The World Health Organization has long argued that air pollution is the worldвЂ™s most severe environmental health concern. The racialized experience of deathly atmospheric exposure is not a new issue. In what follows, I argue that his short story вЂњIn the City of Red DustвЂќ (1988) allows for the interrogation of how West African writers draw on Gothic aesthetics to give shape to the racist history of toxic exposure, and, in the process, enable us to model a new analytic framework for understanding global environmental crisis as a political and ecological project that distributes life and death unevenly. I chart the evolving politics and aesthetics of racial toxicity by focusing on the mobilization of atmospheric terror in the writings of Nigerian author Ben Okri. вЂњHave you seen the soil in the country?вЂќ asks a local mining worker from Arlit, an industrial town in north-central Niger, вЂњit is dry and lifeless вЂ¦ There is something evil in the dustвЂќ (Mohanty).ДЇocusing on the uneven experience of global environmental crisis, this article is interested in mapping new directions in the Gothic through analysis of West African writing in which the site of Gothic terror becomes reconfigured and located in atmospheric racism. In Niger, also known as the вЂњUranium Capital of Africa,вЂќ locals employ a similarly Gothic lexicon to describe the contamination of land, water, and air by radioactive dust.

In Johannesburg, the center of South AfricaвЂ™s gold mining sector, the air quality is so poor it has been dubbed вЂњairpocalypseвЂќ (Kings). Like the black men who recently died at the hands of American police brutality, African civilians regularly describe air quality in urban Africa through fears of asphyxiation. In Africa, the proliferation of Covid-19 has similarly exposed how global crisis is shouldered disproportionately by black bodies, which have long borne the effects of airborne toxicity in particularly violent ways.

2 In the United States, the phrase вЂњI CanвЂ™t Breathe,вЂќ which memorializes the dying words of Eric Gardner, Byron Williams, and George Floyd, has become both an anthem of dissent against the American stateвЂ™s deadly toll on black lives, and a slogan that captures the racial inequalities structuring the current racialized experience of the pandemic (Baker et al.). Evidence shows that Covid-19 has more severely affected people of color across the world. The pandemic has unfolded across various fault lines, particularly in terms of racial inequality. How do we read Gothic under these new conditions, when the meaning of terror becomes reconfigured no longer located in the enclosure of space but in the very air we breathe? Such events force us to reconsider how the Gothic form reconfigured might give expression to a world suffocated and suffocating radically reframed, in other words, by the terrors of an atmosphere. To curb spread, countries across the world have implemented various stay-at-home-measures, framing confinement and isolation as necessary precautions against contamination. The virus spreads through droplets that can spread through the air via coughing and sneezing, attacking the respiratory system, causing inflammation and making it difficult to breathe. As I write, the world is in the throes of a protracted lockdown period resulting from a new airborne virus named Covid-19. BaldickвЂ™s description of the sickening disintegration experienced through the enclosure of space reads starkly in light of recent global events. As Chris Baldick argues, Gothic tales attain their вЂњGothic effectвЂќ through a combination of вЂњa fearful sense of inheritance in a time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in spaceвЂ¦to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegrationвЂќ (xix). Traditional Gothic tales, as many critics have shown, glean much of their terror from their claustrophobic spatial settings, in locations such as closed-off cellars, chambers, and attics, which вЂњbespeak abandonment and unlifeвЂќ (73). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth Introduction вЂ¦ let us return to that atmosphere of violence, that violence which is just below the skin.

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