Ethno-gothic: Repurposing Genre in Contemporary American Literature

Abstract

This chapter notes how traditional American gothic literature has been largely motivated by racial dread and fears of miscegenation. It then argues that many contemporary ethno-fiction writers repurpose gothic tropes and idioms to two ends. The first is to critique anxieties of American gothic in order to expose the racialism embedded in the assimiliationist and hegemonic narrative of upward mobility defined by the ethnic ‘melting pot’. The second is to use these gothic redeployments imaginatively to disinter the voices of those legions who have died and disappeared, un-mourned.

Burial Grounds and Dead Lovers: Places of Interment in the Gothic Modernism of the American South

“…In Haints, I argued that contemporary gothic writing has, since the millennium's turn, worked to undo national and progressive American narratives "by excavating alternative histories or ghost stories, by imaginatively summoning into presence those voices and beings that have been sacrificed to the march of progress and the consolidation of American literary and cultural traditions" (Redding, 2011, p. 39). And I have argued in an essay on what I term ethno-gothic (Redding, 2015) that there is-or "are" rather-diasporic gothics occasioned in, by and of the imaginaries of the millions of migrants and refugees that are now wandering the globe. Here, I want only to say a few things about American writing, because my initial source is Faulkner, whose work epitomizes what critics often term "Southern Gothic."…”