Please join the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics seminar on Gothic poetics and new materialism, taught by Joe Milutis, for “Lovecraft/Uncraft: Race, Cosmic Horror, and the New Weird”, a event featuring panelists David Bering-Porter and Rebekah Sheldon. 

Register for this event to receive the Zoom link details. This talk is free and open to the public.

Lovecraft marks a particular shift in the history of Gothic writing, which formalizes the reader's encounter with absolute otherness. His shifting of emphasis from uncanny supernaturalism to "non-supernatural cosmic art" also marks the emergence of racial anxieties nakedly manifest in his work. Terminally ill-at-ease with the new immigrant realities of the 20th-century city, Lovecraft crafted a world in which an ancient unknowable race of monsters pushes at the boundaries of the known world, and upsets the very fabric of reality.

Panelists David Bering-Porter (The New School) and Rebekah Sheldon (Indiana University Bloomington) will discuss this fraught legacy in which these stories of absolute otherness emblematize the anxiety over racial and ethnic difference, yet still continue to be widely appropriated and extended in the world of the "Lovecraft mythos." As can be seen in works like Victor LaValles' The Ballad of Black Tom and the recent HBO series Lovecraft Country, this proliferation or contagion of Lovecraftianism is not goaded by racist sentiment, but rather by the desire to intimately wrestle with the psychic legacy of racism, within the prolific and heterotopic locus of Lovecraft's imaginative universe.

April 15, 2021: Rebekah Sheldon and David Bering-Porter

Rebekah Sheldon is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University and the author of The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe (U Minn), which received an Honorable Mention for the 2016 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize. She is an editor of Extrapolation and her essays have appeared in GLQ, Rhizomes, Science Fiction Studies, Symploke, Angelaki, and E-Flux as well as in several edited collections. She is currently composing a new book project on speculative philosophy and the occult.

David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at the Eugene Lang College of the Liberal Arts at The New School, USA. Areas of research include film and media studies, new media theory, and the intersections of media, science, and technology. His current book project is a study of undead labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie. His articles have appeared in the journals Flow, MIRAJ, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

***

from The Convergence Zone is a series of author readings, and artist talks and performances, sponsored by the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. It brings together sometimes peaceable, sometimes combustible, fronts of discovery and experiment. This series brings to the (virtual) Seattle metropolitan area exciting writers and artists who "cross" and "trans" genres and media. It discusses and performs written arts in an expanded field.