If history is written by the winners, Gothic fiction is a powerful tool to re-imagine and re-configure history from the standpoint of those whose life experiences are usually neglected or unheard: stories of the weak, of women, of people of color, of the other. 

In this paper I will analyse two works, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, a 1986 novel by the Francophone author Maryse Condé (1937-) and the all-new “Netflix Original” French TV-series La Révolution (2020). Both fictions go back to momentous historical events, such as the Salem Witch Trials (1692-93) and the French Revolution (1789) with the explicit goal of re-telling history from the angle of the oppressed. The Caribbean looms eerily over the fictional horizon of these stories: an evil spreads from the Caribbean Seas to North American and Europe, respectively, in the shape of a Black woman whose voodoo magic powers threaten and shake Western Society to its core. While in Tituba racism and misogyny infect metaphorically anyone, in La Révolution blue blood, drained from a black woman, is transforming French aristocracy into powerful zombies. In my paper I will try to disentangle the inextricable themes of supernatural, race and contagion interwoven in these works.