Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s <i>Frankenstein in Baghdad</i> (2013)
<p class="first" id="d618687e74">The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interr...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pluto Journals
2022-05-01
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| Series: | Arab Studies Quarterly |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/arabstudquar.44.2.0045 |
| Summary: | <p class="first" id="d618687e74">The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of
haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes
disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interrogated in Ahmed Saadawi’s
<i>Frankenstein in Baghdad</i>, a war Frankenfiction. It stages horror to chronicle national disintegration through
the rise of a sewn-together zombie to mark the appalling arrival of the Iraqi dissenter.
The new twenty-first-century monster is a zombie to defy marginality and to associate
monstrosity with deviance and abnormality. Within this rationale, the present study
investigates the aesthetics of Postcolonial Gothic politics to examine the use of
the supernatural, the grotesque body, the monstrous abject, and the haunted ruins
to depict a dismembered nation through the deployment of eerie motifs and surreal
techniques. My premise fleshes out the Frankenstein hubris to dismantle the US political
culture in Iraq. The aim is to reframe the modern Gothic monster as an emblem of reverse
colonialism to defy the imperialist ideologies and to articulate past trauma through
the rhetoric of bodily horror, haunting and ghostly fear.
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| ISSN: | 0271-3519 2043-6920 |