Looking back at the late-twentieth-century global ramifications of gothic from this side of the millennial threshold, Glennis Byron pioneers a reflection on the centrifugal forces that have pulled the genre's origins – rooted in the late-eighteenthcentury evolution of the English romance – into multiple and sometimes invisible directions: ‘in “Globalgothic” traditional gothic tropes … [are] reformulated to engage gothickly with the anxieties produced by the breakdown of national and cultural boundaries’, she argues (2013, 2). As much as the fluid and uncontrollable transactions of globalisation have had an impact on definitions of the gothic, as a tradition, mode of representation, and interpretive practice, the reverse, Byron notes, is also true: globalisation is, increasingly, articulated through eminently gothic forms and aesthetics. And if, on the one hand, the effects of globalisation on gothic raise questions about ‘the homogenising of culture’ and cultural appropriation, they also, on the other hand, produce ‘a more dynamic process of transnational exchange with new forms being produced or old forms revitalised’ (2013, 1). In its typical aptitude to unsettle accepted norms and expose anxieties about the instability introduced by change, globalgothic speaks of the concerns derived from the erasure of fixed national boundaries and simultaneously contributes to ‘the cultural flows and deterritorialisations that characterise globalisation’ (2013, 3). More recently, however, as this chapter goes on to demonstrate, the narratives of globalgothic have focused on the geopolitical tensions rooted in the neo-colonial drives of global politics, shifting their attention to the exacerbation of racialised and gendered division of labour worldwide and social injustice, the increasingly urgent environmental crisis and the ‘invisible’ threat of AI.

The impact of globalisation on gender, an identity category central to gothic's exploration of sexuality and desire but also of patriarchal oppression and female subversion, has produced complex and often contradictory effects. On the one hand, as R. W. Connell notes, ‘[i]mperialism and globalization change the conditions of existence for gender orders’, as colonialism replaces local patriarchies with colonising patriarchies, destabilising existing gender arrangements, and undermining the local cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity (2005, 1804). In this respect, the persisting effects of colonial control on gender oppression have, for instance, haunted the postcolonial gothic works of writers as diverse as Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison and Helen Oyeyemi.