Introduction

Decolonising Deep-Sea Gothic: Perspectives from the Americas

“…In this beautiful and benign programme, there is darkness as fish feeds on fish and there is the constant fear of danger which can rise up from the black chasms of the oceans […] The 'alien' needs to be made comprehensible, to be labelled, and contained […] The Blue Planet is of course not a Gothic text but there are crossovers in how it represents the alien and outlandish. 34 Relatedly, they continue, 'David Punter and Elizabeth Bronfen contend that "the uncanny, the disorder, the alien-ness that Gothic appears to express might be better seen precisely as evidence of what the genre is seeking to control"'. 35 The Blue Planet thus associates the depth of the ocean to outer space, and is only one among many science-communication projects which use horror tropes to represent the deep-sea.…”