Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-24T02:20:23.731Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3.17 - Gothic Multiculturalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2021

Catherine Spooner
Affiliation:
Lancaster University
Dale Townshend
Affiliation:
Manchester Metropolitan University
Get access

Summary

While multicultural policy might be represented as a failure, or multicultural reality as threatening, the Gothic – as a psychoanalytic mode with a ready shorthand for the representation of violence, alienation and monstrosity – is ideally suited to return what mainstream discourse represses, to engage with the subject of fear and to speak the unspeakable. This chapter demonstrates how contemporary Gothic literature functions to reveal that which multicultural discourse seeks to repress: racism and inequality. I argue that alternative accounts of cultural contact foreground socio-economic inequality, racism and structural violence, while registrations of the impossible and the absurd function to signify a failure in discourse. The Gothic aesthetic is equally suited to represent sectarian violence as a source of fear through the literalisation of monstrosity, and I argue that in engaging with the mechanics of monster-making, contemporary Gothic offers a critique of the construction of fear (and terror) as a tool of (rather than a threat to) governments. Finally, I consider contemporary Gothic’s engagement with the afterlife as a space of multicultural harmony, equality and justice, holding a heterotopic mirror up to the inequalities of the present in which the management of diversity is hostage to political corruption and economic disparity.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Gothic
Volume 3: Gothic in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
, pp. 342 - 363
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×