Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature

Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez is  the Scholarly Programs Research Manager at the National Humanities Center. He has written extensively on the Latin American Gothic, Horror cinema, and cultural migration.

Though long obscured by the critical preoccupation with magical realism, the Gothic strain in Latin American literature has become a topic of vibrant scholarly interest in recent years. Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s Colombian Gothic in Cinema and Literature is a welcome contribution to the field, charting, as it does, the emergence of a distinctive strain of Colombian Gothic in the nineteenth century and tracking its manifestations across literature and film of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Eljaiek-Rodríguez’s pioneering study is at pains to show, the Colombian Gothic, while sharing certain affinities with the so-called Tropical Gothic, is as singular and distinctive as the culture and history that gave it form. For this reason alone, the book is crucial to understanding the global reach and significance of the Gothic in Central and South America, well beyond the more familiar Anglo-American frame. — Dale Townshend, Professor of Gothic Literature, Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, Manchester Metropolitan University.

• Introduction: The Gothic in Colombia and in Latin America; 1. Gothic Pioneers: José Asunción Silva and José Joaquín Vargas Valdés; 2. Gothic in the “Hot Lands”; 3. Colombian Negrótico and the Gothic in the Mountains; 4. Beyond the Regions; Bibliography; Index.