Geobiopolitics of the Gothic: On the Queer/Inhuman Dislocation of Spanish/ English Subjects and Their Others (For A Definition of Modernity as an Imperialist Geobiopolitical Fracture)
Abstract The article contends that the inhumanity mobilized by the Gothic novel is not only biopolitical, as queer theorists of the Gothic novel argue (Halberstam, Haggerty), but also geopolitical: it is not only about indivi dual monsters or horrific characters but also about places and geographies of horror. By focusing on the location of the most important Gothic novels (The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer…), the article concludes that the southernEuropean characters and the technology of horror that they generate represent a space of past European imperialist decadence with which the British reader ultimately is made to dis/identify. By doing so, English Gothic novels disavow the imperialist past of southern Europe, and specially imperialist Spain, in order, precisely, to assert England’s own present identity as new empirehence the ultimately uncanny and unrepresentable nature of this horror. Con sequently, the Gothic novel announces a biopolitical and geopolitical fracture at the core of modernity –a fracture that is not only inhuman, but also posthuman, since the Gothic already argues for the impossibility of the human by invoking a geopolitical technology of horror. This break or crack of modernity, which the Gothic genre maps out not only biopolitically but also geopolitically, must be ultimately read as an inhuman and situated critique of European imperialism thus refashioning Stephen Arata’s dictum about the vampire novel as a narrative of reversed colonialism.
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WALPOLE, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
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APPADURAI, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Min neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
ARATA, Stephen D. «The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonialism». Victorian Studies, 1990, 3, pp. 621645.
ARMSTRONG, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction. A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
ARRIGHI, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London; New York: Verso, 1994.
BECKFORD, William. Vathek. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
BUTLER, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
BUZARD, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 18001918. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
CASERIO, Robert L., Tim DEAN, Lee EDELMAN and José MUÑOZ. «The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory». PMLA, 2006, 121, 3, pp. 81936.
CHAKRAVARTY, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2000.
DAVISON, Carol Margaret. Gothic Liteature 17641824. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009.
EAGLETON, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. Lon don: Verso, 1995.
ELSAESSER, Thomas. «Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodra ma». En NICHOLS, Bill (ed.). Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1976, vol. 2, pp. 16589.
ENG, D. L., J. HALBERSTAM and J. E. MUÑOZ. «Introduction». Social Text, 2005, 23, pp. 117.
HABERMAS, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991.
HAGGERTY, George. Queer Gothic. Champaigne, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
HALBERSTAM, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
KILGOUR, Maggie. The Rise of the Gothic Novel. New York: Routledge, 1995.
LE FANU, Sheridan. In a Glass Darkly. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.
LEWIS, Matthew. The Monk. New York: Penguin, 1998.
MATURIN, Charles. Melmoth the Wanderer. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
PUNTMER, David. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. New York: Longmans, 1979.
RADCLIFFE, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
RANKE, Leopold. Sovereigns and Nations of Southern Europe, in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Whittaker, 1843.
RANKE, Leopold. History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 14941514. London: Bell and Sons, 1915.
SCHMITT, Cannon. «Techniques of Terror, Technologies of Nationality: Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian». ELH, 1994, 61, 4, pp. 853876.
SCOULAR, Bryan T. Shadows of Spain: Continuities of the Conflictive Age in the Nine teenth Century. New York University, ProQuest, UMI Dissertations Publishing, 2006.
SEDGWICK, Eve Kosofsky. The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. New York: Methuen, 1986.
SMITH, Andrew. Gothic Literature. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013.
WALPOLE, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.
WEBER, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Penguin, 2002.
WEIN, Toni. British Identities, Heroic Nationalisms, and the Gothic Novel, 1764 1824. Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
ZIZEK, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Gabilondo, J. (2015). Geobiopolitics of the Gothic: On the Queer/Inhuman Dislocation of Spanish/ English Subjects and Their Others (For A Definition of Modernity as an Imperialist Geobiopolitical Fracture). 1616: Anuario De Literatura Comparada, 4, 153–167. Retrieved from https://revistas.usal.es/dos/index.php/1616_Anuario_Literatura_Comp/article/view/13004
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