Search for Articles:
Title / Keyword
Author / Affiliation / Email
Journal
Article Type
 
 
Advanced Search
 
Section
Special Issue
Volume
Issue
Number
Page
 
0.7
0.3
Journals
Humanities
Special Issues
Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature...
share announcement

Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature and Film

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Literature in the Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 August 2023) | Viewed by 6613

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Andrew Pisano

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of English, University of South Carolina Union, Union, SC 29379, USA
Interests: early American literature; gothic American literature; early transatlantic studies

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Since Leslie Fiedler’s seminal Love and Death in the American Novel, a litany of scholars has explored the mingling of race and Gothicism in American literary and cinematic production. Building on Fiedler’s work, scholars such as Kari Winter, Teresa A. Goddu, Charles Crow, Michelle Burnham, Justin Edwards, Sian Silyn Roberts, Ellen Weinauer, Robin R. Means Coleman, and others have produced important analyses of how race and the Gothic shape and challenge American myths of social and economic equality. Indeed, Fiedler’s assertion that “certain special guilts await[e] projection in the gothic form” continues to ring true for contemporary writers and film makers. Colson Whitehead, Gloria Naylor, Toni Morrison, Matt Ruff, and Leonard Pitts, Jr. are just a few writers who rely on Gothic tropes to explore issues of race in American society, whereas film makers such as Jordan Peele, Misha Green, Little Marvin, Quentin Tarantino, and Ted Geoghegan utilize Gothic tropes to address the horrors of injustice directed towards African Americans and Native Americans. Of course, these contemporary writers and film makers draw from a rich tradition of American Gothic literary and cinematic expression.   

This Special Issue seeks scholarly articles that examine how past or present American writers and/or film makers explore issues of race in Gothic storytelling. Some questions to consider: 

  • How does the Gothic narrative form open spaces for critical race theory?
  • How does Gothic storytelling contribute to specific American social movements, past or present?
  • How do lesser known/studied primary texts contribute to treatments of race in Gothic Studies?
  • Does text-to-film adaptation open new ways of examining race in Gothic narratives?
  • Does intertextuality (allusion, for example) in print text establish useful frameworks for exploring issues of race in American Gothic writing or film making? 

Please send a 300-word abstract to Andrew Pisano () by 1 December 2022. Full articles (6,000-12,000 words) due by 15 August 2023.

Dr. Andrew Pisano
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • gothic American
  • race
  • American literature
  • film criticism
  • American cultural studies

Published Papers (4 papers)

Download All Papers
Order results
Result details
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

11 pages, 237 KiB  
Article
Attempted Indigenous Erasure and Frontier Gothic in Arrival (2016)
by Bethany Jordan Webster-Parmentier
Humanities 2024, 13(1), 29; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010029 - 01 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1043
Abstract
In the process of adapting a written narrative for the silver screen, there is much that can be lost (or gained) in translation. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaption of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is no exception. Often analyzed as a [...] Read more.
In the process of adapting a written narrative for the silver screen, there is much that can be lost (or gained) in translation. Arrival, Denis Villeneuve’s adaption of Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life, is no exception. Often analyzed as a work of science fiction, this article argues that understanding Arrival as a work of the frontier gothic renders the attempted erasure of Indigenous presence in the film visible. The frontier gothic elements of Arrival, most prominently the transformation of Chiang’s protagonist, Louise, into a frontier hero(ine), and the looming Montana setting, both evoke and attempt to erase the Indigenous presence in this “frontier”. As a frontier hero, Louise ultimately supersedes the aliens of Arrival, absorbing and appropriating their knowledge and language to save the world (and the superiority of the United States). Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature and Film)
16 pages, 566 KiB  
Article
Get In and Get Out: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination
by Hannah Lauren Murray
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 129; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060129 - 03 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1841
Abstract
This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these [...] Read more.
This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature and Film)
►▼ Show Figures

Figure 1

16 pages, 308 KiB  
Article
Body Horror in Octavia E. Butler’s Clay’s Ark
by Maria Holmgren Troy
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 120; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050120 - 16 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1349
Abstract
African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic [...] Read more.
African American science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler’s works have attracted a great deal of academic interest since the 1990s onwards. Clay’s Ark (1984), however, has not gained as much scholarly attention as some of her other novels, and the centrality of Gothic aspects, in particular those related to body horror, has not been addressed. By focusing on how these aspects inform the structure, setting, and characters’ actions and relationships in this novel about an extraterrestrial infection that threatens and changes humanity, this article demonstrates how Butler employs and adapts strategies and conventions of Gothic horror and body horror in order to explore various attitudes towards difference and transformation, paralleling these with a particular brand of antiblack racism growing out of American slavery. Although the 1980s are already receding into American history, and a few aspects of the imagined twenty-first century in this novel may feel dated today (while many are uncomfortably close to home), Clay’s Ark is a prime example of how aspects of popular culture genres and media—such as science fiction, the Gothic, and horror films—can be employed in an American novel to worry, question, and destabilize ingrained historical and cultural patterns. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature and Film)
13 pages, 273 KiB  
Article
“You Can Really Make the Story Your Own”: Taking Back Candyman
by Marco Petrelli
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 103; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050103 - 18 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1597
Abstract
This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCosta’s film establishes a transformative relationship with [...] Read more.
This essay offers a comparative analysis of Bernard Rose’s 1992 Candyman and its 2021 sequel directed by Nia DaCosta. Through an intertextual approach informed by gothic studies, narratology, and critical race theory, the essay shows how DaCosta’s film establishes a transformative relationship with its predecessor. In the 2021 film, Candyman rewrites the story of the original, disrupts its stereotypical representation of Blackness, and appropriates the horror genre to give voice to the peculiar anxieties of contemporary African American life. In so doing, DaCosta’s film also challenges classic gothic tropes of horrific Blackness while at the same time pushing back against dominant narratives on race to reclaim space for a discussion on racial relations in America filtered through a Black lens. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Gothic American Imaginaries: The Gothics of Race in American Literature and Film)
Show export options expand_more Show export options expand_less
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:
 
Displaying articles 1-4
Back to TopTop