Global Weirding Guest Lecture #3 - Rebekah Sheldon (University of Indiana)

"Race, Nature, Magic, Lovecraft"

Rebekah Sheldon (University of Indiana, Bloomington)

December 14, 16:40 (CET), Zoom

Abstract

In an article for The New York Times, writer Gabrielle Bellot describes recent Black horror cinema as giving expression to the “frightening reality of being Black in a world that still associates darkness of skin with the old meanings of darkness” and where “the ghosts of the past still walk the American landscape.” Her reading of the supernatural (darkness, ghosts) as figuring the past is in line with the journalistic consensus that Black horror is a genre of the uncanny, one that reflects the failure of post-racial optomism in the ongoing present of Black and brown dispossession and white supramacist violence. Without dismissing the importance of what Black activist Reverend William Barber has called the Third Great Reconstruction for the work of the genre, this talk will argue that such allegorical readings of the supernatural elide the way that Black horror also and crucially retools and retheorizes the metaphysics of Weird fiction toward an undoing of the spiritual/material binary. The purpose of this talk is to offer a non-allegorical reading of the supernatural in fictions by women writers and writers of color as well as in the thinking of Black Studies scholars and scholars of the new materialisms who cite the Weird in general and the stories of H.P. Lovecraft in specific. In asserting that these works are engaged in a shared metaphysical (as well as an historical) project, I am also arguing that these writers are doing more than correcting Lovecraft, they are also recognizing and foregrounding something in the tradition of the Weird inseparable from its nativism and racism. The project, in other words, tells us something necessary about the way that nativism and racism serve as defensive supplements to the seductive instabilities of the spiritual/material binary. Reading against the grain of new materialist rejections of vitalism, this talk is especially attentive to the shared interest in natural magic in theoretical and fictional engagements with climate weirding. 

 
Rebekah Sheldon is an Associate Professor of English at Indiana University. Her first book, The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (2016), from University of Minnesota Press, received an Honorable Mention from the Science Fiction and Technocultural Studies book award. She is currently working on a brief theoretical manuscript, New Critical Occultism, and a longer monograph, Magic in Theory and Practice, both of which consider the role of magic in contemporary theoretical and cultural productions from Harry Potter to the Alt-Right Shaman. Her work on Lovecraft forms a part of the second of these projects. She has published pieces on the occult and criticism in Symplokē and Angelaki as well as the volume Trans-States: The Art of Crossing Over. She is also an associate editor of Extrapolation.