The sphinx is a good test case illustrating the complexities of studying Greek hybrids. The pronounced sexuality of modern sphinxes (notably those of Moreau and Ingres) sets them apart from Greek examples, which themselves are very different from the sphinxes of Egypt and the Ancient Near East. Common to all is the blurring of human/animal boundaries, a phenomenon going back to the Palaeolithic. Modern comparisons from New Guinea and Africa confirm that there is an animal dimension at the heart of being human. Hybrids, born of this mixing, are polymorphous, polysemic and polyvalent. Around the hybrid there lurks a host of questions: what bits have been mixed, how exactly are the parts combined, and is the mixture taxonomically fitting or anomalous? Each of these questions shapes our response to a hybrid, affirming the power of hybridity to challenge (or affirm) categories and taxonomies. And since taxonomies are the proof of our comprehending the world by classifying phenomena, hybridity represents a culture’s uneasiness with the limits of its epistemology. If such things exist, even if only in our stories and imagination, how certain is certainty?

The reframing of Black stereotypes in view of new terms of respectability in the 1980s demonstrated the ease with which assumptions of Black abjection could be reproduced and mocked to challenge their preeminence. This chapter examines the “Black Stereotype Sketch” on Saturday Night Live, George C. Wolfe’s play The Colored Museum, and Sherley Anne Williams’s novel Dessa Rose to demonstrate how 1980s satirists scrutinized stereotypes surrounding Blacknessin an effort to subvert them. Through the embodiment of the limiting stereotypes of Black identity, these satirists reveal the ridiculousness of mainstream presumptions of Black abjection and open up a space for an autonomous declaration of nuanced Black identity. By raising inherent questions of authorship, these satirists push back against the naturalization of Black abjection that is intrinsic to Americanness. The subversive nature of satire in the 1980s comes through the acknowledgment of the calculated nature of Black stereotypes. Satire not only reveals the unsustainability of race and racialization as theory, but also wages a greater critique against a broader social realm that remained so devoted to racialization in practice.

It is humbling to be human. Humilitatem and humanitas have always been connected. So, Shakespeare’s characters know when they are "not gentle, not humble" [Love’s, 5,2,617]. But living in an age of service, their creator was also conscious of the fine line between humility and humiliation. Persistently, his plays therefore stage the "Cinderella" scenario of a "proud humility" [All’s Well, 1,1,172], as if he had internalized the self-abjection by which power abases itself in "the gown of humility" [Coriolanus, 2,3,36]. Almost all of Shakespeare’s references to humility describe it as an act. Hence, "I have sounded the very base-string of humility" [1Henry IV, 2,5,5], reports his most winning king. In staging his own "abject position," as a professional "waiter" on the mighty, "our humble author" [2Henry IV, Epi, 23] thereby seems to anticipate modern skepticism towards the false modesty of the "humbled visaged" [Love’s, 2,,34], the "meekness and humility" that is "cramm’d" with "arrogancy, spleen and pride" [Henry VIII, 2,4107-108]. This chapter on humility argues that Shakespeare’s dramatization of the supposed virtue has never been more relevant than in our own populist times, when the clown prince dives into our hearts, "with humble and familiar" smiles [Richard II, 1,4,25-27].

Is all horror “body horror”? Can we think of the horror genre without thinking about the body’s messy and intimate materiality? This chapter looks at some of the queasier manifestations of horror culture, a mode that foregrounds questions of the body’s (and the reader’s or viewer’s) limits. Despite body horror’s association with recent cinema, this chapter argues for a longer and more diverse lineage for the term, an attention to embodied experience and its grotesque transformations that can be found in US fiction from Charles Brockden Brown’s spontaneous combustions in Wieland (1798) through to the zombie apocalypse novels of the twenty-first century. The emphasis is placed on five main types of body horror and their differences: hybrid corporeality, parasitism, abjection and disgust, the grotesque, and, finally, body horror built around gore and the explicit rendering of violence.

This chapter uses Freud’s understanding of the uncanny to interrogate the ambivalent relationship between managerial governance and juridico-political government. It suggests that managerial infra-law can appear uncanny from an international legal perspective: it looks like law, it sounds like law, but its documents, statements, speeches, and dialogues are empty words and dead letters. Infra-law is uncanny because it is inarticulate. The chapter refrains from using this insight to nostalgically affirm juridico-political government. On the contrary, international lawyers’ attempts to abject management (in Julia Kristeva’s sense) are symptomatic of deeply rooted problems within juridico-political systems. The chapter argues that juridical authority stifles law’s responsiveness and ability to articulate grievances against the status quo. The chapter uses this insight to argue for a version of legal advocacy capable of articulating complaints against the injustices of security measures. The force of law, on this model, derives not from its own authority but from the anger generated by injustice. Law can shift its horizon of responsiveness, the discussion concludes, by learning to listen to those whose security is sacrificed to collective security, and to articulate their complaints.

Chapter 2 examines the altered body of the female mastectomy survivor. Such women may be viewed as correlates to castrati in that they too were often exoticised: the figure of the one-breasted Amazon was an erotic and ethnographic spectacle. In this guise the mastectomied woman was also, like the castrato, sexually dangerous and functionally unique, with her bodily alteration believed to confer martial advantages. Unlike castrati, however, the altered status of the Amazon body was consistently obfuscated, and was never linked to instances of medical mastectomy. This occurred in spite of the fact that mastectomy was well known as a cure for breast cancer in the early modern period; indeed, the cancerous body and the Amazonian body had troubling parallels, both being perceived as rejecting or perverting maternal function. The absolute exclusion of one-breasted bodies from the stage and from domestic narratives reveals how far the status of the altered body was determined by patriarchal social structures.

Following the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea, per Evelyn O’Callaghan, Jean Rhys held a singular and pre-eminent position as the most widely known and systemically surveyed anglophone woman writer, but despite her literary project of decolonization, various critics describe the position of Rhys and her text as initially and continuously contested. Indeed, the ‘absence’ of women writers during the male-dominated nationalist period as well as their later emergence in the USA accounts for African American genealogies of Caribbean women’s writing advanced by scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies and Belinda Edmondson. Attention to Rhys’ insider/outsider ambiguity in that nationalist literary era evinces her influence on subsequent Caribbean writing, however, and an examination of works by Caribbean writers, spanning both of what Donette Francis refers to as the ‘second’ and ‘third waves’, suggests that writers consistently return to Rhys’ iconic novel not only as an ur-narrative of place, space, and identity for the anglophone Caribbean female subject but also as a source of what Elaine Savory dubs Rhys’ ‘productive contradictions’ as a literary foremother. This essay thus examines Rhys’ work and the complexities of its reception diachronically in conversation with some of these writers, assessing its manifold genealogical impacts both in its time and the present. Writers discussed include Jean Rhys, Marlon James, Derek Walcott, Lorna Goodison, Robert Antoni, Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez, and Kamau Brathwaite.

Legends about the vampire and the development of Gothic fiction took separate tracks throughout the eighteenth century in England and the rest of Europe. But they united decisively in S. T. Coleridge’s ‘Christabel’ (composed 1799–1800; published 1816), which then inspired the more symbolic uses of the vampire-figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819). These works showed that the vampire could be a symbolic site for ‘abjecting’ (in Julia Kristeva’s sense of ‘throwing-off’) the most feared inconsistencies and conflicts at the heart of individuals and their whole culture. From there, this mating of fictive schemes, empowered by the Janus-faced nature of Gothic symbol-making, proliferated across the nineteenth century in plays, penny dreadfuls and fully-fledged novels. As these versions of the Gothic vampire progressed, so the range of deep conflicts that this figure could abject, individual and social, grew exponentially, as we can still see in texts ranging from Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Charles Nodier’s French plays in the 1810s and 1820s to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire in the 1890s.

This chapter looks at Lady Gregory’s Grania (published 1912) and Marina Carr’s The Mai (1994), in which the central women live in exile, yet attempt to negotiate expression of their embodied subjectivity. The capacity to generate new forms is pursued through attention to the process of corporeal change: how the metamorphic body might refute and escape its unhomeliness. These protean bodies can draw attention to, and undermine, the relationship between form and the limitations it imposes, and furthermore evoke a female morphology which demands expression through an alternative cultural imaginary. While the chapter draws on Luce Irigaray’s advocation of a creative female corporeality which evokes a female imaginary, it also looks to Judith Butler’s work on those bodies which fail to signify or matter, and are delegitimated and abjected at the boundaries of the dominant social order. The chapter proposes that Grania’s and The Mai’s metamorphoses question interpretations of both plays’ endings as an act of despair and submission to abjection, instead offering performative confrontations with cultural representations of viable bodies.