Giselle Anatol, in her articulation of the postcolonial Gothic in young people’s fiction, considers the ways in which familiar living spaces become unfamiliar, and how this “represents both the epitome and the deformation—a haunting, in essence—of traditional notions of home, a place that is supposed to provide safety, security, contentment, and happiness ("Brown Girl Dreaming: A Ghost Story in the Postcolonial Gothic Tradition" 411).

Young adult literature, arguably, anchors itself in such “hauntings” as adolescent protagonists find themselves alienated from or challenged by the specters of their younger selves and their former ideas of “home”; they exist in between not only childhood and adulthood, but also between autonomy and erasure, belonging and alterity.

The in-between is where the young adult resides—next to literal or metaphoric ghosts.

The subjective in-between, according to Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, is “no less real than the world of things,” as it can refer to narrative, representational, and psychic spaces as a means to human connectivity—how we see and define ourselves in relation to others.

Taking cue from Anatol and Arendt, “Geographies of the Precarious In-Between: Navigating Spaces of Young Adulthood and the Gothic” explores the intersections between the broadly conceived terms “young adult” and “gothic” in literature and consider how these “in-between” spaces function as sites of liberation for marginalized identities, but also as sites of precarity.

Marked by themes of resistance, liminality, and monstrosity, the gothic genre relies on conventions that encourages an interrogation of systematic otherness. As such, the gothic allows us to reframe notions of otherness, agency, sexuality, self-identification within young adult literature in a way that liberates the protagonist from prescribed futurities. The submissions for this panel explore the intersections of this liberation (or lack thereof) between the broadly conceived terms “young adult” and “gothic” in literature as they consider these “in-between” spaces as sites of liberation for marginalized identities. The rise in diverse representations of young people requires new ways of reading that more fully considers the complexity of the estrangement these protagonists face.

In this spirit, “Geographies of the Precarious In-Between” encourages discourse not only on the complex space between childhood and adulthood, but also between autonomy and erasure, belonging and alterity. In doing so, the panel will reexamine the canonical coming-of-age journey and de-center the patriarchal, heterosexual lens for one that instead focuses on social precarity and inequity. In unpacking the “precarious in-between” as conveyed through literary figures at the intersection of youth and maturation, the papers of this panel wrestle with how young people, across time and space, map the landscape of their social realities and individual identities.

Sydney Lauer, in “Catherine at the Window: Nature Driving the Coming-of-Age Narrative in Wuthering Heights,” posits that the novel, through its Gothis tropes, suggests “Victorian ideals fail the development of independence in young women.” Ultimately, Lauer argues, “young women like Catherine will forever be waiting at the window.”

In “Spirits and the Mind: Liminality as Subversive Discourse in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater,” Casandra Aigbogun considers how these two 21^st-century novels of the African diaspora use elements of traditional African religions to chart and disorient “the creation of selfhood” for its protagonists. The novels, Aigbogun contends, “present their liminal spaces as subversive discourse against the social inequalities” the main characters experience.

“Dark academic,” explains Mckenzie Bergan, “most often signifies an aesthetic connected to higher education, and the study of classical literature and art. Her paper “question[s] whether dark academia realizes its radical potential to subvert the goals of elite institutions” and explores how “gothic tropes employed in this fiction are wrapped up in this binary—used both to challenge and also to prop up the dark academia aesthetic of the institution.”

Through investigating the textual environments encountered by the protagonists in a beloved Victorian novel, the emerging genre of “dark academia,” and contemporary novels from the African diaspora, the projects of “Geographies of the Precarious In-Between” present new, provocative arguments for how we read these works, but how we read youth.