Gulf Gothic: Mexico, the U.S. South and La Llorona's Undead Voices

Gothic Gulfs examines haunted, secret-laden narratives that emerge from the gulfs between people all along the Gulf of Mexico and on both sides of the Rio Grande. The Gulf is presented as a unified region and as dynamic ground zero of North American (and global) cross-culturality and traumas.

Gothic Gulfs studies gothic narratives that emerge from real and conceptual Gulf spaces. The Gulf of Mexico is an intensely cross-cultural ground zero of modern North America. Rarely, however, has the Gulf been examined as the dynamic transnational region that it is (taking in the Gulf states of Mexico and the U.S., as well as western Cuba), a space that nourished the spread of maize agriculture and the rise of a two-thousand-year-old literary historical tradition that marks the landfall of colonial conquest and the emergence of plantation slavery through ports such as Veracruz, Havana, and New Orleans. In this study, the Gulf signifies metaphorically and symbolically (gulfs between peoples), as well as topographically. Its gothic modalities carry a particularly urgent charge that demands to be read and addressed in holistic form.

Gothic is a mode of representing all that is blocked from free movement and aspiration. It carries what has been pushed back, what we have been inoculated against: something deemed barbaric or monstrous--some undead folklore or occultism untamed by colonial projects. All across the Gulf, the gothic harbours what hasn't submitted to (or been incorporated by) projects of nationalism. It manages to reveal the corruption of supposedly noble regimes. It becomes tropical, directionally southern, a space of attempted quarantines and border walls.