This chapter considers Elizabeth Bishop’s published and republished uncollected work focusing on her figuration of racial difference in both South and North America. It will engage with existing scholarship on Bishop’s Brazil poetry, as well as her problematic 1965 New York Times Magazine article on Rio’s 400th Carnival. Bishop’s poems engaging with racialised figures (“Manuelzinho,” “Faustina, or Rock Roses,” “Cootchie,” “Songs for a Colored Singer”) will be read against her engagement with and definition of a particular kind of whiteness, often in contrast to the primitive, exotic or native, as observed “In the Waiting Room.” This chapter ultimately maps Bishop’s cartography of racial otherness as a way of exploring the interiority (and integrity) of the self.

This chapter explores how slave insurrections in the Caribbean and West Indies throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries impacted upon British and American Gothic writing. In particular, it argues that the Gothic mode became, and remains still, haunted by an ever-present racialised discourse, one which reveals the horror of modernity’s constructions and their inheritances. From the nineteenth century onwards, Gothic texts not only ask what it means to be a (wo)man among the human race, but anxiously investigate the lie of racial difference. Examining texts by Charlotte Dacre, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville and Florence Marryat, the chapter explores how the Gothic depicts acts of black rebellion in unequivocal tones of horror, and the extent to which their black (enslaved) characters assume the place of the utterly monstrous while also betraying anxiety over the blurry line separating blacks from whites. Such fictions, the argument holds, debate the justice of violent black revolution and express the concern that, while slavery itself may be responsible for the violence of the enslaved, slavery may in fact debase white subjects too.