that we understand how they are interpreted and adapted by younger generations. one prime example is la llorona. she is the screaming woman, the banshee, a universal trope whose main characteristic is this idea of the lament. octavio paz has written about her in his influential book the labyrinth of solitude. i believe she is the most represented ghost or monster in mexican enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 184 cinema, and has appeared in several films from the 1930s to the present day. the legend also exists in central american countries, like guatemala. la llorona is the ghost of a woman rejected by her spaniard lover. out of grief, she drowned her children in a river and now her spirit is haunting every nook and corner in mexico, wailing for her lost children. i have explored la llorona and her portrayal in mexican and hispanic american popular culture before, while trying to understand what she represents in gothic terms. the ideas of the lament and of the foretelling—in themselves associated with loss—are combined with the anxiety about identity. this is further articulated with the notion of mobility because la llorona is associated with bodies of water and water that moves, such as rivers. typically, you would encounter la llorona close to water. if this water moves, then the ghost can easily travel beyond specific locations and be found in other regions and countries (ajuria ibarra, “ghosting the nation” 132). therefore, la llorona could be associated with migration and carrying a certain haunted cultural heritage to new places. crossing the mexico–us border on the rio grande, a dangerous body of flowing water, can help boost this idea of cultural ghostly motility and how it is inherited and interpreted by the hispanic community. migrants and ghosts must bear the dangers of the river to make it to the other country. in my analysis of la llorona, i have noticed that she has crossed over to american mainstream media too. the pilot from the tv series supernatural revolves around la llorona. in the setting, a river and a bridge feature prominently as the original sites of death and trauma. a woman has killed her children, and then she decides to throw herself off the bridge. the tv series grimm also features an episode about the legend of la llorona. in this episode, the ghost appears, once again, by the river that crosses portland, oregon. a few mexican horror films about la llorona also associate la llorona with bodies of water, such as kilometer 31 (2007). set in contemporary mexico city, the film notices that many of the rivers that existed in the valley of mexico have now become part of the complex urban sewer system. therefore, la llorona haunts the city underground, coming out through the drains to haunt and terrify to death. la llorona is a gothic figure in the sense that it forces us to reconsider our heritage and identity by means of a haunted mestizaje or hybridity. her legend depicts a history of violence and rejection. the spaniard man rejects the children because they were born out of wedlock and are not fully spanish. la llorona attests to a conflicting view of what mestizaje is. we tend to celebrate it as the encounter of two cultures, but again it also speaks about the anxiety about the circumstances that led to that mestizaje. if these circumstances are violence and death, which are intrinsically related to the conquest of mexico, then mexican identity is perennially haunted by this: the affirmation of a thriving hybrid culture that needs to acknowledge the pain of its formation (ajuria ibarra, “ghosting the nation” 148). how can this be passed on and reflected again in hispanic american identity in the united states? we can speak of a celebration of heritage, of being mexican american or guatemalan american; still, at the same enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 185 time, there is an implicit fear about miscegenation that the gothic and la llorona constantly remind us of. it is an origin that is conflicting, and that we never really let go of. open q&a session sofía martinicorena: i just wanted to go back to the idea of nationalism and the gothic in relation to the borderlands. i was thinking about how the gothic is used often in dominant us culture as a way of dealing with the colonial guilt that results from a very destructive past of land appropriation. obviously one of the most evident examples of this is the idea of the indian as a revenant that is haunting white people to take revenge, and the obsession with native burial grounds which is a very gothic trope, which you see in lots of films. i was wondering if there are like analogous examples in the southwestern border of the us, where there’s obviously also a violent history of fight for the land. are there gothic narratives or gothic tropes in borderland us fiction that arise from this idea of colonial guilt? eai: the first example i can think of is mccarthy’s blood meridian, which i have mentioned before. part of the novel’s premise is that the gang the kid joins thinks in terms of the discourse of manifest destiny that existed during the exploration and appropriation of the western united states. in film, the idea of tensions across the southwestern border with mexico can also be seen in john carpenter’s vampires (1998). the setting in these narratives is an idealized desert-like landscape, which is closely associated with the border along texas, new mexico and arizona. mexican film belzebuth (2017) also deals with illegal border crossings in a city that resembles tijuana, which is on the border with california. the plot focuses on the second coming of the messiah and a cult of satanists who are trying to kill the child. mass killings occur all over the city, an allegory to the pervasive violence associated with drug cartels in mexico. the protagonist, a police detective who lost his newborn child during one mass killing at the hospital, ends up helping an excommunicated american priest get the child safely across the border. they use one of the underground drug trafficking tunnels that they have built to get him across to the united states. halfway through the tunnel, the characters find a room filled with both catholic and pagan artifacts, where the final confrontation with the devil takes place. the film discloses a relationship between the demonic and the monstrous with illegal actions that gravely affect cross border relationships, as well as communities on the mexican side. ideas of illegality and moral corruption are always happening south of the border, while safety and protection is what characterizes the country north of the border. it’s not southwestern per se, but the film explicitly addresses border tensions related with politics, society and economy. the dynamics of this liminal geographical area are exposed in a story framed by holy revelations and the act of saving a child from vicious adult harm. it may not be explicitly about the southwest, but there is a hint about similar concerns all along the border between the united states and mexico. enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 186 mónica fernández jiménez: the enlightenment is central in the origins of the 18th century gothic, but also in postcolonial narratives. you mentioned latin america and the caribbeans, characterized by a different way of dealing with the landscape, of understanding the environment, and this has also been applied to politics by carpentier himself and josé martí who— discussing theories of development—stressed that these populations want to abide by their own epistemology and not by imposed models, because they are not for “here.” so, in terms of turning all this conversation to the gothic, you’ve been mentioning some authors that— like all mccarthy—that clearly come from a more western anglo tradition, and some other authors that would identify more with indigenous forms of knowledge, chicanx tradition etc. i was wondering if there is some critique toward more europeanized or western forms of gothic. guillermo del toro’s films, you said, draw on the brontës and similar authors. the gothic in the 18th century was a rejection against the enlightenment but it’s still a product of it. is there any critique to the european gothic and its relation to the enlightenment, in the same way that post-colonial and indigenous narratives critique european epistemology? eai: you are right in pointing out that the gothic can be understood as a reaction to the enlightenment. concepts associated with the enlightenment, such as reason, law, light, face a dark side, or what fred botting defines as a “negative aesthetics” that “informs” the gothic (1). perhaps, more recently, we can think these terms laid out with the mexican project of the modern nation that developed throughout the 20th century. after the mexican revolution, the country went through a period of rapid modernization and industrial development, particularly between the 1940s and the 1960s. this was paired with an idealization of mestizaje as the core of mexican identity. in mestizo modernity, david s. dalton claims that the pairing of the project of the modern mexican nation is associated knowledge of/and technology. for him “the transformation of amerindian individuals into mestizos … used technology to modernize the indigenous body” (2). therefore, the encounter of different cultures aims to modernize the nation, incurring the marginalization and erasure of indigenous identities. this is where the gothic comes in again. dalton’s pairing of modernity, technology, and mestizaje reminds me of the role of photography in rito terminal (2000), directed by óscar urrutia lazo. i have previously analyzed this mexican film with a focus on “visually mediated spectralities” (ajuria ibarra, “media, shadows…” 198), but a focus on technology and identity also discloses tensions about the subject, the body, and the nation that dalton suggests. the plot focuses on a photographer based in mexico city who is sent to film the festivities of an indigenous community in the state of oaxaca. during his stay, the protagonist experiences a series of ghostly encounters and his shadow is eventually stolen. he decides to go back to search for his shadow, and discovers that the community is haunted by the ghost of a young woman who decided to embrace mestizaje and the modern world and was murdered for her choice. the film revolves around what photography unravels, but also about the failure of mestizaje itself. the film depicts an isolated indigenous community that is wary of people coming to see them as something exotic and outdated, as something from the past that needs to be recorded and enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 187 saved with film and photography. the technology of photography reveals the spirit of the murdered young woman. the town’s elders—her mother being one of them— decide what must be kept in the collective memory of the community, and they decide to forget her. her own mother decides to raise her little girl in their own traditions in an attempt to erase her mestizaje. the film acknowledges other voices and discourses that shape mexican identity, our own origin, and our own past. the intrusion of technology by means of photography and film discloses the tense encounters between tradition and modernity. even though the community may try to keep their own traditions alive and to shy away from modernity, modern technology sparks the return of the ghost of the murder victim they have decided to forget. this film makes use of certain gothic tropes to reveal the other side of mexican identity: the project of modernity based on reason, on technology, on moving forward, has points that crack, points that haunt, points that make us question the discourse of the modern mexican nation. laura álvarez trigo: i was wondering about caribbean gothic in terms of its recent evolution. how we see the origins and how is it being developed these days? if you see there’s been certain changes and how i was thinking about contemporary authors, such as mónica ojeda which has been sold or publicized as andean gothic—an andino gothic—and how that also works in relation to the us market, because you were mentioning before also magical realism and this is something that’s what the market expects from latin american authors. is there something to that in how this caribbean gothic is being maybe developed, or sold, or published these days? eai: first, european writers have written about the caribbean and have portrayed it as a strange land. then, there are writers from the caribbean who resort to haunting and the supernatural to express that the past is still an issue in terms of defining identities and nationalities in the caribbean. for example, puerto rico has a rich hispanic culture inherited from colonialism, but now they are a dependency of the united states. they are not quite a state, so they are still being bound by a remnant of colonialism. in what ways puerto rican writers recur to the gothic to address the political and social—and even economic—inequities that have affected their own island in terms of how they can identify themselves? we can also think about the cuban, puerto rican and dominican communities that have migrated to the united states. junot díaz’s the brief wondrous life of oscar wao deals second-generation caribbean teenagers assimilate american pop culture. at the same time, it explores feelings of estrangement when they take young men back to the caribbean countries their parents grew up in. this is what happens with oscar. he feels inadequate, he feels out of place and out of bounds because of his body. he does not conform to the idea of what a latin lover should look like. when he goes to the dominican republic on vacation, he cannot fulfil the idea of masculinity that is culturally dominant in this nation. through the gothic, the novel deals with the crisis of identity that the protagonist experiences. the narrative features a dominican curse, and oscar believes that his family has been cursed and so he is too. transgenerational enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 188 mistakes and wrongdoings befall on oscar, and he is unable to fit anywhere because he has no stable ground. he does not feel like he belongs in the united states, but, whenever he goes back to the dominican republic, he does not belong there either. the insistent haunting curse affects his own perception of himself and his own reality. the idea of belonging and of the past that keeps creeping in when defining who the nation states in the caribbean are could be one of the elements that i personally see is a current topic for caribbean gothic. works cited ajuria ibarra, enrique. “ghosting the nation: la llorona, popular culture, and the spectral anxiety of mexican identity.” the gothic and the everyday: living gothic, edited by lorna piatti-farnell and maria beville, palgrave macmillan, 2014, pp. 131–151. —. “gothic re-constructions: mayan ruins and tourist horror in the ruins.” tropical gothic in literature and culture: the americas, edited by justin d. edwards and sandra guardini vasconcelos, routledge, 2016, pp. 119–135. —. “media, shadows, and spiritual bindings: tracing mexican gothic in óscar urrutia lazo’s rito terminal.” latin american gothic in literature and culture, edited by sandra casanova-vizcaíno and inés ordiz, routledge, 2018, pp. 189-201. —. “permanent hauntings: spectral fantasies and national trauma in guillermo del toro’s el espinazo del diablo [the devil’s backbone].” journal of romance studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2012, pp. 56–71. armitt, lucie. “the gothic and magical realism.” the cambridge companion to the modern gothic, edited by jerrold e. hogle, cambridge up, 2014, pp. 224–239. baldick, chris. “introduction.” the oxford book of gothic tales. edited by chris baldick, oxford up, 1992, pp. xi–xxiii. botting, fred. gothic. 2nd ed. routledge, 2014. bradbury, ray. “the next in line.” the october country: stories. del rey, 1955, pp. 18–57. carpentier, alejo. “on the marvelous real in america.” magical realism: theory, history, community, edited by lois parkinson zamora and wendy b. faris, duke up, 1995, pp. 75–88. dalton, david s. mestizo modernity: race, technology, and the body in postrevolutionary mexico. u of florida p, 2018. díaz, junot. the brief wondrous life of oscar wao. riverhead books, 2007. king, stephen. the shining. bca, 1977. laplanche, jean, and jean-bertrand pontalis. “fantasy and the origins of sexuality.” formations of fantasy, edited by victor burgin, james donald, and cora kaplan, methuen & co., 1986, pp. 5–34. enrique ajuria ibarra | the gothic and the ethnic other reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1833 189 lewis, matthew. the monk. 1796. oxford up, 1998. mccarthy, cormac. blood meridian. vintage, 1985. parkinson zamora, lois, and wendy b. faris. “introduction: daiquiri birds and flaubertian parrot(ie)s.” magical realism: theory, history, community, edited by lois parkinson zamora and wendy b. faris, duke up, 1995, pp. 1–11. radcliffe, ann. the mysteries of udolpho. 1794. oxford up, 1998. —. the romance of the forest.1791. oxford up, 1999. rulfo, juan. pedro páramo. 1955. cátedra, 2004. shelley, mary. frankenstein. 1818 text. oxford up, 1998. stoker, bram. dracula. 1897. oxford up, 1998. todorov, tzvetan. the fantastic: a structural approach to a literary genre. translated by richard howard, cornell up, 1975. films and tv series belzebuth. directed by emilio portes, videocine, 2017. borderland. directed by zev berman, after dark films and lionsgate, 2007. crimson peak. directed by guillermo del toro, universal pictures, 2015. cronos. directed by guillermo del toro, prime films s. l. and october films, 1993. the devil’s backbone. directed by guillermo del toro, warner sogefilms a. i. e., 2001. from dusk till dawn. directed by robert rodriguez, miramax films, 1996. hellboy. directed by guillermo del toro, sony pictures releasing, 2004. jeepers creepers. directed by victor salva, united artists and mgm distribution co., 2001. kilometer 31. directed by rigoberto castañeda, lemon films, 2007. “la llorona.” grimm, written by akela cooper, directed by holly dale, nbc universal television distribution, 2012. pan’s labyrinth. directed by guillermo del toro, warner bros. pictures, 2006. “pilot.” supernatural, written by eric kripke, directed by david nutter, warner bros. television distribution, 2005. rito terminal. directed by óscar urrutia lazo, foprocine, 2000. the ruins. directed by carter smith, paramount pictures, 2008. the shape of water. directed by guillermo del toro, fox searchlight pictures, 2017. vampires. directed by john carpenter, sony pictures releasing and summit entertainment, 1998. microsoft word 3.2_full issue_rev.docx david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 202 the dark thread: an interview with david punter mónica fernández jiménez universidad de valladolid david punter is the author of fifteen academic books, many of which revolve around gothic fiction. the literature of terror: the gothic tradition (vol. 1-2, 1996) is one of the most relevant manuals about the gothic published so far. he is also the editor of ten academic volumes and has taught at universities in different countries and even continents, the university of bristol being the last one, where he was the research director for the faculty of arts. david punter has also authored eight volumes of poetry and has published poems and short stories in various anthologies. his work can be found at davidpunter.org. keywords: american gothic, gothic literature, popular culture, film, horror, interview. mónica fernández jiménez: the titles of your two most famous volumes on the gothic make reference to terror. in the introduction to the first one you clearly state that “gothic fiction has, above all, to do with terror” (13). how do you associate the particular features with which you describe the gothic genre to the fact that they always create terror? can you think of some exception? david punter: when i published those books that was forty years ago and i suppose my views have changed or i hope developed a bit since then. i do think the gothic and the notion of terror are critically interlinked but one has to bear in mind that gothic was from the very beginning, if one takes the beginning to be the late eighteenth century, to an extent formulaic. if you take an early novel like clara reeve’s the old english baron (1777) i would not imagine that that produced in its audiences a sensation of terror, but it might have produced a kind of frisson, of excitement. i think that terror is a term that sometimes needs to be thought of in inverted commas. and, of course, from the beginning there was this distinction which is still with us i think between terror and horror, with terror being seen as more psychological and david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 203 horror more to do with what we now call body horror, a kind of gross intersection of physicality. and, of course, that does occur as a dialectic at the beginning of the gothic with the frequently cited differences between ann radcliffe and matthew lewis, with lewis as a far more explicit writer about various matters which might cause us to feel fear. but i would want to now say one or two more things about that, because what i had assumed in the days when i first wrote about the gothic as a strand of writing from the eighteenth century to the present day was that gothic should be seen as a function of whole works, whole novels, whole poems. i always had trouble with that because, for example, in the literature of terror i talk about dickens, and you might think of dickens in terms of the old curiosity shop (1840). the old curiosity shop does contain moments which i would still think of as gothic, but it is not a gothic novel, and i think now we might want to be more sophisticated about how the gothic interweaves with other genres and modes in particular works. maybe not many works are actually wholly gothic and maybe that is okay. maybe gothic needs to be thought of as a vein that runs through works rather than the whole deal as it were. i think of early gothic drama back in the early to mid-nineteenth century, where a gothic play or mini play might crop up in an evening’s entertainment alongside satirical works, comical works, farces, and so forth. this is all part of an evening’s entertainment and not many early gothic writers would have thought of themselves specifically or entirely as gothic writers. they were writers who wrote, among other ways, in a gothic vein. if i move on to a different matter related to this, it occurred to me when thinking about your question to think a little bit about henry james’s the turn of the screw (1898). now, that is often referred to as a gothic work but i do not think that that story, that novella, invites one to experience terror quite. one certainly has fear about the unstable relationship between the governess and the children. but i think that what is more interesting in that work, as an example, is about doubt, suspicion, uncertainty. and i think that the gothic could be seen as a kind of strand in writing that takes away your usual bearings and means that you are looking at things in a different way. and that is because gothic always, i think, has to do with transgression of one kind or another, and there is no knowing how far that transgression will go. once you have transgressed against the usual physical and so-called natural rules then you might go anywhere. outstandingly, of course, that is the case when dealing with the supernatural, which the gothic has always done, i think, in one way or another, either through belief in the supernatural or through challenging the supernatural or through criticising or indeed mocking the supernatural. self-mockery then was in the gothic from the beginning, because once we grant the possibility of ghosts, vampires, zombies… then anything might follow from that. mfj: you endorse a very inclusive definition of the gothic in these volumes. gothic has always been hard to categorise and there are some horror and science fiction, decadent or supernatural works that have been excluded by critics from the gothic category even though they also include some transgression. i was thinking of a particular piece of work which you david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 204 indeed include in the second volume of the literature of terror that i personally love. it is arthur machen’s novella the great god pan (1894). the critics aidan reynolds and william charlton argue that this novella does not create fear because it is too detailed and it is more about embracing the occult (44-45), which is commonplace in decadent literature. what thoughts do you have on the literature of the occult sometimes written by authors who fearlessly embraced these unknown forces in relation to gothic transgression and terror? dp: my original attempts at defining the gothic in the literature of terror were indeed very inclusive. some might say they were too inclusive but i was trying to trace this strand of the gothic from the late eighteenth century to what was then the present day—that is quite a long time ago now. in another sense they were not inclusive at all because in those early books i was entirely dealing with a tradition based in british and to an extent american literature and now things have changed. we have had a great deal of work done on what we might loosely call global gothic or gothics of different cultural backgrounds. and i think that one of the crucial features in these new critical approaches to gothic is that there is a series of intersections between what we have thought of traditionally as gothic and what some might say folk motifs within very different, very various cultures. every culture i know of has some dealings with the supernatural. and every culture i know of is predicated at least to an extent on attempts to deal with fear. different cultures deal with that in different ways and therefore different cultures produce different kinds of ghosts, but the ghosts are always there. from the fox fairies of chinese and japanese writing through to the wendigo in north america, every culture that one can think of has these dealings which are partly, of course, dealings with the ancestors and dealings with death. so we now have within our purview a very much wider range of materials that we might think of as gothic and of course it is even more complex than that because what we might call indigenous texts of fear have become inflected recently with european and american gothic, so there is a kind of mutual feeding between what we think of in the west as gothic and what has originated in other cultures to cope with issues of fear. and that of course has now fed back into, for example, an emerging anglo-american folk horror tradition. think of the wicker man (1973). i am currently reading a graphic novel by hannah eaton called blackwood (2012) which is all about folk motifs in the english countryside. it is all to do with managing fear, lots of gothic motifs, ghosts and so forth, but it is not really based in that. it is based in some historically different kind of past. arthur machen’s the great god pan is a tremendous novel. wonderful. i agree with you entirely, mónica. one of my favourite books. it is certainly occult. is it gothic? well, i think you could say it is gothic if we accept this description, not a definition but a description of the gothic as transgressive, specifically in relation to the supernatural, because it deals with the supernatural and, to an extent, it accepts the supernatural. but, of course, when we think of novels of the occult then it turns out that almost all of them, in my experience, are actually quite intensely more than that. they do not say that there are dark forces coming to claim us. they say that there is a battle in the world between david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 205 dark magic and white magic and that this battle is something that needs to be described in order to restore order, or at least to point out, as matthew lewis did of course in the monk (1796), the extreme dangers of challenging the boundaries around that order. let me just mention a couple of other novels of the occult. aleister crowley, moonchild (1923). crowley of course was supposedly a believer in magic, in dark magic. but again, in the novel it is white magic that triumphs. a much more interesting and more ambiguous novel which is not so well known, i think, is by a wonderful writer called m. john harrison who has written a long series of science fiction works but also a book called the course of the heart (1992), which has to do with ritual magic but also with psychological disorder. and the hinge of that book is that what you summon up through magical rituals or through memory cannot be banished. and that, of course, is also the root of recent and not so recent cultural anxieties about the literature and more specifically the film of terror, as in the example of the visual experience of child’s play (1988). once you have something lodged in your mind then you cannot dismiss it and you may have to, in some sense, act upon it. and that is the cause of lots of moral panics about gothic and horror texts, not so usually literary now, more filmic. there is the threat of an incitement to violence, maybe a result of repeating images. another example, my last one of literature of the occult, peter ackroyd. his wonderful book the house of dr dee (1993) is about john dee, the famous elizabethan astrologer and magician. what ackroyd does is perform a historical engagement with ritual magic, which is brilliantly ambiguous about whether that magic is or ever could be actually effective. so all through the literature of the occult, i think, there is this set of doubts about whether or in what sense we are dealing here with magic. you can describe magic as a supernatural power over the natural. the physical is not its own master but supernaturally in some way you can control those forces, that is what magic has been about since the ancient greeks at least, and in chinese culture probably for even longer than that. where there is magic, that goes way back into what we think of as some deep history. but whether that magic is actually effective or being used as a metaphor—and crowley i suppose is good on this because he does talk about how, for him, even magic is a kind of metaphor for exerting power—is another issue. maybe the occult is something like that, although the occult of course is also a way of forming relationships, small groups. think of the society for psychical research at the end of the nineteenth century in the uk and elsewhere. this is a way of banding together to form some kind of power, often among those who are otherwise powerless. mfj: i have always been intrigued by the occult because its emergence and its representation within decadent literature follows a different periodisation than the early gothic fictions of the eighteenth century. in your answer you have mentioned psychic disorder and also the different cultural traditions where the gothic has made an appearance. in the introduction to volume one of the literature of terror you seem to express the belief that the nature of fear in the american reappearance of the genre is completely different because of its psychic david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 206 dimension if we compare it to eighteenth-century british gothics. in your words, “this new american gothic seems to deal in landscapes of the mind” (2). this is also how rosemary jackson, who wrote a book about fantastic fiction, defines the gothic genre. she defines it as a recognition that fears are “created by the self or by unconscious forces” (14). but you seem to believe that in the early british gothic works there was a sort of more external fear compared to the reappearance of the genre in the american context. can you elaborate a little bit on that in relation to what is unique about the american gothic? dp: there are many critics far more expert than i am on the us dimension: charles crow, maisha wester, marilyn michaud and bernice murphy, for example, have written very powerful books on us gothic. to slightly sidestep that for a moment—but i will come back to the united states—i think i would no longer say that there is a distinction between inner and outer fears, but there are different ways in which they might be represented. i was recently reviewing a book on polish gothic and the author, agnieszka lowczanin, discusses ruins. of course, ruins are a theme in the gothic from the eighteenth century through to iain banks’ a song of stone (1997), shirley jackson … lots of material. ruins run right through anglo-american gothic. but the point made in this book is that although ruins also run through polish gothic, they mean something quite different because in britain ruins represent the legacy of internal strife, largely religious, monasteries being destroyed, abbeys being burned to the ground … all in the course of religious strife within the uk. whereas in poland, and in polish gothic, those ruins are almost always the effect of a destructive invasion from other nations and empires which have sought over several centuries to destroy poland, and in fact they succeeded twice in banishing poland from the map of europe. so all i mean to point out by that is that any repertoire of gothic motifs in different polities—the ruin, the castle even the persecuted maiden depending on gender politics—will be different in different locations. and so, fears in the us will also be differently coded. here is a huge generalisation and i am not an expert on this so i expect i am quite wrong. nevertheless, it seems to me that in a lot of us gothic the anxieties are about insurrection from within, whereas in european gothic a lot of those fears are about invasion from without. now that is a vast generalisation, there are many exceptions, but that is something which i think may have some mileage in it and therefore in the us i think the return of the repressed, whether that be through anxiety about indigenous racism, national fate, or terrors about the after-effects of slavery … these i think are very much to the forefront in us gothic. they are more on the back burner, i think, in britain. but in the us these are sometimes very interestingly coded. and i want to make reference here to stephen king who i believe is a great american novelist. a lot of american critics over the decades, even last century, have wailed and moaned about the question of where is the great american novelist and they have said “oh, he or she has not yet arrived.” i think he has. i think he did. i think it is stephen king. but you cannot confront stephen king or face stephen king partly because king is boxed into a genre, gothic or horror, whatever you call it, and partly because what he does with that is based not david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 207 in these returns of the repressed. he very rarely writes about the fate of indigenous peoples. he does write about small-town usa and he writes about it in terrifying ways and the novel of his i think is the best is called needful things (1991). now in needful things the devil arrives in small-town usa, does not matter where it is, and sets up a shop, and in that shop he can give you anything you want. the people in the town, who appear fairly peaceful but actually have these huge antagonisms one to another, come asking for various things they think will help in these disputes. and the devil helps, of course, the devil is a helpful kind of chap. but, in the end, it turns out that all that people actually want, all they need, their needful thing, is a gun. so the devil provides guns and there you go, there you have one powerful version of the history of contemporary usa, i suppose. black lives may matter, but do they matter as much as the right to bear arms? i know i am always puzzled by the assertions of the national rifle association in the usa who say repeatedly, “guns aren’t the problem.” well, i do not think they are right but if they are right, what is the alternative? if guns are not the problem, then something deep in the us psyche must be the problem. there is no third way, it has got to be one thing or the other, the motive or the means. so you are talking about a deep traumatic root of disturbance in the us which is what us gothic keeps on trying to gnaw at. although maybe recently the threat of invasion is back. i think about max brooks’ wonderful book world war z (2006) and how the us remains no longer immune to a kind of invasion. and, of course, now with this current pandemic we see again that the us is not immune to invasion. another kind of return i think is represented in kameron hurley’s wonderful set of books the bel dame apocrypha (2010-2012), which are about the violence on women and about the return of the ravaged deserts so that what the us has done in afghanistan and in iraq and so forth comes back home. and to go back to stephen king again, in his book cell (2006) he refers memorably to the possibility of americans being refugees in their own land, doing an endless “refugee walk” (183), which of course echoes cormac mccarthy’s the road (2006). mfj: the stephen king novel is a great example. i am going to move on to something a bit different and it also has to do with something that you have been mentioning which is changing your mind about things that you wrote in the past. unlike many scholars with a background in the literature of the previous centuries, although your background is extensive and you never historicise the gothic in absolute terms, you also have an interest in the critical framework of deconstruction. this is particularly visible in your 2007 book metaphor, especially in the seventh chapter “metaphor, difference, untranslatability,” although i can see a deconstructive form of writing throughout all of your texts. i have enjoyed reading this text very much. this book was published after the ones on the gothic that i have been mentioning so far. has your latest interest in deconstruction added something new to your perception of the gothic? dp: yes, thank you again for that question. i am interested in deconstruction. on the positive side i find that derrida’s writings and kristeva’s writings provide a kind of jouissance, a kind david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 208 of enjoyment in the twists and turns of language. i think deconstruction can almost be defined as an alertness to the ways in which words never say exactly what they mean, or they never mean exactly what they say. i think that it is extremely important not to get boxed in by the notion that words have a conventional acceptable history and that they can be defined entirely in the ways in which they are defined by dictionaries, because words are always small explosions. almost any word that you can use has other meanings hidden or partly visible within it. and that is only thinking about them in terms of one language and its etymology. of course, when you spread that out across a range of languages, matters become even more complex. i also think that deconstruction is in a sense a development of a political position and specifically a marxist position, though very few deconstructive thinkers would agree with me. what marx said about ideology before the term ideology got debased was that ideology is a way of purveying the world upside down so that you are taught to ignore the real causes of things— in this case the real economic causes—and to focus on the superstructure as though that is what causes things, which it does not. this is a complicated situation. i do not want to go into any more detail about that but i think that deconstruction follows on from that, even while not wanting to, in trying to expose this kind of upside-down view of the world that we are continually exposed to. that is on the positive side. on the negative side i think the real problem is with the ways in which deconstruction has been interpreted as the possibility of a slide into relativism. and i worry increasingly about whether that connects with or has been made to connect with the current discourse of fake news because when deconstruction says “there is nothing outside text” (158), then it is in danger of saying “therefore, there is no such thing as pain,” and pain for me is the touchstone. you could say there is no such thing as death because different cultures view death differently. i can understand that, some cultures do not acknowledge death. that is grand, good for them. i wish we did not but there we are. and some religions do not acknowledge death, and that is good too, that is absolutely fine. but pain for me is the touchstone, you cannot not acknowledge pain. it is real, it is physical, and i do not think deconstruction has a rhetoric for coping with that, or with the many painful experiences that most people in the world go through. another thought i have had recently about deconstruction is that it is a kind of experimental criticism and i like that. it is good, we all need to experiment, but it does seem to me that it coincides rather oddly with a decline in what we used to think of as experimental fiction, except of course for flash fiction, which i think of as fiction for those with a short attention span. i am not very fond of flash fiction. to go back to deconstruction, i think we are at a kind of cusp, or maybe beyond it, in relation to high theory. i am not sure anybody cares much about high theory anymore, i think there are more pressing concerns, mainly about the realignment of the canon so that we no longer have a kind of male supremacist view of writing, a white supremacist view of writing. these things have moved on amazingly in the last twenty years and that is obviously all to the good. i have got a brief footnote to that which i suppose is partly about the current pandemic. i am interested in the way in which deconstruction david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 209 speaks about different kinds of speed of writing and reception. thinking about that took me back recently to paul virilio, a major cultural critic who about forty years ago wrote a book called speed and politics (1977). what he was saying was that the real privilege in political life has to be geared to speed so that if you can travel faster, you can conference faster, you can influence faster, you can be part of the world as it moves. if you are stuck in one location you cannot influence how things go on. it is a fairly obvious point but he goes into great detail about different speeds. in a different book of his he says that “the invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck” (89). i think that is the most wonderful, crisp statement about how every advance produces or can produce its own disaster and i take it that is the situation with the pandemic. i presume it has been spread by global air travel, i presume also in the way of inversion people now, or governments now, choose to try to blame poorer communities, communities who do not have access to power. they choose to say that they spread the pandemic. actually, it is spread by the super-rich and their air travel. if you look at the figures for how many people travel by air, 3% of the people in the world do 90% of the world’s air travel. my point about the pandemic, if i just continue that for a moment, is that what we have at the moment is a speeding up. international conferences are a speeding up of the interchange of ideas, and the current problem with physical presence and interaction might speed things up even more. but there is also a slowing down. will air travel ever really function again? interestingly, a great deal of gothic has traditionally been about claustrophobia. we think of poe above all. we think about all those castles of radcliffe and lewis and so forth. and we think about imprisoned heroines, and cells, and prisons, and dungeons, and all the associated paraphernalia of incarceration. a rare exception actually is the remarkable writer algernon blackwood who writes almost entirely about agoraphobia, but he is different. but i am interested in looking forward into whether that is going to change because i do not now know whether our greatest fear is of isolation, that is, claustrophobia, or fear of public spaces and what might be transmitted through them as in a pandemic situation. and i am interested to know how gothic will emerge and cope with it. i am sure it is doing so already but there is a long way to go, i think. mfj: i am really fond of deconstruction but i do fear as well the tendency to relativise everything and that it might lead to something dangerous. i think it has a lot of possibilities. i do have just a small last question about your own creative writing. you have written eight volumes of poetry, the last but one is titled those other fields (2020). this is about events that happened in 2020 so i would like to ask you about the process of writing during such a difficult time. i think, personally, that the gothic mode survives because it allows us to deal with the unspeakable, so i am therefore curious about how it feels on the other side, where you have to deal with writing about these unspeakably difficult times. dp: those other fields is my last book but one, i published one since then called stranger (2020). those other fields was straightforwardly political but it was mainly focused on refugees, which david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 210 of course has now become not the major issue of our times, which i think is a problem because the whole issue of refugees is how we code our fear of the other. stranger has more ghosts. but the poems i am writing now seem to be more about the local, the immediate small incidents that happen outside my study window. so maybe that reflects the way in which we have all been driven back on ourselves during the pandemic and the questions are, i think, about how we will behave when we are freed from lockdown, how we are beginning to behave as lockdown loosens up. will we rampage or will we emerge blinking into the sunlight? just one very small point. i do not know about other parts of the world, but in the uk we have had the continuous repetition of this terrible mantra “it is what it is.” that is supposed to make you feel at ease with things and not mind too much about lockdown and so forth. well, hegel often implied, in his dismissal of common sense, that actually things are not exactly what they are, and the urban dictionary online that you may know is especially good on “it is what it is.” it says that “it is what it is” is a code for saying it will always be what it is. so it is a way of telling us not to even think about change, not to imagine a future. and the gothic is all about imagination, about possibilities, maybe especially when they are transgressive, so i think we need to resist that terrifying thought “it is what it is.” open q&a session anna marta marini: i see that you have recently worked on mexican gothic. i found some remarks that you made on the border very interesting, about how the border can be a place where gothic happens in a way. could you briefly say a few words on why the mexican gothic interests you and how you find the border connected with terror and horrific realities and narratives. dp: i have written a couple of things on mexican gothic but i know i am no expert. i think the mexican gothic is a kind of classic, maybe the classic site of intersection between what i was mentioning earlier about folk traditions and cultural appropriation, because mexico can obviously be seen in very large-scale terms as a continuous struggle between the indigenous and the imperialised. that has been so for a very long time and it was accentuated again during the trump years one hopes it might be a little more relaxed now. so, on the one hand, you have the mexican traditions of the day of the dead, the death cults and so forth. on the other, you have the continuous threat of invasion or takeover from the bully in the north. that i think produces a very interesting form of gothic which is of course full of fear and anxiety but also is curiously jaunty. i am thinking here of laura esquivel. water like chocolate (1995) is an interesting book of course in itself because of something i was saying earlier about gothic being a kind of hybrid form, never quite as pure as we would like to think. and that, of course, is a hybrid book. it is a cookbook and it is a book about a family, and it is a book about real terror, isn’t it? or at least fear. but it has a jaunty kind of tone to it, it seems to me, as though in mexican gothic, to quote heidegger, the terrible has already happened (164). something terrible has happened in the past and whatever happens now cannot be worse than david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 211 that and we will manage somehow to survive it. that is the kind of tone i get from mexican writing which i get from very few other countries. i do think that gothic can sometimes be not just a site of transgression, also a site of resistance. and i think there is some resistance evident in mexican gothic, some resistance of being entirely taken over, even when most of the films being watched in mexico are us films. although that is the case, i still think that their reception is not the same as it would be in the us, so there is still some mexican différance. on the other hand, i think one must be careful not to romanticise that mexican resistance because mexico has numerous indigenous difficulties and problems which will not be solved by simply reading its literature. but i do find that site of cultural resistance and reaffirmation of the mexican past very intriguing, and especially because it is done through a lot of motifs which in themselves are quite terrible. octavio paz, as we all know, saw mexico as imbued with a kind of a culture of death. amm: i think i do agree with you because i find mexican fiction of this kind to have a connection with the past, but it is like a ghostly past. it is like they are haunted and if, in a way, as you say, that can be a place of resistance, it can also be a place of not moving on. it has these two different sides and i think you can feel that in the fiction. the border, in a metaphorical and material sense, is an absolute place for that. i would like to find, though, a lot more mexican fiction on the border, but i think it is still too present. they write about haunting from the past if it is the colonial past or the pre-colonial past, or even the revolutionary times as is the case of laura esquivel’s book, but i think it is still too early for a real gothic of the border. dp: gothic of that border takes you back to cormac mccarthy, doesn’t it? and the trilogy. amm: i find, for example, the movie the sleep dealer (2008)—which is science fiction but not quite—to have a kind of a gothic edge, because there are migrants that are attached to machines and they work from mexico in the us attached to virtual reality machines. so i think maybe this border fiction is still trying to find somehow a way. dp: i think that is partly what separates some gothic fiction in the british tradition from lots of other gothics, because i think it is fair to say that in the british tradition we do not have those anxieties about borders because we persuade ourselves that we do not have any. so we are ignorant of borders as we are ignorant of invasion. or pretend we are. or have been for a long time. of course, everywhere is invaded. there is a wonderful poem in the eighteenth century by defoe called “the true born englishman” (1701) which just lists all the various peoples that the so-called true-born englishman in the early eighteenth century is actually made up of. we are a hybrid race and so on and so forth. but we do not care to acknowledge that, i think. laura álvarez trigo: paul virilio’s idea of technology and speed in relation to power is often discussed in relation to marshall mcluhan. i come from the field of communication and media studies and i am very fond of mcluhan as a theoretical framework. i was thinking of this david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 212 very commonly quoted idea in his work that “the medium is the message,” which is the title of one of his books, and i wanted to ask you if you had any comments that you could share with us in terms of the gothic modes and the gothic strands that you were mentioning at the beginning, especially how they are expressed through different mediums, if there is a specific way in which the gothic modes and strands vary according to medium and which one, if any, is a better medium for that to be expressed. dp: i do not know that one could say that one is better than another. i suppose you might say that some media are more culturally effective than others and i suppose that mixed media, visual and verbal, are always bound to be more effective in some way. it seems to me now that if effectivity is the main criterion, rather than quality or subtlety or density of thought, then, obviously, a meme is going to have more power than any other kind of form. i am thinking just as one example of a meme called slenderman. slenderman got everywhere but what was the purpose? what was the point? or is the point that there is no point? is the point in simply showing that you can get anywhere with a meme, regardless of what that meme might mean? or was the point to instill and foster a kind of fear parallel to but not effective in the way of a serial killer or stalker. was that the point? lat: i think it might be a bit both in the sense that it worked because it came from a creepypasta, if i am not mistaken, and in the sense that these ideas are spread on the internet and just the capacity to get to a wider and wider audience. that is what is dependent on the medium, that it is more effective by virtue of the numbers. dp: that virtually is a kind of pure example of the medium is the message. the message is nothing more than the medium in which it is conveyed. the message is the speed at which you can convey. but the image does not mean anything beyond that. slenderman is a slender image. maybe that was the point. an image without depth. an image that is purely of the surface. virilio might like that idea, i think. natalia kopytko: i would like to ask you whether modern gothic authors are interested in using mythological patterns in their works. dp: some are some are not but also, again, it depends on what you think of as modern gothic authors. the authors that come to my mind most immediately as using mythological patterns or making up new mythological patterns are, firstly, russell hoban, who i do not think one would call a gothic author in every way, but his novel riddley walker (1980) is certainly involved with issues of fear and terror and uses a huge mix of myths to sustain that. also neil gaiman who, again, i am not sure one would think of as a gothic author, is clearly involved all the time with remaking myths and making them into more fearsome versions. if you go back a little way then i suppose a more acceptedly gothic writer would be angela carter who is often, i think, taken within the gothic canon, at least again partly but not wholly, and is obviously interested in myth, in fairy tale, in folklore, and gains some of her most terrifying david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 213 effects from that. angela carter is a very good example, i think, of how difficult it is to speak these days of a wholly gothic author and it is interesting this has gone in two different ways. if you look in the bookshops, then you do not find shelves all devoted to the gothic, you do find shelves devoted to horror and in the bigger bookshops you find shells devoted to what is now called “dark romance.” but what is mostly on those shelves are books written specifically to figure in the charts and the sales pertaining to those labels, whereas a writer like carter would figure, i think, in the general fiction shelves. if you try to classify her you would use such a number of labels, and the first, of course, will be “feminist,” or “women’s fiction” depending on what kind of labelling one is using. then you might think of gothic. you would never think of horror, not in relation to carter. you might think of satire. you might think of cultural criticism. there are all manner of ways in which you could seek to classify carter’s works, her fiction as well as her essays, but none would be wholly satisfactory. it comes back to the whole way in which literary criticism tries to deal with questions of genre, which now has become more complicated because of course there are many, many writers, maybe the majority of writers, who write to fulfil a specific genre demand. there is nothing wrong with that, but it does mean that we now have this odd divide between genre fiction, so-called, and general fiction, which is not in a genre. is it superior? is it literarily superior to genre fiction? is it simply unclassifiable? is it better or worse for that? it is a very strange situation, i think. and, of course, it affects gothic because gothic has never, i think, really emerged as a genre in quite that sense. it is an academically reputable genre. some would say it is the academically reputable version of horror. that is possible, but it does not sell in the bookshops in itself as gothic. it might sell through horror, it might sell through certain kinds of graphic novel, it might sell through dark romance, always mediated through some other more popular, in inverted commas, form, because gothic has this curious position of being and having been immensely popular without ever being popular. it has had a kind of ring of something slightly above popular genres. paul mitchell: one of your quotes that i always use when i teach the gothic and cinema is where you call the uncanny “a savage negation of history” (“shape and shadow”, 260), which i think is a wonderful phrase to think about the uncanny and the way in which it makes us think about how we look at the world so that we re-see this world in which we think we live and that we think we know. i just wanted to pick up on something you talked a few moments ago, about borders. and i do not know if you are familiar with the british tv series humans (2015). it is a really interesting piece because it is actually about kind of sentient robots, it is about ai and this kind of thing. but, in reality, it is kind of allegorical because it is about the migrant crisis and it is about britain becoming swamped by these kinds of beings that come from without. do you think that in the twenty-first century one of the hallmarks of the gothic is that it has become more political, that it has become a force of subversion and resistance to big government? humans, for example, is very much about the government that we have had david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 214 in the uk for many years, about living under austerity and these kinds of politics. that very much in the us has become a way to reflect on what has happened in the past few years with the obama administration and then the administration of trump. so whether it is becoming a lot more kind of politically focused than perhaps it was historically. dp: well, that is a really interesting question. i think my short answer is i would hope so. i think that one way of going at that would be to think about the history of the zombie and how that has always been infused to an extent with the political. think back to the early film white zombie (1932), by victor halperin, which obviously was making some extremely important points about slavery and exploitation, at the same time doing it in a way which was itself almost a kind of exploitation film. this is a brilliant kind of melding of popular form and political content. then, if you think through with the zombie, i suppose the zombie becomes a kind of multivalent code for all manner of oppression. and i think that those relations between the notion of the zombie, slavery, and mindlessness have become more focused in recent years. again, i could allude to works i have already mentioned. stephen king’s cell which is about zombification through cell phones. a very potent thought that is. and again, world war z, where the zombies prove capable of invading even the us. one of the wonderful things about world war z is how different nations react in different ways, which gives good scope for max brooks to talk about different national priorities and to give his own views on how those national priorities might themselves be exploitative and open to critique. i will not mention examples right now but there are plenty of them in that book. i have said i hope you are right and i also think you are right. i have read quite a bit of lockdown poetry recently, some of it published poetry, some of it just written by colleagues i am in poetry groups with, and that motif of the coming of the mindless is very much there. but i think we have to be very careful because when you are speaking of zombies, then you can be speaking of that which is done to people, zombification by governments, or by capitalism, or by slave control. but by speaking of zombies, you may also be depriving sources of possible resistance, or, indeed, dare one say, revolution, of true agency. so i think the political force of that can go in two directions. pm: i think it is interesting you mentioning the zombie as well given the context that we are in with the pandemic, and to see how that now plays out in terms of whether there is a space of zombie movies and zombie graphic novels which reflect that notion of people being contaminated in some way. david punter | the dark thread reden vol 3, no 2 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.3.1835 215 works cited derrida, jacques. of grammatology, trans. gayatri chakravorty spivak. johns hopkins university press, 1998. heidegger, martin. poetry, language, thought. harper & row, 1971. jackson, rosemary. fantasy: the literature of subversion. routledge, 1981. king, stephen. cell. hodder & stoughton, 2006. mcluhan, marshall. the medium is the message. penguin, 1967. punter, david. “shape and shadow: on poetry and the uncanny.” a new companion to the gothic, edited by david punter. wiley-blackwell, 2012, pp. 252–264. —. the literature of terror: a history of gothic fictions from 1765 to the present day, volume 1. routledge, 1996. reynolds, aidan, and william charlton. arthur machen, a short account of his life and work. dufour, 1964. virilio, paul. politics of the very worst. semiotext(e), 1999. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 59 redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice tana-julie drewitz university of duisburg-essen abstract science fiction enables us to explore alternative notions of gender, identity, and biotechnological advancements. a potential new futuristic universe may depict societies that might have different social norms. anthropocentrism limits our imagination in that humanity becomes the vantage point from which we judge other forms of existence. the notion of posthumanism challenges human exceptionalism, thus constructing a narrative based on post-anthropocentrism. this article addresses the issue of displaced discriminatory power structures with special attention to reconfigurations of humanity that challenge the self/other dichotomy. the cyborg as a hybrid identity disrupts the traditional dualisms of embodiment (mind/body) and identity (organism/machine). it examines octavia butler’s dawn (1987) and ann leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) in order to show how the protagonists deal with power struggles that are quite different from conventional narratives of power in western scholarship such as white patriarchal capitalism. the protagonists of both novels become posthuman cyborgs by moving beyond the normative human condition, with gender as a key aspect. butler’s lilith biologically transcends her human self by fusing with an alien other, thus representing biological posthumanism. leckie’s breq merges an enhanced human body with an ai consciousness and becomes an exponent of technological posthumanism. i argue that the anthropocentric issues of racism and sexism are not supplanted by post-anthropocentrism, the protagonists rather subvert anthropocentrism in different contexts of posthumanism. this project sheds new light on science fiction narratives written by female authors—with a focus on afrofuturism, in the case of butler—and explores how the protagonists are exponents of unique non-binary gender configurations. keywords: posthumanism, science fiction, collective will, hybridity, cyborg, transformation. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 60 i. introduction: advantages of science fiction the age-old question of what it means to be human is prevalent in almost every field of study. whether it is the evolution of the modern homo sapiens in biology, pivotal events in human history, or sociocultural aspects of spirituality in theology: despite ongoing debates in the course of philosophy, the mysteries of humankind have yet to be unraveled. speculative fiction in literature becomes a tool for writers who seek to explore the privilege of calling oneself a human being. science fiction (sf) in particular is a genre in which a plethora of possible futures can exist, presenting readers with interesting alternatives to the present real world. mary shelley’s frankenstein or the modern prometheus (1818), an exponent of gothic fiction, is also regarded by some scholars as the first real sf narrative because it includes scientific and ethical issues in a story about a mad genius creating a being that wreaks havoc upon society: an unholy monster that confronts its maker with the harsh reality of its (in)human nature. humanity as a concept can be understood in two different contexts. on the one hand, it is the whole of humankind on earth as in a bipedal, intelligent mammal that has populated the planet. its biological constitution (humanness) includes a developed consciousness, advanced intelligence and an s-shaped spinal cord. on the other hand, humanity represents the virtue of acting on kindness, compassion, and benevolence. the concept of becoming “more than human”—moving away and beyond humanity—is represented by the notion of posthumanism. the two primary texts analyzed here, as it is shown through close reading, deal with the transcendence of humankind in two different ways. in octavia butler’s dawn (1987) humanity comes in direct contact with an otherworldly intelligence called the oankali. protagonist lilith iyapo wakes up on an unknown spaceship which turns out to belong to the aliens who kept her and other humans asleep for 250 years in suspended animation after a nuclear war rendered planet earth uninhabitable. having been rescued from a gruesome death, lilith and the other survivors are to become part of a plan to re-colonize earth. lilith is chosen to teach a group of forty humans how to survive on their former planet as well as to mentally prepare them to meet their alien saviors. with genetic engineering and biological modification as key themes, this novel is a great example of how popular culture representations of stem and gender operate within different ideologies and in terms of power struggle. ann leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) tells the story of a rogue soldier by the name of breq who seeks revenge on the leader of the radch empire. nineteen years before, she had been in the service of the radchaai as an artificial intelligence (ai) in the warship justice of toren. after an act of betrayal which leads to a traumatic incident resulting in her new posthuman existence, she now seeks revenge, traversing the empire in search of her enemy. this narrative revolves around augmented cyber bodies, militarized ai, and a far-reaching conflict while featuring a prominent female protagonist. thus, it fittingly portrays the interrelationship between stem, gender, and popular culture. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 61 i argue that the two novels feature characters that transcend human standards in favor of enhanced bodies. in that sense, both narratives convey the notion of posthumanism in terms of biology (in butler’s case) and technology (in leckie’s). the two novels are both the first installments of a trilogy and can offer new ways of evaluating two different decades of american sf writing. hence, a comparative reading of both narratives is useful in revealing similarities or even crass differences in depictions of leading female characters. in order to examine the extent of posthumanism and its realization in american sf, it is necessary to define the concept more clearly and develop three main aspects significant for its further analysis: the existence of a collective will, the transformative process of becoming posthuman, and finally, the state of being more than human. prominent scholars such as donna haraway and katherine hayles have analyzed different conceptualizations on decidedly the most well-known figuration of posthumanism, namely, the cyborg. this article utilizes their theoretical frameworks along with critical perspectives from other academic writers (such as ivan callus and stefan herbrechter; francesca ferrando; and cary wolfe). the following analysis is founded on three aspects concerning posthumanism in american science fiction: a collective will, transforming into a posthuman subject, and the consequences of hybridity. in terms of a collective will, both novels feature a type of overarching authority that seeks to unite humans under a collective mentality. this is either a benevolent alien civilization, or an expanding military power. arguments concerning the construction of a collective will center on the idea that an individual can only thrive if they find their place in a collective culture. as a second aspect of posthumanism, becoming posthuman involves abandoning one’s humanity in order to become a posthuman subject. technological fragmentation represents one way of transforming, while biological and social assimilation in the form of alien kinship represents the other. finally, the third aspect entails the consequences of existing as a posthuman cyborg. hybridity means either worrying about cyborg anxiety or having a new sense of identity by dismantling dualisms and embracing non-binary modes of existing. essentially, it is crucial to question whether a supposed non-hierarchical society truly liberates individuals who are disadvantaged by prejudice and discrimination, or if it constrains them even more so. ii. defining posthumanism posthumanism refers to the notion of going beyond the normative definition of being human: a different body, species, or perception. generally known as critique of the liberal humanist subject from the age of enlightenment, this interdisciplinary field has scholars drawing connections to known critical theory terms such as postmodernism or poststructuralism. for cary wolfe, posthumanism “comes both before and after humanism: before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world” (xvi-xvii). ivan callus and stefan herbrechter define tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 62 posthumanism as “the cultural condition occasioned by twenty-first-century biopolitics, technoculture, lifescapes and all the desires and anxieties arising therein, as well as the discourse that studies all that” (145). there are two consequences to moving beyond the human condition. on the one hand, posthumanism poses a threat to humanness—human nature, in an anthropocentric sense—, which might lead to its rejection. on the other hand, however, the idea can be embraced based on the positive implications of a posthuman condition that encompass a better future for all life on earth. a closer look at different contemporary critical, philosophical, and cultural approaches to the concept contributes to clarifying what this key term means for the present literary analysis. human exceptionalism establishes a primacy of human over non-human animals, while also creating social hierarchies within the human realm. posthumanism as a concept dismantles human power structures entirely and alternatively creates a non-hierarchical environment. thus, it challenges human exceptionalism and reimagines “particular modes of inquiry from perspectives that do not privilege human needs, human ideas, and the general bias toward human centrality“ (pilsch 312). in this sense, humans are not put above animals but are rather regarded as equals to them. postanthropocentrism replaces anthropocentrism in that human social issues such as racism, sexism, and homophobia are supplanted by speciesism, which then becomes a new form of distinction, or worse, prejudice and discrimination (callus and herbrechter 150). new differences emerge as the humans become obsolete: exotic others such as the robot, the extraterrestrial, and the cyborg challenge the dualistic nature of the human condition (ferrando 30). yet, the question remains if a non-hierarchical society can truly exist without a new authority rising to take control. the extent of postanthropocentrism in the novels must be further examined in the context of a collective will. posthumanism breaks down boundaries and the barriers of traditional binaries. one figure that embodies the blurring of strict separating lines is the aforementioned cyborg. commonly known as a cybernetic organism, this figure can also act as a link between polarizing concepts. two leading scholars in this field, donna haraway and katherine hayles, have published works concerning this iconic paradigm. both see its significance for the posthumanist discourse, albeit in slightly different contexts. in haraway’s “a cyborg manifesto” (1985), the cyborg is a political myth which explores boundaries that “have resulted from post-world war ii technoscience: those between human and animal, organism and machine, and the physical and non-physical” (leitch, “donna haraway” 2188). within the framework of feminism, an oppressed individual (e.g. women) becomes a liberated posthuman subject, freed from constraints of the conventional narratives of power like western white capitalist patriarchal society (csicsiery-ronay jr. 396). in reference to ferrando’s non-hierarchical future, haraway’s cyborg transgresses certain dualisms such as self/other, mind/body, and even male/female (leitch, “donna haraway” 2217). posthumanism offers a future society that abolishes distinctions based on binary systems, tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 63 creating a world in which we, as posthumans, are all hybrid identities, either cyborgs (human/machine) or maybe chimeras (human/animal) (2191). hybridity in both novels is depicted differently, with one narrative focusing on various blurred concepts and the other highlighting the anxiety arising from the merging of the self/other. hayles’s approach to the posthuman incorporates aspects of information theory and cybernetics. in her groundbreaking theoretical framework how we became posthuman (1999), hayles touches upon several terms that describe the steadily increasing virtual quality of human life and social interactions. for her, the emergence of the posthuman is due to the scientific developments since the second world war that transformed the liberal humanist individual (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2161). this shift in favor of virtual existence privileges a disembodied state of existence over a materially embodied one: “in the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism” (hayles 3). these material-informational beings do not possess a will of their own as there is “no a priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will” (4). this leads to the construction of a collective will. iii. collective will: alien saviors and imperialistic radch in the fictional worlds of both novels, a new authority seeks to unite humans under a certain mentality. it can either be the benevolent exotic other, as is the case in butler’s alien oankali, or it can appear in the form of leckie’s militaristic radch empire. both factions are characterized by a specific drive to ameliorate humanity in terms of existence and culture. in this sense, the new authorities dismantle individual autonomy and become all-embracing omnipresent systems (callus and herbrechter 145). in other words, human self-will fuses with the authorities’ other-will resulting in a collective will (hayles 4). the following sections deal with two different conceptualizations, one where individuality is negotiated and one where it is unwillingly suppressed. the premise for dawn deals with a planet earth that has been devoid of human civilization for nearly three centuries after a human-induced nuclear war rendered it uninhabitable. the only humans who are left in this postathropocentric scenario are on a space vessel floating just in proximity to the planet. protagonist lilith wakes up in a strange room in which she feels like a prisoner. after some time one member of the alien species keeping her there eventually reveals himself to her. this is the first time lilith comes in contact with the new other. the male humanoid being with an androgynous voice and strange worm-like tentacles all over his body triggers xenophobia, or rather speciesism, in the protagonist due to the “pervasive need to alienate from oneself those who appear to be different—i.e., to create others” (zaki 241). tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 64 in the conversation with the oankali male, lilith learns more about the aliens. they have three sexes: male, female, and ooloi, with the latter being gender neutral and playing a crucial role in oankali reproduction (butler 22). the ooloi are genetic engineers, their bodies being living science laboratories where they mix their species’ male and female genes to create offspring. physiologically, they differ from the other sexes with their four arms and two elephant-like trunks. as a people, the oankali regard themselves as gene traders whose existential purpose involves collecting genetic material from various sentient and intelligent species in order to create new forms of life: “we trade the essence of ourselves. our genetic material for yours … it renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species” (40). this practice of genetic engineering from an alien other exemplifies biological posthumanism. in their opinion, humans are erroneous beings who need guidance. the destructive nature of humanity apparently stems from the combination of a high level of intelligence and the tendency to fall into hierarchies (ferrando 28; butler 38). to avoid a nuclear war from ever happening again, the oankali seek to correct the human flaw in order to establish a peaceful togetherness. in exchange for the humans’ willingness to mate and produce hybrid offspring, they will be offered the chance to return to earth to restart a posthuman civilization: “that’s part of the trade … to the rebirth of your people and mine” (butler 42-43). already, the collective will set for lilith and the other survivors seems like a good alternative to letting the human species go extinct. this human-alien partnership “suggests the birth of something new through the fusion of two previously separate entities” (bollinger 37). both sides would mutually benefit from each other by surrendering an aspect of their self (self-will) in return for a part of the other (other-will). however, not all humans on board agree to this collective will. social hierarchies based on discrimination and difference reappear, hence confirming humans’ need to constantly create others in order to reassert one’s own true human self (zaki 241-2). this can be observed later in the novel when lilith starts mentally preparing the other humans to meet the oankali. after a couple of days, the group is divided into two factions: those who trust lilith and those who outright reject her leadership while accusing her of conspiring with the enemy (butler 159). the oankali represent the new exotic other that seeks to create a postanthropocentric future without hierarchies that would lead to conflicts and violence. the collective will is therefore established on a positive note: the aliens are a helpful authority wishing to help humanity in order to ultimately help themselves. however, the universe of ancillary justice paints a different picture. this plot takes place in a far-away future in which humanity has moved on from earth into the outer reaches of space. militaristic conquest of the imperialistic radch empire has thus shaped the galactic community in this narrative. for nearly 3000 years, this empire has been tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 65 led by the entity known as lord of the radch, anaander mianaai.1 unlike butler’s alien narrative, this collective will is mainly based on obedience rather than benevolent guidance and can be observed in two ways. the first involves the radchaai society, while the second refers to the construction of military warships with their artificial intelligence systems. the latter specifically constitutes technological posthumanism. using violent annexations to expand its space territory, the radchaai seek to bring civilization to planets and assimilate the respective cultures into the prevalent radchaai society. in their language, radchaai means to be civilized and any member of the radch is addressed as citizen (leckie 62). here, then, the binary labels citizen/noncitizen replace binaries known to us such as male/female, abled/disabled, or heterosexual/homosexual. people are either radchaai or non-radchaai, civilized or not civilized. although this new authority seeks to unite humanity into one great collective through space conquest, the radchaai society is not inherently egalitarian. a class system divides radchaai citizens into privileged and less privileged houses. therefore, the radch does not represent an ideally non-hierarchical society (ferrando 30). the large military arsenal includes various spaceships called swords, mercies, and justices which are used for annexations. the justices function as troop carriers and the built-in computer system of the ship is completely automated; ais control every part of the ship, which includes up to twenty technologically modified humans that act as extensions for the military unit. this clearly represents technological posthumanism, as the cyborg segments are hooked onto a collective unit in which they are completely under the other-will. the self in this case is the ai program in the ship, a sort of technological nervous system that controls various connected bodies. these ancillary segments are a part of a powerful operating system (clark 133) and have no will of their own due to ai-controlled brain implants. the fusion of self-will and other-will results in a perfectly cohesive collective will, like a virtual puppeteer who controls the former human cyborg segments with invisible cybernetic strings. prior to becoming breq, the protagonist used to be the ai of the ship justice of toren one esk. both names refer to one subjectivity,2 it is only the form of existence that has changed. flashback chapters date back nearly two decades, recounting the events that led up to the birth of breq including the ai self and its service under lieutenant awn. with the ai being everywhere, the ship as an entity floats above the planetary orbit while also being 1 the nature of this being is not defined more closely. it would be plausible to assume that this character might also be an artificial intelligence or a powerful human who has managed to create a large empire: “when most people spoke of the radch they meant all of radchaai territory, but in truth the radch was a single location, a dyson sphere, enclosed, self-contained” (leckie 235). 2 given the first-person narrator in the novel, breq and one esk (the ai as well as the actual space ship justice of toren) essentially represent the same identity with the same subjectivity. the only difference is the 19/20 year time jump and the material manifestation. during the analysis, i refer to one as the other but in different contexts. i will refer to the ai as “it” and use the pronouns she/her for breq. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 66 omnipresent on the ground with its many ancillary bodies “i stood at the entrance … i also stood some forty meters away … i saw all of this, standing as i did at various points surrounding the temple” (leckie 13-15). with its distributed cognition and multiple points of perspective, the ai is comparable to a surveillance camera. it is in a constant state of simultaneous embodiment and disembodiment best described as a “new posthuman ontology of simultaneous corporeal substance and cybernetic disembodiment” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). the ship, its brain (ai), and the external connectives constitute one being that corresponds to hayles’s concept of the posthuman subject. she defines the latter as a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo a process of continuous construction and reconstruction (hayles 3). when a new segment is attached the configurations change, a new body must adapt to the collective will. as one esk recounts: “things were always a bit clumsy while i got used to a new segment. sometimes [it] simply would not function properly, and then it would have to be removed and replaced” (leckie 172). like a computer that needs fixing, the construction of ais and ancillaries combines cybernetic elements with biological components. the enslaved victims of the radchaai imperial conquest are used as military equipment, acting as parts in a machine that operates under a collective consciousness. in this sense, the whole system is comparable to the borg, a recurring antagonist from the popular television series star trek.3 what callus and herbrechter refer to as an omniscient “all-embracing system” (145) is represented on the one hand by sympathetic alien oankali, who do not mean any harm to the human survivors. on the other hand, ancillary justice only depicts technological posthumanism to some extent, including the dehumanizing aspect of slavery. compared to the aliens’ plan to eliminate humanity’s proclivity towards hierarchies, the radch empire still adheres to social ones in the form classism. iv. transformation: becoming posthuman, assimilation, and fragmentation the process of becoming more than human entails a transformation from the normative human condition into a posthuman one. on the one hand, seeing as “technology frequently operates in science fiction to dissect or disassemble the body for purposes of reconstruction and modification” (seed 64), a change in terms of technological posthumanism appears in the form of a computer malfunction or a disrupted flow of information codes. biology, on the other hand, works with modification, where the subject adapts to a new way of life through posthuman kinship, intimacy, and physical enhancements. 3 the borg travel through space (and occasionally time) enslaving species they might find useful for their ever evolving collective. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 67 in the alien narrative dawn, the humans on board of the ship become posthuman through assimilation into oankali culture. this happens through interdependency and scenarios of strange intimacy between the species. the following sections deal with the protagonist’s journey into a posthuman existence which consists of her familiarization with members of the alien species and the attainment of certain capabilities. the plot takes a turning point when the ooloi reveal themselves to the awakened4 humans, a pivotal moment that marks a point of no return from humanity. lilith starts becoming posthuman when she starts bonding with the family of the oankali male that she had first met upon waking. slowly but surely, she starts to feel more comfortable among them by living with them and learning about their culture. her relationship with the gender neutral ooloi nikanj grows stronger, which ends in them becoming mates in the course of the novel. the ooloi develops external sexual organs—sensory arms that encase a starfish-like sensory hand—in an apparent oankali puberty during which lilith stays close to it providing food and emotional support. this level of intimacy reaches a climax when a human male is brought into the relationship. when the male and female oankali mates arrive to bring their gender neutral ooloi partner into their home, lilith joins them (butler 82). being in this polygamous alien-human relationship signifies lilith’s transition into a posthuman existence. not only does ooloi nikanj facilitate the protagonist’s social posthuman condition, it also enhances her physical capabilities: ooloi drug-induced brain chemistry change allows lilith to speak and understand the oankali language (butler 79-81), a heightened perception had her efficiently navigate of the ship’s plant-like walls (102), rapid healing prevents injuries. biologically speaking, lilith is human no more. yet, there is also a rather negative aspect attached to that. after spending more time with their designated alien, the humans start to rely on them and, as a result, cannot “tolerate the nearness of anyone except their human mate and the ooloi who had drugged them” (193). the scenario evokes a comparison to drug withdrawal. in this case, the ooloi let the humans become addicted to their biochemical and olfactory signals. by adapting to the otherworldly culture with their bodies (sex) and minds, the post-earth humans acquire a posthuman sense of self: “the choice to embrace the society of the other (the alien) means that the individual, of necessity, rejects his or her own centre (earth)” (kerslake 15). despite the oankali’s apparent dominance, posthuman intimacy also works the other way around. the ooloi themselves are also dependent on their oankali male and female mates as well as their human ones: “ooloi did not endure well when bereft of all those who carried their particular scent, their particular marker … metabolisms slowed, they retreated deep 4 both the adjective “awakened” as well as the verb “awaken” in its other tenses are deliberately spelled with a capital letter throughout the novel. it signifies a specific group of people who have been kept in suspended animation and are now waking up to a new future. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 68 within themselves” (butler 206). the relationship between the species is thus interdependent. with each moment both species spend together, the lines between self/other dissolve. from the humans’ perspective, they move beyond the normative category of “humankind.” thus, they become posthuman by becoming an other. the protagonist of ancillary justice is not human and never has been, which is why her transformation involves moving from an imitation of the human condition to a posthuman existence. one esk’s connection to the ancillaries dissolves and the ai manifests in one single cyborg body, namely breq, a process i will refer to as fragmentation. in order to determine her posthuman condition, it is vital to ask whether an artificial human condition in terms of cognition (psychology, emotion) is a necessary prerequisite for becoming posthuman. this is done by finding evidence for (near) human qualities exemplified by the ai and its relationship to lieutenant awn. a partial transformation of the ai one esk occurs in a scene set in the temple of ikkt. the lord of the radch pays a visit to the city ors, currently under control of lieutenant awn. a false accusation involving conspiracy theories among two citizen groups results in the brutal execution of innocent civilians. unfortunately, the lord of the radch does not tolerate accusations lacking evidence and orders the citizens’ execution by the ancillaries of one esk. a mysterious signal interference renders the ai temporarily powerless as it becomes partially disconnected from its segments: four hours before dawn, things went to pieces. or, more accurately, i went to pieces. each segment could see only from a single pair of eyes, hear only through a single pair of ears, move only that single body … from that moment i was twenty different people, with twenty different sets of observations and memories. (leckie 112) although the segments are not entirely detached from the collective will of the ai, the collective subjectivity still suffers from a form of disembodiment. the cessation of the information flow results in a fragmented subjectivity (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). yet, the former human victims do not truly reclaim a sense of their selves; the incident merely resembles a technical malfunction. the final fragmentation of one esk’s subjectivity leads to the creation of single cyborg breq. after the debacle in the temple, the lord of the radch confronts the lieutenant about the incident. in a turn of shocking events, it is revealed that lieutenant awn had served her purpose as a pawn of the lord’s inner conflict. for some time now, the alien presger have been corrupting a part of anaander mianaai’s identity, which resulted in the lord’s split personality: “i am at war with myself … i have been for nearly a thousand years … at war over the future of the radch” (leckie 245). this puts ancillaries like one esk in a predicament, as it cannot disobey the lord. but obeying one part means automatically disobeying the other. lieutenant awn is caught in that crossfire, and having done nothing wrong, she is still betrayed by one anaander mianaai. the lord orders ship ai one esk to execute its own tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 69 superior. yet, due to the ship’s loyalty to awn, its segment one var immediately attacks one of the lord’s bodies in an act of retribution. this ultimately leads to the fragmentation of the ship ai: “i formed intentions, transmitted orders to constituent parts … and then i fell to pieces” (248-49). segment one esk’s decision to rebel is an expression of free will that turns into a “mutation within a paradigm of pattern/randomness” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2162). it is this segment that would then become breq. in this case, the fragmentation is a technological malfunction, a disruption caused by the informational overdrive of the ship ai. its bond to lieutenant awn is so strong that the guilt of executing her caused the sudden detachment of one ancillary body from the collective. here, breq defies hayles’ concept of the posthuman cyborg because from that moment on, the protagonist develops a self-will that is distinguishable from an other-will (4). what hayles refers to as the “displacement of organic presence by information pattern” (leitch, “n. katherine hayles” 2163) cannot be applied to the transformation that creates breq. in her case, the shift is reversed as the information that used to flow from ai to the different bodies is permanently disrupted; pattern/code (information flow in ship) is replaced by an organic/mechanical presence (ancillary cyborg body). after the single segment escapes, the ship explodes, on board the corrupted part of the lord and the other radchaai soldiers. the collective consciousness of justice of toren is destroyed, or deconstructed, but not entirely lost due to the fragment that becomes breq. moving from the artificial human condition, she is now reconstructed in a posthuman condition. following haraway’s principle of the cyborg subject, “[a]ny objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly” (leitch, “donna haraway” 2204). the destruction disassembles the ship as an entity, but the posthuman emerges as the fragment of one segment detaches just in time. likewise, hayles’ concept of construction and reconstruction (3) is also exemplified in this scenario: the ship is deconstructed and put together again in a different manner. this complex process of fragmentation in ancillary justice aptly represents technological posthumanism. in spite of her insistence that she is not human, breq/one esk does show feelings of love and devotion, even if they are just an imitation of human emotions. these sentiments persist after the fragmentation, which is the sole reason for breq’s quest for revenge. having the courage to face the all-powerful lord to avenge lieutenant awn. a temporary lover of awn, lieutenant skaaiat, points out the strong bond: “you’re the ancillary, the non-person, the piece of equipment, but to compare our actions, you loved her more than i ever did” (leckie 370). love out of loyalty is equally as valid as romantic love in human relationships. compared to the “true” human lilith who biologically transitions into a new being, the protagonist of ancillary justice moves from an imitation of the human condition to a true posthuman one. whether it is posthuman intimacy or fragmentation, lilith and breq must come to terms with their new situation. to further analyze how each form of posthumanism tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 70 is conveyed in both novels, it is imperative to examine the state of being more (or less) than human. v. hybridity: being posthuman, cyborg anxiety, and blurred concepts hybridization in posthumanism is “both a notion of human-machine merging and the rather specific nature of the merging envisaged” (clark 131). haraway’s cyborg is either a being that blurs dichotomies such as human/machine or human/alien, and transgresses binaries which have, in the western world, resulted in categories like male/female or masculinity/femininity. while dismantling these dualisms might liberate an individual, it can also lead to negative reactions when blurring distinct entities means abandoning a part of one’s identity, an aspect represented by the self/other paradigm (mack 194). the protagonist of butler’s dawn exemplifies a blending of the human self and the alien other, hence, she is a posthuman cyborg. while this hybridization liberates lilith in multiple ways, it also has the negative consequence of alienating her from fellow humans. during her time teaching the group survival skills, lilith is met with open hostility because of her alien advantage. in the final battle scene, she must choose a side in the conflict between humans and nonhumans. lilith must defend her leadership along with her posthuman identity when specific members of the group revert to old patriarchal modes of dominance and prejudice like racism, homophobia, and misogyny (butler 159). retaining one’s humanity becomes a battle cry for the resisting humans. binary dichotomies reappear as a reaction to cyborg anxiety, which is simply the fear of humanity becoming impure through means of an other influence: “[i]n times of genetic breeding, the boundaries between human, animal and machine are being eroded, questioning traditional ‘purities’ and provoking new visions of hybridity and anxieties about purity as a result” (callus and herbrechter 150). in the context of butler’s dawn, the term cyborg anxiety describes the fear of anyone who is not truly human attempting to contaminate human purity. contamination connotes illness, toxicity, and even poison (mack 191), therefore it is not beneficial for the human self. three men from the group challenge lilith’s leadership and by doing so they reject the merging of self/other. curt, peter, and gabriel openly antagonize her by accusing her of not being human enough, even insinuating that she might just be enjoying her sick privilege with the oankali. in contrast to a non-hierarchical posthuman society, these three male characters symbolize toxic patriarchal masculinity. in terms of gender dynamics and performativity, protagonist lilith transgresses traditional behavioral concepts of gender roles only to a certain degree. she questions her leadership skills as a woman and thus contemplates her own femininity. she feels like she is too vulnerable and not mentally prepared to be responsible for parenting a group of forty humans. she imagines if a man were to be chosen as leader: “he tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 71 could undermine what little civilization might be left in the minds of those he awoke5. he could make them a gang. or a herd. what would she make them?” (butler 118). lilith is selfconscious of her womanhood and slightly frightened by the prospect of dealing with violent men who openly challenge her authority. in one scene lilith exemplifies typically masculine traits when she uses violence to end violence within the group. lilith quickly intervenes to stop a sexual assault by fighting the aggressors with her enhanced strength. while the men use violence to assert patriarchal superiority, lilith uses it to reinforce human decency by protecting her fellow woman: “nobody here is property … there’ll be no back-to-the-stone-age, caveman bullshit! … we stay human. we treat each other like people, and we get through this like people” (butler 178). lilith urges everyone to remember the virtue of humanity—compassion and respect for one another—an aspect that might also be interpreted as a call for a posthuman way of going beyond binary distinctions. one could go ahead and call her androgynous as she exemplifies both feminine as well as masculine characteristics (zaki 246). yet seeing as she no longer fits into the normative definition of human, she need not adhere to any of the aforementioned categories. a compromise might be achieved by employing the neutral dichotomy of assertive/reserved. it would be even more fitting to say that as a posthuman lilith is non-binary due to the influence of the alien oankali. the conflict between benevolent aliens and human aggressors reaches a climax in the final parts of the novel. human extremist curt radically labels those who willingly choose the oankali’s protection and anyone who displays posthuman capabilities as traitors. he is responsible for the tragic death of the protagonist’s mate joseph, after seeing the ooloi nikanj heal him (butler 220-23). joseph’s posthuman condition is seen as a threat, genetic modification represents alien corruption: “this conflict is expressed in xenophobia on part of the humans, and the idea of the posthuman, the blurring of boundaries between the human, the animal, the machine, the male, and the female … poses a threat, a dystopia, to the human character” (georgi 263). in the face of an increasing hostility from the humans, the people in the group start accusing each other of cooperating with the oankali and thus betraying the human species. it is here where lilith boldly solidifies her posthuman identity by accepting her self/other union during the final battle: “lilith found herself standing with the aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans” (butler 227). her conscious decision confirms her cyborg identity: she possesses human and alien elements by supporting the other. even though lilith the cyborg transcends the human/alien dichotomy, this affirmative hybridization is only temporary. lilith herself feels cyborg anxiety and feelings of abjection when she learns of how the ooloi nikanj had inseminated her through its genetic engineering 5 spelling in novel, see footnote 4. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 72 skills. the protagonist realizes how she truly feels about the collective plan to create a hybrid species and calls her unborn child a monster. her attitude reflects some of the other humans’ stance when she wishes for the human condition to end with dignity and not to become a messy posthuman condition (butler 246). consequently, the “question of hybridization versus purity becomes a matter of species survival, asking whether any process of genetic manipulation, no matter how well intended, should be permitted to triumph at the exposure of another species’ extinction?” (roof 129). this pregnancy is not entirely consensual: for the sake of a collective will, lilith was gently pushed into a risky leadership but is met with hostility and rejection due to cyborg anxiety. with this “monster” growing inside of her she rather unwillingly abandons her human condition. moreover, by challenging her leadership the awakened survivors challenge her humanity. breq as a cyborg embodies the traditional merging of human/machine, albeit in a different manner: she is not a human subjectivity inside a machine (hayles 238) but rather an artificial subjectivity in an enhanced female body. ancillary justice is exemplary for “texts that have served to disrupt or challenge normative cultural understandings” (merrick 241) by creating a gender-neutral society and featuring a protagonist who challenges the dichotomies of sex (male/female) and gender expression (masculinity/femininity). radchaai society does not adhere to the strict gender binary, every aspect is quite ambiguously gendered. this is reflected by the language: “radchaai don’t care much about gender, and the language they speak … doesn’t mark gender in any way” (leckie 3). breq has some difficulty when she meets people from cultures that have linguistic markers for gendered identities. in one instance she tries to assume a non-radchaai perspective when she observes a crowd of people: i saw all the features that would mark gender for non-radchaai – never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place … thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicatefeatured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. a profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. all of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. (283) radchaai gender norms go beyond the set dichotomy of femininity/masculinity. there is not opposition or distinction between the two, blurring or even escaping the categories is normalized. as a result, it would be fitting to consider the radch empire a cyborg society not only in terms of their military technology (ai and segments), but also in reference to their cultural gender ambiguity. technology then becomes “a site of cultural anxieties about gender” (merrick 246) by adding inorganic elements to organic bodies and having former humans transcend gender. it cannot be ignored that this is quite negative seeing as the ancillaries are crudely objectified. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 73 the cyborgs lilith and breq both transgress gender and identity dualisms. the pivotal scenes mentioned above solidify their posthuman condition. hybridity in technological posthumanism works with the oscillating flow of information and the constant change of perspective, whereas the biological posthumanism in butler’s alien narrative revolves around the anxiety of becoming other and abandoning one’s (human) self. vi. conclusions butler’s dawn (1987) and leckie’s ancillary justice (2013) depict two future scenarios in which humankind exceeds its normative condition. with the help of posthumanism we can question humanity’s centrality in the universe as well as become aware of the possible consequences of a post-anthropocentric world through literary narratives. it might be non-hierarchical under the guidance of an alien species and therefore a positive prospective. another possibility entails the emergence of a new military power with the need to civilize space. this may include uniting different places on many planets under a negative collective will, annexations, and technological slavery. the protagonists of both novels become more than what they once were, acquiring skills but also losing some they might have had before. their transformation gives them enhanced capabilities which solidifies their hybrid identity and existence. in sum, the narratives of butler and leckie exemplify biological and technological posthumanism concerning the aforementioned aspects of an omniscient authority, a change of physical constitution, and the transgression of boundaries resulting in a liberation from certain social hierarchies. as such, the core arguments of this essay develop haraway’s and hayles’ work on the posthuman cyborg further in that hybridity can also be regarded in a biological context. regarding other genres of speculative fiction, this new approach to science fiction, horror, or even fantasy narratives opens up new methods of interpreting characters who have hybrid identities that go beyond the typical human/machine cyborg. posthumanism offers a path to redefine humanity in ways that liberate some people in terms of physical and social dualisms, whereas it may evoke anxiety in others at the mere mention of nonhuman entities. it is effective because it challenges our understanding of what it means to be human. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 74 works cited bollinger, laurel. “symbiogenesis, selfhood, and science fiction.” science fiction studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2010, pp. 34–53. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/40649584. butler, octavia e. lilith’s brood. new york, grand central publishing, 2007. callus, ivan, and stefan herbrechter. “posthumanism.” the routledge companion to critical and cultural theory, 2nd ed., edited by simon malpas and paul wake, routledge, 2013, pp. 144–53. clark, andy. “cyborgs unplugged.” science fiction and philosophy: from time travel to superintelligence. 2nd ed., edited by susan schneider, wiley-blackwell, 2016, pp. 130–45. clarke, bruce, and manuela rossini, editors. the routledge companion to literature and science. routledge, 2011. csicsery-ronay jr., istvan. “the sf of theory: baudrillard and haraway (la sf de la théorie: baudrillard et haraway).” science fiction and postmodernism, special issue of science fiction studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1991, pp. 387–404. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/4240093. ferrando, francesca. “posthumanism, transhumanism, antihumanism, metahumanism, and new materialisms: differences and relations.” existenz, vol. 8, no. 2, 2013, pp. 26–32. georgi, sonja. “posthuman dystopia/critical dystopia: octavia e. butler’s parable series (1993, 1998) and xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989).” dystopia, science fiction, post-apocalypse. classics, new tendencies, model interpretations, edited by eckart voigts and alessandra boller, wissenschaftlicher verlag trier, 2015, pp. 253–67. hayles, n. katherine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. the university of chicago press, 1999. kerslake, patricia. science fiction and empire. liverpool university press, 2010. liverpool scholarship online. doi: 10.5949/upo9781846314018.002 leckie, ann. ancillary justice. orbit, 2013. leitch, vincent b., editor. the norton anthology of theory and criticism, 2nd ed., w.w. norton and company inc., 2010. —. “donna haraway.” the norton anthology of theory and criticism, 2nd ed., w.w. norton and company inc., 2010, pp. 2187–220. —. “n. katherine hayles.” the norton anthology of theory and criticism, 2nd ed., w.w. norton and company inc., 2010, pp. 2161–187. mack, michael. contaminations: beyond dialectics in modern literature, science and film. edinburgh university press, 2016. merrick, helen. “gender in science fiction.” the cambridge companion to science fiction, edited by edward james and farah mendlesohn, cambridge university press, 2003, pp. 241–52. pilsch, andrew. “posthuman cities.” the city in american literature and culture, edited by kevin r. mcnamara, cambridge university press, 2021, pp. 312–30. roof, judith. “genetics.” the routledge companion to literature and science, edited by bruce clarke and manuela rossini, routledge, 2011, pp. 124–34. tana-julie drewitz | redefining humanity: posthumanism in the american science fiction narratives of octavia butler’s dawn and ann leckie’s ancillary justice reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1837 75 schneider, susan, editor. science fiction and philosophy: from time travel to superintelligence. 2nd ed., wiley-blackwell, 2016. seed, david. science fiction: a very short introduction. oxford university press, 2011. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? university of minnesota press, 2009. zaki, hoda m. “utopia, dystopia, and ideology in the science fiction of octavia butler (utopie, dystopie et idéologie dans la science-fiction d’octavia butler).” science fiction by women, special issue of science fiction studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 1990, pp. 239–51. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/4239994. 4 reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 55 disability and comedy: challenging stereotypes onscreen sara martínez-guillén abstract characters with disabilities or any type of impairment have been present in film productions since the early stages of cinema. however, they seldom become main characters in mainstream media and in particular in comedy films, as their body doesn’t belong to the acceptable norm. comedy has been known as a tool to challenge the system and yet it seems scarcely used to represent disabilities, drama being the preferred choice for narratives revolving around disabled protagonists. this article focuses on two films in which comedy and drama are combined to tell stories centred, indeed, on people with a disability (come as you are and the peanut butter falcon, both released in 2019). using different humour strategies such as incongruity and superiority, their main characters successfully challenge society, its conventions and its stereotypes—with incongruity mechanisms the films deal with what is considered “normal” and with superiority mechanisms they challenge power relations. the analysis will show how comedy is a genre capable to give its disabled characters the possibility to express themselves for an audience that is also being represented on screen—whether it is disabled viewers who can identify with the protagonists or abled ones who see their behaviours challenged onscreen. keywords: disability studies, humour studies, film studies, stereotypes, incongruity. doi: 10.37536/reden.2023.4.2038 over the years, plenty of films whose main focus has been characters with disabilities have been produced, from the early stages of cinema, for instance the film freaks (1932), to more recent productions as the winner of the best feature film award in the 2022 oscar ceremonies, coda (2021). the presence of the disabled body in mainstream cinema is undeniable and the diversity characterising this group can offer has also been portrayed, spanning from physical disabilities to cognitive ones. to this, the depiction of mental health issues can also be added, which has been brought to the attention of many filmmakers due to the growing awareness shown in western society in recent years. hence, the representation of an array of disabilities has been present throughout the history of cinema. however, it can be argued that the presence of disabled bodies in film representation throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has mostly been circumscribed reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 56 to fleeting moments and rarely delved into. likewise, the public presence of actors with disabilities has been scarce and their roles have been invisibilised. for example, when zack gottsagen—the main star of the film the peanut butter falcon (2019)—appeared on the stage at the oscars ceremony in 2020, it was the first time that an actor with down syndrome officially participated in the event. although he was there to simply introduce an award and was not nominated for one himself, he was received with a standing ovation and gave visibility to disabled people in the entertainment industry. at the same time, while audience members can find many examples of the disabled body disseminated on screen, few of them centre their narratives on disabled protagonists and even less storylines go beyond overly dramatic tones and struggle stereotypes. in this paper i analyse two films, both described as dramedies (a blend of comedy and drama usually with a happy ending), arguing that the combination of these two macrogenres gives the films room to create different associations with disabilities and more nuanced representations—thus allowing the narrative to challenge and problematise expectations and stereotypes that have become commonplace in mainstream us culture. the examined films were both released in 2019 and both include characters with some type of disability as their protagonists: the peanut butter falcon (tpbf henceforth) and comes as you are (caya). the first one follows zak (zack gottsagen), an orphan with down syndrome, whom the healthcare system has confined in a retirement house. to follow his dream of becoming a professional wrestler, he manages to escape with the help of his roommate. while being chased by eleanor, a worker in the retirement house (dakota johnson), zak meets fisherman tyler (shia labeouf) who is also on the run and helps him reach his destination: salt water redneck’s school, a wrestling institution that has been closed for some time. still, the three characters find a way for zak to wrestle, becoming a family in the process. conversely, come as you are tells the story of three disabled friends who go on a road trip to a brothel in canada to lose their virginity. the film follows visually impaired mo (ravi patel), harry (hayden szeto), who has a non-specific degenerative illness and needs a wheelchair, tetraplegic scotty (grant rosenmeyer), and their driver sam (gabourey sidibe). as they decide to flee without informing their families, the group goes to extreme lengths to avoid being traced. however, and to their surprise, when their plan is discovered their parents do not oppose it, thus allowing them to reach their destination. on the topic of disability and film, it is important to take into account the perspective through which the movies are told. films can, for example, rely on a constructionist approach that sees “disability as a social process in which no inherent meanings attach to physical differences other than one assigned by a community” (davis 1995, 504). in other words, people with any impairment that skews from the “norm” are labelled as “disabled” by society because their bodies do not belong to what the community has established as the standard or “normal” body. the films examined challenge the reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 57 establishment of the socially constructed normal body, they do so through the perspective of disabled characters and the development of their narrative, starting from the premises of their plots. in the peanut butter falcon, zak has no place in society because he has no known relatives that could take care of him and he has down syndrome, hence he is not allowed to live independently. even though he is a self-sufficient adult, he is permanently incapacitated by the system. in come as you are, the three friends have to go on a journey to experience their sexuality, as the notion of disability often neglects the possibility of a functioning sex life, as well as the existence of sexual needs. 1. humour theories besides highlighting their constructionist approach, to understand how these films and their main sequences work their use of humour has to be analysed as well. comedic events can be explained through three main theories related to the notions of superiority, incongruity and relief. furthermore, it is fundamental to understand that “there are three available positions in a joking exchange—teller, audience and butt” (davis and ilott 2018, 8). this means that a subject can be the one telling the joke, listening to it or the object of humour, and according to helen davis and sarah ilott “more than one position can be adopted by the same person in a given exchange” (8). the relevance of the positions in a joking exchange is observed in superiority theory. john morreal defines this theory as the one that sees “laughter as expressing our feelings of superiority, over someone else or over a former state of ourselves” (2005, 65). davis and ilott focus on a more negative aspect by seeing “laughter as aggressive and deriving from a sense of superiority in the self in comparison with the inferiority of those forming the butt of the joke” (2018, 7). hence, two branching categories of superiority can be distinguished. on the one hand, in “aggressive superiority . . . the target can clearly be identified: a so-called butt of the joke” (vandaele 2002, 239), that is to say, the direct object of mockery. on the other hand, “affirmative superiority” in turn is divided into “circumstantial superiority, humor solving and institutionalized humor” as they all “affirm rather than destroy” (vandaele 2002, 241). this type of humour can be defined by power relations and thus points at the superiority a social community may have over another (able bodies against disabled bodies), but it can also “denote moral superiority by laughing at sexist, racist, or homophobes” (davis and ilott 2018, 8). another important theory regarding humour is related to incongruity, which can be defined as the mechanism that “sees laughter as arising from the connection of something that fails to match up to people’s expectations, according to how they have been conditioned to experience the world” (davis and ilott 2018, 9). this kind of joke interprets a situation as humorous when “there is something odd, abnormal or out of place, which we enjoy” (morreal 2005, 66). while in most situations a simple contradiction, an unexpected one-liner, may make us laugh, there are other instances when incongruity theory reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 58 alone cannot explain humour. to explain this, jeroen vandaele (2002) gives the example of stutter, which in itself is not amusing but this speech disorder can be turned into a joke by considering the theory of superiority as a trigger of humour (228). finally, the last approach is relief theory which became popular thanks to sigmund freud’s work, and it is “based on the idea that laughter releases a form of nervous energy” (davis and ilott 2018, 10). freud distinguished “innocent” jokes from “tendentious” ones (freud 1962, 91–92). the latter is the one that breaks the restrictions from oneself and the conventional boundaries that society is setting (davis and ilott 2018, 10). as davis and ilott highlight, freud also examined how humour could function as a “rebellion against social structures” (10), which could also mean destroying stereotypes. it is through this theory that the ultimate goal of the comedy of these films can be understood because it can be used to rebel against stereotypes and the normalisation of the body. 2. humour and disability humour can thus be used to tackle taboos in society regarding minorities and the body and these two films do not miss the chance of using humour as a tool to challenge stereotypes. the first two theories mentioned above (incongruity and superiority) are important because they help explain how comedy is used to challenge what has been defined as the “normal” body. it is important to note that the idea of a normal or healthy body has been challenged by the development of the field of disability studies. it is worth mentioning in this sense rosemarie garland thomson’s book extraordinary bodies: figuring disabilities in american culture and literature (1997), in which she coins the term “normate”; and lennard j. davis’s book enforcing normalcy: disability, deformity and the body (1995) which introduces the term “normalcy.” by considering humour as a taboo-breaker, the first clue explaining why incongruity theory is important is found: the protagonists of the films analysed represent a type of body which is not normalised. in her book, alison wilde (2018) states that she tends to “lean towards a preference for incongruity-based explanations, in the belief that we need to illuminate how people have been misrecognised, as a prerequisite for representational change” (33). so, tackling taboos through comedy can be a good device to break or at least challenge stereotypes. the most evident characteristic of these narratives is the fact that their protagonists are all disabled characters. as wilde argues, usually “supporting roles are where many disabled characters are to be found” (2018, 20). hence, simply by having a story centred on characters with impairments is per se breaking the norm, as they are protagonists expressing their needs and their articulated personality, whose identity escapes the stereotyped moulds that disabled secondary characters usually fall into. however, analysing the films only through the perspective of incongruity would be incomplete. i would argue that including the other two theories give a more detailed and reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 59 deep analysis of the power comedy can have. especially by focusing on superiority theory, it can be observed how humour is not only a weapon for the films but also for the characters they represent. as mentioned above, a “moral superiority” stance (davis and ilott 2018) is used to laugh at those who usually assume to be superior. hence, superiority in humour can also come from the member of a minority. it is, however, less common to see because in order for this to happen there needs to be a shift in power relations. usually, the member of a minority is placed in an inferior position within the group and thus has more chances of becoming the butt of the joke—but sometimes the tables can be turned. films like the ones analysed, which are developed from the perspective of disabled characters, allow for the power relation to change slightly and so create comedy leveraging different configurations of superiority. this means that the abled bodies are expected to become the butt of the jokes as, in this recentred narrative, the disabled ones are in a dominant position of superiority. moreover, for many audience members, this type of humor “can seem odd and disturbing” because western society “equates disability with personal tragedy” (bingham and green 2016, 6). the equation of disability with tragedy leads viewers to find it inconceivable to create humour with impairments, and as such to ignore the possible power comedy can entail for this group. when describing the humour of a stand-up comedian who has a disability, shawn chandler bingham and sara e. green (2016) argue that “his set is a mirror and a measuring stick, provoking not only laughter but also thought and discomfort” (2). this ultimately leads the viewers to reconsider their “preconceived notions of what disability is and is not” (bingham and green 2016, 2). hence, the use of humour can be twofold: entertainment and eye-opening. for a group, like the disabled, belonging to a minority, humour can become a weapon. by presenting a relaxed, seemingly naïve, setting comedy “provides tension relief, ammunition for attack or acceptance into a group, and a way to challenge and unveil social norms” (bringham and green 2016, 16). similarly, after interviewing stand-up comedians, sharon lockyer (2015) argues that their comedy had secondary functions “related to the different ways in which disability can be affirmed through comedy via increasing understanding and educating audiences about disability” (1404). hence, humour can serve non-disabled audiences to learn that “the problem is not the impairment per se, but the attitudes and structures that render the impairment disabling” (reid et al. 2006, 630) furthermore, rebecca mallet (2010) argues that “mainstream disability comedy is the product, the symptom, and the cause of negative and discriminatory attitudes, with only certain sort of comedic utterances from certain sorts of comedic authors being deemed acceptable” (paragraph 10). therefore, two different types of humour in regard to disability can be identified. on the one hand, tom coogan (2013) distinguished between “disablist humour” and “crip humour.” the former can be defined as the “faux transgressive humour” while the latter as the “humour that expresses and helps reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 60 constitute group solidarity and values” (coogan 2013, 8). i believe that these two films are using crip humour to support the visibility of disabled people. although it may not be clear if the protagonists’ actions are heroic or still tragic, the films are using humour to increase the awareness of disability rights and improve the representation of the reality of disability. nevertheless, as janine natalya clark (2022) comments “whether humour is constructed as offensive will often depend on many different factors, including an individual's particular circumstances, the context in which comments are made and the intent behind them” (1544). however, it is important to note that the line between humour and offence can be very thin, and sometimes what one considers funny others can regard as offensive (a disparity existing even among people belonging to the same social or cultural group). as michael biling (2005) argues “it is necessary to understand the context in which a joke is told and not just determine its meaning in the abstract” and it is important to understand it as “a more general ideological or political context” (32). one such context can be national or cultural which “plays a part in what is marked as humorous, whether it is received as such or not” (davis and ilott 2018, 15). there are, however, more limited context because “there is a difference between a joke between friends, and the utterances of a famous comedian on a weekly panel show” (davis and ilott 2018, 16). this brought the need to differentiate between comedy and humour. while humour “infiltrates every area of social life and interaction, even rearing its head in situations where it is not normally regarded as appropriate,” comedy is a “more formal staging in club venues, broadcasting or film” (lockyer and pickering 2005, 3). what is more, this division, as davis and ilott state quoting hans robert jauss (2000), “‘horizon of expectations’: audiences will expect to find cause for laughter in the way the world and its inhabitants are represented” (6). specifically, tpbf and caya showcase two different ways in which to represent disabled characters in comedy not as the butt of the joke. this is accomplished through the creation of crip humour thanks to a shift in power relations. the films analysed in this paper showcase forms of crip humour where the use of humour serves the filmmakers to challenge the norms in western society. the use of incongruity mechanisms is used to criticise some stereotypes usually associated with disabled people, mainly incapability and, in the specific case of caya, sexlessness. power relations are opposed using superiority mechanisms. and, lastly, caya is the only one with some comedy associated with relief theory and here it can observed how it is used to express frustration and possibly anger of scotty. through the analysis of some scenes and sequences in the films, i try to demonstrate how these films find a way to use humour as a positive aspect for disabled characters. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 61 3. the power to make rules: the peanut butter falcon the opening scene in tpbf shows zak’s unhappiness and the wish to live his life outside of the retirement house. his plan consists of convincing an elderly woman to create a distraction so that he can run to the main exit and escape. even though they put all their efforts into carrying out the plan, zak is caught seconds after he crosses the door. their facial expressions and body language—as they are clearly trying not to look suspicious— suggest that the sequence could be related to a prison escape, the only difference being that the characters involved are a disabled young man and an elderly lady at a retirement home. the comedic effect is thus accomplished by having unexpected people recreate a kind of scene that usually would belong to an action prison-escape film with athletic, non-disabled, young characters. in this scene, the plan is represented with a simple drawing made by zak (fig. 1) and the payment for his accomplice is just some pudding. the seriousness of their expressions while making sure that nobody can see them, is in stark contrast with the way the unfolding of the plan is represented. in order to avoid speaking, he draws a sketch to explain what he needs from the elderly woman and what her compensation would be. showing this drawing only adds to the incongruity embodied by the scene and helps to make the opening scene of the film funnier. the drawing, however, seems to be made by a child and connects with the idea of zak being permanently seen as a child. throughout the narrative, zak goes through a process of growth. the first half of the film shows how zak is considered unable to do certain things that in reality he can carry out by himself. along the journey, he shows (both to himself and the people around him) that he is much more dependable than the healthcare system made him be. zak escapes the figure 1 zak’s drawing, the peanut butter falcon, 2019. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 62 retirement house by sliding through the bars of the window but for that, he needs to take his clothes off to favour the sliding, as if he was being born again. zak finds himself walking around wearing only his white underwear which resembles a diaper. due to the social censure of nakedness, zak walking around in his underwear may create a feeling of awkwardness in the audience which leads to comedy. moreover, as lockyer (2015) asserts, this humour can have the ultimate goal of making the american audience think of the current situation of people with down syndrome in the united states. his nakedness could be considered a representation of the lack of protection the care system has to offer for people with down syndrome or other disabilities. whether intentionally or not, the progress from going naked to being fully clothed parallels the protagonist’s process of growth. zak goes from being treated like a dependent child to being a dependable adult, which is only allowed once he escapes the retirement house to follow his own path/dreams. in addition, his relationship with tyler and eleanor is a fundamental factor in this process. while eleanor believes that the best place for zak is the retirement house where he can be taken care of, tyler considers that zak has to be free to live every experience he wishes to try and hence helps him reach his destination. the differing attitudes lead eleanor and tyler to engage in several arguments regarding how they should treat zak. following this infantilising representation of zak, eleanor and tyler seem to behave like his parents assuming and making decisions on what is “best for him.” zak is allowed to show his independence because tyler opposes eleanor’s views. however, both characters seem to treat zak as a child—incapable of deciding anything relevant on his own—by not including him in these discussions. a good example of this dynamic is when, while on a raft, tyler and eleanor tell zak to practise holding his breath underwater so that meanwhile they can talk about him, giving him no chance to participate in the conversation (fig. 2). in this sequence, zak continues to be portrayed as a dependent child whose parents, tyler and eleanor, seem to be the ones who know better. the seriousness of the scene is interrupted by zak who takes his head out of the water with a fish that he catches. aside from the comedy created by the unexpected interruption, having zak fishing with his mouth offers some tension relief for the audience. after giving the audience two different positions in the debate over the protagonist, the film presents them with some comedic exchange to lighten the tone. at the same time, by having zak interrupting the argument the film puts him to the centre of the narrative again, as the audience focuses their attention on him and not on tyler or eleanor. whilst representing one more step of the process of growth for zak—in which he can prove his dependability—it is also a process of learning for tyler and eleanor, who ultimately create a bond with zak based on respect. similarly, the film takes the viewers through a similar journey of understanding as they are introduced to zak’s perspective. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 63 while incongruity mechanisms in tpbf are used to challenge the inabilities—or, rather, the stereotypes and assumptions—usually associated with disabled people, superiority mechanisms are used to challenge power relations. after agreeing to help zak reach his destination, tyler informs him that there are two rules he has to follow: to avoid slowing his own journey down and that he is in charge and leads the way. zak immediately accepts these two rules, knowing that tyler is going to help him reach his destination. however, when tyler starts walking zak waits a few seconds before following him, which frustrates tyler because he has to stop and wait for him. when asked again what rule number one was, zak responds “party.” considering how easily the rules were accepted by zak, the audience expects to hear a repetition of the first rule which would assert their positions: tyler as the one in charge and zak as the naïve companion who follows suit. conversely, what zak accomplishes with this simple word is to challenge who is in charge. by “stealing” the role of rule maker from tyler and thus challenging his power, zak turns their power positions on their head. zak is stealing the rules from tyler, thus not letting him take charge of the journey. although the answer seems childish, he is in fact challenging tyler’s power over him. and he is most successful here, tyler being one of the few characters that treats him as an equal on most occasions from the start. although the butt of the joke is tyler in this exchange, zak doesn’t retain a great superiority over him as tyler is frustrated and keeps thinking that zak should not slow him down. 4. neglected needs: come as you are as in tpbf, the adult characters in caya are also trying to run away from home. nonetheless, for matt, scotty and mo their escape is temporary as they intend to lose their virginity and return home. similar to zak’s escape, the characters in this film also elaborate figure 2 tyler and eleanor talking while zak has his head under water, the peanut butter falcon, 2019. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 64 a plan, which makes them behave as sort of secret agents as they only have the chance to talk about it when their parents are not around. one of these moments is the sequence in which they go to their rehabilitation centre. in one sequence, matt and scotty meet at the entrance door of the centre where they have discuss details of their plan. in this shot it can be seen how they give each other a quick update in front of the rehabilitation centre. in order to avoid being suspicious, they stay next to each other and avoid eye contact while using sentences like “leave no trace” [00:20:20] (fig. 3). they also need the help of matt’s sister to buy some things they need or scotty needs mo to help him pack his luggage and scotty is very keen on naming their escape plan “operation copulation [00:22:53]. the only difference between this film and any other involving a secret escape or plot, and hence what creates incongruity, is that the ones plotting it are disabled characters. aside from the escape plan, the film presents some more incongruous situations opposing the expectations that western society has created about disabled people. the first and the most obvious stereotype tackled in this film is that disabled people as sexless or asexual. the wish to express their sexual desire for these characters becomes itself a sign of rebellion because american society does not consider sex as a necessity for disabled individuals. hence, their families do not see the need to engage with that aspect of their lives. moreover, being the mastermind behind the trip, scotty is introduced as the character with more sexual desire and the most outspoken one about it. therefore, watching porn is the first thing he does when he finds himself in a motel room without any supervision. visually impaired mo, however, can’t see what is going on in the video, and although he is not so outspoken about his sexual needs, his curiosity is piqued. figure 3 matt and scotty secretly talking about their plans, come as you are, 2019. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 65 consequently, scotty begins to describe to mo what the porn actors are doing on screen. due to the stereotype that imagines disabled people as sexless, having scotty and mo watch porn creates per se an incongruous situation for the audience. on top of that, to have scotty describe it to mo makes the sequence even more incongruous. a few minutes later, the characters realise that they have been traced and thus need to hide from their parents, but as their driver is absent, they have no alternative to escape than driving the van themselves. here the audience witnesses how the protagonists struggle and use their disabled bodies to find a way to drive a car that is not built for drivers with any kind of impairment. matt and scotty become the eyes and mo the hands and legs, all of them working together to become one body and manage to drive. this sequence is meant to be comical because it creates a completely unexpected situation, paired with the unspoken understanding that someone with disabilities can’t and is not supposed to drive a vehicle. the frame construction of the shot of the three in the van, mo being unsure but scotty and matt trying to ensure him that everything is going to be all right is possibly another reason why this scene is comical (fig. 4). their failure to arrive at their destination is expected, but their goal was escaping, and they are more than successful in achieving their escape. it is interesting to realise that most of the unexpected moments follow the contrast between reality—characterised by ingenuity and diverse capabilities—and a mainstream belief of what a capable body is and what it should look like. as wilde (2018) argues, the stereotypes and narrative tropes usually associated with disabilities can be acknowledged through incongruity and only by analysing them and becoming aware of them might there be any change. comedy in this case, although it may look insignificant, is a powerful weapon to criticise the norms and beliefs in western society. figure 4 matt, mo and scotty driving the van, come as you are, 2019. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 66 after driving the van to a ditch next to the road, mo, scotty and matt are found by a confused police officer. being the police officer the embodiment of authority, the audience would expect him to be the one in control of the situation. in this specific case, however, the police officer finds himself overpowered by the three disabled characters. the stereotypes embedded in his perception of disabled individuals lead him to not fully understand the situation he faces, as he does not fully understand how three disabled people were capable of driving a van. mo, scotty and matt take advantage of his confusion and snatch the position of power from him by using sarcasm. the three protagonists are consciously lying to him, aware that he does not know how to talk to them as peers and opposing them would put him in an awkward situation. it is this uneasiness that makes scotty smile and gives wings to his superiority as can be seen in his facial expression (fig. 5). being in this position the three characters find their confidence and correct the officer regarding the terms he uses to define them. scotty corrects his use of “handicapped gentlemen” because he should use “persons with disabilities.” mo corrects his use of “blind person” by saying “excuse me, it’s visually impaired” [00:46:26]. the number of corrections leaves the police officer even more confused and he seems to seek their approval when he calls a tow truck for their van. aside from showing the importance of inclusive language, the film chooses to have the police officer represent the ignorance of most abled bodies by having him be the butt of the joke. the choice of the authoritative figure as the object of comedy is relevant as it shows how stereotypes and ignorance are embedded in almost every strand of society. still, the most relevant feature of this scene is that the comedy is being created by the disabled characters who feel powerful enough to mess with the police officer. figure 5 scotty, mo and matt talking to the police officer, come as you are, 2019. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 67 the police officer comes across as even more ignorant when he states that “my cousin’s brother-in-law is down syndrome, so i know” [00:47:36]. on the one hand, this scene exposes the commonly applied logic fallacy—possibly shared by members of the audience—undergirding the assumption that because one knows of a person with disabilities (in no way related to them) they can understand the experience that all persons with disabilities including these three characters are living. hence, the film is using both the police officer and the audience itself as the butt of the joke. on the other hand, such a misguided conviction on the fictional character’s part lends more power to the three protagonists, because he clearly did not even consider that he had to be corrected. as much as the police officer tries to regain power by appearing as someone who “knows” about disabilities, he only exposes his inferior position in terms of knowledge, inclusivity, and respect. the protagonists find themselves surrounded by people’s ignorance, those who pretend to understand what their lives are like, but they still do not feel like their needs are taken into consideration. hence, their need to escape their parents’ homes to visit a brothel in canada to satisfy their sexual needs, which are completely ignored by everyone around them. by analysing humour through relief theory, the frustration felt by the characters due to their situation can be highlighted. at the same time, by considering relief mechanisms, the audience might observe more examples of power relations shifts or stereotypes criticisms. i argue that these mechanisms are mostly used through the character of scotty, who shows his frustration in life with sarcastic comments. his main objective on this trip to canada is to prove that he can be independent and that he can carry out more tasks without the constant help of his mother. as he is a tetraplegic, he needs constant help from a caretaker, whether it is to eat his meals or to get out of bed. in his specific case the caretaker is his mother, who seldom gives him privacy. not only does he want to lose his virginity, but he also wants to gain some independence. given the tone of the film, it is no wonder that he transforms that frustration into sarcasm. hence, some of his comments can be understood to be a release of his feelings, inner fears, or insecurities. by using some undertones of aggressiveness in his humour he gains power over the people he unleashes sarcasm onto. for instance, scotty is unable to move most parts of his body and, when he meets matt, he notices his athletic body and that his chair is not the right size for him. he resentfully names him “biceps” and makes fun of his wheelchair. this somehow annoys matt, but not enough to call him out. it does, however, show that scotty is taking something that would make matt “more able” than him and turns it into an object of laughter. a similar example could be observed in the police officer conversation (explained above), where scotty is purposely trying to make him feel uncomfortable. by having other characters feel uncomfortable he gains some power over them and reduces his own feeling of non-belonging. in a conversation between these two characters, scotty reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 68 apologises to matt by expressing how spending time with him and mo has made him feel included [01:14:30]. hence the frustration the character feels as—no matter what he did— he did not feel like he could belong anywhere. throughout the trip, he grows to understand that the anger or frustration he might experience possibly hinders him from enjoying his life to the fullest. that is why towards the end of the film this humour mechanism is less present. nevertheless, it is interesting to see how scotty’s attitude may lead the audience to keep thinking about the real situation of disabled people in the united states. at times, those sarcastic comments or looks might be directed at both the character on the screen and the viewers. it is no longer about making the audience slightly smile or about allowing them to laugh, it is more about the reality of the situation these characters go through. however, it is important that while he is using his sarcasm in conversations, he is also trying to gain the upper hand (again a great example is the conversation with the police officer), and in that sense, it is impossible to not consider the type of humour intrinsic to superiority mechanisms. 5. disability humour in context it is quite clear that the audience is receiving permission to find humour in what they are watching, but the question that one should be posing is: who is giving this permission? and in the case of these films, context is extremely relevant and connected to the different layers that configure these two narratives. on the one hand, the social context is set by the film. that is, the characters on screen represent the roles in the joking exchange and the situation they find themselves in is their specific social context. in that sense, if the disabled character is the one creating the humour, it could be understood that permission is given by that character. however, focusing on the “party” dialogue in tpbf, i would argue that the audience is laughing at zak’s reaction, not so much laughing with him. one could also say that zak is willingly messing with tyler, in which case the butt of the joke could be tyler and not zak. in this case, is quite difficult to determine who is the butt of the joke from the audience’s perspective and so it is to determine who is giving permission to the viewers to laugh. that is why the socio-cultural context where the film has been produced needs to be considered. in the united states there have been several social movements asking for a wider range of disability representation in films or series. these two films respond to that request and present some disabled characters challenging the way the healthcare system and us society in general have been managing their disability and everyday existence. the question that really interests this study to fully understand if the films are successful in creating crip humour, is whose permission should the analysis focus on: the one coming from the characters or the one coming from the creative team? as coogan said “is it possible for a non-disabled person with a disability sensibility to utilize crip humour?” (2013, 8). reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 69 when analysing the different approaches to humour in the films, it is not difficult to realise that the films are trying to break taboos and the stereotypes associated with disabled bodies. because of this, i argue that the films analysed create crip humour. however, it is also relevant to consider different aspects that would make one reconsider this argument. to begin with, as i have mentioned above, the representation of zak as a child in need of education can lead to not perceiving any shift in power between tyler and him, as his answer might be considered childish and powerless. this is an important issue because, from my point of view, it is through this shift that these characters gain some power to create the sort of comedy that suits them or that represents them. however, according to the directors of this film, the line “party!” was an improvisation by the actor himself (cooper 2019), which could change the interpretation of the scene. it is no longer a decision made by a writer, but rather of a disabled actor who thought that a specific word was perfect for the moment and was also given the freedom to play his character in whichever way he thought fit. therefore, one could argue that even though the directors and the rest of the cast were able-bodied, gottsagen’s voice was relevant in the characterisation of zak. similarly, although the cast was non-disabled actors, caya was based on asta philpot’s real-life story, which was also the subject of a documentary and a belgian film that ultimately led to the production of this american film. when he went on holiday to spain with his parents, philpot discovered a brothel where he lost his virginity; it was after this experience that he felt the need to make a documentary, “because there are so many barriers and taboos not only surrounding disability but surrounding pretty much every aspect of life that people are just so uncomfortable talking about” (myers 2020). caya was successful in reproducing philpot’s intentions to break stereotypes and taboos and it chose to do it through comedy. the most important aspect these two films share is that one way or another, both of them include the voice of a person with disabilities. nevertheless, caya missed the chance of hiring disabled actors which could have given more power to the humour used in the narrative. in conclusion, humour can be a powerful weapon to tell stories of disabled people. it is not a matter of becoming the hero of their own story but, rather, of showing abled bodied people their own ignorance. a good way—and a possibly easy way, considering the reach of popular culture products such as films—to make people listen to you is when you use a comedic tone, everything becomes less serious but more real. i argue that it is through the use of humour, following the three theories that the films are capable of challenging what has been socially and culturally normalised regarding people with disabilities. furthermore, the most important feature highlighted by the films is the possibility of changing the power relations and hence giving power to the not normalised body. in order to do that, the films have to create crip humour, so as to not be offensive or insulting toward their own protagonists. the representation provided by these two films in the humour might have been mostly written and scripted by non-disabled people but with the reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 70 intention to listen and give voice to disabled people. without their voices and their stories, films about disabilities would be incomplete. come as you are and the peanut butter falcon are two important examples of disabilities in film because they don’t just prove that these stories need to be told in the genre of drama, but they also show how humour can be more than laughter but a weapon to fight against taboos and stereotypes. works cited biling, michael. 2005. “comic, racism and violence.” in beyond a joke: the limits of humour, edited by sharon lockyer and michael pickering, 25–44. london: palgrave macmillan. bingham, shawn chandler, and sara e. green. 2016. seriously funny: disability and the paradoxical power of humor. boulder: lynne rienner publishers. clark, janine natalya. 2022. “on disability, humour and rabbit holes: a personal reflection.” disability & society 37 (9): 1541–45. come as you are. 2019. directed by richard wong. chicago media angels. coogan, tom. 2013. “usually i love the onion, but this time you’ve gone too far.” journal of literature & cultural disabilities studies 7 (1): 1–17. cooper, freda. 2019 “interview: writers/directors tyler nilson & mike schwartz on ‘the peanut butter falcon.’” hollywood news, 19 oct 2019, https://www.thehollywoodnews.com/2019/10/16/interviewwriters-directors-tyler-nilson-mike-schwartz-on-the-peanut-butter-falcon/. accessed 12 sept 2022. davis, lennard j. 1995. enforcing normalcy: disability, deafness and the body. new york: verso. davis, lennard j. 1999. “crips strike back: the rise of disability studies.” american literary history 11 (3): 500–12. davis, helen and ilott, sarah. 2018. “mocking the weak? context, theories, politics.” in comedy and politics of representation: mocking the weak, edited by helen davis and sarah ilott, 1–24. london: palgrave macmillan. freud, sigmund. 1963. jokes and their relation to the unconscious. translated by james strachey. new york: norton garland-thomas, rosemarie. 1997. extraordinary bodies: figuring physical disability in american culture and literature. new york: columbia press. jauss, hans robert. 2000. “theory of genres and medieval literature.” in modern genre theory, edited by david duff, 127–47. london: routledge. lockyer, sharon and pickering, michael. 2005. “the ambiguities of comic impersonation.” in beyond the joke: the limits of humour, edited by sharon lockyer and michael pickering, 180–97. london: palgrave macmillan. reden 4.2 (2023) | sara martínez-guillén 71 lockyer, sharon. 2015. “from comedy targets to comedy-makers: disability and comedy in live performance.” disability & society 30 (9): 1397–412. mallet, rebecca. 2010. “claiming comedic immunity or, what do you get when you cross contemporary british comedy with disability.” review of disability studies 6 (3): n.p. morreal, john. 2005. “humour and the conduct of politics.” beyond the joke: the limits of humour, edited by sharon lockyer and michael pickering, 63–78. london: palgrave macmillan. myers, scott. 2020. “interview with asta philpot.” go into the story, 14 feb 2020, https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/interview-asta-philpot-50e23469dad9 accessed 12 september 2022. the peanut butter falcon. 2019. directed by tyler nilson and michael schwartz. armory films. reid, d. kim, stoughton, eddy hammond, and smith, robin m. 2006. “the humorous construction of disability: ‘stand-up’ comedians in the united states.” disability & society 21 (6): 629–43. robillard, albert b. 1999. “wild phenomena and disability jokes.” body & society 5 (4): 61–65. vandaele, jeroen. 2002. “humor mechanisms in film comedy: incongruity and superiority.” poetics today 23 (2): 221–49. wilde, alison. 2018. film, comedy, and disability: understanding humour and genre in cinematic constructions of impairment and disability. new york: routledge. microsoft word 4.1_galleys.docx andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 3 good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) andrea sofía regueira martín universidad de zaragoza abstract nerds have been a staple of teenage films for decades. although these characters possess great intellectual abilities, their lack of social skills, sense of style, and romantic and sexual experience places them at the bottom of the high school's social scale. despite the prevalence of this character type, girl nerds are scarce. even though this lack of girl nerds can be attributed to the pressure for women—both real and fictional—to conform to beauty standards, it also reflects stereotypes regarding women’s scientific and technical inclinations. considering the fact that nerds are almost always interested in computers, the lack of girl nerds mirrors the stem gender gap while contributing to its perpetuation by failing to provide role models for spectators. this article analyses how booksmart (olivia wilde, 2019), a recent teen film in which the protagonists are two nerd girls, subverts nerd stereotypes by eschewing the makeover trope and placing an emphasis on internal transformation, sorority, and a rejection of stereotypes. keywords: teen film, film genre, nerds, coming of age. teen films have long been populated by stock characters who are defined in terms of their position within the high school hierarchy. while most of these categories are not gendered— and those that are usually have a counterpart, like jocks and cheerleaders—gender is not distributed equally between them. in the case of nerds, the socially awkward but intellectually brilliant kids that occupy the bottom of the hierarchy, there is a strong gender disparity that can be said to reflect society’s longstanding prejudice regarding women’s intellectual abilities and, more specifically, their technical and scientific skills. if we consider that nerds are usually interested in computers and technology, the lack of nerd girls in the teen film genre mirrors— and shapes—the stem gender gap. olivia wilde’s booksmart (2019) provides a rare example of a teen film with nerd girls as protagonists. this article traces the history of the figure of the andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 4 nerd and the representation of nerd girls in teenage films in order to explore to which extent booksmart subverts the stereotypes that have accompanied onscreen depictions of nerd girls through the decades. i. from zero to hero: tracing the rise of the nerd the figure of the nerd has been ubiquitous in us popular culture for decades, predating the rise of the term itself. benjamin nugent dates it back to scribbly, a comic strip created by sheldon mayer in 1936 (56). the oxford english dictionary shows that the press began to report the emergence of the term “nerd” in the 1950s, when it replaced “square” as an epithet ascribed to those who were considered unhip. by the mid-1970s, comedy writers had realised the comedic potential of these underdogs. in 1975, national lampoon magazine published a poster that defined nerds as “an adolescent male possessing … socially objectionable characteristics” like poor fashion sense, lack of athleticism and sexual inexperience (arky and barrett). as jessica m. stanley explains, this definition of nerds not only codes them as male, but also as the antithesis of traditional masculinity, which is characterised by “activity, extroversion, sexual prowess and interest in athletics” (3–4). despite this association of nerds with subaltern forms of masculinity, the figure of the female nerd is part of the saturday night live sketch series that contributed to the mainstreaming of the word nerd as well as to the crystallisation of the nerd stereotype (lane 8). the sketch series “the nerds,” which ran from 1978 to 1980, introduced the figure of the female nerd in the character of lisa “four eyes” loopner (gilda radner), who carried the same narrative weight as her friend todd “pizza face” delamuca (bill murray). as lane argues, the relevance of lisa lies not merely in her existence, but also in the fact that she is given a voice from her very first onscreen appearance, when she states “we’re an idea whose time has come. we’re young. we’re brilliant. we’re nerds. it’s our turn to be popular” (5–8). anne beatts, one of the writers behind “the nerds,” went on to create square pegs (1982–1983), a television comedy series about two teenage nerd girls and their struggles to fit in. the series predates both john hughes’s humanised depictions of nerds in films like the breakfast club (1985) and weird science (1985) and the revenge of the nerds film franchise (1984–1994), which brought nerds to the forefront and initiated a triumphant narrative from which female nerds, like the characters created by beatts, have been markedly absent despite four eyes lisa’s claim that her time had come. the rise of narratives about (male) nerds as triumphant underdogs who challenge and subvert the social status quo of high school and university campuses coincides with the emergence and spread of the personal computer, which initiated what david brooks calls “the great empowerment phase” of nerds, a period of rapid growth in the computing industry during which those who worked in it accumulated wealth and social prestige. the andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 5 simultaneous rise of the tech billionaire1 and of the revenge of the nerds narrative showed teenage nerds that their current social ostracism need not last forever and that they hold the capacity to subvert the social order and find the sort of success that popularity and good looks cannot buy. in film and television, like in real life, nerd girls were relegated to the background. nerd masculinities, on the other hand, became more visible than ever, a trend which continued growing into the twenty-first century and reached its peak with the success of the big bang theory2 (2007–2019) (banet-weiser 153). the erasure of the girl nerd in popular culture echoes that of the women coders and programmers who populated the tech industry for decades before the boom of the personal computer (thompson). the year thompson identifies as the moment in which men took over programming is also the year that saw the birth of the macintosh computer, whose famous advertisement aired during that year’s super bowl and was directed by ridley scott. seven months later, the first revenge of the nerds (1984) film premiered. although differing in tone and intention, both the film and the ad share several elements that mark a shift in cultural representations of nerds and their power. apple’s 1984 ad shows an orwellian dystopia in which masses of workers march in unison into an auditorium where a large screen projects an image of a big brother figure. the monochrome images of the workers are crosscut with the luminous figure of a blonde woman running towards the screen bearing a sledgehammer while chased by the riot police. in contrast with the workers’ uniforms and the police officers’ riot gear, which cover their entire body, the athlete is clad in a white tank top and red running shorts that leave most of her body uncovered, displaying her athletic physique and tanned skin. with a sledgehammer hit, the athlete liberates the workers from the shackles of big brother as they stare aghast. the workers in apple’s ad are coded as male and shown as obedient rule-followers. their clothes are oversized and unstylish, just like those of nerds, and they are set in opposition with athleticism, which is represented both by the riot police—agents of the status quo— and the woman, whose slim and athletic body and blonde hair align her with hegemonic beauty ideals. the riot police, who monitor and punish the workers’ and the woman’s behaviour, find their equivalent in high school and college jocks, whose athletic abilities place them above nerds in the social hierarchy and who often exhibit cruel behaviour towards nerds. the advertisement, like revenge of the nerds, can be read as a story about a group of nerds breaking free from social conventions, which in both texts are dictated by those who are stronger than them. in both cases, women’s bodies are used as a tool through which the male subjects 1 bill gates became the youngest self-made billionaire in 1987, when he was only 31 years old (thibault). 2 although the big bang theory features two female nerds, these characters, who were not introduced until the third season, play a secondary role. additionally, as willey and subramaniam argue, their gendered representation, along with their association with areas of science considered more feminine and their lack of involvement in the nerdy pursuits enjoyed by the male characters can be argued to contribute to “the erasure of female nerds” (21). andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 6 achieve freedom. in the ad, they are liberated from their drone-like existence thanks to the physical prowess of the runner, whereas in the film their final victory comes partly from lewis’s (robert carradine) seduction of betty (julia montgomery). like the ad’s runner, betty embodies the feminine beauty ideal: she is slim, pretty and blonde. through a cruel deceit, the film denies betty sexual agency and presents her body as an object to be possessed. lewis is, by definition, a rapist, and his rape is not only excused but also portrayed as an avenue to love, showing a complete disregard for women’s bodies and agency that, as kendall argues, aligns nerds with hegemonic masculinity (261–69). the woman in apple’s ad is also objectified. even though the workers do not even glance at the athlete, her body is presented as a spectacle for the spectator to enjoy. the runner’s breasts bounce with every step as she runs towards the camera, apparently not wearing a bra, and the spectator’s gaze is fixed on her curves as she gyrates in slow motion. the message in both texts seems to be the same: set yourselves free from convention and you can have this too. saturday night live’s four eyes was right about something: the time had indeed come for nerds and geeks to rise through the ranks. where she was wrong, though, was in believing that this power shift would include her. we now live in a tech-dominated world, where 7 out of the 10 richest people in the world made their fortune out of nerdy pursuits and none of them are women. going down the forbes list, one must scroll past the first 200 richest men in tech to find women like wang laichun and judy faulkner, who started their own tech companies and rose to success in a field dominated by men (“world’s billionaires list”). the perception of tech and, by extension, nerd identities as almost exclusively male that took hold in the 1980s has prevailed ever since, giving rise to the damaging myth of the stereotypical programmer as an antisocial male loner who prefers machines to social interaction, a stereotype that perpetuates the technological divide across genders and, by extension, women’s access to one of the most lucrative industries (miller). this association of tech and men is illustrated by triumph of the nerds, a 1996 documentary series that was a staple in high school classrooms at the time in which the narrator states “it is no coincidence that the only woman in the vicinity looks bored, because this is a boy thing.” this apparently harmless statement effectively depicts tech as a boy’s club where women are not welcome, which may affect young women’s decision to pursue a career in tech. as we will see in the following section, a teenage girl with an interest in stem will also struggle to find points of identification in teenage films, which reflects the gender gap in science and technology while reinforcing the stereotypes that are partly to blame for it. ii. ugly ducklings and weirdos: looking for the teenage nerd girl considering that popular culture mirrors the society that creates it, the fact that the lack of women in science and technology is reflected in films and television comes as no surprise. when it comes to teenage films, even though the nerd stereotype is a staple of the genre, nerd girls are largely absent from it and—when they appear—they are often relegated to the andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 7 background, ostracised or forced to give up their intellect and/or change their appearance in order to succeed (shary, “the nerdly girl” 236; generation multiplex, 46). a considerable number of films, like cameron crowe’s say anything (1989) or alexander payne’s election (1999) feature what shary refers to as “smart girls” (“the nerdly girl” 236): academically successful female characters who are not coded as nerds. in other films, such as gil junger’s 10 things i hate about you (1999), girls are depicted as intelligent and independent characters who inhabit the fringes of the high school hierarchy but whose academic performance is not alluded to. while it is true that teenage films—especially those about middle-class, suburban teenagers— tend to ignore academic pursuits to focus on popularity or on teenage romance and sexual initiations (bulma 86; wood 312), the genre’s reluctance to portray teenage girls as academically inclined is worthy of attention, as it replicates outmoded but unyielding stereotypes regarding women’s interest in intellectual pursuits. when thinking about women’s education, it is important to remember that, until fairly recently, girls did not have equal access to it. by the mid-1930s, the majority of american teenagers were high school students, and institutions were mostly coeducational. however, for the most part the fates of teenage girls were sealed: they were to become wives and mothers. those who did not, had very limited professional choices, mostly in caretaking roles such as teaching and nursing (hine 215; madigan 11–12; palladino 15). the tide turned in 1972, when title ix of the education amendments banned sex-based discrimination in education across federally-funded education programmes. until then, most higher education institutions limited the maximum number of female students, which made the admission process considerably more competitive for women than for men (rose 157-158). as it turns out, women were eager to learn. less than a decade later, the percentage of women completing an undergraduate degree was equal to that of men, and women have graduated from college in larger numbers than men ever since (bryant). considering this, the lack of representation of academically ambitious girls in teen films not only fails to portray the reality of adolescent girls but, as shary argues, it also underplays the role of their intellect and underscores the importance of beauty and popularity, promoting “appearance over intelligence” (generation multiplex 46). the issue of popularity is one of the teen film’s greatest concerns. the genre is inhabited by character types who are defined by the place they occupy within the high school hierarchy, with popular students and jocks at the top and nerds and other misfits at the bottom. these types are easily recognisable through their behaviour, their hobbies, their clothes, and the spaces they occupy. as we saw in the previous section, nerds are not only characterised by their intellect and their interest in technology, but also by a lack of athleticism, inadequate social skills and unfashionable clothes. the stereotypical nerd is scrawny, has bad skin, wears braces and looks like he is dressed in hand-me-downs. when girls are nerdy, they are often portrayed as more attractive and less nerdy than their male counterparts. harry winer’s spacecamp (1986) provides a good example of a smart girl and a nerdy girl whose nerdishness is andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 8 attenuated. the film takes place during a nasa summer camp where five teenagers and a female astronaut are accidentally launched into space and must find their way back to earth. while other 1980s films that include nerdy girls relegate them to the background, spacecamp features three top-billed female actors playing scientifically-inclined female characters. tish (kelly preston), a fashionable girl who wants to be an interstellar disc jockey, contrasts with space-obsessed kathryn (lea thompson), who aspires to become a shuttle commander. although kathryn is conventionally attractive, she is coded as a nerd through her unfashionable clothing, lack of make-up and limited social skills. her clothes are mostly plain and utilitarian: she arrives at camp wearing a space-themed t-shirt and sleeps wearing an oversized top. in contrast, tish has her hair permed, her make-up is bright and glittery and she wears fashionable clothes and quirky accessories that convey her playfulness and individuality. although tish is not coded as a nerd, she has photographic memory, and it is her knowledge of morse code that allows the lost kids to contact nasa to plan their return to earth. in contrast, kathryn, who is drowning under the weight of her own high expectations, panics under pressure. as a consequence, part of her journey consists in toning down her ambition and learning how to cede control to others and become a team player. while spacecamp is one of the rare films that shows girls with a passion for science, it does so while privileging an agreeable and cheerful type of femininity over a more aggressively ambitious one. another aspect in which spacecamp differs from other representations of nerd girls is in the film’s refusal to give kathryn the cinderella treatment, eschewing superficial change and focusing on psychological change instead. transformation tales in which a nerd girl goes from ugly duckling to swan are common in the genre. where most nerd boys do not have to undergo a physical transformation in order to achieve social recognition, which is achieved through romantic conquest or through their computing skills, in the case of nerd girls their positive qualities are not enough, which suggests that girls may be intelligent or quirky, but only as long as they are pretty. that is the case in films like robert iscove’s she’s all that (1999) and raja gosnell’s never been kissed (1999). in both films, the protagonists are despised by their peers because of their status as outsiders: in the former, laney (rachael leigh cook) is the subject of a cruel bet to turn an unlikely candidate into prom queen, while in the latter, josie (drew barrymore) is ostracised and mocked to such an extent that she carries the psychological consequences into adulthood. in both cases, a tale of transformation aligns the protagonists with an acceptable form of femininity that makes them liked by those who previously treated them with contempt. as shary explains, she’s all that’s laney wins acceptance not due to her artistic inclinations or her social conscience, but thanks to a makeover that consists in little more than her removing her glasses, suggesting that women’s positive qualities are irrelevant unless they are accompanied by masculine validation (generation multiplex 47). never been kissed offers a different take on nerdy girls. to begin with, flashbacks into the protagonist’s adolescence depict a much more stereotypical portrayal of a girl nerd, which is emphasised by garish 1980s fashions that add comedic effect. now in her twenties, josie is andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 9 a successful journalist no longer nicknamed “josie grossie” who has to pose as a high school student for a story, which forces her to revisit the traumatising events of her own adolescence. in order to come out triumphant—both professionally and personally—josie needs to embrace her true self and be completely honest. instead of writing a piece about the shocking behaviour of today’s teens, josie writes about her story, confessing her romantic inexperience to the world and asking sam (michael vartan), an english teacher with whom she had developed a close bond, to forgive her and to grant her her first ever kiss. never been kissed, then, is a tale of transformation in which the protagonist’s positive qualities are not completely left aside. the process by which josie leaves her teenage nerd self behind does not take place during a makeover montage that magically makes her desirable to the eyes of others, but through a long period of time during which the nerdy, insecure teenager grows into a woman, the culmination of which is shown in the film. although josie’s appearance has changed since she was a teenager, her romantic success does not stem from this physical change but, rather, from an appreciation of her honesty, warmth, and intelligence. both of the examples discussed above share another element: the absence of a stemrelated interest. both girls’ passions lie in the arts, which is not uncommon in the depiction of academically-inclined girls. while boy nerds are usually associated with computers, girl nerds and clever girls rarely show interest in scientific subjects. additionally, when they are interested in science, their passion gets in the way of their social success. sometimes they may be encouraged to tone down their ambition like in spacecamp. in other films, like real genius (1985), their behaviour comes across as odd and almost pathological, even more so than that of nerd boys. technologically-inclined girls also face gender discrimination. angelina jolie’s character in hackers (1995) is not coded as a nerd, but as an overly sexualised cyberpunk rebel. as the only female hacker in the group, she sees her abilities questioned by a newcomer because of her gender, and she is made to wear more feminine clothing after losing a bet. as was explained before, in their reluctance to give a voice to academically ambitious girls, teenage films perpetuate damaging notions regarding women’s role in society. additionally, the lack of teenage girls with an interest in scientific subjects mirrors the gender gap in stem fields while contributing to the lack of role models for scientifically-oriented girls, who will struggle to find an onscreen teen girl with interests similar to their own. iii. towards a new conception of nerd girls: the case of booksmart in line with feminism’s “new luminosity in popular culture” (gill 6), the past few years have witnessed a renewed interest in female coming-age-stories across film and television, among which we can find a sizeable number of films that, like greta gerwig’s lady bird (2017), “promote self-determination in matters of gender and sexuality that provide exceptions to heteronormativity and rigid gender roles” (stone 91). some recent teenage films and television series feature protagonists who show a nascent feminist consciousness despite their youth (easy a [2010], lady bird, moxie [2021]), defy normative beauty standards (dumplin’ [2018], sierra andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 10 burgess is a loser [2018]) and challenge heteronormativity (the miseducation of cameron post [2018], blockers [2018], euphoria [2019–ongoing], yellowjackets [2021–ongoing]). some of them, like booksmart, do all three. although they are far from perfect, these girls are often strong, smart, and determined. however, as bernárdez rodal argues, the rise of new models of female heroines in popular culture does not necessarily mean that conventional depictions of gender have been erased (17). this can be seen in the fact that the twenty-first century has not been much kinder to nerdy girls. they have mostly appeared in secondary roles as the protagonist’s best friend (jennifer’s body [2009]) or as the nerd protagonist’s love interest (napoleon dynamite [2005]). teen films continue to show a reluctance to code smart girl characters as nerds, positioning them as outcasts who either fulfil normative ideals of beauty (high school musical [2006]) or rebellious types who refuse to conform to gendered ideals of appearance and conduct (juno [2007]) (clarke 261). with this in mind, the release of booksmart, a film that places two nerdy girls at the centre of its narrative, marks a shift in the onscreen representation of academically-oriented girls, which is taken one step further by a plot that does not require them to change their appearance in order to succeed and does not base their worth on their ability to attract members of the opposite sex. instead, the focus is placed on sorority, selfdetermination and the dismantling of stereotypes. 3.1 a different kind of (feminist) nerdy girl booksmart offers an attenuated version of high school stereotypes: there are no athletes wearing varsity jackets, no cheerleaders in barely-there skirts and most of the students seem to share a casual look that would have placed them within the rebellious misfit group in 1980s teen films. yet the social hierarchy that classifies students according to their popularity remains, and the two protagonists are coded as nerds, and thus positioned at the bottom of the pyramid, from the very beginning of the film. the film’s opening scene shows molly (beanie feldstein) sitting on her bedroom floor while listening to a motivational audio before getting ready for her last ever day of high school. the voice-over narration begins playing over the opening credits, greeting molly with “good morning, winner” and telling her that she is “ready to dominate” the day, that she has “worked harder than anyone” and that she is “a champion.” all of this is said before the film’s first shot, firmly establishing the protagonist as an overachiever who believes herself to be superior to the rest. even though the audio is narrated by somebody else (maya rudolph), it sounds like the protagonist’s internal monologue and it introduces the spectator to molly’s core beliefs both about herself and about those around her. her intellectual excellence is confirmed by the first shots, which show us molly’s room before we even get to see what she looks like. molly is sitting on the floor with her back to the camera, facing a tidy desk that looks like it has been used regularly. on the wall, a yale pennant provides clues regarding her academic ambitions, while the medals and diplomas that crowd her shelves confirm her as a first-class student. the detail shots that follow as the audio continues playing provide insight into the nature of her academic inclinations: the andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 11 camera moves through her shelves revealing academic excellence awards, feminist paraphernalia that includes photos of successful women like michelle obama and gloria steinem and, finally, a detail shot of her graduation gown with “valedictorian” embroidered on it, hung together with an outfit that looks ready to be worn. as the spectator sees this, the audio encourages molly to look down on those who have doubted her. then, the scene cuts to the protagonist’s face, whose eyes remain closed as the audio says “fuck those losers. fuck them in their stupid fucking faces” before she opens her eyes and takes off her retainer while staring at the camera. the emphasis placed on the orthodontic retainer reminds us that molly once wore braces, a staple of onscreen nerds. at the same time, the motivational audio’s unrealistic ending firmly positions it as an extension of molly’s thoughts, while her aggression towards her classmates suggests resentment and hostility towards her peers—which nerds often feel as a consequence of the mismatch between their intellectual superiority and their lowly social status. molly’s self-confidence is then built up only to be dismantled immediately afterwards, with her anger giving way to a vulnerability that anticipates one of the themes that run through the film: the deceitful nature of appearances. the following scene introduces the film’s co-protagonist and molly’s best friend amy (kaitlyn dever). eclecticism and social consciousness are to amy what hard work and determination to succeed are to molly. amy’s clothes are a mishmash of styles, which is emphasised by the oddly placed patches on her denim jacket and the bumper stickers on her car. both the bumper stickers and the patches represent aspects of her identity as well as her eagerness to define herself as an individual. they reveal that, like molly, amy is also a feminist. however, while molly’s brand of feminism is characterised by a focus on individual success, amy’s favours environmental and social issues: she is also a vegan, and cares about the rights of those living in less privileged regions of the world. her informal and utilitarian style reflects her activist aspirations: she wears clothes that allow freedom of movement, which will be necessary when she travels to botswana on a volunteering trip. additionally, her adventurous spirit is highlighted by her eclectic taste and her bolo tie, an accessory associated with the wild west that marks her as a pioneer who is willing to go beyond convention. the two protagonists possess a feminist consciousness that reflects the fact that they came of age during the fourth wave of feminism, a time when, as rosalind gill explains, feminism lost its stigma and became a “desirable, stylish and decidedly fashionable” identity (2). as many have argued, this resurgence of feminism is not without its problems, and the two protagonists embody the contradictions that underlie fourth wave feminism. molly’s shrine to successful women, along with her inspirational tape, reveals her as a personification of a brand of feminism that focuses “on the individual empowered woman” (banet-weiser 17), emphasises “the neoliberal principles of agency, choice, and empowerment” (rivers 57) and promotes the idea that one’s failures are due to a lack of self-confidence rather than a result of a patriarchal system that prevents and undermines women’s achievements (banet-weiser 96, gill 8, rivers 63). the arguments that rob stone makes in his analysis of lady bird resonate here (90). molly’s andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 12 feminist consciousness, like lady bird’s, shows potential but, at the same time, she is selfcentred and blissfully ignorant of other women’s struggles. much to amy’s dismay, molly partakes in the double standards that discriminate against sexually active women. in her individualism, molly struggles to find room to consider other women’s desires—including amy’s—as valid. in contrast, amy’s desire to volunteer in botswana making tampons suggests a deeper awareness of global systemic inequalities, as well as of her own privilege. however, she struggles to make herself heard despite the yearning to speak up that her patches and bumper stickers convey. the film emphasises the importance of sorority by making the two protagonists have to learn from one another in order to tone down the inconsistencies of their respective positions: amy will never be a successful activist unless she makes her voice heard and her intentions clear like molly does, while molly needs to learn from amy’s selfless empathy towards other women. 3.2 dismantling the high school hierarchy costume not only sets the protagonists apart from each other, but also from their peers. unlike in stereotypical depictions of nerds, it does so without making the protagonists look ridiculous or laughable. molly’s formal style reflects her professional ambitions. even though she is still in high school her outfit—a blazer, a turtleneck, opaque tights, and dress shoes—marks her as ready for the workplace. in comparison with her classmates, molly is overdressed. the film is set in los angeles at the end of the school year, when the temperatures are warm, but molly’s clothes are more suitable for a colder climate. this is underscored when she is framed in between her (more popular) classmates, who are dressed in what looks like beachwear. costume, then, makes it obvious that molly does not fit in with the popular crowd and, at the same time, the fact that the others are dressed so casually marks their disregard towards appropriateness in an academic setting. the contrast between the two protagonists and their peers becomes evident as soon as they drive into the high school grounds. in the school parking lot, a shot shows more modern cars parked in the foreground, while amy’s old volvo is shown driving in the background. the position of the cars replicates the hierarchical structure of the high school and serves as a reminder that the protagonists are far from the top. at the same time, the difference between amy’s car and the others marks the protagonists as outliers. their lowly position, along with other students’ disregard for authority, is confirmed when they park the car. the sign that says the spot is reserved for the “class president” has been vandalised so that it reads “ass president.” their inability to fit in continues as they approach the high school building and a skateboarder’s presence scares them. once in the corridors, they are the only ones not partaking in the celebrations. in fact, amy and molly seem annoyed that the rest of the students are celebrating, with molly joking that they should have shown that much energy at her inauguration assembly. costume, props and framing accentuate the protagonists’ status as nerds. however, theirs is a subdued version of the stereotypical nerd: they are made fun of but not cruelly so andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 13 and, while they look different from their peers, their appearance is not meant to be a source of comedy. this is not the only way in which booksmart challenges stereotypes. the entire film, like other teen films before, is keen on reminding us that one cannot judge people by their appearance alone. molly, who finds comfort in the fact that she is the most academically successful out of her peers, is in for a rude awakening when she finds out that those she deems inferior to herself—and who look like they do not care about intellectual matters—are also going to ivy league universities. this happens after she overhears her classmates criticising her personality and claps back at them, telling them that she does not regret her choices because she is going to yale. during her comeback, she is framed in a close-up, which emphasises her emotion and promotes identification. once she realises the others also have bright futures, she is framed from a longer distance, with her image reflected on the bathroom mirrors highlighting the moment in which she is made aware that things are not always that they seem and that one cannot judge others based on appearances alone. the mirror shot marks a moment of identity crisis. up until this point, molly had based her self-worth on her intelligence, but finding out that others can perform as well as she does while making time to devote to other hobbies forces her to question whether she is really who she thought she was. as the others leave the bathroom, we can hear a distorted version of the motivational speech from the opening scene, which reflects her crumbling worldview and self-esteem. as the sound gets louder, her distress is accentuated by the use of a dolly zoom. when she leaves the toilet, handheld camera movements follow her as she frantically asks her classmates where they are going to college, breaking a high school rule that bans them from revealing their destination. the instability of the camera movements combined with the distorted effect of a wide-angle lens and the use of rack focus make the scene feel like part of a horror film, which reflects molly’s growing anxiety. the use of sound further underscores the protagonist’s distress. molly’s breathing gets louder and more laboured as a droning sound effect mirrors her agitation. when the bell rings, an upbeat song that includes a beat that sounds almost like a siren plays as the students celebrate the end of their high school years, with molly and amy being the only ones who are not having fun. the song’s contrasting sounds mirror the situation: while everybody is joyful, molly’s despair and anger are evident, and the siren-like sounds emphasise the fact that she is going through a crisis. her humiliation reaches its peak when a classmate throws a condom filled with water at her face. the fact that the student who does it belongs to the drama crowd, who are also set in contrast with the popular crowd, further positions her as an outsider. it is this event that pushes molly to make a change. framed against an overcast sky while wearing a grey hoodie, which once again mirrors her current state of mind, molly declares: “i am going to experience a seminal, fun anecdote and we are gonna change our stories forever.” with this in mind, the two girls start a quest to find a party in which they can show that they are more than brains. molly’s choice of words suggests that, for her, a fun high school experience is another project in which to excel, her last assignment before graduation. the andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 14 utilitarian nature of the protagonists’ quest is highlighted by their choice of outfit: matching navy boiler suits and oversized down coats. as we saw in the previous section, nerd girls often have to undergo a makeover and conform to the rules of hegemonic femininity in order to succeed, their layers of clothing peeled away to reveal a hidden beauty that finally makes them attractive to the eyes of others. booksmart subverts this stereotype by doing the exact opposite: covering up the protagonists in more layers that deliberately hide their bodies. both molly and amy hope to make romantic advances on someone at the party, but instead of marking themselves as sexually available, they do the opposite. their reticence to enter the social landscape of the high school party is further emphasised by their watching self-defence videos and the use of hand sanitiser before going out. while most teenagers see a house party as a site of pleasure, molly and amy see it as a site full of potential danger. even though there is a change of outfit before they reach their final destination, the two girls look like a glammed up version of themselves, rather than like a completely different person, as it is usually the case in makeovers. the other teenagers do not even notice anything different about amy and molly other than the fact that they are at the sort of event that they usually avoid. by disregarding the makeover trope that so often erases all traces of personality from onscreen misfit and nerd girls, booksmart pushes against heteronormative beauty standards and places girls’ worth on their internal qualities rather than on their beauty. several other stereotypes come undone at the party, highlighting the contrast between appearances and reality. both molly and amy misread other people’s behaviour, thinking that they are flirting when they are simply being friendly, which emphasises their lack of social skills and romantic experience. amy is dismayed to find out that the fact that ryan (victoria ruesga) is into skateboarding and dresses in a pretty masculine way does not necessarily mean that she is a lesbian, which reveals that, despite her feminist consciousness, amy is not immune to gender stereotypes regarding the relationship between women’s self-presentation and behaviour and their sexual orientation. the misalignment of appearances and reality is also emphasised by the fact that miss fine (jessica williams), their english teacher, is not the paragon of virtue that they believed her to be, while jared is a virgin who loves musicals despite the rumours about his sexual experience and wannabe tough guy appearance. last but not least, molly finds out that she does not know every single thing about her best friend. amy does not actually want to follow molly’s carefully crafted plan for their future. instead, she wants to delay going to college and spend a gap year in botswana making tampons. this change positions her humanitarian interests above her academic ones, separating her both from her nerdiness and from her best friend and marking independence and separation—both from one’s peers and from stereotypes—as a stepping stone into maturity. finally, while in most teenage films nerds and other outcasts achieve success through dating somebody who is higher up the social scale than themselves, booksmart rejects this display of upwards mobility. instead, molly kisses jared, who is even more of an outcast than herself, but the most meaningful relationship in the film is the protagonists’ friendship. andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 15 booksmart falls within what alison winch calls a “womance,” its focus is placed on the bond between the two friends—which is depicted through the conventions of romantic comedy— rather than on their romantic achievement, and their eventual success as individuals lies in their “ability to shine for and with their girlfriends” (93). eventually, the two girls manage to reach acceptance by accepting difference, both between themselves and between appearances and reality. the film allows them to keep hold of their identity, but it also forces them to change: amy has learnt to assert her desires and to contradict molly, while molly has learnt to adopt a less judgemental outlook and see beyond the surface. iv. conclusion: what about science? booksmart signals a wind of change as far as onscreen representations of nerd girls are concerned, but there is a glaring absence: an interest in stem. the fact that molly and amy are not interested in science and technology aligns them with previous representations of female nerds and smart girls and reflects the gender gap that exists in stem fields worldwide. although, as we have seen, the rate of women graduating from college in the united states is larger than that of men, they remain a minority in some stem fields, particularly in computer science and engineering. this underrepresentation translates into the workplace, where women account for only 15% of engineers and architects. although the rates vary in different fields, this gender gap remains a concerning issue (fry et al.). the lack of women is more pronounced in those fields that pay better and offer better opportunities. the culprit behind this absence is not a lack of skills, but gender discrimination in the workplace and the perpetuation of gender stereotypes related to girls’ abilities and skills in educational and domestic settings (“towards an equal future” 13–16). the lack of role models is also considered instrumental in the perpetuation of the gender gap in stem (“towards an equal future” 17). popular culture holds up a mirror to the culture that creates it, but it also shapes it. as bernárdez rodal argues, popular culture functions as a “sentimental and emotional guide” (17), and its power to shape the way we see the world is ever-increasing. role models are not only found in real life, but also in the narratives that we consume. if we keep this in mind, teen film’s dismissal of scientifically-inclined nerd girls can be said to both reflect and perpetuate the gender gap in stem. booksmart breathes new life into the nerd girl stereotype by not making them the subject of ridicule, placing an emphasis on psychological rather than physical change, refusing to let them attain popularity through romance and emphasising the importance of sorority. however, it also upholds the stereotype that girls are not interested in science. in fact, the character pursuing a career in tech is the one who fulfils the nerd stereotype the least. theo (eduardo franco), a slacker type who failed the seventh grade twice, has been recruited by tech giant google. professional success is therefore disconnected from academic achievement, which perpetuates the image of the tech whiz as a rebellious man who is too smart for college and undermines the protagonists’ academic achievements. andrea sofía regueira martín | good morning, winner: subverting girl nerd stereotypes in booksmart (2019) reden vol. 4, no. 1 (2022) issn 2695-4168 | doi: 10.37536/reden.2022.4.1838 16 works cited arky and barrett. “are you a nurd?” national lampoon gentleman’s bathroom companion, 1975, http://thetrad.blogspot.com/2011/08/are-you-nurd.html banet-weiser, sarah. empowered: popular feminism and popular misogyny. duke university press, 2018. bernárdez rodal, asunción. soft power: heroínas y muñecas en la cultura mediática. fundamentos, 2018. brooks, david. “alpha nerds.” new york times, 23 may 2008, 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bloodletting: seductive monstrosity and the interplay between waking and dreaming in bloodborne john marc wilson borrell abstract fromsoftware, a japanese game developer, displays perhaps their most gothic inspired creation in bloodborne (2015). hidetaka miyazaki, the director of the game, though drawing from several other key authors in the field, primarily pays homage to themes and concepts present in h. p. lovecraft’s relatively niche oeuvre. the american gothic tradition thematically underscores various significant characteristics of the game, not only through the pervasive use of lovecraftian imagery, but by incorporating the sense that the land itself is cursed, with hidden secrets and occult histories residing just below the surface. the gameplay mechanics in a fromsoftware title are intimately ligated to the lore, world building, ambiance, and the narrative structure—a structure known for being relatively loose and nonlinear. in bloodborne, the playercharacter controls an avatar referred to as a “hunter” during their sojourn in the oneiric, perverse world called yharnam. the various inhabits of yharnam range from beastly in nature to unfathomable to the human mind, though they share the commonality of once being human prior to receiving blood ministration. this blood came from eldritch great ones and was once hailed as a panacea before the terrifying side effects manifested. this article explores the gothic connection between seduction, monstrosity, and the dynamics of waking and dreaming in fromsoftware's bloodborne. keywords: videogames, monstrosity, fromsoftware, seduction, dream, waking and dreaming. doi: 10.37536/reden.2023.4.2131 traditionally, monsters were a reviled thing, yet currently monsters are handled with a more nuanced approach, rendering them as something to be understood on their own terms rather than through fear, repulsion, or an anthropomorphic lens. in a modernized sense of monstrosity, one may be inspired to become sympathetic, even empathetic, to garish nightmares presented in contemporary media. the american gothic tradition arguably pioneered the conceit that monsters which appear resolutely outside of the human experience may yet relate to humanity as they often embody abstract, philosophical concepts found in existential nihilism. in particular, lovecraft’s contribution to the american gothic, notably his formulation of eldritch horrors, rely on and reuse concepts such as existential dread, fear of extinction, and chronophobia amongst a multitude of reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 73 other anxieties. additionally, many have expanded upon h.p. lovecraft’s framework, turning these seemingly incomprehensible eldritch horrors into more relatable concerns or unjust social practices. lessening the othering of the monstrous frequently leads to the revelation that humans are the “real” monsters. however, a type of schism remains in formulations of the monstrous in the contemporary american gothic as some monsters retain unrelatable characteristics, such as stephen king’s pennywise the clown in it (1986), while others appear created to inspire sympathy, like the enigmatic ghost in the film gothika (2003). the familiarity of contemporary monsters, which is arguably the type currently more en vogue, is partly subverted in fromsoftware’s iconic video game bloodborne (2015), as it has examples that belong to both sides of the aforementioned schism. the player inhabits a post-cataclysmic world where the monstrous is simultaneously relatable and unrelatable as it draws inspiration from lovecraftian and similar works. this complicates the blurred lines between what constitutes a monster and what passes for human. bloodborne, keeping in line with various gothic tropes and elements, presents a confluence of monstrosity, replete with its at times seductive allure. additionally, the game world allows the player to enter impossible physical realms, such as altered states of consciousness, namely nightmares, or modalities of experience. in particular, this article argues that the game is concerned with exploring aspects of waking and dreaming in relation to monstrosity and seduction. 1. the monstrous world of bloodborne in obscuring the narrative, fromsoftware allows for dreamscapes, nightmares, and consciousness to converge, exploring anxieties and bugbears that are no longer relegated to their primary strata of the mind. the monsters of xenophobia, racism, and othering appear just as readily as cosmic horrors, existential threats, and nihilistic demotivation. these incarnations, embodiments, or representations (however the observer best sees fit) appear as “enemy” creatures. though as noted by a former hunter djura found in the buried remains of old yharnam, the beasts were once human. therefore, while the motives of the eldritch great ones are perhaps more unrelatable, what they represent can be related to very human concerns. regardless of appearing more beastly or extraterrestrial in nature, these foes are integral aspects of the human experience: they are an extension of the psyche. fromsoftware, a japanese company that often takes inspiration from western media in their games, establishes a fragmented form of mythopoesis where the narrative is obscured through broken dialogue interactions from scattered non-player characters (npcs), in addition to item descriptions that hint at events that have already transpired. if the player wants to understand aspects of the narrative instead of enjoying bloodborne strictly for its gameplay, then it is incumbent upon the player to piece together this seemingly disparate information to begin to understand some of the more major plot points. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 74 however, fromsoftware also omits a substantial amount of narrative information, allowing for the subject to fill in the gaps of the plot with their own “head canon.” this makes their games interesting for debate and discussion, but rather difficult for concrete analysis, especially in an academic sense where precision is key. in “the cryptographic narrative in video games: the player as detective” (2021), ana paklons and an-sofie tratsaert assert, “this concept of the cryptographic narrative has been adopted by some indie horror games . . . the idea behind this type of narrative in the gaming experience is that it leads to a hidden story which is not evident in the narrative first suggested to the player, thus creating a mystery to be solved” (170–71). though bloodborne is not an indie game, it is cryptographic as there are numerous hidden narrative threads throughout the game; some of these threads are merely hinted and are not fleshed out by design, leaving the mystery to be purposefully unsolvable by the player. this sense of an untold, buried history is another key aspect that bloodborne has in common with numerous pieces of american gothic media. bloodborne’s ideologies are difficult to narrow down as the cryptic nature of the narrative allows the player to insert a degree of their own understandings into the narrative. the player draws their own conclusions as if the game were paradoxically both an exercise in the school of new criticism, prizing formal analysis of what is solely presented, fragmented as it is, as well as its opposing theoretical framework, reader-response theory. there is an interesting form of remediation at play in bloodborne as it is a japanese game set in a carnivalesque, steampunk world that mirrors or is mimetic of victorian england in a multitude of ways. yet the american gothic tradition thematically underscores various significant characteristics of the game, not only through the pervasive use of lovecraftian imagery, but by incorporating the sense that the land itself is cursed, with hidden secrets and occult histories residing just below the surface. this transnational approach assists in making the game more relatable on a global scale; within the context of the american gothic, it is interesting to see an adaption of lovecraftian lore used in foreign media that clearly pays homage to an integral and innovative aspect of the american gothic. while other inspirations are readily noted, it is lovecraft that predominates as the chief source of inspiration. the foreboding nature of the game is also mimetic to horror cinema and television, where the narrative gets progressively tenser, and the central character is placed in a more precarious position the closer they get to the “truth” of what is occurring. the surreal quality of bloodborne with its preoccupation with dreamscapes, altered consciousness, and various strata of the mind further muddles a logical approach to the narrative. much like in lovecraftian writings where madness is symptomatic of greater knowledge, the incoherence of bloodborne arguably places it in a more subjective web of meaning. in his article “from content to context: videogames as designed experience” (2006), kurt squire claims, “players’ understandings are developed through cycles of reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 75 performance within the gameworlds, which instantiates particular theories of the world (ideological worlds). players develop new identities both through game play and through gaming communities in which these identities are enacted” (19). the player adopts the persona of a hunter that was once fully human yet becomes something slightly different after receiving blood ministration from the so-called healing church for an undisclosed malady. blood ministration comes with peculiar side-effects such as transforming a human subject into an aggressive, monstrous beast that ultimately loses their sense of humanity. the nature of cosmic horror in bloodborne, especially its relatability on a transnational scale given its existential-nihilistic sentiments, is furthered by the bloodborne plague wrought from blood ministration that affects humanity by altering their status as a human. the process converts them into grotesque monstrosities. the hunter is tasked with dispatching these altered humans; the irony being that the hunter is a close relation—a precursor to this grotesque form of monstrosity. maintaining a more human visage arguably allows the player to feel a closer affinity to their character, their stand-in that acts out monstrous tendencies. therefore, the hunter occupies a liminal space between humanity and the monstrous—a more relatable form of monstrosity than the eldritch great ones whose blood is used in the blood ministration. furthermore, aside from the eldritch great ones themselves and the nearly extinct race of pthumerians (who may or may not have been human), the vast majority of the enemies of the hunter in bloodborne are former humans. the celestials, for instance, are humans experimented on by high-ranking members of the church to transcend humanity, in the hopes of creating a new eldritch great one. there are also mutated crows, rats, and canines that have been altered from their original, natural state due to their close proximity to humans, which may have led to accidental ingestion of mixed blood. bloodborne highlights a dynamic relationship between knowledge and the power of blood. bygernwerth embodies both of these principles as it is mostly comprised of a university full of scholars seeking to move beyond human knowledge into a posthuman state. through their research of eldritch blood discovered in the tombs of the pthumerians, leading to the origins of the healing church, these scholars ultimately altered their status as human. additionally, it is heavily implied that the pthumerian civilization ended after experimentation with said blood went awry, yet the healing church would not exist without the discovery of this blood since blood ministration is the cornerstone of that institution. from this, factions were established, represented by hunters dressed in either white or black. the hunters dressed in white belong to the choir, the highest order of the church, and they rely more on innovations begotten from research and “hunter tools” (the equivalent of spells that have eldritch properties). the members of the choir are highly reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 76 educated and are often trusted to perform blood ministration, whereas the black garbed hunters tend to use more common weapons since they favor going on hunts to eradicate beasts. there is, of course, an irony to this since the fears of contagion and violent death are both represented by these factions, yet both were allegedly created for the betterment of society. however, this is an instance of attempting to fix one problem by creating another. while traditional diseases may no longer be a pressing concern, infection from the plague supplants this fear. mutation and death have become more pervasive. the few surviving humans fear infection from the blood plague or being torn asunder by rampaging beasts. those remaining stay quarantined in their homes unless directed by the player-hunter to a place of relative safety, as non-infected humans do not have the capability of leaving on their own. it is telling that the other hunters do not assist in evacuations, despite being created as a social service. the blood plague is derived from using the blood of the great ones in the hopes of creating panacea. yet it is experimenting with the unknown that causes a cataclysmic event—an event the player does not experience first-hand as they are only subject to the world in ruin. while susan tyburski is discussing gothic cinema in their article, “a gothic apocalypse: encountering the monstrous in american cinema” (2013), the claims are readily applicable to video games. tyburski states that “in the last winter, an even more mysterious force causes humans to descend into madness as their environment becomes increasingly more hostile. despite their individual incarnations, in all of these films the threat to humans is not limited to a single monster but to an all-encompassing monstrous environment” (148). bloodborne’s world, yharnam, also causes a blurring of sanity and insanity, demonstrating elements of gothic horror; it highlights the monsters lurking within the darker recesses of the collective human psyche that exist in dynamic relation to their environment. this also follows closely tyburski’s central argument concerning eco-horror since the natural environment has been disrupted and transformed into a more hostile, dangerous, and polluted world. the game sets yharnam as a hellscape that the player transcends or succumbs to by either surviving the hunt, evolving into an eldritch great one, or failing to complete their quest. furthermore, the underlying causality for the blood plague is a closely guarded secret from all but the members of the choir. it is implied that the choir relies on misinformation to create contempt for outsiders, shifting the blame to them for the grotesque results of the choir’s treatments. this establishes knowledge and censorship as a means of power, assisting in driving the current of xenophobia since outsiders, much like the average yharnamite, are not trusted to know the machinations of the church, how society collapsed, or the origins of blood ministration. the insular yharnamites have a sense of reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 77 mistrust placed on outsiders, which is exacerbated by the fear of contamination by the plague (see fig. 1). paranoia likely is a common symptom of the plague, which furthers this disdain towards foreigners. eileen the crow is an outsider twice over as she is tasked with eliminating hunters that succumb to their “blood lust” and is the only character with a scottish accent. this too places it within the tradition of lovecraftian fiction and the american gothic as xenophobia and the hidden, “true” drivers of particular societies are prevalent themes in those works as well. blood lust and xenophobia are recurring themes that will be further discussed. the fears in bloodborne, exaggerated as they are, mirror some more recent fears of contracting a global epidemic, most notably covid-19 and the mandatory quarantines. 2. seductive monstrosity bloodborne also ascribes to yet another gothic tradition: there are no born monsters; they are expressions of humanity. jeffrey cohen (1996) proposes that the monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. the monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an uncanny independence. the monstrous body is pure culture . . . like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself. (4) humanity, therefore, falls under the seductive influence of its own dark reflection, leaving representation of the self and its difficulty in asserting a “true” referent in its wake. yet the motives of the eldritch great ones are unknowable; they are thus part of the more unrelatable, less sympathetic tradition of the monstrous. the incorporation of eldritch great ones in bloodborne is an integral part of the narrative and gameplay that serves as the catalyst for the dystopic game world, as it is the blood of these eldritch horrors that disrupts virtually every conceivable facet of this society. bloodborne resembles fromsoftware’s flagship series dark souls (2011–2018), yet it is set apart from dark souls on a gameplay level, by focusing more on a type of controlled yet frenetic playstyle that prizes aggressiveness rather than methodical combat; viciousness becomes an asset to the hunter who increasingly becomes more monstrous. the hunter is not some noble knight set to slay a malicious dragon or a belmont tasked to put dracula to rest for a century: the hunter is in the process of becoming a monster. the presence of father gascoigne, an early game boss who turns into a beastly monster, gives supporting evidence to what eileen the crow admonishes against: overindulgence in the hunt will rapidly progress the symptoms of beasthood until the hunter becomes “blood drunk.” the result of which includes losing their humanity by becoming a beast. gascoigne, along with other hunters that transform into hideous abominations, become reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 78 signifiers or distorted portents, representing the consequences of zealously dispatching enemies. in a sense the hunter is not only destroying the inhabitants of yharnam, but the human player as well, given that becoming a monstrous hunter that revels in the destruction of their fellow inhuman inhabitants is satisfying for the competent player. by adopting aggressive playstyles, the player interacts with the game on psychological and physical levels. this is not particular to bloodborne, yet its alleged difficulty requires players to learn the most efficient manner of slaying the various beasts and great ones, lest they do not progress further in the game. that is, of course, if the player responds to the game in the manner the developers intended. bloodborne’s emphasis on dispatching the various residents of yharnam in a bestial fashion creates a seductive quality for the player (fig. 1). the hunter remains mostly human until one of the endings of the game is achieved—where they ascend to become an infant great one—yet they are undeniably something other than human, despite various signs and signifiers of humanity. perhaps that is not quite accurate in bloodborne; perhaps these monstrous qualities that the hunter possesses, seductive as they are, formulate an expression of innate, deep desires of the human psyche. ideally, the player is meant to cast away their fears in entering this gothic world with the aim of embracing primal violence: a space dominated and relegated to what may be conceived as the id. the id is, after all, the seat of wanton desire and pleasure. figure 1 yharnamites assembled for their ritualistic hunt for “monsters,” bloodborne (2015). reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 79 the gothic possesses a long history that continues to evolve in regards to seduction, replete with alluring qualities. a multitude of narratives depict protagonists that are often inexplicably drawn towards their own peril or ruin, ensnaring the audience by casting a similar type of spell of attraction. bloodborne likewise draws in the player yet makes their presence feel out of place, an unwelcomed foreign addition that cannot assimilate into the various regions comprising yharnam. seduction, in this context, is rather difficult, if not impossible to represent, as seduction comprises an eradication of the boundaries between the self and other as noted in baudrillard’s text seduction (1979). squire’s earlier assertion that players acquire new identities through video games may be further understood as a drive towards the seductive, which is, debatably, a stronger force than the commonplace power fantasies in modern media. baudrillard asserts, “seduction cannot possibly be represented, because in seduction the distance between the real and its double, and the distortion between the same and the other is abolished. bending over a pool of water, narcissus quenches his thirst. his image is no longer ‘other;’ it is a surface that absorbs and seduces him, which he can approach but never pass beyond” (1990, 67). yet there is a degree of madness associated with this seduction; the revelation that narcissus is pathological is all too apparent to the observer, though obscured from the principal subject. as the realities of the horrors in bloodborne are revealed, a greater degree of the irrational and absurd must be accepted to maintain its narratological engagement with its player. in narratives, the concept of a panacea is a rather seductive one—not just for those suffering from thanatophobia—begetting a state free from virological, bacterial, fungal. . .etc. attack. “freeing” the body of these concerns has not only been a preoccupation in medicine, but for literature as well. yet it is in literature that such promises come at the expense of a faustian arrangement. established medical communities do not purport to own a panacea; it is in narratives where these things are imagined in tandem with the ramifications they present. be it immortality, unforeseen somatic side-effects, psychological corruption, or a costly trade, narratives generally envision that panaceas do not come cheap. while it is certainly seductive to be free of ailments, bloodborne falls within the gothic tradition of urging caution as it defies the natural order (fig. 2). importantly, blood ministration does more than cure pathologies prior to transformation since it grants the user a feeling of power and euphoria. the monsters often seek out and recreationally abuse this eldritch blood. furthermore, they become far stronger, instilling a lust for more power that is sated by consuming ever growing quantities of this blood. there are cravings for more blood, which before the monstrous side effects are fully realized and noted, was often freely given to patients, expediting the spread and intensity of the blood plague. the cost of this failed panacea is quite clear: it comes at the expense of one’s humanity in favor of succumbing to desire and the alleviation of primal, instinctual fears. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 80 savagery may not just be an intrinsic part of bloodborne, but also part of the seductive influence of our darker desires, our simultaneous denial of and return to monstrosity. after all, monstrosity, given the previous premise, can only exist within civilized realms. under this assumption, monstrosity is a turn from the social or civilized, regardless of the various guises and manifestations monstrosity may take. yet the civilized must exist as a baseline to establish the monstrous; breaking the normative, at least in fantasy or ideation, is frequently viewed as a pleasurable, seductive act. stefanous geroulanos and daniela ginsberg (2008) reason that, “we must reserve the qualification of ‘monster’ for organic beings. there are no mineral monsters. there are no mechanical monsters” (135). the organic has the capacity to feel pleasure, pain, anxiety, and comfort, relegating the monstrous to be inherently and dynamically ligated with emotion, biology, and cognition. while contemporary gothic representations do create spaces that are uncanny, particularly impossible realms as seen in works such as house of leaves (2000), these things are not necessarily monstrous as they lack an embedded host to signify the monstrous. often times, as in the case of bloodborne, the allurement of being monstrous comes from the shirking of established laws whilst giving into the impulses of the id. savagery and monstrosity have an indelible link with human impulses that underscore a tendency towards the anti-social. it is notable that the denizens of bloodborne follow predictable, ritualized patterns when they are unaware of the hunter’s presence. once they become aware of the player, they instantly become hostile, as if the hunter’s mere presence is figure 2 a statue on a lift depicting experimentation, possibly an early form of blood ministration. below the operating table, a scourge beast—resembling a werewolf—emerges, bloodborne (2015) reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 81 enough to galvanize these former humans, which is another form of patterned, scripted behavior. while there are ludic and mechanical reasons for this, it also displays the frenzied and volatile nature of this brand of monstrosity. thus, the physical representation of monstrosity becomes a secondary visual signifier to the more primal impulses residing in the deeper recesses of consciousness. it is through a meticulous process of enculturation and cohabitation that these impulses become stymied yet not fully removed from the subject. however, as the game takes place after a catastrophe, the moment of potential salvation, the hope for recovery, has long since been forgotten in the amnesic fog of recurring behavioral patterns in a brutal, primal society. these humans-turned-monsters acting in anomic ways may serve to illustrate the desire to act in a more anti-social manner, or it may be more closely related to constructions of the monstrous as more “brainless,” akin to zombies or remnants (fig. 3). regardless of the reasoning, the monstrous in bloodborne is one of primal violence propagated by instinctual aggression. it is pleasurable to give in to one’s urges or to “turn the mind off” and do as one pleases. there is a sense of losing oneself for the sake of desire. patterns, which may be a product of action without heavily relying on cognition, comprise much of the mechanical interworking of the game, though this may also a consequence of narrative design. this denotes a paradox between the ritualized and the seductive impulses of the monstrous. bloodborne eliminates, or at least reduces, the schism figure 3 inhabitants of the fishing hamle in ritualized prostration, bloodborne (2015) reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 82 between the seductive, monstrous impulses of our instinctual self with the controlled, cooperative self. removing this dichotomy establishes a logical explanation of how monstrosity may become a societal normative if it is allowed to become unfettered through the death of ordered society. 3. waking and dreaming the interplay between society, culture, consciousness, subconscious, and the unconscious come to the forefront in bloodborne. in that nebulous realm of dreams is potentially where meaning is further broken down and fragmented and where, paradoxically, greater insights into the interworking of bloodborne’s narrative are found. irina paperno, in her chapter “dreams of terror: interpretations” (2009), proposes a theoretical framework when discussing dreams and their relation to narrative: “in a word, dreaming is an analogy of fiction, or literature. as one scholar put it, dreaming is the ‘ur-form of all fiction.’ yet (he continues) ‘a dream is fundamentally unlike a fiction, structurally and affectively, in that it is a lived experience as well as a narrative’” (162). bloodborne’s narrative is difficult to sequentially arrange, as if its telling resembles the foggy moments of a dreamer attempting to recall their recent dream as it slips away under the pervasive influence of rational logic. the nightmare realms in bloodborne will be pursuantly analyzed within the context of adding to the overall narrative and as a type of lived experience for the player (fig. 4). yharnam, despite being a digital environment, is not purely mimetic of a physical setting. mirroring early models of psychoanalysis that arrange the complexities of the mind, consciousness and unconsciousness, in various intermingling strata that possess a dynamic relay between various layers, yharnam allows the player to enter distorted versions of the past referred to as nightmares. interlaid amongst these strata is the liminal realm of dreams. derrida muses, “the metaphor of the stratum (schict) has two implications. on the one hand, meaning is founded on something other than itself. . . on the other hand, meaning constitutes a stratum whose unity can be rigorously delimited” (1979, 159). derrida’s assertion that the metaphor of the stratum may be flawed, despite some pragmatic uses, is applicable in attempting to understand the constituent nightmare layers of yharnam, given their abstract nature. yharnam is a place that resides in non-space as much as it does the material, replete with liminal spaces that fill this synthetic world. it is difficult to establish outside referents for some aspects of the respective stratum, causing, as derrida suggests, a failure of the structure of a proper stratum correlating to the nebulous layers of yharnam. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 83 there are various areas that comprise yharnam in a material sense if discussed as a physical, rather than digital, location. yharnam is built over the ruins of old yharnam and encompasses the eponymous town, cathedral ward, and corresponding areas. close to this are charnel lane, forbidden woods, the college of byrgenwerth, and yahar’gul. the nightmare realms are distorted versions of the past that do not exist in the same way that yharnam does as a geographical location in the game. they are more in line with states of consciousness. a yharnamite cannot simply enter nightmare realms without acquiring particular items or traversing plague infested areas—a trial or ritual of sorts must be performed to gain access. these additional layers are nightmare frontier, which may be entered through the school of mensis or by using a tonsil stone, the nightmare of mensis, accessed through progressing the game, and the hunter’s nightmare, which requires an item called the eye of a blood-drunk hunter to enter. if the hunter’s nightmare is viewed as a singular location with a couple of connecting parts, it comprises a more horrific and grotesque version of cathedral ward, the research hall, and the fishing hamlet. this is the most notable stratum of yharnam, forming the downloadable content (dlc), “the old hunters.” the first section of this dlc is a stark contrast to the hunter’s dream, which is the hub area of the game. in bloodborne, a prevalent thematic element is that of finding purpose within the dynamics of waking and dreaming, as noted by the doll’s recurring phrase, “may you find your worth in the waking world” (bloodborne). it is quite intriguing that it is in waking, rather than being vulnerable during repose, that the hunter is figure 4 the oneiric realm of the hunter’s nightmare, bloodborne (2015). reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 84 presented with the greatest risk of harm to their person. furthermore, the hunter is able to traverse to a distorted past where memories, regret, and nightmares reside in a tangible manner. the hunter does not simply battle so-called ghosts representative of various subconscious fears or anxieties in these nightmare realms. these spaces are beholden to the same in-game physics as the rest of yharnam. the liminal realm between waking and dreaming has long been a preoccupation of the gothic. judith halberstam (1995) states, “gothic. . . is the breakdown of genre and the crisis occasioned to ‘tell,’ meaning both the inability to narrate and to categorize. gothic, i argue, marks a peculiarly modern preoccupation with boundaries and their collapse” (23). this inability to properly articulate can readily be expanded into conversing about dreams due to the lack of coherence, cohesion, and chronology of dreams. the “inability to narrate” is not only part of the aforementioned fragmented mythopoesis of fromsoftware, but also alludes to the difficulty in properly communicating and expressing dreams. in his chapter, “dreaming in layers: lovecraftian storyworlds in interactive media” (2021), eoin murray asserts: the nightmares and dreams within bloodborne craft deeper meanings for the player to explore, from enemy encounters to the structure of the space around them. the farthest reaches of the game screen and environment hint towards a deeper connection between these dream and nightmare locations where the true madness of bloodborne’s storyworld, yharnam, resides. (225) these nightmare locations become of special interest as they are emblematic of a breakdown in reason and sanity, furthering a sense of madness and monstrosity. the nightmare represents that which is hidden from history, culture, and the myths the hunters propagate about themselves. the nightmare is a closer verisimilitude of the truth of yharnam than the typical areas the player encounters. it is in these spaces that the gothic tradition of buried secrets arises anew through unconventional means, as bloodborne subverts its already unorthodox narrative by having the player call into question the reality of the world they are experiencing. the fears expressed in bloodborne function symbolically since the subtext does allude to the deep-rooted fear of the unknown, primarily manifested through the fear of infection, the other (xenophobia), and scotophobia (numerous enemies lurk out of sight or in the dark), amongst various other concerns. as in numerous gothic works, there is a profound correlation between fears and trauma. in “beyond the walls of bloodborne: gothic tropes and lovecraftian games” (2019), vítor casteloes gama and marcelo velloso garcia argue, “mental trauma is translated into an element of the mise-en-scène by relating scenery revelations to odd metaphysical events. changes in perception are linked to physical changes in the game’s setting, for instance, the result of making contact with great ones is the access to nightmares” (53). this also supports the appearance of the reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 85 amygdalas (massive multi-limbed and eyed creatures) throughout yharnam since they are hidden from the player from the onset of the game. once the player reaches the final act or has acquired relatively high insight—a metric that also denotes the amount of forbidden or inhuman knowledge—then the amygdalas are seen. in medicine, the amygdala is an almond shaped mass of gray matter believed to be the core of a neural system that controls and regulates some emotions, particularly processing fear and threatening stimuli with corresponding reactions. creatures hidden beyond human perceptions, the veil of “reality,” is a conceit directly used in lovecraftian fiction, but also functions in bloodborne as means of demonstrating that the world of yharnam is not quite how initially presented: it experiences dynamic changes in its environment in relation to the player’s or the hunter’s (perhaps both) alleged acquisition of occult knowledge. one of these amygdalas ushers the player into the dlc. these environmental changes, notably the aforementioned distorted version of cathedral ward, prime the player to notice that the initial perceptions of the game world may have been erroneous. entering a living nightmare via an amygdala, conceived in different terms, facing fears in a dream-state, is a means of ascertaining higher “truths” in bloodborne. the final area of the dlc and arguably the one with the most hidden truths is the fishing hamlet. this villa is, with little doubt, highly inspired by lovecraft’s “the shadow over innsmouth” (1936). from a narrative perspective, the hunter is enticed to traverse this perilous plane of existence or consciousness (it is rather ill defined), through the seductive allure of uncovering the secrets that the original hunters attempted to bury. lovecraft writes, “several non-residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old zadok’s tales and the malformed denizens it was no wonder such illusions were current. none of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. besides, the streets were loathsomely dark” (2011, 822). the inhospitality towards the other in lovecraft’s text stems from a mistrust towards outsiders, illustrating a pervasive sense of xenophobia. this is also the case in bloodborne, yet it was the first hunters, long before the player arrives, that caused the initial transgression. much like colonizers, the first hunters conquered the initially passive village after a great one washed upon their shores. given that colonialization is an ongoing process, the residents adopted many of the customs of these first hunters. furthermore, these hunters, who were trained in occult sciences by the healing church, experimented on the residents, further mutating the natives of the fishing hamlet that were already affected by the presence of a great one. this underscores the influence of outsiders on a relatively closed socio-political and ecological environment, causing this area to become an approximation of historical horror arrived at by traversing cultural unconsciousness. the game makes clear that this area is not part of the contemporary yharnam, but rather an echo of a traumatic past: it is a nightmare space. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 86 the realm of dreams as means of glimpsing “truth” is wooly at best, impossible at worst. richard hilbert (2010) uses a hypothetical dream to discuss complications that may arise in analyzing a simple dream where a person is “chased by a dog” (see fig. 5). the dog in question may represent a variety of disparate things and its appearance in a dream calls into question its signification or meaning as a dog, proposing the question, “what makes it a dog?” (42). the polysemous nature of dreams becomes obfuscating, even potentially manipulating as definitively ascribing a particular interpretation of a dream and its associated dreamscape with singular, comprehensive, concrete, or abstract meanings becomes associated with self-reflexive exercises: the dog in the example could be virtually anything, rendering it closer to nothingness or, perhaps, a funhouse mirror for both the dreamer and interpreter. while this multifaceted approach moves dreams more into philosophical and not fully understood scientific realms, it does not necessarily preclude their use, as they comprise part of a visual shorthand that has become quite standardized within gothic and horror media. this shorthand becomes codified in bloodborne’s visual language through not only the monstrous creatures, gothic architecture, and statues (some in yahar’gul allude to hiroshima and nagasaki atomic bombings), but as well in the vistas, landscapes, and sky. the color pallet, while seldom bright, presents a nebulous, hazy quality that may be interpreted as fog, further occulting sight, or to the blurred aspects of the represented stratified mind. as noted, these strata do not exist in clearly delineated borders, but in figure 5 the hunter in action, either evading or ambushing scourge beasts, bloodborne (2015). reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 87 dynamic flux and conversation with one another. the clouds are also mimetic of this, stretching long and dark, fostering an opaqueness that stifles the clarity of the night sky as if a type of overdrawn cobweb. while the nature of the narrative is murky, this is reiterated and reinforced by the visual metaphors that transcend direct language. images, pictures, or, in this case, graphics may only be discursively discussed as they are a different medium than the strictly literary; it is an impossibility to fully translate images into literary terms as roland barthes suggests in camera lucida (1980). rather, there is an ongoing relay of remediation in attempting to extrapolate deeper meaning when discussing the visual, pictographic, or ocular as this formulates an altogether separate medium than that of the literary. bloodborne has a preoccupation with the visual and, therefore, eyes, which is a recurring theme ligated with insight. rather than an avenue of acquiring insight, it can also refer to the means of properly engaging and reading the visual codified language that supports and scaffolds the narrative, by paradoxically being mysterious and obtuse. in the nightmare of mensis (named after the school of mensis that was wiped out in their attempt at communing with or potentially calling down an eldritch great one), the main antagonist of the area, micolash, a scholar driven to madness in his attempt to breach the unfathomable nature of the great ones, repeats a haunting chant, “grant us eyes” (bloodborne). eyes thematically recur throughout bloodborne with some of the monsters possessing nearly an uncountable number of eyes. this denotes a closer proximity to the great ones than the monsters that appear to have the typical number of eyes for their respective species. if the player angles the camera in a particular fashion, they can glimpse peculiar eyes inside of the doll’s head; these eyes also have extra eyes on them, supporting the notion that these organs are not intended for relating visual or ocular stimuli, but rather serve a different, preternatural function. theoretically, these eyes are what animate and bestow a sense of identity to the doll. “grant us eyes” is construed as thematically complex given the expansive nature of the game, yet there is also a simplicity associated with it: grant us the ability to read that which is hidden before our eyes. rather than a call to greater beings to grant the ability to perceive beyond the electromagnetic spectrum, it becomes a plea to communicate the visual in a more instinctual, primal mode. generally speaking, this means that visual language does not necessitate a logical, rational discourse, but rather an intuitive understanding. thus, for bloodborne it may even be a misnomer to refer to visual language as a type of language as it serves more as a means for stimulus to garner a primal response. simply, the intuitive and instinctual is the providence of the monstrous. and monstrosity defies the rational order, despite the human claim of being a rational creature. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 88 4. conclusion sleep is often associated with a sense of vulnerability; dreams are typically outside of the subject’s control, rendering the individual a relatively passive agent in their own mind. yet it is in the hunter’s dream where safety, ataraxy, and sereness rule supreme: waking from the dream is when the horror of existence begins. the doll’s recurring phrase takes on a new meaning once the player puts down their controller; eventually, one must leave the phantasmagorical, oneiric world of yharnam to face their own monstrous version of reality. yharnam is not the nightmare: it is an escape where one may experience, even revel, in the monstrous. it is a controlled release of adrenaline on a physiological level, potentially granting an evocative and emotive experience. it is an alternative means of experiencing “reality” codified through visual, auditory, and literary cues, as gothic narratives are often fundamentally concerned with revealing hidden aspects that reside within the fabrics of mainstream cultures. it is in entering this world, being gradually introduced to the implications of the presented monstrosity, that bloodborne belongs to the gothic’s enduring legacy as a purveyor of either the unfathomable or all too human monster. the outsider in these narratives is never fully accepted by the residents, potentially leaving (if they do in fact leave) with more of an unsolved mystery in spite of having a profound truth revealed. yet the seductive nature of becoming a monster—to rely on instinct, id, or the primal irrational self where a sense of catharsis, potentially euphoria, may be experienced—is a deeply appealing human desire. briefly removing their societal shackles offers the chance to become that which society fears: an unrestrained version of the ancestral self, residing in the liminal space between the logical and irrational. the player-hunter and the denizens of yharnam are simply that—unapologetically too human, rife with wonder and mundanity, mystery and tedium, restraint and terror. works cited baudrillard, jean. (1979) 1990. seduction. translated by brian singer. new york: st. martin’s press. caracciolo, marco. 2014. “those insane dream sequences: experientiality and distorted experience in literature and video games.” in storyworlds across media: toward a media-conscious narratology, edited by marie-laure ryan and jan-noël thon, 230–50. lincoln: university of nebraska press. cohen, jeffrey jerome. 1996. “monster culture (seven theses).” in monster theory: reading culture, edited by jeffrey jerome cohen, ned-new edition, 3–25. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. reden 4.2 (2023) | john marc wilson borrell 89 derrida, jacques. (1972) 1984. margins of philosophy. translated by alan bass. chicago: the university of chicago press. fromsoftware. 2015. bloodborne. sony. playstation 4. gama casteloes, vítor, and marcelo velloso garcia. 2019. “beyond the walls of bloodborne: gothic tropes and lovecraftian games.” aeternum: the journal of contemporary gothic studies 6 (2): 49–60. geraci, robert m., recine, nat, and samantha fox. 2016. “grotesque gaming: the monstrous inonline worlds.” preternature: critical and historical studies on the preternatural 5 (2): 213–36. https://doi.org/10.5325/preternature.5.2.0213. geroulanos, stefanos, and daniela ginsburg. 2008. “monstrosity and the monstrous.” in knowledge of life, edited by paola marrati and todd meyers, 134–46. new york: fordham university press. halberstam, judith. 1995. “parasites and perverts: an introduction to gothic monstrosity.” in skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters, 1–27. durham: duke university press. heise-von der lippe, anya. 2019. “techno-terrors and the emergence of cyber-gothic.” in the gothic and theory: an edinburgh companion, edited by jerrold e. hogle and robert miles, 182–200. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. hilbert, richard a. may. “the anomalous foundations of dream telling: objective solipsism and the problem of meaning.” human studies, vol. 33, no.1, 2010, pp. 41–64. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/40981089. lovecraft, h.p. (1936) 2011. “the shadow over innsmouth.” in h.p. lovecraft: the complete fiction. new york: barnes & noble inc. murray, eoin. 2021. “dreaming in layers: lovecraftian storyworlds in interactive media.” in lovecraft in the 21st century: dead, but still dreaming, edited by antonio alcala gonzalez and carl h. sederholm, 225–39. new york: routledge. paklons, ana, and an-sofie tratsaert. 2021. “the cryptographic narrative in video games: the player as detective.” in mediating vulnerability: comparative approaches and questions of genre, edited by anneleen masschelein, florian mussgnug, and jennifer rushworth, 168–84. london: ucl press. paperno, irina. 2009. “part iii dreams of terror: interpretations.” in stories of the soviet experience: memories, diaries, dreams, 161–208. ithaca: cornell university press. squire, kurt. 2006. “from content to context: videogames as designed experience.” educational researcher 35 (8): 19–29. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189x035008019. tyburski, susan j. 2013. “a gothic apocalypse: encountering the monstrous in american cinema.” in ecogothic, edited by andrew smith and william hughes, 147–59. manchester: manchester university press. 4 reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 18 of blackboards and bathrooms: space as metaphor for power relations in hidden figures (2016) cora zoé övermann abstract this paper examines the film hidden figures (2016) from a critical perspective which combines concepts of intersectionality, gatekeeping, and spatial analysis. through its depiction of the space race in 1960s america, the film superficially focuses on outer space. nevertheless, much can be gleaned about the inclusion and exclusion of groups and individuals within the inner space of the nasa campus. the analysis thus centers around two questions; the question of who cannot access spaces, privileges, and knowledge, as well as the question of who can. in emphasizing the role of the gatekeeper, more attention is afforded to the male characters in the film, which have received little previous regard in comparison to the three black female leads. in this paper, i argue that the white men’s range of movement and their degree of belonging at nasa stand in crucial relation and opposition to the black heroines. three characters have been chosen to exemplify this point; katherine johnson, al harrison, and paul stafford, who interact with one another in a triangular relation of inclusions and exclusions. five locations have been selected to illustrate their interplay in terms of power and space: the west computing group, the space task group, the bathroom, the hallway, and the home. keywords: space race, spatial analysis, gatekeeping, intersectionality, 1960s america. doi: 10.37536/reden.2023.4.2041 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) have traditionally been the domain of white men in both the real world and the media. in a joint overview titled “portray her: representations of women stem characters in media” (2021), the lyda hill foundation and the geena davis institute on gender in media relate that male “stem characters significantly outnumbered women stem characters in film, television, and streaming content from 2007–2017” (9). moreover, the “vast majority of stem characters in entertainment media” were white, accounting for more than seventy percent of all characters. in contrast, only 16.7% of stem characters were black. the averages that the lyda hill foundation and geena davis institute present cover three visual media formats: film, television and streaming content. out of these three, film is frequently less inclusive towards both women and black people than television and streaming content (9–10). at reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 19 the intersection of race, gender, and the fact that few stem characters function as leads in popular media, one finds an underwhelming two percent of black female leads (11). it is against this backdrop that one understands the significance of the american biographical drama film hidden figures (2016). with immense success at the box office and a number of charity screenings directed at youth to promote careers in stem, hidden figures features characters who often have little prominence on screen. directed by theodore melfi and based upon the novel by margot lee shetterly, hidden figures portrays three black women who worked for the us national aeronautics and space administration (nasa) during the era of the space race. mary jackson (janelle monáe), katherine johnson (taraji p. henson) and dorothy vaughan (octavia spencer) are shown as three talented friends who made critical contributions to nasa in 1961 and 1962, culminating in the first crewed american orbital spaceflight. since its release in 2016, scholars from all over the world have examined how the black heroines are portrayed in the film. while some note the positive impact of bringing these “hidden figures” to light and providing role models for a new generation of women in stem (robert 3), others critically inspect the white savior figure al harrison and the isolation that the women operate in (frühwirth et al. 2021, 84). since both theodore melfi as director, as well as allison schroeder as screenwriter, are white, the question of who tells this story can be further taken into consideration. in addition, one might also ponder the significant changes that have been made in the process of adapting the book, and history, to the screen. quoting author margot lee shetterly, timo frühwirth et al. (2021) assess that “[f]or better or for worse, there is history, there is the book and then there's the movie” (88)—which dramatizes the heroines’ experiences by adding instances of discrimination which never happened, while surreptitiously glossing over ongoing discrimination and segregation outside of nasa at the time. with this paper, i intend to join existing scholarly interest regarding stem in popular culture. since role models for women in stem remain rare, students “conclude consciously and unconsciously that these careers are not for them because they don’t see people like them” (valantine in shen 2013, 22). if representation is low, it can “affect young people’s career choices, leading to a mutual reinforcement of gender stereotypes,” as elena makarova et al. point out (2019, 2). similar arguments are presented by jocelyn steinke (2005, 27), carol colatrella (2011, 8) and tara nkrumah (2021, 1336), all pointing to the significant influence of mass media and american popular culture on western perceptions about who belongs in stem—and who does not. the purpose of this paper is to examine who is shown as belonging in stem via the example of spatial relations in the film hidden figures. since both segregation, which has lasted into the era that the film portrays and which was protested by the then ongoing civil rights movement, as well as the medium of film itself, are highly spatialized, the examination of spatial relations as metaphor for power becomes a suitable tool for reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 20 analysis. for a film that focuses on outer space, much can be gleaned about the access, inclusion and exclusion of groups and individuals within the inner space of the nasa campus.1 as nkrumah (2021) notes, “[r]epeated examples of restricting individuals from certain spaces due to gender norms,” as well as racial inequalities, “surface in the film” (1346). yet these have not been previously examined from an intersectional perspective. such an analysis should not only include the question of who cannot access spaces, privileges, and knowledge, but also the question of who can. next to intersectionality and a sociopolitical reading of space, this paper therefore operates with the concept of gatekeeping. in emphasizing the role of gatekeeper, more attention is afforded to the white male characters in the film. their range of movement and their degree of belonging at nasa stand in crucial relation and opposition to the black heroines. the following analysis will treat this opposition on basis of the triangle formed by katherine johnson, al harrison, and paul stafford. 1. theoretical approach 1.1 intersectionality the film hidden figures portrays a segregated 1960s virginia. due to conventions of gender as well as race, the white male characters are shown as being significantly less restricted in their movements than the three black female leads. both their gender and their race position katherine johnson, mary jackson, and dorothy vaughan as initially outside of the prestigious circles at nasa. their experience can and should therefore be considered from an intersectional perspective. first introduced by the feminist theorist audre lorde in the 1970s and later coined by american civil rights advocate and scholar kimberlé crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality “is the concept that social identities, such as race, class, and gender, create overlapping systems of discrimination and oppression” (lyda hill foundation and geena davis institute 2019, 10). it can be defined “as a theoretical and methodological approach to understanding the meaning and consequences of holding multiple coconstructing categories of social group membership” (ireland et al. 2018, 230). referring to recent work by crenshaw, danyelle t. ireland et al. (2018) clarify that intersectionality is “a theory not of multiple identities but of how holding certain identities makes one vulnerable to discrimination and exclusion” (230). especially in stem, unconscious bias and traditional western gendered values can make intersectional factors of discrimination difficult to detect. as katherine robert (2021) explains: 1 i would hereby like to thank the bremen research colloquium of july 2019 for the animated discussion of this film, which has in part inspired the present paper. reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 21 intersecting social identities like age, gender, and race as well as academic and professional disciplines and degree attainment generate a hierarchy of power in stem that is difficult to study due to the complex relationality between these various social identities. (3) while the intersections between racial and gendered discrimination complicate many careers, stem in particular is a field which has been constructed around white ideals of rationality and masculinity (ireland et al. 2018, 227). furthermore, there persists a “culture of no culture” (rose 1994, 2), which denies cultural influences on the sciences and therefore makes them resistant to revision. taking up the example of engineering, robert (2021) points to the increasing difficulty of countering inequalities due to “the culture of engineering, which is apolitical, ahistorical, and locked in a positivist mindset that research finds often denies the space to acknowledge how different bodies experience engineering culture” (3). as a result, a white and patriarchal status quo is maintained, which present gatekeepers further contribute to. 1.2 gatekeeping gatekeepers are persons in a professional network who hold the power to grant access, resources, and professional advancement to others. in the words of massimiano bucchi (2015), gatekeepers are “those scientists or other individuals who, because they occupy particular positions within scientific institutions, are able to influence the distribution of resources such as research funds, teaching posts or publishing opportunities” (246). in the film hidden figures, notable examples of gatekeepers include al harrison as head of the space task group, his employee paul stafford, the judge who enables mary jackson to attend advanced classes, and to some extent, vivian mitchell. with the exception of the latter, all of these gatekeepers are white and male. they are part of the dominant group which reproduces itself through gatekeeping (van den brink and benschop 2014, 464). according to robert k. merton, gatekeepers as a collective “evaluate the promise and limitations of aspirants to new positions, thus affecting both the mobility of individual scientists and, in the aggregate, the distribution of personnel throughout the system” (merton in van den brink and benschop 2014, 464). gender is a deciding factor in this evaluation (ibid). therefore, “[w]hen the gatekeepers are predominantly men, women have difficulty gaining access to desirable academic networks” (van den brink and benschop 2014, 464). marieke van den brink and yvonne benschop relate this phenomenon to the principles of homophily, homosociality, and the “similar-to-me-effect” (2014, 464). in the case of hidden figures, these aspects cover not only gender, but also race. if nasa is controlled by white and male individuals, then the power these parties hold is likely to be maintained, unless active change is enforced. to date, “making the organization [nasa] inclusive and equitable is an ongoing mission,” as robert notes, observing that the “whiteness, and maleness, of stem remains in place” (11). i argue that this status reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 22 quo not only remains in its place, but further determines what space is afforded to diverse actors in stem, which the film hidden figures exemplifies. 1.3 spatial analysis it was nancy hopkins who first measured women’s offices in stem and found that they were considerably smaller than their male colleagues’ in the 1990s (humphries 2017). in a study conducted from 2012 to 2018, british researchers still observed that women starting their first research labs “have access to less laboratory space than their male peers do” (else 2019, n.p.). in a metaphorical as well as literal sense, it becomes clear that women to date are afforded less space in stem. while space is only one of a number of critical resources—such as funding, equipment, and staff—it is a crucial one. therefore, the present paper treats space as metaphor for autonomy and belonging in stem. as a visual medium, film provides clues towards space both through its settings as well as through character movements in relation to their environment and one another. space does not exist as neutral territory—rather, it is shaped by human relations and experiences. even though the work of henri lefebvre, a pioneer in spatial studies, has been contested in the decades that followed its publication, “his primary call to attend to the agency and complexity of space as a lived, social product remains a central insight” (zacharias 2016, 214). in their paper “time for space: a narrative review of research on organizational spaces,” scott taylor and andré spicer (2007) define space among three dimensions: “[t]he first conception treats space as distance between two points. the second conception treats space as materialized power relations. the final conception treats space as the manifestation of our imagination” (327). it is the second conception that becomes relevant to my analysis of hidden figures. as taylor and spicer outline, the great value of viewing space as physical manifestation of power relations lies in moving away “from a focus on how surface manifestations of organized spaces operate,” and instead considering “the reasons why spaces are configured as they are” (332). to norbert schaffeld (2016), “the dominant distribution of scientific space” in science narratives can give insight into gendered exclusions from areas where new knowledge is produced (182). next to perceiving space as a metaphorical manifestation of access, inclusion and exclusion, there are two further considerations that can meaningfully contribute to an analysis of black women in stem on screen. the first one is presented by teresa bridgeman (2007), who argues that while “[o]bjective spatial relationships between aspects of a narrative are helpful in enabling readers to visualize its contents,” equally important are the ways “in which characters inhibit the space of their world both socially and psychologically” (55). how women experience their working environment can provide clues to their sense of belonging (55), which is “a key predictor of persistence in stem fields” (diekman et al. 2017, 156). reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 23 the second theory turns from the individual character to the united states as a nation. especially during the space race, borders are relevant within buildings, cities, states, and in between nations. as dora holland and jack burns (2018) point out, “[s]pace, by the nature of the word, means thinking outside of the boundaries of our own border, be it country or global borders” (13). in hidden figures, outer space is something to be conquered, an expansion which echoes the previous drive of the western frontier (méndez gonzález 2001, 10). “because national interests have dictated u.s. direction in space exploration, this has meant that as the country finds itself at the crux of where it stands on the global stage politically, it also does so in space endeavors,” holland and burns relate (13). in effect, “[t]he examination of the changing narrative of space exploration in the united states is also an examination of the changing self-perception of the country in relation to the rest of the world” (13). the film hidden figures itself notably adds to the narrative of the united states as an innovative country facing ahead. 2. film analysis the narrative of the united states dominating the space race permeates the entirety of hidden figures. it also aids the three black heroines in interacting with white male gatekeepers throughout the film. from the policeman who interrogates katherine, dorothy and mary in their first joint scene to the judge who grants mary access to higher education, most depicted male figures can be convinced by arguments that point to the space race and simultaneously flatter their own image as white american men. three of the most prominent male characters are the astronaut john glenn (glen powell), head of the space task group al harrison (kevin costner), and his employee paul stafford (jim parsons). all three figures are shown as unrestricted in their movements and have access to spaces and knowledge. in relation to katherine, al and paul perform the role of gatekeepers, while john on occasion functions as a catalyst. 2.1. a note on masculinities because it has not previously been discussed, i would like to note in this instance that john, al, and paul can among themselves be ranked in a hierarchy of masculinities (connell 1998, 5). the fact that all of these characters are white—as are all the portrayed men working at nasa—is crucial, because it limits the given depiction to white, middle-class masculinity in the workplace. while the following analysis will have to disregard john as a side character, it is he who embodies the most prestigious facets of american masculinity. as an astronaut who advances the united states in the space race against russia, john is a public figure and national hero. he is depicted as young, healthy, fit, conventionally attractive and level-headed, as well as just and humorous. he thus symbolizes white american hegemonic masculinity (connell 1998, 5). reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 24 al approves of john, even though he cannot embody the same degree of hegemonic masculinity himself. al is notably older, less attractive, and less directly associated with physical action. nevertheless, as head of the space task group, he combines authority, rationality, and a sense of justice and appreciation of hard work and efficiency. out of all characters introduced in the film, al is the one who moves most freely across langley campus. he is also the one who most prominently underlines the national spirit and position of the united states in the ongoing space race. put under pressure at the beginning of the film by president john f. kennedy and his own superior, al highlights his authority by positioning himself above paul. portrayed by jim parsons, who viewers will be familiar with as sheldon cooper from the big bang theory series, paul ranks the lowest in terms of masculinity. he possesses neither john’s physical nor al’s professional prestige. nevertheless, since he is white and male, the gendered and racial hierarchies in the given context of the 1960s united states position paul as superior to the black and female katherine, whom paul selects as the target for his own frustrations. as a result, a hierarchical flow of pressures and humiliations can be detected throughout the film, which trickles down from the president of the united states, to the higher ups at nasa, to its white male employees, and finally to its black female members. i argue that a significant portion of dramatic tension within the film hidden figures arises from the triangle constellation between a disadvantaged katherine, a prickly paul, and an avuncular al, who helps katherine while continuously disparaging paul. even though al can be read as an unsympathetic character, it is paul who is positioned as the unlikable and spiteful foil to katherine’s rising mathematical success throughout the film. meanwhile, al is presented as the white savior who helps katherine to advance and who upholds american ideals. the following paragraphs examine how these relations and power dynamics are mirrored in space throughout the film, organized by relevant locations and in a roughly chronological order. 2.2 the west computing group the west computing group constitutes the cradle of professional development for katherine, dorothy, and mary. at the beginning of the film, the three women are shown in a room labelled “colored computers,” which appears to be their regular workplace. the room is located in the basement and has no windows. even though the women who work there are dressed brightly and maintain a cheerful atmosphere, the room itself is dim, grey, and unappealing (00:10:41). as the viewer soon finds out, the west computing group is removed by a considerable distance from strategically significant offices such as the space task group. by assigning a room in the basement to its black and female employees, their lower social status is exemplified in space. reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 25 as a room, the west computing group embodies a segregated and patriarchal status quo. the action centering on the three black heroines begins on the day that this status is disrupted. in receiving new assignments, both mary and katherine are enabled to step outside of their familiar zone and into new environments. mary is invited to work in engineering, while katherine is spontaneously recruited by vivian mitchell for the space task group, which needs a mathematician capable of handling analytic geometry. since the position cannot be filled from the talent pool in the white male space task group or the white female east computing group, katherine is presented a chance she would otherwise be denied. the fact that assigning a black woman to the task is a last resort is echoed in vivian mitchell’s parting words: “didn’t think i’d come all the way down here” (00:11:52 – 00:11:54). the brief interaction illustrates that the west computing group is indeed located outside the usual range of movement of a white female employee such as vivian mitchell. yet even though the environment is comparatively foreign to her, vivian mitchell is able to move through it freely and ask for favors. for the black female employees to be able to leave the “colored” spaces they are assigned, they depend on the need that others have of them. this holds true for mary (needed in engineering), katherine (needed in the space task group) and dorothy, who is eventually needed in operating the new international business machines (ibms). in each case, the eventual relocation is significant, because it signifies boundary crossing, movement, and progression. while progression is something that is celebrated by the heroines, they are also wary of the unfamiliar risks that the new environments entail. while mary faces physical dangers in engineering, it is the threat of failure that bothers katherine. after her first day in the space task group, she confides in her friends that she is concerned about not being able to “keep up in that room” (00:27:52). she prophesizes that she will either be back with the west computing group within a week, or out of a job entirely. while the first option signals regression from a professional as well as spatial point of view, the latter option denotes katherine’s possible exclusion from langley campus. katherine’s predictions turn out to be warranted in so far as she does return to the west computing group once the space task group no longer has need of her. however, this setback turns out to be temporary. all three leads are permanently reassigned to new positions by the end of the film. dorothy, acting as supervisor of the west computing group, successfully advocates for herself and the “colored computers” to be assigned to the new ibms. near the end of the film, it is she who spares the west computing group a last glance before switching off the lights and closing the door behind her (01:50:30), thereby signaling that the days of segregated work places are now over. reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 26 2.3 the space task group in comparison to the west computing group, the interior design of the space task group is considerably nicer. even though the walls are similarly monochrome, they are glossy grey instead of concrete, interspaced with warm wooden highlights. as the first black woman entering this realm, katherine is a pioneer. “they never had a colored in here before, katherine,” vivian tells her, adding “don’t embarrass me” (00:16:20 – 00:16:25). vivian leaves katherine behind to open the door to the space task group, with a box tucked under her arm and inspiring music rising in the background. the fact that katherine opens the door herself suggests that she has gained entry on her own, being judged on her mathematical abilities which grant her access. however, the door closing behind her indicates that katherine is the exception, and that no other black women are expected to follow. hesitant and conscious of the boundaries she is crossing both in terms of race and gender, katherine surveys a large circular office. a few steps into the room, she is mistaken for the custodian, an occupation which would constitute a more common relationship between katherine and the present space. as a mathematician occupying one of the desks, katherine stands out socially and visually—clothed in a colorful dress in an environment of men in white shirts (nkrumah 2021, 1344). ruth, the only other woman in the room, advises katherine to “do your work, keep your head down” (00:17:25), and directs her towards the desk in the back. while this direction initially seems to place katherine at the periphery of the group, and thus position her as an outsider, the desk she is assigned in fact stands closest to the steps that lead up to al’s office—a position which may symbolize the sympathy these characters eventually develop for one another. al himself occupies a superior position both socially and spatially. this is illustrated by the fact that he inhibits a separate section of the office, which is located a level above the desks of his employees. in his office, a black and white portrait of president john f. kennedy can be seen on the walls, which accentuates his pride as american citizen. the walls of the office are glass, so that al is able to survey his employees, which brings to mind foucault’s panopticon (taylor and spicer 2007, 330) and demonstrates the power that al has over others. both his office and the circular room hold at least one blackboard. these blackboards convey the mathematical nature of the work that is being done and are frequently crucial in demonstrating katherine’s brilliance. furthermore, the circular room holds both a globe in its center as well as a large map of the world on its wall, which underlines the characters’ awareness of their work in relation to the global context. the constant awareness of global competition motivates al to walk down from his office and address the room. he stops in front of paul’s desk and pointedly deposits his half-eaten sandwich in paul’s trash can, which can be seen as a gesture of dominance over paul, especially since al tasks the newcomer katherine—the lowest ranking person reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 27 in the given hierarchy—with checking paul’s work in the same instance. al takes center stage both in terms of camera movement as well as in terms of spatial position. he stands in the middle of the room with his employees around him and imprints upon them the importance of making significant progress in the space race (00:19:12). al once more singles out paul in asking “america’s greatest engineering and scientific minds are not gonna have a problem with having their work checked, are they, paul?” (00:20:00 – 00:20:03). having been publicly humiliated, paul waits until after al has left before handing over his work to katherine. a large portion of the file has been blacked out. noticing her reaction, paul informs katherine that the numbers are “classified” and that katherine does not have clearance (00:20:59). in this instance, paul thus purposefully withholds information and makes it harder for katherine to complete the task that al has set for her, exercising his power as gatekeeper. throughout the day, katherine continues working until only she and al are left— katherine at her desk, and al up in his office. when katherine moves to hand in her work, the empty room and low lights make clear that she has worked significantly overtime. she makes her way to the edge of al’s office and speaks his name, startling him from his train of thought (00:24:50). it is only after al acknowledges her and instructs her to deposit the work by his desk that katherine may enter his space, her movements less restricted once less people are present. she further needs permission to leave, politely asking if she may go home. al absentmindedly agrees, seemingly distracted and unaware of time, which plays into his image of white male dedicated scientist. it also shows that al controls the movements of his employees both in a spatial as well as a temporal sense. it is up to him to decide where they may go, and when. this authority is mirrored in a later scene when al calls upon his employees to work harder than the competition (00:54:32). he thanks everyone for staying behind after hours since they have received news that the russians have once again made headway. again, al moves through their midst, the only one in a vest as every other man is wearing a plain white shirt. it is noticeable that he stands half a head taller than his employees, which adds to the space he occupies and underlines his air of authority. as the only women present, katherine and ruth stand apart in their colorful dresses. yet they seem invisible to al, who concludes his speech as follows: there’s only two things you need to know going forward, one is staying here, working late, that’s gonna be a fact of life. and two don’t expect your paychecks to reflect the extra time it’s gonna take to catch up and pass those bastards. for those of you who can’t work that way i understand and thank you for what you’ve done. for everyone else: i suggest you call your wives, tell ‘em how it’s gonna be. i’ll start with mine. (00:55:38 – 00:56:07) phone in hand, al is shown surveying the room from his own office, as everyone present dutifully informs their family. katherine, a dedicated worker, is shown calling what may reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 28 be presumed to be her mother. however, katherine’s dedication is called into question when al notices her frequent absences from her desk. 2.4 the bathroom on the first day in her new position, katherine politely inquires about the women’s restroom; “excuse me, may i ask where the ladies’ room is?,” to which ruth replies, “sorry, i have no idea where your bathroom is” (00:21:21 – 00:21:26). the given reply alters the question. while katherine had asked where the ladies’ bathroom was, the answer she is given specifically refers to the “colored” ladies’ restrooms, which subtly excludes katherine from using the present bathrooms in the building. discouraged, katherine resorts to the ladies’ restroom she is familiar with—the “colored” restroom in the west computing group. however, that bathroom is half a mile away from the space task group. it thus takes katherine a significant amount of time to walk between the two. intersectionality is important in this scenario. it becomes apparent in the way in which katherine had asked about the bathroom in terms of gender, and is given an answer which refers to race. different aspects of her identity intersect and create interdependent disadvantages. when al confronts her about the significant amount of time she appears to be missing from her desk every day, katherine fiercely explains: there is no bathroom. there are no colored bathrooms in this building, or any building outside the west campus, which is half a mile away. did you know that? i have to walk to timbuktu just to relieve myself. and i can’t use one of the handy bikes. picture that, mr. harrison. my uniform; skirt below my knees, my heels, and a simple string of pearls, well i don’t own pearls, lord knows you don’t pay coloreds enough to afford pearls! (01:01:47 – 01:02:42) in this instance, katherine demonstrates that she is excluded from spaces due to the color of her skin. however, getting to the places she is allowed to go is made harder due to her gender. she cannot use one of the bikes to commute between the space task group and the west computing group because it would compromise her social standing as a woman. up to the point of this confrontation, katherine is therefore frequently shown running across campus in her heels and working in the bathroom when she gets there. it might be noted that based upon biographical sources such as shetterly’s book, “katherine felt completely at home at langley” from the very beginning and remained unaffected by policies of racial discrimination (shetterly in frühwirth et al. 2021, 84). it would seem that the real katherine johnson had comfortably inhabited the space task group for several years before being made aware of the segregated bathrooms—“[b]y then, she simply refused to change her habits” (shetterly in frühwirth et al. 2021, 84). the assessment that katherine johnson felt completely “at home” at langley underlines her sense of belonging as a woman in stem. in the film adaptation, this sense is shattered. what results is a very different image of the woman in question, who in the film is dependent on the white male savior (nkrumah 2021, 1347). the focus is therefore put on reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 29 al in what may be seen as one of the most dramatic scenes within the film—the destruction of the colored ladies’ bathroom sign in the west computing group. upon witnessing katherine’s outburst, al takes it upon himself to remove the colored ladies’ bathroom sign in the west computing group with a crowbar. the action is visually impressive, if somewhat exaggerated. based upon the prior logic of unlabeled ladies’ bathrooms, the missing sign would indicate that the bathroom is intended for white women only. however, al’s accompanying speech makes clear that instead, he is abolishing the racial segregation of bathrooms at langley: “there you have it. no more colored restrooms. no more white restrooms. just plain old toilets. go wherever you damn well please. preferably closer to your desk. here at nasa? we all pee the same color” (01:03:58 – 01:04:26). what is remarkable about this scene, which cements al’s role as white savior, is the control he demonstrates over a space that lies far outside his own jurisdiction, as well as the bodies that move across a whole campus. even though the bathroom lies half a mile from al’s place of work, he does not seem to question his own authority in physically altering it. since the space is designated for black female workers, al as a white male automatically assumes control over it. moreover, he dictates how bathrooms are to be used by all employed women in the future. he points at katherine when instructing her to use a bathroom closer to her desk. this gesture illustrates that it is not necessarily a sense for equality which drives al, but rather a focus on efficiency in the ongoing space race. therefore, he is arguably not motivated by a desire to support minorities within his institution, but by international competition and american masculine ideals. 2.5 the hallway in order to be able to support nasa in the ongoing space race, access to information is crucial for katherine, dorothy, and mary. while dorothy and mary fight their own battles for educational materials and opportunities, katherine too struggles with what information she is privy to and which she is excluded from on a daily basis. this struggle begins with the first mathematical report that paul gives her, which is heavily redacted. it is al who eventually grants katherine access to the data. throughout the film, repetitions of the same dynamic—paul withholding information and al providing it—arise. a series of exchanges takes place in the hallways around the space task group. as an unfixed space where either direction can be taken, these hallways illustrate the tug-and-pull nature of the arguments. the first exchange between katherine and paul in the grey, glossy hallway of the space task group is given below: katherine: mr. stafford! paul: what, katherine? katherine: if i could attend the briefings, i’d be more useful to the project. reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 30 paul: pentagon briefings are closed-door. katherine: yes, but if we don’t have the information of the changes, we can’t keep up, i need those changes as they occur, as you said, it’s a pinhead. paul: katherine, that’s the job. you asked for this assignment. so just calculate with what you have. or we’ll find someone who can. (01:18:38 – 01:19:05) in this argument, katherine refers both to increased efficiency, as well as paul’s own established difficulty of the task they are facing. she thereby flatters paul and underlines her own interest in being useful. yet paul cannot be swayed and denies katherine access—additionally hinting at her dismissal from the space task group if she cannot successfully operate on basis of the information she is given. since physical access to meetings directly translates into access to vital information, it is not surprising that katherine persists in a following scene: katherine: sir. if i could attend briefings, i could stay – paul: katherine, we have been through this, it is not possible, there is no protocol for women attending. katherine: there’s no protocol for a man circling the earth either, sir. paul: okay, you know what, that is just the way things are. (01:20:13 – 01:20:26) in this second exchange, katherine once more begins to point out her improved ability to aid with the project if she could attend briefings. while this argument would likely prove effective with al, whose dedication to winning the space race has been amply illustrated throughout the film, paul once again remains indifferent. instead, he resorts to pointing out the status quo of gendered relations and protocols, which he has no interest in changing. al eventually steps in after witnessing the frequent and increasingly heated exchanges between katherine and paul. katherine petitions al by reminding him of the upcoming launch of john glenn, stressing that “[w]e don’t have the math figured out yet” (01:21:25 – 01:21:31). just minutes prior to this scene, al had relayed his motivations for bringing john home safely to the pentagon: let me say first, discovery is never for the sake of discovery, gentlemen, but for the sake of human survival, and it will always come with a risk. whoever gets there first makes the rules, that’s been true of every civilization, and so i think the bigger question for this body to consider is; who do you want calling the shots in space? we have to know what’s out there, senator. we have to touch the stars if only to ensure our own survival and only a man can do that. we’ll get john glenn home safely because we have to. (01:15:53 – 1:16:31) al is keenly focused on the importance of bringing john home, because he believes that it is a crucial step in ensuring that america wins the space race. he believes that human survival rides on a western victory, calling upon ideals of white masculinity and dominance. it is this motivation which, shortly after, prompts him to act as gatekeeper and reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 31 open the door to pentagon briefings for katherine. thus, when paul repeats his argument concerning a lack of protocol for women attending, al cuts in: “okay i get that part, paul. but within these walls, who uh, who makes the rules?” (01:21:51 – 01:22:00). seizing her chance, katherine is quick to supply an answer: “you sir, you are the boss. you just have to act like one. sir” (01:21:11 – 01:22:12). in this scene, al directly refers to his own role as gatekeeper. this illustrates that he is aware of the authority he wields. katherine supports him in this role because it is a gambit likely to win her what she needs: access to the briefings. al grants it, on the condition that katherine keeps quiet once they enter the room. both of them interact with john in the meeting, and it is john who later requests katherine’s attendance and verification of the calculations before his launch. once the calculations are completed and delivered, the door to the meeting closes in katherine’s face until al opens it, provides her with a pass which signals clearance, and motions for her to join him inside (01:45:50). 2.6 the home it is pertinent to note who is where when important events, such as john’s launch, happen. consequently, it is worth taking a closer look at the home, where the heroines are predominantly located during game-changing developments. while much of hidden figures centers around the events at langley, the viewer is nevertheless presented glimpses into the heroines’ private lives outside of work. this includes their homes, their loved ones, and their joint black community. scenes set at or around the home stand in direct contrast to scenes set at langley. they are colorful where langley is monochrome, and lively where langley maintains a serious atmosphere. they are of little consequence to the overall narrative and function as breaks between the tension-ridden interactions at langley. one might note here that the private lives of katharine, dorothy, and mary are the only ones the viewer sees, while all male characters are strictly shown at work. i argue that balancing work with the private life presents the leads as more feminine and thus affirms their identities as women, next to their identities as scientists. this sense is fostered by the fact that all of them have two to three children and a heterosexual love interest. katherine, dorothy, and mary are shown as operating in two spheres: the private and the public. while al’s demand of working overtime makes clear that the home may not interrupt work, work is shown interrupting the home. in their private lives, the heroines turn to the radio as the following news are relayed: we interrupt this musical programming with breaking news: the soviet news agency has announced that russian cosmonaut juri gagarin has become the first man in space. gagarin completed one full orbit around the planet in one hundred and eight minutes. stay tuned to the station for more details as they become available. (00:53:31 – 00:53:51) the scene cuts to a historical montage of gagarin’s success and then to the men at langley, who are viewing the news on a large screen. the only woman present is ruth, who reden 4.2 (2023) | cora zoé övermann 32 stands next to al. a similar montage of historic footage and film images of langley is employed when the news of american progress in the space race around gus grissom and the liberty bell 7 capsule are made public, which the three heroines once again receive at home (01:15:03). furthermore, the same format had previously been used to relate the launch of alan shepard (01:05:40). this shows that katherine, dorothy, and mary receive the latest news regarding developments pertinent to their work at home regardless of whether developments are achieved by a foreign country or their own. in either case, they are not among the white men whose ambitions in the space race they passionately share. 3. conclusion hidden figures as a film creates a story, and a space, for three women who had previously received little attention for their outstanding work for nasa. the prominent setting is langley campus, the mood anxious but excited. hidden figures champions its country of production, america—where racial and gendered inequalities, the film suggests, are things of the past (nkrumah 2021, 1350). this paper has argued that throughout the film, intersecting inequalities can be observed in space, which has been treated as a materialization of power relations (taylor and spicer 2007, 327). katherine johnson, dorothy vaughan and mary jackson each enter new spaces throughout the film, which allow them to advance their careers. on this journey, they are hindered or aided by several gatekeepers. as the analysis has illustrated, paul stafford and al harrison in particular interact with katherine, creating a triangular dynamic of exclusion and inclusion. hidden figures is a story of exceptionalism (nkrumah 2021, 1350): exceptional innovation, exceptional national spirit, and exceptional scientific genius that especially katherine embodies. yet while the film portrays a country on the move, it nevertheless focuses on “individual victories” (cruz 2017, n.p.) especially in terms of gendered and racial equality. little structural change is enforced within the film, with the exception of al’s heroic destruction of a bathroom sign. the doors that katherine and mary have walked through have likely closed behind them. it is dorothy who makes sure that she brings her coworkers with her into new and better environments. through its immense success and subsequent scholarly attention, hidden figures has secured its place within american stem-centered popular culture. at a first glance, science is brought into culture and to viewers all over the world. at a second glance, hidden figures makes visible how much of culture is in science. the film exemplifies how factors of race, gender, career stage, and the (inter)national context intersect and 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discourse.” zeitschrift für anglistik und amerikanistik 64 (2): 169–87. shen, helen. 2013. “mind the gender gap.” nature 495: 22–24. steinke, jocelyn. 2005. “cultural representations of gender and science: portrayals of female scientists and engineers in popular films.” science communication 27 (1): 27–63. taylor, scott and andré spicer. 2007. “time for space: a narrative review of research on organizational spaces.” international journal of management reviews 9 (4): 325–46. van den brink, marieke and yvonne benschop. 2014. “gender in academic networking: the role of gatekeepers in professorial recruitment.” journal of management studies 51 (3): 460–92. zacharias, robert. 2016. “space and the postcolonial novel.” inthe cambridge companion to the postcolonial novel, edited by ato quayson, 208–29. cambridge: cambridge university press. 4 reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 1 solarpunk cyborgs against cyberpunk’s pessimism: the evolution of the feminist cyborg archetype from moxyland, to “solar child” and “for the snake of power” alejandro rivero-vadillo1 abstract this article explores the different ways in which some female-authored solarpunk stories employ cyborg models developed by feminist cyberpunk fiction. the text explores contemporary critical readings of cyberpunk fiction and analyzes lauren beukes’s moxyland (2008), camille meyers’s “solar child” (2017), and brenda cooper’s “for the snake of power” (2018) focusing on the way in which embodied and disembodied female cyborg(esque) subjectivities are represented. the article argues that, although solarpunk has abandoned the idea of subversion in cyberspace developed in early cyberpunk, some of the techno-human alliances embodied by cyborgs that are inherent to this punk movement have remained. either developing physical bio-cyborgs liberated from the biological limitations of materiality, as in meyers’ story, or representing stem-experienced women who cooperate with ais in order to fight against green capitalism’s material structures of power, contemporary solarpunk hybrid subjectivities are greatly influenced by feminist cyberpunk’s portrayals and symbolical uses of the cyborg. keywords: feminist cyberpunk, solarpunk, feminist cyborg, stem female cyborgs. doi: 10.37536/reden.2023.4.2062 climate change is forcing cyborgs to abandon cyberspace, and through that, a renovated feminist posthumanism is being materialized in contemporary evolutions of the cyberpunk genre. the models that described the female techno-humans of old, produced during the different waves of feminist cyberpunk, are finding their own space in contemporary solarpunk short stories, although with new concerns in mind. solarpunk is a literary, performative, artistic and political movement that aims to inspire optimistic futures in which humans and sustainable industrial technology can coexist on earth. although 1 this research was funded by the spanish ministry of universities (ministerio de universidades) under a national predoctoral contract program for university teaching training (ayuda para la formación de profesorado universitario). reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 2 solarpunk imaginaries are heterogeneously built, both in terms of visuals and ideas, the corpus of published solarpunk stories opens the door for comparative analysis of technology between the cyber and solar modes of worldbuilding. the liberatory role traditionally associated to the cyborg in feminist cyberpunk has offered a suggestive model that some female authors have replicated in their own solarpunk stories. this article explores how cyberpunk feminism has codified an idea of the cyborg, developing two different models engaging with embodied and disembodied portrayals of “the female cyborg,” and comments on how both of them have influenced later solarpunk imaginations of “ecologized” techno-women. by analyzing contemporary literary theory on feminist cyberpunk and exploring lauren beukes’s post-cyberpunk novel moxyland (2008), camille meyers’s “solar child” (2017), and brenda cooper’s “for the snake of power” (2018), this article illustrates how cyborg models have mutated from their original techno-optimism to post-cyberpunk techno-defeatism and back to techno-optimism in recent solarpunk, thus changing the very notions of what it is to be a cyborg. 1. the cyberpunk techno-woman before delving into the complexities of solar and (post)cyberpunk cyborgs, it is necessary to briefly comment on how the cyberpunk feminist cyborg came into being. cyberpunk’s portrayal of feminine bodies within its feminist and non-male-authored branch is far from monolithic and has substantially evolved since the early 1980s. scholar lisa yaszek (2020) defines three main historical subdivisions of the feminist cyberpunk movement. the first one (from 1980 to 1990) is characterized by narrative subversions of the more masculinist sense of cyberpunk popular at the time (34). mainstream representations of cyborg bodies during this decade were patterned and reinforced by stereotypical gender dynamics and so, “male cyborgs [such as robocop or terminator] became invincible while female cyborgs were sexually exploited [such as molly in gibson’s neuromancer]” (lavigne 83). this view of technology overemphasizing patriarchal gender relations may also be observed in the very same cyberspace created by many male authors. as yaszek claims, commenting nicola nixon’s “cyberpunk: preparing the ground for revolution or keeping the boys satisfied?” (1992), “cyberpunk was an antifeminist mode of storytelling that gutted the future of meaningful female actors and cast both cyberspace and corporations as feminized spaces to be penetrated and tamed by male hackers more interested in profit than revolution” (yaszek 2020, 34). these female cyborgs, mostly virtual ais, merged with a technologized territory to be conquered by masculine characters. in contrast to this trend, feminist authors from that time. for instance, pat cadigan, casts women as resourceful heroines who oppose the exploitative practices of an inherently masculinist capitalism. . . . rather than following the adventures of a lone man whose efforts to ensure justice are compromised when he is seduced by a femme fatale who enmeshes him in corrupt and uncontrollable social, political and legal institutions, cadigan’s protagonists reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 3 are usually women whose efforts to do good in the world are compromised by men who make bad choices that enmesh them in corrupt and uncontrollable social, political and legal systems. (yaszek 34) cadigan's cyborgs embodied a gender-liberatory view of empowerment represented by technologically enhanced women. they were feminized versions of the robocop/terminator cyborg archetype, making them not only protagonists (which were rare in early cyberpunk fiction [cadora 1995, 358]), but also agentic beings that provided a critique of real-world patriarchal domination, despite still adhering to highly gender-normative behaviors. for yaszek, the second wave of feminist cyberpunk (from 1990 to 2005) represented an abrupt change in the representational politics of cyberpunk women (35). this is traditionally linked with the rise of much of the cyber-feminist theory in the 1990s that enriched both debates and narrative creations. haraway’s cyborg manifesto (1985) and the works of other cyber-feminist theorists such as sadie plant (1995), rosi braidotti (1997) and katherine hayles (1999) inspired different reflections on the role of cybernetics with regards to feminist thought, embracing ideas that dislocated previous understandings of women as subjectivities essentially associated with a non-anthropogenic nature. in this view, the link between machinic and female bodies is observed as one communicating two subalternized subjects that liberate or even enhance patriarchal humanism. as sadie plant (1995) puts it: the machines and the women mimic [men’s] humanity, but they never simply become it. they may aspire to be the same as man, but in every effort they become more complex than he has ever been. cybernetic feminism does not, like many of its predecessors [. . .] seek out for woman a subjectivity, an identity or even a sexuality of her own: there is no subject position and no identity on the other side of the screens. and female sexuality is always in excess of anything that could be called 'her own'. woman cannot exist 'like man'; neither can the machine. as soon her mimicry earns her equality, she is already something, and somewhere, other than him. a computer which passes the turing test is always more than a human intelligence; simulation always takes the mimic over the brink. (63) the cyber-feminist critique is, nonetheless, not homogenous, and the perspectives through which the alliance between female and machinic subjectivities have been explored were already complex in the 1990s. however, all of them embraced a common ethos of liberation from patriarchal control utilizing machinic integration within their bodies. the 1990s produced a high number of feminist works in which the “cadiganesque” trend of portraying “reversed-male-cyberpunk-heroines” shifted to a different paradigm, one dominated by women characters in stem professions. thus, readers may find women as experts in nanotechnology, data analyst, hackers or even internet magicians in some fantasy/sci-fi worldbuildings (yaszek 2020, 35). early feminist debates on cyberpunk cyborgs have historically been divided between two theoretical views, one aiming reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 4 to feminize the techno-body (and the technologized space) or exploiting its patriarchal feminization for feminist purposes, and another one based on donna haraway’s “cyborg manifesto” ideas on science, technology and gender, aiming to “androgenize” both bodies and space (lavigne 2013, 84). the two of them challenge the original masculinist idealizations of cyberpunk worlds. machinic interfaces mediate questions regarding feminist discourses by presenting technology as a transgressive and definitive tool against patriarchal logics, either through depictions of women in stem jobs or through representations of technologically enhanced human bodies, such as the protagonists of marge piercy's she, he and it (1991) and kathleen ann goonan's queen city jazz (1994), and the proxies in laura mixon's proxies (1998). representations in the 1990s introduced a new sense of cyborg that is not necessarily characterized by its ontological combination of technology and flesh and interacts with the machine in a reactive and disembodied way. these stem feminist cyborgs employ machines as an externalized body and push women’s progressive incorporation into the technoscientific job market. the feminist cyborg can therefore be understood in two different ways that will later influence solarpunk representations of female cybernetic subjectivities. on the one hand, there is the figure of the the classical “literal” techno-body composed by a mixture of heavy machinery and human flesh. her symbolic power can be found in the physical communion between organic and inorganic matter that they embody. on the other hand, we may find a “post-cyborg” representation of women in which the union with a machinic apparatus is less self-evident, as it lies in the collaboration between a stem technician and the machine they operate. both observe integration with (embodied or disembodied) inorganic organisms as a vital “first step” towards any kind of feminist enunciation. whereas the former produce a sense of cyborg identity that only operates in allegorical terms, the less self-evident cyborgs reflect a more realist approach toward cyber-feminist politics and ontologies. these “post-cyborg” women present a clearer view of how gender emancipation through technology can be performed in out-of-fiction spaces. although technically fully organic, their use and knowledge of cybernetic tools (and of how to hack or manipulate them) makes them as connected to the machine as the literal cyborgs. it must be noted, however, that the feminist undertones of cyberpunk fiction evolved from dealing with concerns related to cisgender female bodies and patriarchal oppression to an increasing interest in queer themes. as carlen lavigne (2013) comments, in the 1990s “queer concerns were gaining cultural traction, and their inclusion within feminist cyberpunk’s speculative futures is therefore, on one level, easily accounted for. on another level, the challenge of rewriting cyberpunk’s hetero paradigms has obviously appealed more to feminist authors” (145). the feminist cyborg body is, therefore, also a queer one, since the deconstruction of the biological body through technology opens the gate to an eventual deconstruction of sexual and gender identity paradigms. on one side, reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 5 the virtual space that configures the immaterial cyborg “becomes a zone of possibility in which a multitude of genders and sexualities may be explored” (147); on another, the androgyny that characterizes the material cyborg, as explained by teresa de lauretis, “is not only beyond gender or ungendered, but also efficient, clean, indestructible and sexless” (qted. in lavigne 2013, 152). these ideas were expressed in much of 1990s womenauthored cyberpunk narratives , “provid[ing] a place where lesbian viewpoints may be safely explored, and queer issues may be advanced within a feminist paradigm (160).2 the alliance between cybernetics and (queer) feminism presented in both theory and literature might be, nonetheless, problematic from an environmentalist perspective. although it can be argued that cyberfeminism managed to cut loose from the ecological binaries that traditionally entangled feminist identities, this cyber-queer entente only operates in the isolated discourse of gender (and by extention, of sexuality and queerness). beyond that framework, cyberfeminism is problematized by the industrialist dynamics that generate the existence of the machine, ones that also pollute an earth that seems to be doomed to collapse once humanity depletes all resources. in early works of cyberpunk (both feminist and masculinist) “environmental devastation is common, but environmentalism is not” (lavigne 2013, 98), and whenever ecological collapse is critically dealt with, it is predominantly portrayed in the form of a dystopian landscape that can be interpreted as a either a warning message or a defeatist statement, as in the cases of mixon’s proxies, or edith forbes’ exit to reality (1998) (lavigne 2013, 112). the cyberfeminist discourse embedded in these narratives becomes seemingly incompatible with a protection of the environment since, for a feminist liberation to be catalyzed, a ferreous techno-industrial and capitalist infrastructure must support human’s desire to escape their biological body, sexualities and gender concerns. this ambiguous relationship between gender and/or queer liberation and climatic defeatism has been reproduced in many contemporary cyberpunk narratives. it has embraced a generally pessimistic attitude towards technology that disconnects from the techno-naivete of cyborg subversions in many cases. in novels addressing environmental dynamics and cyborgian natures—such as lauren beukes’ moxyland (2008), a novel that may very well belong to what yaszek (2020) defines as the third wave (from 2005 onwards)—the protagonists manage to problematize and sometimes even subvert technopatriarchal power. however, both authors equally situate techno-industrial societies as clearly dystopian with regards to the sustainability of a hyper-cybernetized future.3 2 for the sake of concision, an exploration of queer themes in early cyberpunk fictions has been omitted, but a clear structured analysis can be found in lavigne’s quoted chapter. 3 i use beukes’ text for the purpose of this analysis but there are many more works of post-cyberpunk fiction with similar themes in a similarly pessimistic manner: i.e., rosa montero’s bruna husky’s trilogy — reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 6 in moxyland, readers find two examples of critical representations of gender/queer cyborgs who fall prey to techno-capitalist dynamics in an attempt to subvert them. the clearest example is kendra, a young girl who enhances her body through nano techonology in order not to suffer any injuries and to better heal from disease. in exchange, she is forced to become “a living bill-board” of the company that carried on her cyborgization (duncan 2020, 89), and also their property legally speaking (beukes 2008, 303). this allows the company to eventually euthanize her when it finds out that she has participated in a protest against cape town’s authoritative use of digital technologies. in this sense, kendra is an example of the classical cyborg, the one with a machinic body whose concerns, in the novel’s case, derive from the (lack of) bodily autonomy that their machinic parts allow her to have. on a different “cyborg” side is tendeka, a gay cisgender young boy, who keeps entering a metaverse-like space to freely perform his sexuality whilst also calling to action against the political problems of a cape town that has seen the rise of a ecocidal neo-apartheid regime4. tendeka is an example of the “post-cyborg” above defined. he is technically organic, but his knowledge and use of cyberspace as both an extension of his identity and a tool for political dissent reflect a cyborg connection as equally symbolic as kendra’s. tendeka, however, ends up rejecting his cybernetic idealism and so, his post-cyborg identity—even willingly sacrificing his online relationship with ashraf, his partner— “essentially nullifying the potential for expressions of queer love” (andrews 2020, 136), when seeing himself in need to confront the techno-colonial police regime of the physical world. his fate in the novel, nonetheless, still sees some subversion through technology, since, in the end, he films his death—after been intoxicated by a lethal virus dispersed by the police during the same anti-tech riot in which kendra participates—aiming to upload it to the internet in an attempt to use cyberspace as a counter-discursive tool that could inspire social change. he wants to transcend and become a mere specter of cape town’s digital space in order to instigate its citizens to rebel against their technocratic government. tendeka uses his post-cyborg identity to destroy the very same processes that produce it. the results of that action, however, are unknown as the novel finishes with toby, the character who filmed it, exiting a room with the tendeka’s tapes, and thus, beukes does not tell us whether this action actually served any purpose. this ambivalent approach toward the subversive opportunities offer by hypertechnologization is lagrimas en la lluvia (2011), el peso del corazón (2015) and los tiempos del odio (2020)—(see leone 2017), or nicky draiden’s the prey of gods (2017) (see andrews 2020). 4 beukes depicts a place out of the city, the rural, an area with “a decimated biosphere without infrastructure or employment that lies beyond the virtual networks of the corporate urban enclave” (duncan, 87) and that reflects the environmental and colonial violence exercised by capitalist structures outside the more “privileged” sphere of consumers. reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 7 representative of a debate that cyberpunk narratives (feminist or not) tend to tackle but never fully solve. high technology is a tool to both control human biopolitics and subvert that very same power that is enforced through technology, but whilst the former is a secure asset, the real possibilities of the later are still subject of debate. moxyland is a good precursor of the eco-technological dynamics that will condition solarpunk’s attitude toward the feminist representation of the cyborg. although highly pessimist, since the corporate state seems to be in almost full control of life in cape town, the novel makes it clear that the cause of the ecocide is not human but capitalist, anticipating contemporary conversations on the notions of anthropocene and capitalocene. according to duncan, technology’s pervasive reach in the narrative is, after all, bound up with post-apartheid financialisation and the concomitant production of surplus humanity in the construction of cheap labour on a planetary scale. while the narrative is concerned with the “manipulation of nature,” its agent is capital and its socio-ecological binary, not humanity generally. (2020, 89) as a result, industrial technology is not a concept immediately related to natural destruction, but one that has been employed by the corporate state for that purpose, leading to the conclusion that it can be used to subvert capitalism’s own power—advancing ideas later developed by laboria cuboniks in the xenofeminist manifesto (2015)—and create a political alternative in line with liberal and marxist discourses on equality, multiculturalism and sexual freedom. still, cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, when imagining environmentally critical (and even sustainable) societies, only position them through the open rejection of industrialism. in other words, many cyberpunk fictions recognize that, in terms of earth-human relationships, sustainability and social justice can only be achieved by obliterating the very cybernetical infrastructures constructing the represented society. virtuality, in this sense, operates “as a form of escapism for characters who wish to literally repress their ecologically damaged and traumatizing background by exchanging toxic materiality with sanitized virtuality” (herzog 2021, 95). the feminist cyborg (sometimes also a gynoid or android) is then conceptualized as a subject who can only find gender or sexual liberation and self-determination either through the consumerist fantasy of the virtual world, or through the technological enhancements, both produced by a hyperextractive, ecocidal and genocidal system. moxyland’s view of a cyberpunk society does not simply reflect on the idea that the corporate system co-opts feminist cyborgs, forcing to accept the immoral conditions of an unjust technocratic government, but also implies that gender and queer subversions are limited in time and space, since the system will eventually fall in the hands of a highly disrupted planet. in line with the ideas of degrowth economists such as giorgios kallis (2018), capitalism is a system based on an eternal-growth drive which cannot comply with the limited resources of our planet (or any other material reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 8 space), and thus, the cyberpunk space (as a hypercapitalist territory), although miraculously alive thanks to the magic of fiction, is doomed to collapse. 2. from cyborg defeatism to cyborg optimism from the perspective of the environmental humanities, solarpunk literature can be observed as an optimistic reaction to post-cyberpunk dystopic landscapes, as it is a subgenre primarily focused on the depiction of technologically sustainable spaces. although solarpunk has no homogenous sense of aesthetics (sometimes authors depict post-cyberpunk societies, sometimes post-apocalyptic ones and sometimes even locations based on steampunk visuals), the genre almost always portrays futures in which the ecological issues of post-cyberpunk have been somehow solved. there are dozens of solarpunk stories conveying this idea. for example, non-binary author t.x watson’s “the boston hearth project,” from the collection sunvault (2017), situates the narrative in a cyberfuturistic, climate-change-affected boston in which a couple of cyborg underdogs infiltrate a selfsustainable state-of-the-art residential building for a corporate elite and liberate it for the working class living around it, forcing the us government to hand these high-tech building to activists fearing “another hostile takeover” (24). although a great quantity of solarpunk stories present greenified cyberpunk aesthetics, some others show a more postcollapse state of technology, which, nonetheless, maintains the idea of human adaptation to planetary dynamics through industrial technology. in m. lopes da silva’s “cable town delivery,” from the collection glass and gardens: solarpunk summers (2018), the city through which the characters move is described as a city built on the cavernous carcasses of several other cities. odd structures were improvised along the planes and sides of collapsed skyscrapers, tenaciously clinging to the concrete skin like brilliant particolored mold. . . . above all the buildings the endless rows of cable cars spanned, creating what lyka called a “town of treehouses.” (225) solarpunk narratives tend to represent technological spaces constructed either over cyberpunk cities or their ruins, but almost always with a positive emphasis on the possibilities of sustainable technologies. this construction of the territory is also represented in solarpunk female (but also feminist) cyborgs. solarpunk fiction does not only convey the most representative qualities of their cyberpunk foremothers, but also incorporates contemporary reflections on posthumanism and ecological theory to its ontologies. in this sense, the evolution of harawayan current of thought seems to run parallel with cyberpunk’s transformation into solarpunk. if the guide to read cyborgs in cyberpunk narratives has always been the cyborg manifesto, solarpunk identities can clearly be addressed through the eyes of haraway’s (2016) post-compost identities (97) as exposed in staying with the trouble. in this reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 9 now seminal text of posthumanism,5 she defines a new sense of subjectivity that might theoretically help restoring planetary biotic self-regulation: that of the holobiont (or symchtonic/sympoietic being). this notion implies constructing a “robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and recomposition” (101) of the necessary interspecies relationships that allow survivance in the natural world, which also include the human world. haraway expands the 1990s cyberfeminist notion of the cyborg that entangled the female body with the machine as a subversive feminist ontology. in different ways, solarpunk takes the idea of ecologically connecting with the non-human bioticly (through connection with nonhuman life) or abioticly (through high or low non-organic tech), presenting a new sense of cyborg that fits haraway’s conveniently proposed slogan of “cyborgs for earthly survival!” (102). haraway’s posthuman “cyborg” is, therefore, different from the ones inspired by cyberpunk feminism. its sense of connection with technology is not dependent on an industrial infrastructure (green or not), it does not create a natural alliance between gender subversion and technology and it expands human/non-human collaboration outside the field of cybernetics. nonetheless, these subjectivities (composites of different organic and/or inorganic holobionts) are still so in relational ways as they collaborate with other intelligences, mix with them and, through their interactions, aim to liberate from the technoscientific capitalism that enforces power over them. this new model of feminist (bio)cyborgs is constructed over the material cyborg developed in cyberpunk narratives, abandoning transhuman reflections on cyberspace that characterized much of cyberpunk through its history. although in some stories (i.e., the above-mentioned story by t.x. watson) there are some technical virtualizations or basic uses of the internet, the solarpunk virtual world is almost inexistent, and the alliances between humans, non-humans and technology always operate on the physical world. this is seemingly a logical approach, as solarpunk narratives tend to be critical with the use of excessive-energy-consuming infrastructures and cyberspaces require great amounts of energy to be operative. its abandonment is also derived from a focus based on imagining green infrastructures specifically designed to help with material concerns. commenting on possible solarpunk infrastructures, solarpunk author and theorist andrew danna hudson (2015) states that i like the idea of focusing on large-scale infrastructure projects that will provide value for communities into the long term. a seed bank; a hyper-dense vertical permaculture farm engineered for carbon fixing; a massive, low-maintenance desalination system; a space elevator. these projects could themselves be the organizing principle around which unique solarpunk communities are organized. (n.p.) 5 even though haraway rejects any identification with this category (2016, 101) reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 10 solarpunk narratives assume the inefficiency of cyber-territorial subversions that had previously been advanced by post-cyberpunk novels such as moxyland and prefer to focus on those which affect humans collectively. the virtual world, as seen in post-cyberpunk literature, often provides a sense of individualistic dissent against the system (regarding gender or queer identity, for instance), but is incapable of enabling full communities precisely because of its consumerist-oriented ethos.6 2.1 solarpunk embodied cyborgs since there’s no virtual simulation in solarpunk narratives, posthuman cyborg models are mostly presented in a material way. their physicality, nonetheless, has not been homogenously represented through history. in general, the “literal cyborg”—the one envisioned as a subject integrating non-human technological components in their own body—has been scarcely represented either by male, female or non-binary authors. since solarpunk’s concerns are predominantly locational, subjectivities have tended to remain corporally human, showing machine-nonhuman integrations through human-environment relations following the post-cyborg stem-like model of second-wave feminist cyberpunk. there are nonetheless a few exceptions to this trend. in “solar child” (2017), camille meyers sets her narrative in a late-anthropocene scenario in which humanity has managed to develop different biotechnologies that allow our species to industrially thrive and survive an anthropogenic climate change (188). essentially, sectors with a high energy demand, like transportation or food production, are now covered by solar energy production (185, 188). this future is, however, far from idyllic, as the human species itself is still biologically vulnerable to the dry, hot and sunny climate of this future earth. the first few lines of the story show jamie, a biotechnologist, arriving at a research station carrying out genetic experiments on humans in order to make them more biologically attuned with the planet’s transformed climate. jamie is introduced to ella, “the first photosapiens,” a plant-girl symbiont grown in a vat and capable of photosynthesis. fernanda, the chief director of the office, describes her in the following way: the project was modelled after the relationship between corals and sea anemones with photosynthetic zooxanthellae. the host animal, photosapiens or solarsaur, for example, provide shelter, transportation and protection, for their photosynthesizing partner. in return, the little green cells gift a bit of glucose, food essentially, straight into the bloodstream of their host. 6 there is an interesting meta-irony concerning solarpunk and cyberspace, since not only the genre and political movement emerged on the internet, but also promote ideas of open source/open access knowledge (see gregory scheckler’s “grow, give, repeat” (2018) in which the young protagonist makes her sustainable-food infrastructure designs publicly available online). the movement itself has also been defined as “open source” (hudson, 2015), denoting its strong structural connections with our contemporary cyberspace. reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 11 ella still needs to eat, but not as much as normal humans. of course, she also needs to spend plenty of time in sunshine. (189) ella may be categorized as a sympoietic being, since her body is in itself different biologies (vegetal and human holobiontic natures) coexisting and developing mutual need relationships that allow her to better resist current atmospheric conditions. contrasting with cyberpunk techno-industrial embodied cyborgs, ella has no heavy machinery incorporated in her body. this machinic part has been substituted by plant cells that required an industrial infrastructure to be made (she is, after all, conceived in a vat). she is constructed imitating the hybrid nature of the cyberpunk literal cyborg, as she represents a symbolic alliance with a non-human otherness that brings hope for a better future of “human” life on earth. ella, and her brothers and sisters in development, are kept secret from the public for fear of a terrorist group of revolutionaries called “the revelationers” killing them. as the demonstrators of moxyland, they see technological development as the cause of the socio-environmental crisis and have bombed other stations in the past. the technophobic argument of cyberpunk’s approach to techno-scientific progress embodied by the revelationers is contested by jamie, who appeals to an alleged need to learn to live with our own biological nature: “the human race does not need revolution. we have tried that so many times, and here we are. no, what we need is a new way of living with ourselves, a way to adapt to the world we have created. we need to evolve. and evolution takes love” (191). jamie’s defense of evolution over revolution (problematically binarized) calls for a sense of technological thought escaping the political dynamics that condition the approach to scientific research in the narrative. thus, high technology is observed in very optimistic terms, since it seems to be the only tool capable of ensuring (post)humanity’s survival during the anthropocene (in contrast to a “return to nature” perspective). although “solar child’s” primary concern when depicting its bio-cyborgs7 is the universalist issue of species survivability, ella’s subjectivity as a vat posthuman child also opens the door for feminist readings. in this context, xenofeminist ideas on antinaturalism and the role of technology when dealing with reproduction are worth mentioning. xenofeminism’s much echoed slogan, “if nature is unjust, change nature” (laboria cuboniks 2015), bears a special relationship in debates over liberating women’s allegedly biological burden over gestation. in the book xenofeminism (2015), helen hester (member of laboria cuboniks) criticizes traditional ecofeminists mantras attacking 7 since solar children are technically not cyborgs (they are not half machine and half human creatures), i believe the term “bio-cyborg” describes them more accurately. vegetal integration with the human body takes the role that machines bear in much of cyberpunk, showing an evolution of the bases that conform the cyborg paradigm that transforms steel and gears into plant cells. reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 12 technologically assisted reproduction, in which bioengineers are viewed as constructing the child as if it were a machine, made from isolated component parts. in this version of the reproductive process, human beings are in possession of a far greater degree of direct agency and control; ergo, the process loses its magic and is no longer experienced as “creative, productive and spontaneous.” (16) in contrast, xenofeminist anti-naturalist proposals embrace the idea of employing scientific progress under a gender liberatory perspective, and thus “rather than cede this territory to conservative or corporate interests—which have been angling for the enclosure of biomedically manipulable bodies for several decades—we must reframe the evident (if partial) changeability of nature as a space for emancipatory politics” (19). from a feminist perspective, a purely technological reproduction of human subjects that leaves gestation in the hands of a machine prevents much of the unwelcome suffering that impregnatable individuals might experience during and after a pregnancy. this techno-feminist alliance is specifically addressed in meyers’ story when the character of fernanda asks jamie to adopt one of “the solar children” they have created. the main reason why she wants to take one of them is adoption already reflects her traumatic experiences. as she comments, “in my early thirties, my husband and i tried to start a family. even with all the medical expertise money could buy, i suffered three miscarriages. one so far along i counted fingers and toes as the bloody fetus grew cold in my cupped palms . . . finally i carried a baby to term. my son lived two months before his lungs collapsed” (191). solar children like ella present a solution that alienates and alleviates physical but also psychological damages that the gestating subject might endure. this not only makes ella and the other solar children bio-cyborgs who ensure a future for a (post)human world, but also positions their non-humanly-originated existence in feminist terms. photosapiens’ technologically mediated biology becomes ontologically xenofeminist and thus, recovers early cyberpunk’s idealization of machines (which are now shaped as micro-plant holobionts) as a potential ally in the fight for a bodily appropriation of the female (or, in this specific case, impregnatable) body.8 “solar child” is a rara avis with regards to the most common depictions of posthuman cyborgs in solarpunk short stories. there are other representations of them, although less developed and openly engaging with feminist proposals. for example, female authors like natsumi tanaka in “a life with cibi” (2021) or meyari mcfarland in “old man’s sea” (2021), portray animalistic—yet very human in behavior and language—biocyborgs blurring the boundaries between human and non-human animal communication. other stories, like the already-mentioned “boston hearth project,” present minor characters in line with the cadiganesque’s idea of cyborg heroine characteristic of early 8 complementary to this idea, there is the fact that biology is a stem field highly associated with women. this reinforces the feminist undertones developed in the story, as it suggests that biology is the technoscientific field through which feminist liberation may be eventually achieved. reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 13 cyberpunk. juniper, the female cyborg represented in the story, is only shown as an action figure, yet almost no context of her identity (or even a voice) is given to her. meyers’ representation of the bio-cyborg is, in this sense, highly valuable, as it presents a symbolic link between the material, more self-evident depiction of the cyborg that characterized cyberpunk narratives and the posthumanist ethos of solarpunk themes. 2.2 solarpunk dissembodied cyborgs solarpunk authors have prioritized stem-like representations of the cyborgs introduced during the second feminist wave of cyberpunk. not only many stories present non-cishetero masculine bodies as college educated characters (see i.e., fernanda in “solar child”), but also in many cases the narrative forces the character to employ their scientific knowledge to operate different machines with proficiency in order to solve a particular problem posed by the author, making some sort of posthuman communion. examples of this model can be found in many collections, but there is one that makes a specific emphasis in visualizing these subjectivities: the weight of light (eschrich and miller 2019)9. although not marketed as a solarpunk collection, the compendium features stories by important figures of the literary movement, such as andrew danna hudson, who has participated in previous collections, or brenda cooper, author of the solarpunk novel series project earth (composed of wilders [2017] and keepers [2018]) and it directly engages with some of solarpunk political ethos of techno-optimism, development of solar-powered imaginaries and liberal politics. this collection differs from previous ones in that its texts aim to portray both scientifically accurate energetic solutions to overcome our contemporary petro-chemical dependence, and the dilemmas that will feature these potentially immediate solar futures. the stories narrate answers to questions such as: where and how will solar energy systems be deployed, e.g., on buildings or in the desert? what impacts will they have on those spaces and how they are used? will solar energy disrupt or reinforce existing energy technologies and markets? will the resulting power plants be ugly or beautiful? who will own them? who will regulate them? what kinds of jobs will they create, and for whom? how will solar systems be integrated into broader systems of power, transportation, manufacturing, and computing, not to mention food and water systems? how will they shape global patterns of security, power, and wealth? (eschrich and miller 2019, 18) the material viability of the ideas presented in the four stories is explained after every narrative, with texts in which different scientists and scholars analyze the stories and explain the potential interest (and problems) that developing a specific solar infrastructure might entail for different communities, particularly those that might be most negatively affected during the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies. 9 a similar project coming from the same editors was published in 2021: cities of light. reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 14 whereas the collection is focused on energy debates, the stories also feature narratives with much interest from a (purely) feminist perspective, as they tend to present female protagonists (and characters in general) expressing their concerns with issues such as working conditions or motherhood in this possible solarpunk future. “for the snake of power,” by brenda cooper, is relevant to the analysis of solarpunk post-cyborg identities, as it features a renovated approach to this figure. the story follows rosa, a worker of the local energy company providing solar power to the city of phoenix. she discovers the energy production meant to power working-class districts is being sold to some of the northern cities, enriching the state’s treasury at the expense of lowering the living conditions of phoenix’s citizens, who are increasingly dying due to the hot weather. rosa, with the aid of a (feminized) ai, hanna, and her former mentor, callie, exposes these treaties and organizes a protest against arizona’s governor that culminates with the state government canceling the energy sellout when realizing that the electric lines to chicago have been sabotaged. rosa’s relationship with hanna illustrates an interesting revision of the post-cyborg archetype of 1990s cyberpunk. rosa is a maintenance technician with university training (47), who, along with hanna, is in charge of repairing and arranging the necessary logistic operations of the “solar snake” infrastructure. hanna, in principle, operates as a machinic helper who compensates the psychical limitations of a human body with regards, for instance, to the obtention of immediate data when repairing a solar panel (43–44). she is, nonetheless, not just a technical helper, but a machinic subject that sometimes shows a conscience of her own. for instance, even though she “wasn’t responsible for maintenance on [rosa],” she informs her when she is too tired to work (44). although technically at service of the company, hanna is depicted ambiguously, and rosa is sometimes surprised that she is following her orders, even when she feels she is not supposed to have access to some of the information that hanna provides her (44). thanks to hanna, rosa manages to get all the documentation regarding the energy transfer to the northern cities (49), and, in the end, it is hanna, trough callie’s intervention, who blocks “the [energy] lines to chicago.” hanna’s actions in the cybernetic world (the use of the system’s infrastructure in its own prejudice) and rosa’s actions in the social sphere organizing the protest can only be successful in combination. information and sabotage could have only been carried out by the machine but the successful protest resulting from it requires an embodied subjectivity to be organized (and to participate in). resistance to administrative corruption is then performed in both superstructural and infrastructural planes by two subjectivities (rosa and hanna), who are nonetheless interconnected in ways that make them one individual. hanna may be considered a disembodied limb—and yet a conscious one—that acts in the same way stem post-cyborgs operate in the above-mentioned narratives by marge piercy and kathleen ann goonan. hanna tends to carry out every operation rosa asks her to do. the results of their reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 15 mechanic-organic alliance, however, may complicatedly be referred as “feminist” in its purpose, but it reflects a clear feminist sense of empowerment. rosa and hanna save the city from power shortages not in an explicit attempt to help, enact or liberate subjectivities from a patriarchal system, but from a capitalist, class-hierarchical one (47–49), and yet, the fact that the liberator protagonist of the story is represented by a woman reproduces uses of feminine subjectivities replacing narrative places traditionally deserved to men. this is easily observed when looking at how structures of power in the energy company work, and who represents power inside of them: rosa’s boss, christine, is a woman; callie, rosa’s former master is also a woman; and as far as the story tells readers, there seems to be no man other than the governor in a higher power position. women seem to be running the public company in charge of the distribution of energy for working and middle classes in the city (47). from this perspective, the company also reflects feminist anxieties, as it oversees the wellbeing of phoenix’s citizens with less resources, maximizing to an urban level traditional roles enforced on women. rosa and hanna’s actions obey an apparently not-explicitly-feminist purpose and yet, their actions are tainted by ideas of representation and gender roles conditioned by the patriarchal structure that they try to confront. 3. conclusions although, not self-evidently concerned with feminist philosophical messages, solarpunk offers the possibility of reading new (and yet very old) types of feminist human/non-human bodies. if late post-cyberpunk texts’ such as beukes’ moxyland depict a subversively ambiguous representation of the cyborg (ultimately tending towards pessimism), solarpunk’s take on the cyborg figure recovers its original optimism and attempts to apply it to the ecological (but still feminist) concerns of the genre. female authors are producing stories that rewrite the main models of cyborgs generated during the development of the cyberpunk movement, either portraying posthuman bio-cyborgs, such as the photosapiens of “solar child,” or through the depiction of alliances between female and machinic ais that enact historical concerns debated in the history of feminism(s), as in the case of “for the snake of power.” in both cases, nonetheless, the environmental preoccupations that haunt and nurture solarpunk narratives are also embedded in these representations, displaying cyborgs that are no longer interested in individual subversions but in developing actions that might benefit societies as a whole and help them survive the anthropocene. in this sense, post-cyberpunk’s techno-human defeatism is transformed, in these narratives, into an optimistic reaction in which bio-cyborg or post-cyborg natures embody subjectivities that overcome capitalism’s elitist and ecocidal power relations. the new-yet-very-old solarpunk “cyborgs” presented by cooper and meyers, open the door for less fatalistic understandings of machinic-human interactions that reden 4.2 (2023) | alejandro rivero-vadillo 16 might help us face the incoming era of climate (and so social and economic) crisis that we are headed to. works cited andrews, grant. 2020. “queer cyborgs in south african speculative fiction: moxyland by lauren beukes and the prey of gods by nicky drayden.” scrutiny2 issues in english studies in southern africa 25 (2): 128–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2020.1832561 beukes, lauren. 2008. moxyland. boston: mulholland books. braidotti, rosi. 1997. “mothers, monsters, and machines.” in writing on the body: female embodiment and feminist theory, edited by katie conboy and nadia medina, 59–79. new york: columbia university press. cadora, karen. 1995. “feminist cyberpunk.” science fiction studies 22 (3): 357–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240457 cooper, brenda. 2019. “for the snake of power.” in the weight of light: a collection of solar futures, edited by joey eschrich and clark a. miller, 43–50. tucson: arizona state university’s center for science and the imagination. cooper, brenda. 2018. keepers. amherst: pyr. cooper, brenda. 2017. wilders. amherst: pyr. duncan, rebecca. 2020. “writing ecological revolution from millennial south africa: history, nature, and the post-apartheid present.” ariel: a review of international english literature 51 (4): 65–97. eschrich, joey and clark a. miller, eds. 2021. cities of light: a collection of solar futures. tucson: arizona state university’s center for science and the imagination. eschrich, joey and clark a. miller, eds. 2019. the weight of light: a collection of solar futures. tucson: arizona state university’s center for science and the imagination. forbes, edith. 1998. exit to reality. new york: seal press. goonan, kathleen ann. 1994. queen city jazz. new york: tor. haraway, donna. 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