Call for Papers
Edited Collection – ed. Suvendu Ghatak (ghataksuvendu@ufl.edu)
Abstract submission date: 15 September 2027
Article submission date: 1 February 2027 (7,000 words)
The humorous has often been understood to be a relief from the horrific, or the proximity of the humorous and the horrific has been analyzed as specific mixed genres, such as the horror-comedy. This edited volume posits that the boundary between a gasp and a guffaw is not a universal aesthetic constant. Rather, the historical and cultural conditions of systemic racial subordination, marginalization, policing, and violence fundamentally focalizes what is experienced as horror or humor. This edited volume aims to examine the not-human, the abhuman, and the posthuman figures in Modern literary and media studies that slip across the barriers of the comic and the horrific.
The philosopher Noël Carroll has found in both horror and humor shared markers of incongruity, impurity, and transgression. Similarly, literary scholars Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik have pointed to the incorporation of comic elements in foundational texts, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Yet, the interaction between horror and humor is far from merely aesthetic or seamlessly universal. Race often shapes what becomes laughable or monstrous, as Jerry Rafiki Jenkins traces what he aptly calls the “ideo-pleasure” of “anti-Black sadism” under figurations of monstrosity in Black American horror literature.
The materiality and historicity of race under the inscription of the comic-horrific has been traced by a range of scholars in Black Studies, South Asian Studies, and Latin American Studies. The media scholar Robin R. Means Coleman has noted in Horror Noire the historical oscillation between comic caricature and monstrous threat in the representation of Black figures in American genre cinema, while the historian Tithi Bhattacharya has analyzed how depredations of colonial capitalism in nineteenth-century Bengal trivialized both the life and the death of the colonized, and thereby exiled the vernacular cosmologies of fear out of the domain of “serious horror” into dark humor and parody. In the seepage of the comic and the horrific, marginalized subjects have also navigated suppressed pathways of history, as scholars on the Gótico Tropical of Latin America, such as Sandra Casanova-Vizcaíno and Inés Ordiz argue.
While these scholars have explored the comic-horrific in specific geographic and historical fields, this volume seeks to bring scholars from different fields for an interdisciplinary conversation on race, horror, and humor. This volume explores how in the intersection of the comic and the horrific, the body and its spatial boundaries lose their fixed form, mutating into uncanny, grotesque, or campy figurations that interrogate and dismantle normative identities. Thereby, the volume seeks to initiate a rigorous theoretical exploration on the role of various marginalized identities, racial, class, gender, and so on, in focalizing and shaping the interstices of the comic and the horrific.