Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations

Call for Papers

Edited Anthology to be published by Bloomsbury

Horror Fiction in the Global South: Cultures, Narratives, and Representations
 

Death frequently asserts itself in the human consciousness through sensations of horror and anxiety. Thoughit is the only absolute in human lives, the limited knowledge that we have about this finality has always ensured a strange relationship between the life that we live before dying and the one (that we won’t live) after the moment of our death. This strangeness is, primarily, a result of the clash between that which we definitively know against something that has always been unknown; where the promise of the moment of death does not necessitate a corresponding knowledge of either that moment or the ones after it. What remains, then, is just this strangeness as it gets entangled with our lived realities and disturbs the world that we live in. On the one hand we have the naturalness of our deaths, while on the other the speculation of everything after it.This speculation, in turn,desperately trying to make some sense of our absurd lives, begets a whole new world that is somehow both natural and outside it:the world of the supernatural and the occult, of ghosts and specters; of witchcraft and monsters; of vampires and werewolves; of Gods and Demons. This is a world that haunts our lives whether we are awake or asleep. This is a world that keeps on nagging at the corner of our minds, sometimes pulling us to the brink of madness. All humans, suffering from the essential strangeness, understand this pull that the supernatural have over them. It is, perhaps, because of this knowledge that eons ago our ape-like ancestors decide to appease these things that go bump in the night and worship them. This worshipping, however, is not a simple deification of the creatures of the night but an acceptance that nature is beyond the control of humans. However, this is a knowledge that seems to have waned in cultures that have subscribed to the idea of history as a march of mankind’s progress. As organized religions developed in these cultures, thesecreatures of the night, once venerated,got recast as emblems of evil that needed to be exorcised.

Beyond religion, and precisely at the time that religion’s grip over public life began to recede and give way to a secular Reason, the twin emergence of European nation states and colonialism gave currency to a set of ideas that objectified the belief in the supernatural and dismissed it as superstitious or primitive. History, as can be seen in the case of “developed” nations, ensures the privileging of empirical investigation, logic, and rationality to the lived,experiential, realities of its people.This is not to say that this world of ghosts and monsters simply gets discarded. They remain, in the dark recesses of collective memory, either as narrative metaphorsor pathological abstractions. Even so, while these “developed”cultures have been inclined to define their natural reality through empirical rationality, the other “developing” or “under-developed” cultureshave followed a different path. Never really believing in (or, for that matter, having any reason to believe) the efficacy of empirical rationality, theyhave continued to actively retainan older order of existence – sometimes as a gesture of resistance to the homogenizing impulse of colonial modernity. In the continuity allowed to pagan and tribal affects within these postcolonial cultures, the supernatural is also accommodated within the natural order of experience. Instead of reducing the spectral or demonic incarnations of the world beyond death to a psychic symptomatology, the figures of horror are given a greater agency in the lives and fortunes of individuals and communities.

What changes, then, is the experience that these cultures (and the individuals of these cultures) have of the supernatural. While the “developed” civilizations strive to bind the monstrous within systems and institutions of human comprehension – either through the rationality of science or the metaphysics of organized religion – the other half of the world settles in for a more nuanced understanding,and subsequent acceptance,of the supernatural as it is. In other words, though the feeling and affectof horror that emanates from and because of the supernatural remains generally tied to the functions of fear, the nature of this horrorvaries in texture and impact. For the western world, for example, ghosts are either evil or epiphenomenal figments of imagination that need to be banished through psychiatry or exorcism. For other cultures, however, ghosts have a phenomenal presence of their own which cannot be wished, exorcised, or medicated away. In such a scheme of things, William Peter Blatty’s novel The Exorcist exemplifies this western imagination of a haunting that, at all costs, needs to be amended. Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, on the other hand, reveals a relationship between a ghost and a human that is more organic. The only way Jose Arcadio Buendia can find some relief from the horror set in because of Prudencio Aguilar’s ghost is by accepting the latter in his spectral form. There is no getting rid of ghosts.

Given, therefore, that the experiences of horror are not just individual but also/simultaneously cultural, literary productions become rather potent sites for the relation of such experiences both on the individual and the cultural front. It’s not coincidental, then, that either Blatty’s or Marquez’s novels become archetypes of the re-presentations of the way horror affects individuals placed inside different cultures. Such an affectation, though, is but a beginning of the ways in which the supernatural interacts with the human and gives rise to horror. Considering that almost all aspects of what we now designate as the Global North, and its concomitant, the Global South – political, historical, social, economic, cultural, and so on – function as different paradigms, the experiences of horror and their telling in stories become functionally different as well. Added to this are the variations that one nation or culture of the east has from another.

The present anthology of essays seeks to examine and demonstrate these cultural differences embedded in the impact that figures of horror and specters of the night have on the narrative imagination of storytellers from the Global South. If horror has an everyday presence in the phenomenal reality that Southern cultures subscribe to, it demands alternative phenomenology. The anthology allows scholars and connoisseurs of Horror to explore theoretical possibilities that may help address precisely such a need.

The book will be published by Bloomsbury India by the middle of 2020. Interested scholars are requested to send in an abstract of 300-500 words by the 23rd of December 2019 to horrorfictionanthology@gmail.com. Acceptances will be notified within a fortnight. The anthology is open to all researchers interested in the field.

Please feel free to write to us at horrorfictionanthology@gmail.com for any queries.

About the Editors

Ritwick Bhattacherjee is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi. His research is centered on phenomenological and literary fantasy, horror fictions and the questions of reality. He is also the author of Humanity’s Strings: Being, Pessimism and Fantasy, published by Bloomsbury alongside other papers published across different anthologies. 

Saikat Ghosh is an Assistant Professor, Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi. His areas of academic interest are Literary Modernisms, Horror Fiction, Marxist Theory and Psychoanalysis.

About the Publisher

Blomsbury (https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/)

Launched in September 2012, Bloomsbury India upholds Bloomsbury Publishing’s tradition of publishing books of the highest quality in Fiction, Non-Fiction, Children’s, Academic, Business, and Education by both Indian and international authors. Bloomsbury India’s catalogue of authors also includes J.K. Rowling, Khaled Hosseini, Elizabeth Gilbert and Kamila Shamsie; Nobel Prize winners Nadine Gordimer and Patrick Modiano; Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood; Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert; Orange Prize winners Madeline Miller and Anne Michaels and cookery books by Michelin-starred chefs Anthony Bourdain, Vikas Khanna, Heston Blumenthal, Atul Kochhar and Raymond Blanc. Bloomsbury India distributes both UK and US Bloomsbury imprints together with the popular and critically acclaimed Arden Shakespeare series.