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Session 9b: Monstrous Types and Races
Chair: Sonia Ouaras

Mapping a Monstrous Nation: Reading Post-Colonial Monsters
Justin Edwards
English Department, University of Wales, Bangor, Gwynedd, United Kingdom

In this paper, I examine the doubling process of monstrosity within the nation. On the one hand, the history of colonisation in Canada, Australia and New Zealand enables us to consider the nation as threatening, a powerful force that has mangled, mutilated and marginalised those who have stood in its path. On the other hand, though, the dominant narratives and discourses of these nations have sought to construct and represent certain minority groups as threatening Others, a powerful cultural construction which sanctions the country's definitions about who belongs and who does not belong to the social, cultural and national order. As I show, texts such as Maria Campbell's Halfbreed (Canada, 1973), David Malouf's Remembering Babylon (Australia, 1993) and Patricia Grace's Baby No-Eyes (New Zealand, 1998) are sensitive to this doubling process: these texts represent national discourses which have constructed the Native and the bicultural person as the Other, while they also expose and foreground the violent acts of the nation.

Monsters: A Philosophical Portrait
Lewis Gordon
Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought; Center for Afro-Jewish Studies, Temple University, USA

This paper offers a typography of monsters through a philosophical discussion of the various forms of naturalism and supernaturalism on which they are based. After articulating that typography of monsters and monstrosity, the paper raises questions of the importance of theorizing the every-day or mundane dimensions and implications of monstrosity in contemporary social life.

Monstrous Modernity: Frankenstein’s Creature, the Black, and Other Inassimilable Naturalistic Extremes
Jane Anna Gordon
Department of Political Science at Temple University

Lewis Gordon has outlined a typology of monsters comprised of three basic types—those metaphysical or supernatural, naturalistic, and nihilistic. I explore Victor Frankenstein’s creature as a clear embodiment of a naturalistic monster and offer an account and explanation of why his account of who he is in the world is so strikingly similar to W.E.B. Du Bois’s reflections about what it is to be a member of a “problem people” and Fanon’s portrayal of the development of black self-consciousness in an antiblack world. Although Frankenstein’s creature is the product of modern science as “the Negro” is the product of the project of whiteness, both appear as unassimilable extremes of nature forced to ask in the face of their repeated failures to become part of the social world, “what, in reality, am I”? I close with two kinds of reflections: first about how we might read the monster that Mary Shelley, who at 19, while pregnant, offered the world, (one that is far better known than she) as autobiographical and finally about whether we should regret the increasing displacement of naturalistic monsters by nihilistic ones.

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