Middle Eastern Gothics: Literature, Spectral Modernities and the Restless Past

By Karen Grumberg

Middle Eastern Gothics is the first scholarly volume on Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its nine chapters consider literary expressions of the Gothic in the major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Spanning the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, the book makes a case for the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space encompassing diverse cultures, languages and histories that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic Studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyper-local. Across the MENA region, the Gothic helps express ongoing literary negotiations with modernity, leaving its distinctive mark on representations of globalisation, colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, Middle Eastern literary texts expand the boundaries of the mode on their own terms, refracting broad histories through local and indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781786839305

Book preview

Introduction (Re-)Orienting the Gothic

KAREN GRUMBERG

It is no surprise that Aḥmad Saʿdāwī’s remarkable Arabic novel Frānkishtāyn fī Baghdād (Frankenstein in Baghdad) (2013) has generated such excitement in the field of Gothic studies. As the winner of the prestigious International Prize for Arabic Fiction and numerous other awards, it is the most internationally visible work of Arabic literature to engage explicitly with the Gothic. The International Prize for Arabic Fiction, which is administered by the Booker Prize Foundation, not only offers the prestige that accompanies a major literary award, but also a translation contract to facilitate a gateway to readers who cannot read Arabic. As the proliferating scholarship on Saʿdāwī’s novel demonstrates, the prize performs an invaluable service for Anglophone readers eager to engage with non-Western novels as world literary texts. For scholars of Gothic studies, Frankenstein in Baghdad has emerged as a salient expression of the relevance of the Gothic in non-Western texts broadly and in Middle Eastern texts more specifically. The novel has been a valuable source for critics who continue to hone the concept of what is called by turns global Gothic, globalgothic, international Gothic or non-Western Gothic. Further, Saʿdāwī’s explicit confrontation with a key British Gothic text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, invites a consideration of the connections between this Iraqi novel and a critical apparatus primarily associated with Western literature.

Frankenstein in Baghdad, however, is by no means the only Arabic or Middle Eastern text to engage with the Gothic. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has produced a rich and diverse body of works that engage with themes, poetics and aesthetics that can be characterised as Gothic even if they do not allude to the Western Gothic overtly like Saʿdāwī.¹ Unlike Saʿdāwī’s novel, many of these works have not been translated and, if they have, never reached the meteoric international status of Frankenstein in Baghdad, remaining relatively unknown outside their immediate cultural context. Yet their presence in the Middle Eastern literary milieu suggests that there may be something worthwhile about shifting our frame of reference for the Gothic in the Middle East. Alongside the conceptualisation of Saʿdāwī’s novel vis-àvis the world or the globe, we might ask how the novel relates to other Iraqi, Arabic or Middle Eastern Gothic texts. While questions of nation, language and specific theoretical paradigms like postcolonialism or globalisation have made valuable contributions to Gothic criticism, I want to propose that what I call the transnational region – in this volume, specifically in reference to the MENA region – allows for a different and productive practice of relational reading.

This volume’s goal is twofold. First, it proposes the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space with specific cultural and historical networks that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyperlocal. Second, it demonstrates that the Middle East region, specifically, complicates Gothic literary representations of globalisation, of transnational currents and of the ongoing engagement with imported spatio-political paradigms such as nationalism – even as it offers indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic. In what follows, I address the fundamental question underlying this volume: what makes the Middle East region fecund ground for the investigation of the Gothic? I begin, though, by outlining the contours of the transnational region and considering how it might contribute new dimensions to the fields of Gothic studies and Middle Eastern studies.

The Transnational Region

Before drawing a distinction between ‘the region’ as it is conventionally understood and the transnational regional frame I propose here, I want to take a moment to address what I mean by ‘Gothic’. Even as many scholars have celebrated the expansion of the Gothic to include texts and approaches far beyond the purview of what David Punter has called ‘the original Gothic’, others have wondered whether the idea of the Gothic has been stretched thin to the point of meaninglessness.² Certain characteristics clearly demarcate the concept of the Gothic: settings that elicit foreboding, such as ruins, castles, urban labyrinths and dark forests; the cultivation of extreme and excessive emotions in characters as well as readers; supernatural figures or incidents; an anxiety regarding the past and the threat it poses to the present; the exposure of fissures in ideas associated with the Enlightenment. As a cohesive mode or genre, the Gothic is widely regarded as having been born in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. There is no question that a distinctive literary mode designated as ‘Gothic’ refers to a particular canon of British texts published from 1764 to the late nineteenth century.

Our recognition of this canon, however, does not preclude the fact that the features that have coalesced to define ‘the Gothic’ in Britain in this period informed other geographies and temporalities, even if they were not designated by the term ‘Gothic’. In other words, some non-British Gothic texts can be considered vis-à-vis their relationship to British Gothic, whether in the form of appropriation, influence or subversion; other non-British texts might not engage in these relational dynamics with Western Gothic. A text such as Alf Laylah wa-Laylah (One Thousand and One Nights), for example, historically precedes the British Gothic by centuries, yet clearly includes key motifs associated with the Gothic, which are themselves later taken up by orientalist British Gothic authors.³ If Gothic begins in 1764 on Strawberry Hill, then such a text cannot be considered Gothic. Relatedly, the association of the Gothic with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British writing suggests that describing a text like One Thousand and One Nights as Gothic is not only anachronistic but also an act of cultural colonialism that foists irrelevant Western aesthetic forms onto non-Western texts. Valid as these concerns may be, though, they leave unaddressed the fact that the narrative devices and themes of One Thousand and One Nights resonate with what we call ‘Gothic’. A conceptualisation of the Gothic as a ‘sensibility’ and not only as a genre with a clearly defined moment and place of origin, as P. M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen propose, can help reconcile these factors (Gothic Topographies, p. 2). Thinking about a ‘Gothic sensibility’ that might exist beyond or irrespective of encounters with the West – not instead of but alongside conventional understandings of the Gothic – allows an expansion of our understanding of the mode, while preserving the imaginative and historical integrity of the literature at hand.

I suggest a multipronged approach to Middle Eastern Gothic literature. First, I seek to create the conditions for regional readings. The chapters in this volume do not, in themselves, bring texts in different Middle Eastern languages in conversation. Rather, the idea is to create a forum that brings together distinct studies as complementary components of Middle Eastern Gothics, to foster a practice of reading these texts that exceeds or transcends the national frame but does not necessarily span the global. Such a practice can showcase fruitful connections and compelling disjunctures and help readers experience new modes of engagement with these texts. Second, I urge that we take language seriously, even when language itself is not the subject of an analysis of a Gothic text; that is, that we recognise the importance not only of plot and theme but also of raw poetics – the texture, nuance and particular cultural and historical associations of language. As the eminent comparatist Haun Saussy has observed, language must ‘be recognised as something more than a delivery system for content … as having a weight and resistance of its own’ (‘Exquisite Cadavers’, p. 14).⁴ Though in some critical milieux language has been deprioritised and translations regarded as interchangeable with their originals, I agree with Saussy that ‘[a] translation always brings across most successfully the aspects of a work for which its audience is already prepared; but what is most worth knowing may be what requires the most strenuous and imaginative adaptation from its readers’ (‘Exquisite Cadavers’, p. 26). For Western readers who wish to engage with texts written in an unfamiliar language, the area studies or comparative literature critic can help illuminate those aspects of a work for which the reader may not be prepared, and which are worth knowing. This emphasis on language entails bringing literature back into the fold, alongside the multiple media that dominate contemporary discussions of the Gothic in non-Western contexts. Third, I promote the value of reading texts as autonomous cultural products first and foremost, even as we acknowledge that exchange, hybridity and mobility make every Gothic text – including British and US Gothic texts – inherently global. The globality that Western readers and critics perceive and highlight in non-Western texts offers just one of many possible paths of enquiry into those texts.

With these priorities in mind – Gothic sensibility, language, literature and cultural autonomy – I propose the transnational region as the basis for the understanding of Middle Eastern Gothics. The transnational region hosts diverse local expressions without homogenising them; it is a multilingual, multi-ethnic space, not defined by national boundaries but also the site of multiple and sometimes competing national negotiations; it accommodates rural ways of life as well as urban cosmopolitanism; it is the site of distinctive but overlapping histories of colonialism and imperialism, internal and international conflict. I refer not to the region in the sense of the hyperlocal site where dialect or accent narrow the straits of the national, but rather the transnational region, which encompasses many languages, religions and nations but lays claim to entwined histories and certain shared cultural attributes that shaped the space long before colonialism and decolonisation helped create the conditions for the contemporary experience of globalisation.⁵ The transnational region is expansive, inclusive and diverse; its histories are informed by external global currents, internal local ones and the Bhabhian ‘third space’ that hybridises them, but it also documents dimensions of experience that cannot be understood only in terms of the global and the local.

It is this process of documentation or inscription, signified by the ghostly traces it leaves behind, that the concept of a regional hauntology can help articulate. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, Jacques Derrida in Spectres de Marx reflected on haunting as an aspect of being and time, its logic at once constitutive of and more powerful than ontology and history. The sociologist Avery Gordon narrows the all-encompassing lens of Derrida’s hauntology, arguing that haunting is ‘a story about what happens when we admit the ghost – that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present – into the making of worldly relations and into the making of our accounts of the world’. Haunting is a story, and it also informs the way we tell stories. The ghost indicates ‘the difference it makes to start with the marginal, with what we normally exclude or banish, or, more commonly, with what we never even notice’ (Gordon, Ghostly Matters, pp. 24–5). Strikingly, in reading Middle Eastern literature with this understanding of haunting in mind, we find that the ghostly traces embedded in many of these stories attest to a haunting of the self. Calling attention to elements of history and of collective selves that have been marginalised, excluded or banished in the interests of an unadulterated, pure identity and in defiance of a multifarious inheritance, these traces designate a common ground for an ongoing, sometimes violent negotiation with the past.

The idea of a regional hauntology invites a confrontation with this inheritance. Conceptualising the Middle East as a transnational region involves coming to terms with the fact that, across the region, complex configurations of identity and power foil efforts from within and without to create digestible, accessible and familiar narratives. And this might be the most urgent task for a project like this one: to convince readers that, despite the familiarity we might feel with the Gothic, and though we may understand the Gothic as a common currency that allows us to think about literatures not conventionally associated with the Gothic, part of the point of engaging with other Gothics is to feel discomfort, to feel that the Gothic has been defamiliarised in some of these texts, and to accept that as crucial to our experience with texts produced in languages and cultures we may not know. In some ways, this approach takes a stand against globalisation’s worst effects. As readers, we cannot deny the power of global networks evident in those literary texts that we are likely to access in translation, any more than we should assume that such networks express everything worth knowing about a text. Approaching such texts as products of the transnational region allows us to inhabit an unsettled readerly space that might elicit difference or identification and may or may not subscribe to Western expectations and modes of reading. In short, rather than offering paradigms with which Western readers can readily identify, this volume seeks to create the conditions for an uncanny encounter with the gothicism of these Middle Eastern and North African texts, via critics who read them in their own languages and on their own terms.

The Limits of the Global

As scholarship on national and regional Gothics far beyond the purview of the ‘original Gothic’ continues to expand, ‘global Gothic’ has emerged as a convenient shorthand. Aside from the hierarchy such a formulation expresses (it is primarily from the British or other Western perspective that such works are usually indexed as ‘global’), it also has implications for the ‘original Gothic’ itself. The need to modify ‘Gothic’ with ‘global’ suggests that the Gothic is inherently not global or international and must be acted upon or revised in some way – ‘globalised’ – to be global or international. Yet the Gothic was always already global, always already informed by international and transnational currents. The Gothic is global not only because it travels to other places but also because it invites penetration by external forces, which it may appropriate, amend or absorb in various ways. Orientalist colonial engagements with other people, places and traditions, for example, colour much of British Gothic. I have already referred to the incorporation of translations of One Thousand and One Nights into works like William Beckford’s Vathek (1786). British authors of so-called ‘Egyptian Gothic’ adapted Egyptian folktales and legends into narratives of British imperial anxiety.⁶ The etymological trajectories of figures and concepts associated with Gothic plots also lay bare the notion of a globally influenced tradition. The word ‘ghoul’, for instance, comes to English from the Arabic ghūl, a grave-robbing desert demon that consumes the rotting flesh of corpses; the English ‘vampire’, before its appearance in French and German in the eighteenth century, likely developed from the Slavic vampir and its various permutations, which itself possibly originated from the Turkic uber, ‘witch’; ‘zombie’, a West African word, entered English only in the nineteenth century. This linguistic boundary-crossing is only one strand of evidence supporting the understanding of the Gothic as always having been informed by external influences. For the ‘original Gothic’ as for Gothic texts from other places and times, varieties of global encounter are embedded in gothicism itself.

Since the 1990s, numerous paradigms for the theorisation of Gothic literature beyond its conventionally understood origins have emerged. Many of these paradigms are geared towards the ever-growing territory of the Gothic, whether circumscribed by nation, region or particular geographies such as the Arctic, the ocean or the desert. Others are concerned with different types of relations that inform the Gothic, and the networks between and among different Gothics. Studies of particular nations and nationalisms as drivers of Gothic literature continue to accumulate, expanding the boundaries of the Gothic and contributing to an ongoing conversation about the position of such Gothics within the mode writ large. Increasingly, scholars seek models to express configurations of the Gothic that interact across nations and cultures. The idea of a ‘global Gothic’ suggests a body of texts from around the world that engage in some way with conventional Western understandings of the Gothic. One of the first and most influential models to theorise non-Western Gothics – that of the ‘globalgothic’ – revises this hierarchised relationship between ‘global’ and ‘Gothic’, aiming ‘to decentre notions of Gothic’ and ‘to register a sense of gothic inextricable from the broader global context in which it circulates’ (Byron, Globalgothic, p. 4). As such, it offers a formulation whereby non-Western Gothics are not beholden to Western Gothic but are always understood in a larger and more fluid global context.

Globalgothic has had a tremendous impact on the field of Gothic studies. It has opened up the range of what constitutes Gothic, asserted the legitimacy of reading texts from non-Western traditions as Gothic and extended a warm welcome to scholarship on a wide and diverse spectrum of Gothic texts (a hospitality from which I myself have benefitted). Crucially, it acknowledges the imaginative autonomy of non-Western Gothic works and recognises the contributions of indigenous and local traditions to these texts. In exposing the global circuits on which the Gothic travels and the webs created by their intersections and exchanges, it has provided important interpretive tools to help critics engage with forces that have defined the contemporary world. Certain defining features, however, limit the globalgothic’s applicability. The focus on the ‘flows’ and ‘multidirectional exchanges’ characterised by the twenty-first century iteration of globalisation means that studies of globalgothic, by definition, are primarily concerned with contemporary or very recently produced texts.⁷ Relatedly, globalgothic privileges film and visual cultural products as subjects of analysis. As Glennis Byron explains, ‘These are necessarily best suited for thinking about the globalgothic because they – obviously – move more easily than literary texts beyond linguistic boundaries and lend themselves to the marketing of a popular culture that can be easily commoditised, sold and consumed’ (Byron, Globalgothic, p. 4). Fred Botting and Justin D. Edwards emphasise the perpetual movement of these hybrid forms of globalgothic: ‘Here, always mobile, travelling with migrations and through the flows of global media, boundaries between life and death, real and unreal, self and other, normality and deviance become defamiliarised as they are shifted across geographical, virtual and cultural planes, global and local at the same time.’⁸ This expansive perspective depends on a mobility facilitated and sped-up through the flows of global media. Because the emphasis is less on literary texts than on the diverse types of cultural products that can easily hitch a ride on global networks, the obstacle of language may be subdued, blunting or circumventing the possibility of encountering radical difference.

This preponderance of visual and other non-literary media is particularly germane to my conceptualisation of a transnational regional paradigm that looks to area studies as much as to Gothic studies for its analytical underpinnings. Though the dominance of visual media in globalgothic scholarship reflects the conditions of globalisation, it also raises questions about Western readers’ expectations of and assumptions about non-Western Gothics. Visual representations of Gothic tropes travel fast via global technologies, and they can generate a comforting sense of familiarity, recognition and identification even in an unfamiliar linguistic or cultural context. Literary texts, on the other hand, travel slowly, if at all; they are not so inviting and less hospitable to readers from other cultural and linguistic contexts and are more likely to be left behind. Such texts, however, are integral to a truly decentred Gothic, one in which non-Western Gothic need not be designated as ‘global’ any more than does British Gothic. An approach that highlights literary texts and benefits from critics’ intimate familiarity with their languages and cultures offers an important complement to one focused on interconnected global networks and multidirectional exchanges.

In the wake of the important conversation sparked by the globalgothic paradigm, scholars both in Gothic studies and in national literatures or area studies have continued to theorise the dynamics informing a geographically expansive Gothic. In The New Urban Gothic: Global Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene (2020), Ruth Heholt and Holly-Gale Millette consider ‘transmedia storytelling’ of late twentieth and twenty-first century urban spaces as products of the Anthropocene, namely ‘global meta-histories of the systems of domination, periphery, anti-landscape and residue’ (p. 5). Taking up another dimension of global Gothic, Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age (2017) covers roughly the same period. Linnie Blake and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet argue that literature, television, film and visual art from around the world ‘articulate the social and existential consequences of thirty years of globalised laissez-faire capitalism’ in ways that parallel the ‘cultural work that was carried out by the gothic mode in earlier periods of socio-economic turbulence’ (p. 1). Moving away from the contemporary moment, Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, in Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century (2013), reject what they call ‘petty individual or national concerns’ as frames for Anglophone Gothic, arguing instead for a paradigm they variously refer to as ‘international’, ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ (pp. 5, 1).

One of the most exciting interventions on the topic of international Gothics is P. M. Mehtonen and Matti Savolainen’s Gothic Topographies: Language, Nation Building and ‘Race’. Reflecting on Gothic literature from ‘the North’ (Scandinavia, Northern Europe and Canada) and ‘the South’ (Australia, South Africa and the US South), Mehtonen and Savolainen supplement the idea of ‘Gothic literature as a well-edged tradition’ with ‘an idea of minor literatures and networks of narratives that co-exist with and question this canon’ (Gothic Topographies, p. 1). Proceeding from the understanding that language and nation do not necessarily overlap but nevertheless interact in complex ways, they propose that we ‘postpone the idea of a genre and focus on Gothic sensibility which, in addition to employing classic horror topoi and motifs, articulates by way of fiction cultural and social concerns both local and global’ (Gothic Topographies, p. 2). Thinking about the Gothic as a ‘sensibility’ loosens the strictures imposed by the generic designation without denying the coherence of the Gothic and its provenance as a distinct generic category. Notably, the question of language, which figures minimally if at all in other studies, underpins Mehtonen and Savolainen’s approach. Calling attention to the thematisation of linguistic hybridity and the implications of the production of Gothic texts in minor languages, they characterise linguistic minority as ‘a more invisible space of writing, a language within language’ (Gothic Topographies, p. 3).

In addition to these global and international considerations of the Gothic, recent studies based on regional or ethnic affiliation abound, from Asia, South Asia, Latin America, the American tropics and the Nordic countries, to name a few.⁹ Particularly since 2017, these studies have gained traction for the new dimensions they bring into Gothic studies. Many of these demonstrate the continuing impact and ongoing engagement with the globalgothic and the idea of the Gothic as an ‘import’ to be appropriated, revised or cannibalised (in the memorable formulation by Edwards and Vasconcelos). Some, though, are concerned less with the effects of globalisation and the idea of the Gothic as an external imposition and more with the internal, overlapping anxieties informing various constituents of the region at hand. While the globalgothic conceptualises the global/local binary as an intricately entangled paradigm, the ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ forms and tendencies under discussion are themselves far more variegated and historically complex than even such a recalibration can accommodate. Side by side with the models of hybridity, fusion, interaction and encounter that have dominated the question of non-Western Gothics, they acquaint readers with the internal tensions and currents informing many of these texts, which resonate with neighbouring Gothic productions even if they speak a different language.

As noted earlier, the transregional paradigm I propose invites a practice of reading. It is no coincidence that the studies amenable to this practice, which benefit from deep expertise across several languages and cultures, are overwhelmingly collaborative collections of essays rather than monographs. This speaks to the advantage of such a paradigm – it illuminates diverse voices and perspectives that maintain depth even as they help establish breadth. The proliferating studies on regional