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      Gothic Politics in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013)

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            Abstract

            The present article examines a narrative of darkness to illuminate the rhetoric of haunting and monstrosity. Gothicity evokes a sense of indeterminateness and it dramatizes disruptive incorporeal occurrences as interrogated in Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad, a war Frankenfiction. It stages horror to chronicle national disintegration through the rise of a sewn-together zombie to mark the appalling arrival of the Iraqi dissenter. The new twenty-first-century monster is a zombie to defy marginality and to associate monstrosity with deviance and abnormality. Within this rationale, the present study investigates the aesthetics of Postcolonial Gothic politics to examine the use of the supernatural, the grotesque body, the monstrous abject, and the haunted ruins to depict a dismembered nation through the deployment of eerie motifs and surreal techniques. My premise fleshes out the Frankenstein hubris to dismantle the US political culture in Iraq. The aim is to reframe the modern Gothic monster as an emblem of reverse colonialism to defy the imperialist ideologies and to articulate past trauma through the rhetoric of bodily horror, haunting and ghostly fear.

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            Author and article information

            Journal
            10.13169/arabstudquar
            Arab Studies Quarterly
            ASQ
            Pluto Journals
            2043-6920
            17 June 2022
            2022
            : 44
            : 2
            : 45-67
            Article
            10.13169/arabstudquar.44.2.0045
            df501b6f-81d2-4ca6-97ed-4e88405ba74f
            © CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF MUSLIM AND ARAB WORLDS 2022

            All content is freely available without charge to users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission of the publisher or the author. Articles published in the journal are distributed under a http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

            History
            Page count
            Pages: 23
            Categories
            Articles

            Social & Behavioral Sciences
            gothic politics,monstrosity,Frankenfiction,Frankenstein,postcolonial gothicism

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