Degenerate Hybrids: Miscegenation, Racial Purity, and the Colonial Unconscious in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Abstract

This article offers a postcolonial reading of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” arguing that the novella converts colonial contact into biological crisis by coding hybridity as degeneration and miscegenation as civic threat. Through close attention to the text’s lexicon of contamination, physiognomic description, and spatial quarantine, the essay shows how Innsmouth is constructed as an “internal foreign zone” in which difference becomes legible as hereditary stigma and moral failure. Drawing on scholarship on immigrant eugenics and genotypic horror, the analysis demonstrates how the narrative’s horror depends on racialized ideas of purity, breeding, and irreversible taint. The essay further situates Innsmouth’s maritime economy within an Atlantic framework, reading Obed Marsh’s pact and the sea-borne circulation of wealth as displaced histories of extractive exchange and imperial entanglement. Finally, it addresses the limits of postcolonial interpretation for an author whose racism is historically documented, arguing that the text’s ending produces a structural ambivalence that destabilizes purity fantasies without redeeming their ideological violence. By foregrounding how otherness is manufactured through space, bodies, and inheritance, the article clarifies the novella’s continuing relevance as a case study in the aestheticization of racial ideology as cosmic horror.