The New Urban Gothic

This discussion juxtaposes Miéville’s novella The Last Days of New Paris (2016) with the Victorian poem ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ by James Thomson (1880). Exploring the psycho-geographic horror and the claustrophobia of cities, it argues that the Mieville’s text moves away from the nineteenth-century depiction of the ‘hidden horrors’ of the city to a space where ‘horrors are made deliberately visible’. Citing the contemporary city as a space of terror(ism), it suggests that the new Urban Gothic speaks to a very immanent sense of threat, battle and anxiety that are rooted in the sense of temporal and spatial dislocation. Bell explores how Miéville’s work marks a significant move away from anxieties that pervade the Urban Gothic tradition, and toward contemporary geographies of stress and fear over navigating political and environmental concerns in the age of the Anthropocene.

Tembo writes of a contemporary reimagining of the urban Gothic in Anime, through the lens of aesthetic. He suggests that Angel’s Egg brings a surrealist aesthetic to anime that is unique in its dystopia. Locating his discussion within the context of a World’s End tale, Tembo looks at how each part of the text portrays a different image of post-apocalyptic Gothic space and what he terms as ‘psycho-emotional Otherness’. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s discussion of abjection, this chapter also seeks to examine how Oshii directs his anime in combination with the Gothic and the surreal to represent the Gothic urban space as one of existential stasis, crisis, and reflection.

Slavin looks at the way in which Arundhati Roy demarcates the cities into areas—the colonial and the postcolonial. Arguing that she deliberately writes her protagonists as ‘out of place’, Slavin follows Roy’s protagonists as they reinvent Gothic tropes for the twenty-first century. Questioning ideas of home, Slavin argues that the novel is an example of the urban Gothic trope that enables contemporary Indian urban issues such as inequality and violence to be explored. With an unusually optimistic tone, Slavin argues that The Ministry of Utmost Happiness uses the new urban Gothic sites of Delhi and Srinagar to translate colonial and Gothic conventions for productive, justice-oriented purposes in contemporary South Asian cities.

By examining the film Suzhou River (2000), Dr. Lopez traces the narrative and aesthetic legacy of a Chinese film that was banned from screenings in China. Often compared to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the film crosses genre boundaries to unsettle the viewer’s sense of certainty. The narrative is complicated by doubles, drownings, mythical creatures and point-of-view shifts; it uses these tropes to both question the reliability of storytelling in general and specifically in China. Through the disjunction between visual evidence and fictional constructs, the film weaves the viewer into its spectral world of ghosts. It uses the eerie, polluted landscape of millennial Shanghai, and the decaying surrounds of Suzhou River to evoke a social and aesthetic malaise stemming from rapid economic and environmental changes in a newly globalized China. The director, Lou Ye, builds his hybrid narrative from flotsam and jetsam of cinematic and literary influences in a wider aesthetic negotiation of the Gothic. Ultimately, he creates a new type of Urban Gothic tale, one that addresses the particular difficulty of telling stories in China, a world haunted by the ghostly proliferation of stories, both untold true stories and discarded fictions.