cultural studies and historical approaches

CALL FOR PAPERS special issue ‘Tropical Gothic’

Submission Deadline: 30 December 2018

‘TROPICAL GOTHIC’

‘The Gothic’ is undergoing a resurgence in academic and popular cultures. Propelled by fears produced by globalization, the neoliberal order, networked technologies, post-truth and environmental uncertainty – tropes of ‘the gothic’ resonate. The gothic allows us to delve into the unknown. It calls up unspoken truths and secret desires.

NeMLA 2019

Travel, travel writing, and the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century have received an impressively wide scholarly focus. In informing the willing sightseer, guidebooks like Baedeker’s or Murray’s constructed a particular approach to the foreign and the unknown. Obligatory rather than spontaneous, requisite rather than discretionary, the experience guidebooks delineated and that powerful tourist agencies like Thomas Cook regulated, produced an intrepid British traveler whose thirst for the new and the exotic challenged conventional notions of relaxation and knowledge, while, at the same time, remained a carefully governed cosmopolitan identity.

A growing body of recent scholarship argues that the Haitian Revolution is one of the defining events of modernity. But from 1791 until 1804, the fog of war distorted and obscured Western perceptions of Haiti. From independence until official recognition by France in 1825, isolation did likewise. Fear, mythmaking, and bigotry filled the void. In Tropics of Haiti, Marlene Daut states that “[a] great portion of the texts within the transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution reveal themselves, upon closer examination, to be unsure about what they ‘think’ they are: novels or memoirs, histories or dramatizations… [they] blur the lines between history and fiction, biography and memoir, philosophy and science”.

In the last decades, the general perception that emotions are opposed to history and that politics is unemotional has been challenged by a number of scholars in various disciplines: Sara Ahmed’s, for example, has argued that emotions ‘stick’ to objects in a social context, while others consider affect as a fundamental aspect of citizenship (among them, Graziella Parati). This panel seeks to continue a conversation started at NeMLA 2018 about the role and representation of emotions and affect in Italian history and literature. We will accept proposals that analyze the intersectionality between history, identity and emotions from early modern to contemporary Italian literary texts.