Hemispheric Horror, Neofeudal Empire, and the International Women's Strike

Abstract:This essay proposes that recent texts of hemispheric horror, like those sentimental fictions on which Amy Kaplan turned her fierce analytic gaze, offer the field of American studies objects to think with as it grapples with the difficulties of conceptualizing US settler colonial capitalist empire in the present, particularly as neoliberal capitalist empire takes on neofeudal aspects. As the field searches for analytic frames that might allow scholars to best apprehend the complex entanglements of ongoing forms of colonial and settler colonial practices and relations with shifting structures of state and racial capitalist power, this essay looks to recent horror fiction and film—Bacurau (2020), Mexican Gothic (2020), and La Llorona (2019)—to examine how contemporary writers and filmmakers have been animating gothic genre conventions in order to make sense of ongoing yet evolving settler colonial capitalism and imperial formations in the Americas, as well as to imagine popular resistance. The resistance envisioned by these texts participates in theorizations of the international women's strike, as feminized bodies collectively haunt, flood, burn, and otherwise destroy a new class of extractive barons, genocidal generals, and US adventurers.