Bodies of Horror in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and Clovis Brown’s Cartoons

This examination of Marlon James’s novel The Book of Night Women and a selection of Clovis Brown’s newspaper cartoons posits these Jamaican-authored works as texts that instantiate a uniquely Caribbean aesthetics of horror in their response to historical and contemporary events. Both artists excavate genealogies of horror at the root of Caribbean identity discourse, tracing this through sexual histories linked, respectively, to femaleness and male homosexuality represented as a male-feminine morphology. Ultimately, the texts excavate different spaces of a “demonic ground” to reveal the “unspeakable contents” of creolization, nationalism, citizenship, and regionalism, all of which are brought into deep question by acts of psychic and political border control.