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Gulf Gothic examines haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between peoples all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. The Gulf is presented as a single transnational region and as dynamic ground zero of North American (and global) cross-culturality and trauma. Responding to the long history of Mesoamerican writing, plantation systems, and racialized divides across the region, this study argues that gothic—with all its affect, undead figures, heavy weather, and hauntings—provides a powerful lens through which to awaken the kinds of gulf-traversing vision so necessary to us here and now.
"American literature starts here’, Flores-Silva and Cartwright write, where an American gothic originates in response to the violations of Euro-settler colonialism and where presumably ‘impassable gulfs’ become passages binding the living to the undead, where La Llorona, her origins deep in prehistory, haunts the present. A fascinating and generative study"—Barbara Ladd, Professor of English, Emory University, USA.
Acknowledgments; Introduction. Gulf Gothic; La Llorona’s Undead Voices: Woman at the Borderwaters; Plantation Entanglements: Gulf Afterlives of Slavery; Gulf Atmospherics: Huracán and the Visceraless State; Coda: “Phantasmal Space”; Works Cited; Index