Saturday, February 17, 2024

February 17, 2024


 Greetings Everyone!

My new book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft: White Fragility in the Weird Tales, has just been released by Bloomsbury, the foremost academic publisher in the United States and in the United Kingdom!

I hope that all of you will pick up a copy; you can order it online from the publishers and, of course, from Amazon and other online booksellers around the world.  The book is also available in bookstores here in the states as well as overseas.

https://www.amazon.com/Horror-Racism-H-Lovecraft-Fragility/dp/B0C5CPHCR2

In two of his earliest poems, “De Triumpho Naturae” (1905) and “On the Creation of Niggers”(1912), Lovecraft upends Darwin’s theory of evolution by proposing a theory of polygenesis, arguing that humans, including the superior types of humans—white Anglo Saxons—evolved from some type of highly developed quadruped, complete with pointed ears and a tail, like its distant cousin the monkey.  However, Blacks evolved from different, lower quadrupeds.  Thus, since white Anglo-Saxons and Blacks are not descended from the same quadrupeds, they are separate species, and therefore, Blacks should not be considered as human beings.

You can read all about Lovecraft’s theory of polygenesis  in Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft, and how Lovecraft uses this theory to insist that Blacks, like monkeys and apes, must be kept separate from humans—they represent, in fact, a threat to the purity of the white race. 

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