The Gothic Mediterranean: : Haunting Migrations and Critical Melancholia

This article proposes to examine the contemporary Mediterranean as a melancholic cultural formation and a transnational fluid space where histories intertwine and territories overlap. Drawing on examples ranging from theory, literature, visual culture and cinema, the article will explore some poetic and aesthetic representations of contemporary migrations across the Mediterranean, where the body of the migrant is portrayed through Gothic tropes, such as watery graves, dead bodies, zombies, and melancholy ghosts, as figures of resistance and survival. From this analysis, a new theoretical configuration emerges: a ‘Gothic Mediterranean’ as an expression of ‘critical melancholia’, a haunting countercultural space of memory which re-articulates the past in such a way as to rethink the present.