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Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic
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Journal Article
Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic
2018
Overview
Much of the criticism on Marlon James' novels focuses on their representation of graphic violence and salaciously profane language. In this essay, I intervene in these discussions by shifting focus from the violence itself to the generic elements this violence engages or represents. More specifically, I discuss James' use of violence, doubling, and abjection in The Book of Night Women and John Crow's Devil to argue that both novels engage these gothic tropes to offer critiques of canon formation in Caribbean writing. More specifically, I contend that they deploy gothic tropes of violence and horror to convey metafictional concerns about the relationship between literature and black sovereignty, both sexually and nationally. I suggest, moreover, that in taking this tack James's writing finds company with other contemporary African Diasporic art – literature, music, tv shows, and film – that constitutes a new iteration of the black gothic aesthetic. This new black gothic art functions, through temporal collapses, to demonstrate how and why disruptive and traumatic aspects of the slave past continue to manifest, and in fact are redoubled, in the neoliberal present of late capitalism.
