The Gothic: Lizabeth Paravisini
Speakers): Lizabeth Paravisini (Hispanic Studies, Vassar College)
We are very excited to announce the very first event of the newly created Gothic Research Unit, sponsored by the DLCL and kindly supported by the Department of English.
We will be hosting Lizabeth Paravisini, Professor of Hispanic Studies on the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair at Vassar University, who will be presenting on the Caribbean Gothic: “How to Build Your Own Zombie: Animating Corpses and Assembling Spare Body Parts in Caribbean Literature and Art”.
In recent Caribbean literature and art, the ecological turn has drawn on the figure of the zombie in its various incarnations—from enslaved bodies toiling on cane-fields, to vacant-eyed, light-skinned young women trapped in a sorcerer’s web, to cannibalistic infectious zombie mobs roaming dystopian landscapes—to address the alienation from despoiled lands and dehumanized bodies as the ultimate outcome of the region’s crucial role in the development of capitalist modernity. This ecological turn—rooted in ongoing debates about Gothic imaginaries—underscores the centrality of the Caribbean monstrous to the analysis of Gothic ecologies, drawing us in turn back to Shelley’s Frankenstein and the horrors of the transgression of the so-called natural.
In preparation for the talk and the subsequent discussion, you can find here a chapter on, from The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Literature. Edited by Gerrold Hodges. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 229-257.
Register in advance .
If you would like to follow our next events and be informed of the other activities of the group, please contact Cynthia Vialle-Giancotti (cinziag [at] stanford.edu (cinziag[at]stanford[dot]edu)) to be added to our gothic mailing list: thegothic [at] stanford.edu (thegothic[at]stanford[dot]edu).