Global Horror: An Introduction

When I imagine contemporary art outside the constraints of the nation the first thing I notice is horror. An Anglophone Caribbeanist by training, my work has long focused on texts featuring subjects — characters, themes, politics — that push against the idea of the nation as the only horizon of political possibility. This in part explains my obsession with Marlon James's writing, which, as I have suggested elsewhere (in my first book, as well as here, here, and here), took a while to become legible within Caribbean literary culture because of its skepticism about the nation. Since finishing John Crow's Devil (2005), I have spent a lot of time thinking through my own horror at James's audacity in eschewing the pieties I had come to deem necessary to postcolonial projects of nation-building, as well as his deployment of an aesthetic of horror itself. Finding few precedents in Caribbean literary discourses, I began to look elsewhere. My research trajectory has taken an unpredictable path away from the contemporary Caribbean novel and toward similar sites of horror in other Black diasporic literary traditions. In these sites of horror, as in James' fiction, I have found a rejection of the future-oriented focus of nation-building narratives, a rejection deployed in a manner that, as David Scott suggests, enacts an "unsettling of the settled settlements of...postcolonial sovereignty itself."1

Nor has my nomadism been strictly literary. According to Candice M. Jenkins, "to be black in the contemporary moment is...to be shaped by profoundly contradictory but mutually constitutive experiences, to which our literature gives complex voice — not alone, but in concert with numerous other media, creating a truly heterogeneous and often downright astonishing cultural landscape."2 Likewise, my interest in horror in Black diasporic culture has required me to think about images of violence and horror in multiple genres of black art — fiction, film, television, movies, and the visual arts. In "New Black Gothic," I discuss a revival of gothic forms in contemporary art through a comparative analysis of Childish Gambino's music video for "This Is America," the television show Atlanta, and Jesmyn Ward's novel Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017).3 The defining features that characterize this contemporary gothic revival, across multiple forms and media, are dark humor that isn't comedic (there is uncomfortable laughter but not jokes), a preoccupation with the domestic legacies of the War on Drugs, and the rejection of an orientation toward the future characterized by hope. As I contend, "these contemporary black Gothic texts bring into sharp focus the near-constant vulnerability of black life."

Beyond the black Gothic, we need a transverse logic of criticism that can encompass the multiple dimensions through which a global aesthetic of horror currently operates in contemporary art around matters of race. With this cluster, we seek to extend the conversation about the persistence of precariousness in black and brown life across the globe, particularly around the issues of incarceration, mental health, global warming, and violence against women. By thinking together about multiple and seemingly disparate sites of horror, we hope to articulate spaces of convergence and to limn the aesthetic that enables them.4 These essays, taken together, occupy a field I describe as global horror, which I sketch in a little detail here.5 Its chief formal characteristics are generic instability tentatively organized around the category of speculative fiction, an extreme anti-sentimentalism designed to break down all forms of the societal taken-for-granted, and reliance on a multi-generic, international, and transhistorical network of texts that links the local with the global, while bypassing the nation.

Lauren Berlant has described the improvised implosion of form in contemporary culture as "genre flail."6  For Berlant, "genre flailing is a mode of crisis management that arises after an object, or object world, becomes disturbed in a way that intrudes on one's confidence about how to move in it. We genre flail so that we don't fall through the cracks of heightened affective noise into despair, suicide, or psychosis. We improvise like crazy, where 'like crazy' is a little too non-metaphorical."7 As Patricia Stuelke puts it in her essay for this cluster, "amidst the floods, famine, and fire of accelerating climate disaster, worsening refugee crises, unbounded global war, mass incarceration, femicides, the resurgence of white supremacist movements, and the crushing burden of work and debt, the aesthetic and social forms people share are no longer sufficient to sustain them in the face of the 'violence of the world,' and so we fumble around for new imaginaries that might hold us together and propel us towards the possibility of just and livable life."

The genre flail that Berlant describes distorts the predictable affects that have long been associated with antiracist struggles. Consider the absence of affect in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996) when the protagonist Gunnar's best friend Nicholas commits suicide at Gunnar's indirect provocation, a flatness that is strange even for satire. If affective appeals, sentimentality and empathy especially, have been central to the political impetuses of African American letters, beginning with the slave narrative form, Gunnar's lack of grief surrounding the horror of Nicholas's suicide and the loss of his closest friend makes sense as a genre flail in that it can be imagined as a response to an antiracist literary field that no longer holds the capacity to make sense of the crises of the present.

Speculative fiction offers a potential framework through which the global cohesion of such a widely dispersed network of texts can be revealed. In "The New Black Gothic" it is the genre of the gothic, a form of speculative fiction, that allows me to read fiction, a music video, and a television show together in order to make visible their shared evocation of unease, fear, and terror, as these continue to characterize black life in the United States. This is one example of speculative fiction's capacity to organize a literary field characterized by "genre flail." While the catch-all nature of speculative fiction might be frustrating for some in its generic indeterminacy, its capacious inclusivity is precisely the framework through which artists are actualizing new imaginaries that are able to hold together the world and its varied, yet shared, crises.

But what does this look like in practice?

We can begin to think about the first characteristic of global horror — the proliferation and porousness of form — by considering the closing pages of Citizen: An American Lyric (2014), where Claudia Rankine reproduces J. M. W. Turner's iconic 1840 painting "The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On)" as the conclusion to a series of prose poems interspersed with visual art.8 The poems detail various microaggressions endured by ordinary and celebrated African Americans such as Serena Williams and Rankine herself. Rankine reproduces Turner's whole painting and a close up of the bottom right corner so that the dismembered and manacled limbs of drowned Africans are visible among a school of chomping fish. The end of Citizen thus meets the horrific yet vibrant sunset of Turner's painting, which has been invoked by multiple artists since the mid-nineteenth century to highlight the humanity of the drowned Africans depicted in the painting, and to invoke a pivotal moment in the intersecting legal and economic histories of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. Turner's painting depicts the Zong slave ship caught in an approaching storm at sunset. The ship lies in the background against a dramatic and dark, yet fiery, sky and sea, while its jettisoned human cargo, as represented by disembodied manacled limbs jutting up out of the water — that is to say, horror — inhabits the foreground.

The massacre, subsequent court case, and Turner's painting have all gone down in history as key moments in the legal history of perceiving Africans as chattel rather than human beings. In closing Citizen with Turner's painting, Rankine returns her reader to this formative historical site that continues to reverberate across oceans, nations, and history as what we might call — trying to keep the contradiction in view — an all too typical limit-case for human beings who occupy black bodies. Rankine's return to this exemplary moment of transatlantic slavery is a familiar move in conversations about the continued dehumanization of black bodies. Different, though, are the implications of Rankine drawing our attention to the horror of the painting's grotesque imagery — the disembodied manacled black limbs. Another image in Citizen offers an informing precedent for how the grotesque functions in the book: Kate Clark's installation Little Girl (2008). Made in part of caribou hide and rubber eyes, Little Girl is a sculpted representation of a calf with a child's face, lying on its side, with its front legs tucked under it. We can think of Little Girl as a sign of Rankine's engagement with what Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman calls "black grotesquerie."9

According to Abdur-Rahman, "rather than merely signifying excess, dread, or decay, black grotesquerie delineates an aesthetic practice of contortion, exaggeration, substitution, inversion, corruption." In this way, the "conception of this aesthetic mode explores disturbed form more than it does disturbing content."10 Central to Abdur-Rahman's black grotesquerie is the Bakhtinian notion of the "degradation of form" as not only a destructive force, but also one of regeneration. Where degradation is typically associated with negative terms such as humiliation, monstrosity, and ugliness, Bakhtin suggests a paradoxical generative component. "To degrade" form "is to bury, to sow, and to kill simultaneously in order to bring forth something better ... [Degradation] has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one."11 As a central principle of Abdur-Rahman's black grotesquerie however, this regeneration crucially offers neither remediation nor recovery, but rather the creation of texts that might demonstrate how narrative fails "those whose terms of existence are tethered to structural loss — to forms of civil and social death and to the persistent likelihood of their own untimely demise."12 Thus, "the grotesque is a process of revaluing and repositioning the debased elements of bodily, structural, conceptual, and worldly configurations. The black grotesque discomforts the world, disparaging and reforming the official order of things."13 In the case of Clark's Little Girl, this re-ordering takes the shape of a discomfiting calf with a child's vulnerable, fear-filled, and confused face. In Citizen, the image is all the more horrifying because it faces Rankine's poem about what happens when the black persona tries to get trauma therapy at a white therapist's home. This juxtaposition emphasizes the disruption of form that links Rankine's genre-mixing with Clark's disturbing anthropomorphism. The poem's black persona rings the doorbell to the home of a trauma therapist with whom she has an appointment, and "when the door finally opens, the woman standing there yells, at the top of her lungs, Get away from my house! What are you doing in my yard?"14 The retraumatizing of someone seeking helps redoubles on itself in this moment. The piteous expression of the child/calf's face on the facing page imbues the trauma of the migroagression with the vulnerability of a young animal lying prone as if for slaughter.

At stake here is a refutation of the sentimental politics associated with liberalism. In "Everybody's Protest Novel," James Baldwin argues for an underlying continuity between Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Native Son (1940), grounded, he contends, in the dehumanizing affect of sentimentality. "Bigger's tragedy," Baldwin writes, "is not that he is cold or black or hungry, not even that he is American, black; but that he has accepted a theology that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his being sub-human and feels constrained, therefore, to battle for his humanity according to those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth."15 For Baldwin, both Stowe and Wright traffic in "the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion" that ironically exemplifies sentimentalism's function as a defense against feeling: "the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty."16 For this reason, the protest novel,

so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all. This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvation and "As long as such books are being published," an American liberal once said to me, "everything will be all right."17

It is perhaps with something like Baldwin's critique in mind that contemporary black writers like Paul Beatty and Kiese Laymon turn so frequently not to Stowe but to another canonical nineteenth-century work, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In their engagement with Twain (and Laymon's engagement with Beatty), these novelists' fiction works through satire and temporal collapse to delink fiction from the sentimentality that usurps its capacity for revolutionary political change. In a Q&A at the end of Long Division (2013), Laymon says that the novel was born out of the impulse to "critique art ... through the creation of alternative art." Laymon's alternative art is in conversation with a diverse — generically and temporally — list of texts: "Kindred, Invisible Man, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Bluest Eye, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, Black Boy, The White Boy Shuffle, and all the 'classics' [his] mother would make [him] read before he was allowed to go outside."18 I can't do justice to how wildly inventive and complexly provocative Laymon's story of time-traveling 12-year-olds is in the present essay. But I'd like to suggest that the site of the convergence of all these texts in Long Division is the novel's allusion to the time Jim spends in Huckleberry Finn imprisoned in a shed, tormented by Tom Sawyer's increasingly baroque efforts — which Huck silently protests, but outwardly abets; and which serve to amplify the sentimental affects that attend the act of freeing Jim. It is in this scene, which was published three decades after Stowe's novel and sixty-five years before Baldwin's essay, that Twain makes clear just how dangerous white sentimentality can be for black bodies.

Long Division inverts this scenario. The person imprisoned in the shed is a white character whom the protagonist City calls Pot Belly. Pot Belly is kept imprisoned, intermittently beaten, and eventually murdered in City's grandmother's shed for a few reasons: he is suspected of kidnapping a missing girl named Baize Shepherd (he didn't), he racially assaults City and posts it to YouTube, and (as we learn later) City's grandfather drowned while trying to save Pot Belly when he was a boy. Following one of Pot Belly's beatings, City's grandmother "made [City] sit on the toilet in the bathroom while she took a bath. The suds in the tub were brownish and pink from the dirt and blood on grandma's hands." When he asks her what happened, she answers, "Nothing, City. That man, he gone far away from here.... Ain't nothin in that work shed for you, you hear me?"19

The horror here works on multiple levels, beyond the discomfort of a preteen boy being made to watch his grandmother bathe. There is also the horror of the violence Pot Belly suffers at the hands of City's grandmother and uncle, and City's lack of horror when faced with it. Moreover, though City spends time with Pot Belly in the shed on multiple occasions, without his grandmother's knowledge, and even though he claims he plans to free him, City only ever talks with Pot Belly and reads to him from Long Division, an act that reflects a level of indifference to Pot Belly's plight.

Moreover, the scene with City's grandmother bathing away Pot Belly's blood while her grandson watches becomes all the more interesting when one notices how it alludes to a scene in The White Boy Shuffle in which the protagonist Gunnar's friend, the gang-banger Psycho Loco, turns up at Gunnar's door on Halloween night "in a black knit whodunnit mask and a nickel-plated nine-millimeter in his hand" and asks "in a shaky voice if he could take a shower."20. Gunnar subsequently follows a trail of steam down the hallway and attempts to close the bathroom door, but comes across Psycho Loco "crying so hard he had tears on his knees." Gunnar ends up, at Psycho Loco's request, sitting on the toilet while the latter showers. In both instances an audience that doesn't know how to properly respond is required to witness the aftermath of violent acts. In Beatty, the gang-banger with the automatic pistol exhibits more contrition than City's grandmother, but in both instances it is unclear how the protagonists — and, crucially, readers — should respond to the horror of their violence.

How does one even begin to make the leaps necessary for parsing such convoluted intertextuality? I'd like to suggest that Laymon's key inheritance from Twain, like Beatty's, is the pairing of violence with absurdity. In Twain, this pairing indicts Tom and Huck's inability to see the person they are attempting to free as a human being who, like them, feels pain and anguish — and extends this indictment to the reader, who finds the harrowing violence of this situation to be funny. In Laymon and Beatty, the absurdity is deployed as a zero degree of social relations tout court — a starting place from which to rethink relationships within and across racial divides.

This in part explains why I suggest that speculative fiction offers a capacious home for all the variations on the horror aesthetics at work in contemporary black art. Here I follow Marek Oziewicz's account of speculative fiction as a literary field that "groups together extremely diverse forms of non-mimetic fiction operating across different media for the purpose of reflecting their cultural role, especially as opposed to the work performed by mimetic or realist narratives."21 For Oziewicz, "speculative fiction emerges as a tool to dismantle the traditional Western cultural bias in favor of literature imitating reality, and as a quest for the recovery of the sense of awe and wonder."22 While "awe and wonder" might not initially seem like the best description for writers like Beatty and Laymon, it gets at the epistemological refreshment with which they recalibrate our ability to negotiate the horrors of the present.

Oziewicz asserts that speculative fiction

accommodates the non-mimetic gestures of Western but also non-Western and indigenous literatures — especially stories narrated from the minority or alternative perspective. In all these ways, speculative fiction represents a global reaction of human creative imagination struggling to envision a possible future at a time of major transition from local to global humanity.23

In its opposition to realism as a lingua franca — one which, as many critics of the novel have noted, is genetically tied to the nation form — speculative fiction draws eclectically upon the grab bag of human culture to try and imagine an as yet unthought global worldview.

Though I have discussed largely African American texts here, speculative fiction's globality enables thinking about how the local and global can connect in ways that bypass the nation. While term like magical realism, the fantastic, hoodoo, and voodoo all reflect historically- and geopolitically-situated meanings, the reach for speculative forms in the present uproots and combines these previously located concepts in a manner that reflects the global circulation of texts and people. In the twenty-first century, the once historically-located meanings of speculative fiction "are now being superseded by an emerging consensus, in which the term refers to a fuzzy set field of cultural production."24 This "fuzzy" field responds to the conflicts and upheavals of the present on a global scale. Consider the magical doors that characters use in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2018) to travel from one country to the next unburdened by the bureaucracy that enables the legal movement of bodies across borders. These doors offer a speculative conceit for what I mean when I suggest that global horror links the local with the global in a manner that bypasses the nation.

The essays in this cluster illuminate the tendencies that I have been describing as central to global horror: generic and temporal collapse, anti-sentimentalism, and an interest in linking the global and the local. Brigitte Fielder "present[s] nineteenth-century discourses around the enslaved child in order to show that figure's centrality to discourses of racialized childhood in the United States." This ongoing centrality, she argues, demonstrates

that 1) racist anxieties were pragmatically directed toward ensuring a future of white supremacy and that 2) antiracist arguments (and particularly those formed by formerly-enslaved black people) have historically considered childhood as real and experienced, beyond the simply symbolic resonances by which it is usually considered.

In its emphasis on the historical trajectory from the enslaved child to the carceral child, Fielder's essay begins to delineate the limits of sentimental abolitionist images of the separation between slave mothers and their children. Where such scenes may have garnered the sympathy of white viewers/readers, stoking antislavery sentiment, Fielder suggests they have never afforded black children the same vulnerability, innocence, and humanity granted white children.

Vincent Haddad puts the music video for rapper Danny Brown's "Ain't it Funny," from his album Atrocity Exhibition, alongside sentimental accounts of Detroit as a ruined or recovering city to place in "tension the actual, racial materiality of Detroit with the burden of its symbolic significance on the psychic life of individuals who live or have lived there." In this way, Haddad argues, Brown asks his listeners to confront their own "complicity in the racism and economic inequality that generate [Detroiters'] physical and mental health crises." For Haddad, Brown's satirical hip hop — which construes "Detroit" as "a city whose ruins are commercialized, admired, and consumed, and whose survival many have only a symbolic investment" — offers "a poignant example of a wider stigmatization of Black mental health, experienced in unique and particular ways by Black men, Black women, Black activists, and members of the Black LGBTQ community (especially in Detroit where there is currently an epidemic of violence against Black transgender people)."

In his focus on the Louisiana landscape of True Detective, meanwhile, Min Hyoung Song thinks about the ways

. . . viewers . . . are not separate from the landscape, but a part of it, inextricably entangled as things in mutual co-being; that race grants some of us more of an illusion of being separate, which is in turn getting more difficult to credit in the midst of environmental breakdowns; that male-centered genres, like the crime drama, no longer work all that well to shore up white masculinity's conflation with the human; that the experience of time has a way of collapsing on itself, scrambling teleological ideas of linear progression, as distinctions of race, gender, and the human are scrambled; and most of all that climate change figures in the background, resistant to plot but there nonetheless to the attentive.

In this way Song approaches the South as both explicitly regional in specific ways determined by the domestic history of the United States, and as an implicitly global location in the collective histories of the New World and of global petroculture. Song's essay highlights the manner in which the manifestations of climate change in True Detective's visual field do not register in its narrative one, "so that viewers cannot make sense of how the ravaged landscape, the ravaged bodies of white women, and the ravaged lives of almost all of its characters are connected." The horror True Detective reveals to its viewers, then, is how we can't see what is plainly visible, and how this failure puts so many, especially the most vulnerable, in danger.

Song's approach to True Detective's setting accords with Matthew Pratt Guterl's account of the Gulf South in particular — the main setting of Laymon's Long Division and Jesmyn Ward's novels, we might recall — as defined

by the port cities of Galveston, New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston, as much connected to Havana as to New York. At different moments in history, the outer rim of the former slaveholding galaxy — Louisiana, Texas, and Florida — was culturally and geopolitically confusing, sometimes French or Spanish and not English, sometimes Catholic and not Baptist, sometimes brown and not white...Indeed, one of the most striking features of the region is not its permanence and uniformity but its repeated exchange (the larger southern expanse has changed hands, or been "sold" or "taken," more often than any other part of the United States) and its memories of a past life as somewhere and something else.25

It is in this spirit of transhistorical and transregional connectedness that Stuelke explores how the energy of the hemispheric feminist experiment with the genre of protest and assembly is being captured by a number of contemporary feminist literary texts that are creatively reimagining tropes of horror fiction. Stuelke's essay demonstrates how "in their refusals," recent feminist horror fiction

capture[s] something of the way the Argentine feminist and international women's strikes are reusing old materialist feminist theory and pressing it into an embodied anticolonial anticapitalist vitalist ecofeminist project, one that connects the violence of extractive capitalism and the corporate pollution of the earth to sexual, economic, and toxic violations of women's bodily sovereignty, without re-naturalizing women's bodies as the site of reproductive labor.

Focusing on Argentina, Stuelke reminds us that our conceptions of the global should not just be a dressed-up version of American imperial influence radiating outwards. We need to choose starting points from all parts of the globe. This is something like what James does in his Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) when he centers Jamaica as a site for understanding how Reagan-era anti-socialist foreign policy led to new circuits of trafficking — in drugs, in arms, in people — across the US, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Born in Kingston and educated, like so many Jamaican intellectuals, at the University of the West Indies, James has since 2007 lived in Saint Paul, Minnesota. It was there he wrote the novel about Jamaica's role in Western hemispheric politics that won the British prize — financed by sugar trade money — that had only recently opened itself to American authors. In this way, James's career as well as his writing exemplify the necessity of thinking contemporary literary cultures not outside old categories like American, African American, Caribbean, and Latin American, but certainly in a manner that puts these categories into continual, negotiated discussion with each other.

In James's work, as in that of numerous other writers, horror serves as a common denominator for this discussion. Gothic writing, we might recall, began through the association of horror with all the social frameworks — the aristocracy, the Church, the foreign — from which the new, enlightened, nationally-based middle classes sought to distinguish themselves. Within the United States, meanwhile, the Gothic frequently addressed slavery and its legacies as a putatively anachronistic holdover of horror within capitalism. If, today, horror seems not only re-nascent but ubiquitous, what does this tell us about the period of human history associated with capitalist modernity, and about literature's ability to track seismic shifts in the logics by which we organize human society? This is the question that we seek, in bringing together these disparate accounts of contemporary global horror, not so much to answer it as to place it on the critical agenda.

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