“Ecological Gothic: Spirit and Power in a Public Garden,” Material Religion, January 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2024.2436319
The Elizabethan Gardens, a ten-acre site on the North Carolina coast, was designed in the mid-twentieth century as a living memorial to sixteenth-century English colonists. It is a place where many layers of mourning converge; for deceased relatives and colonists, absent indigenous and Black people, and climate-related land loss. The article begins by suggesting that the Gardens, a secular site with strong spiritual implications, can helpfully unite studies of gardening, critical secularism studies, and multispecies studies. I extend my analysis of the Gardens as a secular formation by introducing the “ecological gothic,” a rubric for analyzing complex experiences in sites that combine memory and visible ecological change. It emerges where encounters between humans and non-humans leave room for spirits to dwell. Loosely based on the literary genre, it usually includes the romanticization of nature, an aesthetic of haunting, and the presence of ruins. In temporal terms, it is a relation to the past oriented toward the future. With respect to the Gardens, I explore the ecological gothic in terms of shaping the land, mourning and racism, human-plant relations, and the failure of past infrastructure. More broadly, the ecological gothic may offer scholars of religion a potentially useful framework for theorizing the affective side of climate change. It contributes to clarifying how climate change is as much a moral problem as an economic, legal, or technical one.
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The Elizabethan Gardens, a ten-acre site on the North Carolina coast, was designed in the mid-twentieth century as a living memorial to sixteenth-century English colonists. It is a place where many layers of mourning converge; for deceased relatives and colonists, absent indigenous and Black people, and climate-related land loss. The article begins by suggesting that the Gardens, a secular site with strong spiritual implications, can helpfully unite studies of gardening, critical secularism studies, and multispecies studies. I extend my analysis of the Gardens as a secular formation by introducing the “ecological gothic,” a rubric for analyzing complex experiences in sites that combine memory and visible ecological change. It emerges where encounters between humans and non-humans leave room for spirits to dwell. Loosely based on the literary genre, it usually includes the romanticization of nature, an aesthetic of haunting, and the presence of ruins. In temporal terms, it is a relation to the past oriented toward the future. With respect to the Gardens, I explore the ecological gothic in terms of shaping the land, mourning and racism, human-plant relations, and the failure of past infrastructure. More broadly, the ecological gothic may offer scholars of religion a potentially useful framework for theorizing the affective side of climate change. It contributes to clarifying how climate change is as much a moral problem as an economic, legal, or technical one.
back