Any discussion of Global Gothic, Horror and Weird (GoHoW) needs to address, at least, two basic questions. First, how can we avoid the bias of Amero- Eurocentrism that considers texts throughout the world only as derivative of preceding works from the metropolitan core? Second, how can we balance the drive to link a text to a cluster of other works through similarity of plot or figuration, what might be called the act of genreification, against our desire to give every document its own specificity of meaning and particularity of historical, social and geographical context? The intersecting challenges of decolonising and de-derivatising texts may well stand as the basic problematic for the emerging domain that we are here considering as Global GoHoW.

The persuasive goal of this chapter is to argue that a world-systems analysis – outlined in more detail below – ought to be fundamental to any consideration of GoHoW as one way to answer the above questions. Here I want to briefly outline what is meant by a world-systems analysis, and then suggest some ways that Global GoHoW can be considered in terms of its cultural objects of analysis, temporality and geography through a world-systems approach. I will argue that GoHoW studies still leans too heavily on a binarised outlook that is a legacy of centrist liberalism and its false promises of developmental equality. Once we move away from this framework of othering, we can also perceive a non-linear history of cultural production and realm of GoHoW creativity beyond the West/North's metropolitan control. Below I will suggest that world-systems provides a different set of ways of looking at GoHoW, even ‘unthinking’ some otherwise commonly accepted viewpoints. The point here is not to provide simply ‘new’ outlooks on GoHoW, but to radically and thoroughly transform them for greater emancipatory action.

World-systems analyses are most well known through the works of Immanuel Wallerstein and their editorial work on the journals Review (1976–2015) and Journal of World-Systems Research (1995–present). Though Wallerstein was a prolific and learned scholar who wrote in an accessible prose, it does nothing to diminish their achievements to note that readers who focus only on their work will not see the wider horizon of world-systems approaches. Wallerstein insisted that world-systems was not a methodology, but a perspective. World-systems approaches are not a mechanism to deliver relatively predetermined answers, but a way of asking questions.