Travel writing and the gothic seem an unlikely pair. While gothic literature is commonly associated with fiction and fantasy, travel writing, more so than most other literary genres, is often considered a more factual and objective mode of reportage. However, monstrous marvels in medieval travelogues, supernatural representations of racial and cultural Others in colonial-era travel writing, and ethereal encounters in contemporary travel texts from around the globe point to the idea that a gothic aesthetic has haunted travel writing for centuries.

In this chapter, I consider two Black-authored travel narratives, both of which describe journeys to the Caribbean. Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960), in her Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938), and Amryl Johnson (1944–2001), in her Sequins for a Ragged Hem (1988), both subvert imperial gothic tropes and contribute to the diasporic gothic and the postcolonial gothic respectively. Hurston and Johnson describe personal encounters with figures and belief systems which might appear otherworldly to a Western readership, such as zombies, ghosts, and what Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert refer to as ‘diaspora religions’ (Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert 1997, 2–3). Unlike a selection of their travel author predecessors who used gothic sensibilities to an imperialistic end, Hurston simultaneously demystifies and defamiliarises ‘gothic’ elements of Caribbean culture and Johnson illustrates how apparitions are integral to postcolonial collectivity. I begin by examining examples of imperial gothic literature to illustrate how Tell My Horse and Sequins for a Ragged Hem offer a response to gothic stereotypes concerning the Caribbean.

Imperial Gothic

An emphasis on alterity is at the centre of the imperial gothic. The conception of gothic literature is typically associated with texts set in Europe, such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). However, Paravisini-Gebert notes that, towards the end of the eighteenth century, gothic authors began to realise ‘that Britain's growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who would … bring a freshness and variety to the genre’ (Paravisini-Gebert 2002, 229). In this way, texts which utilised colonial spaces as gothic settings and represented colonised people as sources or instigators of horror contributed to the colonial project because, in the words of Sarah Ilott, they ‘made monstrous that which was nationally or racially other’ (Ilott 2019, 20).