Globalgothic Ecologies

Globalisation has devastated world ecosystems and silenced queer identities over time. It has been a neo-colonial force that continues to contaminate and subvert cultural traditions and values, an idea that gothic fiction in recent years has begun to explore. ‘Gothic fictions that address the issue of globalization,’ Glennis Byron writes, ‘particularly those . . . that represent globalization as neo-imperialism, tend to explore the darker side of the new world order, most notably in ways they register disturbances to traditional identities and cultures’ (2012, 372). Yet, what is often referred to as globalisation is only the latest phase in five centuries of coloniality and the capitalist expansion it has produced. Since the Renaissance, European colonisation has obliterated indigenous sexualities and genders, dismantled indigenous naturecultures, and set out to classify and denaturalise non-heteronormative sexualities and non-binary genders using justifications that were both theological and secular. As Walter Mignolo notes, ‘Proponents of both were Christian, white, and male, and assumed heterosexual relations as the norm – consequently they also classified gender distinctions and sexual normativity’ (2011, 9). The ecologies of those colonised by Europeans were quite queer – diverse, varied and in a constant state of becoming something new. The colonial discourses produced of race, gender and nature continue to organise socio-ecologies on a global scale. Some gothic fictions have found ways to disrupt the continuation of colonial hegemonies by reappropriating gothic tropes in ways that help to reclaim and naturalise queer identities for indigenous cultures, in turn rebuilding the naturecultures of the past. Caribbean gothic stories, for instance, sometimes use queer ecologies to scrutinise the ways in which coloniality has neglected, subverted or erased sexualities and gender identities, and, when doing so, I argue, contribute to a process of decolonisation. In such cases, the globalgothic becomes something new in the way it acts as a mode of recovery that resituates ecologies.

Queering globalgothic ecologies reclaims the past from modernity and coloniality. Part of that reclamation must include a critique of the intersections of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and environment. Of course, the gothic has a long tradition of interrogating and negotiating anxieties about genders and sexualities. Gothic supernatural elements and tropes, such as spectres and sublime landscapes, often appear in postcolonial gothic fiction wherein plots of insurgence and resistance are found that include and are sometimes led by queer(ed) characters.