As the twenty-first century unfolds with the longest US military intervention on record ending in failure and violence (Afghanistan, after twenty years), the gothic continues to be an important genre for exploring and questioning the global dynamics of war. This chapter will focus on the transmedial and transnational circulation of gothic tropes in the context of contemporary war writing and popular culture. With an eye on the larger imperial, neoliberal and ecological issues framing the globalgothic portrayal of war in literature and popular culture, I will explore how recent war-themed gothic texts have responded to anxieties about the unfinished business of empire and fascism from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anxieties about new technologies and state agencies, and the continuing fascination generated by the highly mutable and adaptable trope of the living dead. Drawing on Glennis Byron's account of how local and non-Western cultures use local mythologies to resist silencing in their encounters with the West, this chapter shows that the globalgothic represents a culturally hybrid vocabulary to encode disturbances in local lifeworlds by transnational forces, including economic and military.

Although the gothic is often seen as mainly a British and American literary genre, it was a much broader transnational movement from the start, especially if we look at its blood-soaked military roots. Historically linked to modernity and industrialisation, as a literary and visual exploration of the darker aspects of both, the gothic was also a child of global war. Even before the Age of Revolutions with which it is often linked (e.g. American, French, Haitian), the gothic actually emerged in the wake of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), known as the French and Indian War in the United States (Wright 2013, 12). This conflict, fought by France, Britain, Spain, Prussia, Russia, Austria, Sweden, India and the Iroquois Confederacy, left somewhere between 900,000 and 1,400,000 people dead across the globe. It was the first of many violent conflicts that would shape the gothic imaginary throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter will look at war-themed globalgothic in three parts: first, a look at its historical obsessions and revisitations of the unfinished business of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially colonialism and fascism, then an examination of its new developments, including notably the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of visual and surveillance technologies, and a willingness to scrutinise institutions that have previously escaped gothic attention, such as the CIA.