Marlon James and the Metafiction of the New Black Gothic

Abstract A reprint from a 2018 issue of the Journal of West Indian Literature devoted to Marlon James, this essay engages two of the West Indian writer's novels, John Crow's Devil and The Book of Night Women, under the rubric of the Gothic. By shifting focus from the violence of James's novels to the generic elements this violence engages, the essay argues that James's engagement with the Gothic better accounts for these two novels’ attention to issues of excessive violence, doubling, and feminine abjection and the way they perform a metafictional critique of the notion that nationalism can produce equitable sovereign subjectivity. While the Gothic offers James's interest in coercion, abjection, and the absence of choice a precise frame for rendering a world structured by neoliberalism, James also reworks the Gothic by offering a queerly affirmative version of its at times misogynistic interest in gender distinctions. Indeed, by ending all his novels with women as the figurative last person standing, James subverts the notion of the feminine abject as the Gothic trope associated with primordial chaos, presenting it instead as a possible way forward at a moment when the historical present is not seemingly graspable by existing paradigms.