there's interesting stuff in here, but I'm left wondering, as always when I read speculative realism and adjacent areas of thought (tbh even more so here than in other places), what we should make of the corpus of texts the speculative realists focus on.
the glaring absence of the racial connotation of the word "black" in the discussion of black metal was particularly striking, especially in conjunction with (of course) the use of Lovecraft. note 3 refers the reader to "Facts Concerning the late Arthur Jermyn and His Family", probably Lovecraft's most blatantly racist story (which is saying something), without mentioning that the "daemoniacal hints of truth" which "make [life] sometimes a thousandfold more hideous" to which the passage refers is, of course, the truth of miscegenation and the horror of a white person having some concealed blackness (because of course black people, especially if they are from ~Africa~, are inhuman savages). I can't help but wonder about the conceptual baggage these references brings with them, especially when that baggage goes completely unacknowledged.
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