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The publication of a revised and enlarged edition of Cristina Artenie's Gothic and Racism¹ (2023) is timely. Over the last decade or so, gothic has emerged as a key mode in which contemporary cultural production is interrogating racial violence. A small sample of work demonstrating this development might include, for example, Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (2009), Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) or Remi Weeke's His House (2020). Corresponding to the appearance of these and related fictions, new directions have emerged in Gothic Studies, with scholars foregrounding the resistant politics of minoritized gothic traditions and exploring justice-centred frameworks such as decolonial thinking.² Appearing in this contemporary context, Gothic and Racism also joins with critical trajectories established since the late-20th century. These consider how gothic images have long been leveraged in the production of popular racial imaginaries; how gothic provided a racialised language that both provoked and allayed imperial anxieties; and how, in the hands of postcolonial writers, gothic can function as a discourse for critiquing colonial regimes or for giving haunting voice to histories of trauma and cultural erasure.³

Taken together, all these various critical engagements provide a sense of gothic's long and intimate involvement with the materially efficacious fiction of race, and with the systems and practices of racism that, on a global scale, have organised socio-ecological realities in its violent image.⁴ It is surprising, then, that few full-length and wide-ranging studies of gothic and racism exist, and still more so given that gothic first appears in an ‘Enlightened’ and industrialising Britain culturally and materially powered by histories of enslavement and colonisation.⁵ A collection broadly titled Gothic and Racism would be well-placed to address how, from its inception, gothic registers, elides, colludes with or critiques a world produced by racialised systems of power, and, encouragingly in this respect, Artenie's volume is fuller in historical and regional scope than most existing analogous studies.⁶ The book covers the period from the 19th to the 21st centuries and includes chapters on Britain, Russia, Canada, the Caribbean, India and the United States. It also adopts a productively generous definition of gothic forms, moving between readings of highly canonised texts such as Dracula (which appears twice as a focus), to analyses that shed light on gothic aspects in fictions – Sholem Abramovitch's The Mare, Richard Wright's Native Son – less often categorised in this way.

A comprehensive reading of the volume might therefore lead the reader to formulate their own impression of the extent and complexity of gothic's relationship with racism. However, th

In March 2024, the then UK Communities Secretary, Michael Gove, unveiled a new official definition of ‘extremism’. It turned out to be something of a damp squib, but the attendant announcements and guidance notes suggested that he meant it to be important. The exercise was informed, then, by the assumption that defining a word may be a consequential political act in itself. Is that so? Is there a politics of lexicography?

The definition is politically slanted, but it presents itself as the straight answer to a straight question: what is extremism? It does not even admit to having an author; the definition of the word appears as an impersonal fact. This effect of objectivity has obvious ideological advantages. In Orwell's 1984, sinister philologists rewrite the dictionary so as to make the English language incapable of expressing liberal ideas. If you can determine what words mean, you can control thought.

Of course that is one of Orwell's boldly Swiftian simplifications. Real-life lexicographers do not wield such power, and a definition is not a once-for-all edict; it is common for a single word to be defined variously, depending on what the definition is for. So ‘salt’, say, will have one definition in a dictionary for foreign learners of English, and a different one in a glossary for students of chemistry. Definitions which are adapted to particular contexts in this way can hardly claim general authority. But among these contexts, there is at least one in which definitions really are designed to be arbitrarily authoritative—namely, the specification of terms that normally forms part of the text of a law. A legislator's definition is not the same thing as a lexicographer's, because the legislator actually is in the business of exercising power.

So far from explaining what is meant by ‘infrastructure’, this merely repeats the word itself, apparently in the belief that it is self-explanatory. Despite what they say, the authors of this section are not really interested in meaning. Rather, the function of their definition is to delineate a class of objects which one can be prosecuted for disrupting. The class has no general validity: it exists only for the purposes of this law, and according to a later clause it can be altered by statutory instrument—that is to say, ‘key national infrastructure’ denotes what the Secretary of State may at any time say it does. The expression is semantically empty in the same way as ‘category A prison’ or ‘grade 2 listed building’: the definition is not an exposition of what the words mean, it is the label on a box.

The opposite kind of definition is elegantly exemplified, as it happens, by another account of ‘extremism’, produced in 2016 as part of the judgment in a libel case.⁴ The Chief Imam at an Islamic centre, Shakeel Begg, had been described as an extremist on a BBC current affairs television programme and was seeking damages; the BBC's defence was that what had been

Decolonising has become central to contentious discourses connecting historical (in)equalities and (in)justice to the present day. Recent debates have revolved around proactive inclusion and forcible exclusion, and the concrete and abstract elements of decolonising, and it is these competing semantic elements, alongside recent rapid semantic change, that render decolonising a keyword. In this journal, decolonising the curriculum was described as ‘perhaps the most important slogan in British academic letters in recent years’.¹ Usage of decolonise has recently extended well beyond narrow, established specialist or technical debates, such as the decline of empires or decolonising the curriculum. Even as those debates have hit mainstream news, decolonising itself has spread to other domains and expanded semantically into equalities discourses unrelated to colonial histories.

Decolonise is formed from de- and colonise, which in turn derives from colony. Colony itself has a rich history, borrowed into Early Modern English from Middle French colonie. Colony has referred to a wide range of specific human settlements established by emigrants, whether under political and economic control by the emigrants' country of origin or not (C16). In extended use, it could refer to a sub-group moving away from a larger population to pursue a disparate lifestyle, as in artists' colony or nudist colony (from C17); or, in contrast, forcibly removed, as in leper colony or penal colony (from C19). In broader usage, it could refer to a sub-group living within a larger population, but distinguished from that population by, for example, status or occupation (from C16), or nationality, race or religion (from C19). Colony thus refers from earliest usage to in-group and out-group status.

Colonise has currency from C17, first referring simply to the settlement in a new territory by a group of people; then (from early C18) to settlement by a group alongside deliberate political, military, and economic appropriation, occupation and/or exploitation by that group's country of origin; and finally (from late C18) to such deliberate exploitation without any population settlement at all.

Decolonise was rare before late C20. Early examples from C19 have one of three senses: (1) to ‘undermine’ colonial occupation; (2) to free from the political and military occupation of a colonial power; (3) to free from the social and cultural influence of a colonial power. It seems that the first sense can represent only the stance of the coloniser, implying legitimacy to the colonial enterprise. The second and third senses can reflect the stance of the colonised and the work for liberation, and it is these two senses that reappear in mid-C20. Colonise develops a variation of this third sense in late C20, meaning to soc

It was Jane Austen who clinched it. When Martin Amis died last year, an essay he had written for The New Yorker in 1995 titled ‘Jane's World’ resurfaced on Twitter.¹ In this essay, Amis recounts how he and Salman Rushdie found themselves trapped in the cinema confronted with Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral, a film they both loathed; Amis wrote it off as ‘Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit’. I have always hated this film: how Andie MacDowell's career survived this bafflingly empty performance long enough for her to gain my favour with her charming turn in Magic Mike XXL I will never understand. To discover that Amis felt the same way (about Four Weddings—he never voiced publicly his views on the Magic Mike franchise) warmed me to him. I read on to find that we felt the same way about many things, the most crucial being Jane Austen. Here was Amis, unashamedly calling himself a ‘pious and vigilant Janeite’, his tirade against the film quickly morphing into a celebration of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.² Amis praises that, 200 years after Austen's death, her most celebrated novel ‘goes on suckering you’; it is obvious that Elizabeth and Darcy must end up together by the nature of the genre, Amis admits, but even so, Austen inspires a ‘panic of unsatisfied expectation’ in readers who know the plot back to front. Amis's London Fields (1989) suckers its readers too: It is a story that from the outset tells you where it will end and yet torments you with panicked imaginations of what might take place.³

Labelled as a ‘Who'll do it’ rather than a ‘whodunnit’, the novel follows American writer Samson Young (Sam), on a stay in London to cure his writer's block. Sam, through an unlikely friendship with professional cheat and darts extraordinaire Keith Talent and wretchedly good Guy Clinch, uncovers a plot by the irresistible Nicola Six to bring about her own murder. Nicola, an erotic cartoon of a femme fatale who employs sexual prowess to tempt fate, has garnered much attention in the critical discourse surrounding Amis, many citing her as prime evidence for their arguments that his writing about women is misogynistic. In a 2001 episode of BBC Radio 4's Bookclub,⁴ the discussion heads straight for Nicola. One reader raises Amis's claim that reading Gloria Steinem made him a feminist, asking the author if he would have written Nicola differently had he read Steinem first. ‘I did,’ corrects Amis, meaning that Nicola was informed by his engagement with feminism. Amis insists that Nicola ‘wonderfully satirises male illusions’. For Amis, Nicola holds all the power, within both the text and his own writing practice: ‘I felt very much that Nicola Six was writing this novel with me and I would sometimes, as the narrator does, appeal to her,’ just as Sam laments in the novel's final pages, ‘She outwrote me. Her story worked. And mine didn't.’

In February 1933, Virginia Woolf found herself ‘quivering’, ‘itching’ with anticipation at her next writing project, ‘the sequel’ to A Room of One's Own, for which she had ‘collected enough powder to blow up St Pauls’.¹ In three large notebooks compiled between 1931 and 1937, Woolf pasted newspaper clippings, letters, photographs, political pamphlets, handwritten and typewritten quotations, and other ephemera, testimonials of everyday life lived in early 20th-century Britain. The three now-crumbling scrapbooks that Woolf compiled in the 1930s speak eloquently to her methods. Covering her notebooks by hand with cloth and marbled paper, Woolf made detailed typed index pages for each volume and abbreviated handwritten indexes, which she pasted onto the top left-hand corner of each cover (see Figures 1 and 2). Inside these notebooks, clippings detailing university accounts appear side-by-side with letters asking for donations to women's colleges, while photographs of men in ceremonial and military garb jostle with quotations from ‘lectures by men’ on their ‘Hatred of w[omen]’, handwritten notes about women's access to abortion, men's opinions on women's smoking, nail polish and football, and newspaper cuttings quoting the speeches of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering.² Drawing on these ‘scrapbooks’ (as many scholars have come to call them) in Three Guineas (1938), Woolf would draw a line from the ‘tyrannies and servilities’ of the English private house to the toxic growth of fascism taking hold across both Europe and Britain in the 1930s, arguing that the germ of fascism could be found in British broadsheet newspapers as much as in the speeches of Hitler and Mussolini.³ For Woolf, women's position as ‘outsiders’ gave them a unique vantage point from which to criticise the reigning structures of capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power.⁴ For Woolf, keeping scrapbooks formed part of her own outsiders' experiment—an experiment not only in criticising capitalist, patriarchal and fascist power but also in imagining an alternative society freed from servility to (what she described as) the ‘manly satisfaction’ of war.⁵

In the years that Woolf was compiling her scrapbooks, the writer, educationist and soon-to-be psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, was preoccupied with her own project of keeping notebooks and diaries. In her notebooks from the 1930s, Milner recorded thoughts, desires, doodles, drawings and quotations, gathering up the raw material for the books that she would publish under the penname Joanna Field as A Life of One's Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). In these books, Milner developed a ‘method’ for tracking her own wants, desires and interests, attempting to disentangle that vexed question of what a woman wants, from the pleasures imposed upon us by the outside world.⁶ And yet, in the course of her experiments, Milner found herself strugg