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The Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature traces the aesthetic and political development of the Gothic genre in Colombia. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez shows how, in the hands of Colombian writers and filmmakers, Gothic tropes are taken to their extremes to reflect particularly Colombian issues, like the ongoing armed conflict in the country since the 1950s as various left wing guerillas, government factions and paramilitary groups escalated violence. In this context, collectives such as the “Cali group” challenge both the centrality of US and European Gothics as well as the centrality of Bogota-centered perspectives of Colombian politics and conflict. The book demonstrates how writers and filmmakers transform the European and American Gothic to show genealogical links between colonization, imperialism and domestic elites’ maintenance of social inequalities.
Though long obscured by the critical preoccupation with magical realism, the Gothic strain in Latin American literature has become a topic of vibrant scholarly interest in recent years. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature is a welcome contribution to the field, charting, as it does, the emergence of a distinctive strain of Colombian Gothic in the nineteenth century and tracking its manifestations across literature and film of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s pioneering study is at pains to show, the Colombian Gothic, while sharing certain affinities with the so-called Tropical Gothic, is as singular and distinctive as the culture and history that gave it form. For this reason alone, the book is crucial to understanding the global reach and significance of the Gothic in Central and South America, well beyond the more familiar Anglo-American frame. — Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University.
Introduction: The Gothic in Colombia and in Latin America; 1. Gothic Pioneers: José Asunción Silva and José Joaquín Vargas Valdés; 2. Gothic in the “Hot Lands”; 3. Colombian Negrótico and the Gothic in the Mountains; 4. Beyond the Regions; Bibliography; Index.