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http://hdl.handle.net/11375/28853
Title: | Whiteness as Terror/Horror |
Other Titles: | A Black Feminist Reading (Of) Long Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic, Colonial Gothic |
Authors: | Creech de Castro, Stacy A. |
Advisor: | Zuroski, Eugenia |
Department: | English and Cultural Studies |
Keywords: | eighteenth-century studies; gothic literature; gothic; colonialism; whiteness; imperialism; terror; horror |
Publication Date: | 2023 |
Abstract: | This thesis critically examines the intersections between whiteness and terror/horror in texts produced during the long eighteenth century. I reframe the Gothic as a migratory Transatlantic, colonial mode that problematizes eighteenth-century distinctions between terror as a form of the intellectual sublime and horror as a bodily reaction that generates shock and aversion. Drawing upon contemporary Black Feminism(s), I analyze Enlightenment theories of mind and objective reason and consider whiteness as a spectral and material presence throughout long eighteenth-century writing, with which the Gothic mode grapples directly. Highlighting how the Gothic operates in Transatlantic spaces that rehearse the legacies of violence enacted against Black and racialized peoples, my project contends that classifications such as terror-Gothic (i.e., psychological horror) and horror-Gothic (i.e., bodily horror) are arbitrary and reductive; instead, the Gothic responds to colonialism by imagining that the experience of embodied knowledge is a conflation of both. Centered primarily as a study of literary methodology, this thesis presents readings of three works of literature that operate within and against the backdrop of Anglo-American Enlightenment myths of white supremacy: Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland: or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798), and Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor: Kept During a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (1834). This thesis puts questions to each text, regarding the reproduction, mobilization, and subversion of whiteness in their portrayal of terror/horror; the use of mobility to illustrate preoccupations with displacement, socio-political, and cultural conditions; the depiction of Black life, agency, and subjectivity despite oppression. By unraveling complexities of whiteness and terror/horror, noting the Gothic modality’s haunting/haunted relationship to colonial discourses of power, this study emphasizes the enduring relevance of these themes in understanding contemporary racial imaginaries. |
URI: | http://hdl.handle.net/11375/28853 |
Appears in Collections: | Open Access Dissertations and Theses |
Files in This Item:
File | Description | Size | Format | |
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creechdecastro_stacy_a_finalsubmission2023aug_phd.pdf | 1.51 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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