In the introduction to this collection, I outlined a series of difficulties that arise from the critical approach to gothic fiction that equates the ‘global’ with ‘globalisation’. In particular, I highlighted how the version of the world on which globalgothic has so far been predicated – one that sees old geopolitical hierarchies dissolved into dematerialised ‘flows’ (Byron 2013, 3) – appears increasingly implausible at our present moment, when uneven distributions of climate- and pandemic-related vulnerability are vividly exposing the racialised, gendered and geographical inequalities that have endured despite late-twentieth-century proclamations of a new world order. In fact, if globalgothic is understood as gothic that engages a novel transnational landscape of frictionless mobility and cultural exchange, then it may be the case, I suggested, that the term applies largely to fiction from certain deindustrialised (Northern) regions – places where the shape of society did indeed transform with the relocation of manufacturing to postcolonial nations across the Global South.

As it falls short, in this way, of the South's geohistorical experience, the globalisation theory of globalgothic may also obstruct critical routes into gothic's engagement with currently unfolding climate and cognate crises – a focus of gothic fiction to the existence of which many contributions in this volume attest. This impasse is visible in the register of culture, tradition and identity to which much globalgothic criticism has limited itself so far, and arises as a result of the presentism that underpins the identification of the late twentieth century as a new world order. Such a proposition only makes sense, as I argued with recourse to Andreas Malm (2018), through the erasure of a historical continuity, which consists in the persistence of those forms of material capitalist production supposedly superseded by the emergence of an ostensibly freefloating or spectralised late-twentieth-century market. The effacement of this history is simultaneously the effacement of global heating and the conditions that produce it, since these are inseparable precisely from the processes of extraction through which capital has always operated, into the present.

For a theory of gothic production that accounts, on the one hand, for contemporary gothic's real investment in questions and anxieties surrounding climate breakdown, and which is, on the other, truly global in scope, it is thus necessary to move beyond turn-of-the-millennium accounts of globalisation. In this coda, I reflect on two recent conceptions of ‘the planetary’ that make room for such a critical shift.