Beyond Frankenstein: the Politics of the Gothic in Iraqi Fiction

Abstract This article examines works of post-2003 Iraqi fiction that draw on the aesthetic and thematic conventions of the postcolonial gothic genre by centering the grotesque figure of the animated corpse. Through these figures, the texts bring the disposable victims of necropolitical violence back into view, resisting their erasure while also resurrecting the buried histories that contributed to the outbreak of ongoing conflict. As these texts foreground the victims of violence both past and present, they issue powerful critiques of neocolonial and sectarian violence, particularly through their inversion of the gothic trope of the terrifying Other. In these texts, initially frightening animated corpses are revealed to be the sympathetic victims of violence, rendering necropolitical violence, rather than the corpses, the true source of horror in the texts and issuing a call to the reader to sympathize and even empathize with the frightening Other.