Postcolonial Gothic

“Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi”. Leetsch J., entry in The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.09: Postwar and Contemporary English Writing and Culture, 1945-present. Eds. Valerie Kaneko-Lucas, Kerry Myler, Deirdre Osborne, Judith Rahn and Jenni Ramone. 14 May 2019.

Houses feature prominently in Helen Oyeyemi's novels, The Opposite House and White Is for Witching. I describe the connection between the Greco-Roman Underworld and the Yorùbá Otherworld in Oyeyemi's texts as a " liminal intersection " , one in which Gothic and supernatural metaphors from the Yorùbá culture are syncretised. The Gothic tropes of the House collide with Oyeyemi's revisioning of the Yorùbá pantheon and Otherworld. Key figures and symbols from Greco-Roman folklore, Yorùbá mythology and European fairytales are either represented by characters in Oyeyemi's novels or are present as metaphors. The problematic postcolonial Gothic relationship between competing cultural imperatives and authorities in The Opposite House and White is For Witching takes place in these liminal intersections. I connect this struggle to the idea of transgression as agency. Pursuant to this, this article interrogates the postcolonial Gothic house as a trope in the two studied texts and argues that it is a site for the enactment of liminal and hybrid transgressions as agency through the deployment of the metaphors of doubling and that of the temporal slippage between multiple realities and the findings elucidate the ways in which the House as a gateway to the Otherworld may be a site for empowerment and decolonising through transgression.

This paper is a postcolonial reading of Nick Joaquin's The Mass of St. Sylvestre. It explores the implicit references to historical events that have had a decisive impact on the history of the Philippines. It argues that historical events hidden in the story point to the destructive effect of American colonialism in the Philippines.

ISBN: 978-0-9939951-4-9

*Collection of essays analyzing the various manifestations of racism in Gothic narratives: literature, film, TV, architecture *Essays range from traditional topics and interpretations of Gothic as vehicle for racism to Gothic as subversion and resistance to white, heteronormative privilege.

Contributors: Avishek Parui, Meital Orr, Joanna Wilson, Jessica E. Birch, Mark Henderson, Monalesia Earle, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni, Mariana Zarate, Patricia Vazquez, Lance Hanson, Cristina Artenie, Ipshita Nath, Anubhav Pradhan.

[Long pre-print draft of a chapter to appear in Twenty-First Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Maisha Wester and Xavier Aldana Reyes, forthcoming.]

Reading the ambivalent depictions of nature in ‘global ecogothic’ from cultural traditions outside of Euro-America can help reveal how socio-ecological relations are inextricably bound up with hierarchies of race, class, gender and ideas of natural alterity, but also how the cultural experiences of environmental catastrophe in other nations intersect with wider geopolitical contexts (Deckard 2013, 177). This chapter will adopt a comparative approach to contemporary examples of ‘resource gothic’ fictions that figure the socio-ecological violence of extractivism, plantation, and ecological imperialism in postcolonies and socio-economic peripheries of the ‘world-ecology,’ including the sugar gothic of Roger McTair’s ‘Just a Lark (or the Crypt of Matthew Ashdown)’ (2000)  set in Jamaica, the oil gothic of Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2010) set in Nigeria, and the toxic nuclear gothic of Robert Barclay’s Meļaļ, set in the Pacific (2003). It will also address the prominence of ecogothic aesthetics in contemporary television and video games, exploring the oil and sugar unconscious of the first season of HBO television series True Detective (2014), and the ludic nuclear magnetism of Bethesda Game Studio’s 2016 Fallout 4: Far Harbor DLC.

This is a study of the female diasporic imagination. It sets out to investigate how Anglophone black women writers and performers respond to the imbalances, pressures and crises of contemporary globalization by querying the boundaries between two separate conceptual domains: love and space.

Making Love, Making Worlds breaks new ground by systematically bringing together critical love studies with research into the cultures of migration, diaspora and globalization. Examining a notable tendency among current black feminist writers, poets and performers to insist on the affective dimension of world-making, the book ponders strategies of reconfiguring postcolonial discourses. Indeed, my analyses of literary works and medial performances by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, Shailja Patel and Warsan Shire reveal an urge of moving beyond a familiar insistence on processes of alienation, displacement or rupture and towards a new emphasis on connection and intimacy. The book argues that, by attending to the deeply personal and relational while also depicting structural and geographical displacement in a time of global flows and refugee movements, these authors and performers strive to create possible inhabitable worlds. However, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a point of tracing the complexities of the voices and visions studied, of foregrounding their ability to engage with the harmful as well as the reparative results that come to be produced at the intersections of love, migration, and globalization.

Informed by a wide theoretical interest, the study combines careful literary analyses with in-depth discussions of cultural and socio-historical contexts. It does not only consider the world-making powers of the old novel form in the third millennium but also ponders the formative effect of new digital media. In holding on to the potential radicality of love, Making Love, Making Worlds makes a case for re-articulating an often-dismissed approach that originated in critical black feminist love studies. While theorisations of space necessarily abound in discussions of postcolonial literatures, my focus on affect introduces a very different entry point for analysis.

My choice of texts – ranging from Adichie’s spectacularly successful Americanah and Smith’s well-known London novels via Oyeyemi’s queer vampire fiction to the poems and performances of Patel and Shire – is due to the pronounced but varying significance they give to the interrelationships of space and love, of migration and affect. The works selected for close analysis provide an opportunity of studying various African diasporic imaginaries in concert with one another: Nigerian-American, Caribbean, Nigerian-British, Somali-British, and Kenyan-American. Read alongside each other, the selected novels, poems and performances suggest a newly and differently connected global imaginary – an alternative to dominant constructions of the present world and a site of resistance to oppressive hegemonic dynamics at work on national as well as global levels.

What it means to be from Hong Kong or a “Hong Kong person” is a question being asked with increasing frequency as the conflict between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China worsens. The British Empire and its former presence and influence in Hong Kong becomes, in such discussions, inevitably foregrounded. This article investigates how postcolonial Gothic writing can be used to understand the crisis of identity Hong Kong faced during the 1997 turnover and now faces. In postcolonial Gothic Hong Kong literature, the return of Chinese rule during the turnover and the recent longing for a return to British rule manifest as tangible undead, monsters of hybridity who were repressed and are now awakening. Using Rebecca Bradley and Stewart Sloan’s Temutma as a case study, I discuss the utility of postcolonial Gothic thought and writing when attempting to represent the difficulties of reconciling Hong Kong’s contested cultural identity.

This paper looks at the ways in which intersectionality connects to instances of monstrosity and body horror in three works by Helen Oyeyemi: The Opposite House, White Is for Witching and Boy, Snow, Bird. Intersectionality acknowledges that the systemic oppression of all marginalised individuals is interconnected. More specifically, a conversation about oppression must take into account the ways in which race, class, gender and (dis)abilities intersect in the discourse of both privilege and of marginalisation.  This connection may be seen very clearly in all three texts, from the invoking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in The Opposite House, to the trappings of the 1950s middle-class as depicted in Boy, Snow, Bird. Blood, in all three works is related to legacies, and intergenerational tensions, whilst the monstrous is very directly related to the ambiguities of hybrid and problematised cultural identity. These intersecting problematic identifications are contained within metaphors that connect both to body horror and to different manifestations of madness in the three texts, as well as in the various manifestations of the Other.  As such, this paper aims to shed light on the ways in which the various manifestations of the monstrous Other (the soucouyant, the vampire, the double, and the ominous figure of Boy Novak’s parent) may be connected to the traumas experienced in the margins in-between culture, class and gender, and to further explore the problematic discourses that inevitably emerge.

This paper interrogates the connection between entities that hover in the liminal state between life and death (such as vampires and spirits) and the manner in which these entities relate to Alaya Dawn Johnson's conjurings of alternate political structures and hierarchies in her Spirit Binders series. Johnson's alternate hierarchies are compelling primarily because they are both flawed and liminal. These hierarchies contain gateways between life and death, between material reality and spiritual reality. An ecoGothic lens is applied to these texts as they deal with climate-related disasters and the ways in which the texts instigate not just heroism but also monstrosity. In Gothic fiction, supernatural tropes such as the Vampire, spirits, and intermediaries are often signposts towards psychological states such as Terror and its relation to the Sublime. In Gothic fiction, very often, vampires, spirits and other similar creatures are connected to a hierarchy or community of sorts. A postcolonial Gothic reading of Gothicized texts, however, interrogates the power relations, the sense of haunting underscoring the text as well as the discourse of Terror in relation to the Other. I argue that Johnson's writing enables the reader to peer in between the veils of life and death to unearth the darker sides of human nature, but very often these glimpses are not just about personal choices. These glimpses reveal strategies and missteps that guide the ways in which those hierarchies shape those choices, which Johnson then subverts in her tales.

Gotika se smatra jednim od najfleksibilnijih i najadaptibilnijih žanrova u književnosti, koji je od svog nastanka u XVIII veku sve razuđeniji i razgranatiji. Danas on obuhvata brojne subžanrove, među kojima je i malo istraživana postkolonijalna gotika koja prisvaja formu gotike i kroz nju preispituje i razmatra istorijske narative i političku situaciju nekadašnjih kolonizovanih oblasti. U postkolonijalnoj gotici gotske konvencije doživljavaju korenite promene koje ih ponekad čine gotovo neprepoznatljivim. Cilj ovog rada je da na primeru jednog od najistaknutijih dela ovog žanra, Sramote Salmana Ruždija, sagleda te promene kroz analizu značajnih elemenata klasičnog gotskog narativa: istorijskog senzibiliteta, gotskog ambijenta, granica, čudovišta i položaja žene. U postkolonijalnoj gotici, kako analiza pokazuje, romantično srednjovekovlje klasične gotike biva zamenjeno novijom istorijom dekolonizovanih naroda, lokaliteti se prilagođavaju ovoj promeni vremenskog fokusa, a granice se ne osnažuju kao u klasičnim delima gotskog žanra, već preispituju, podrivaju i ruše. Čudovišta više ne nose negativno značenje: postala su simboli snage i moći obespravljenih koji ustaju protiv svojih tlačitelja, a ženski likovi su koncipirani tako da se razobličava neprekinuta prećutkivana praksa ugnjetavanja žena. Na ovaj način postkolonijalna gotika, pored toga što kritikuje sam kolonijalizam, razotkriva i kolonijalne prakse u dekolonizovanom društvu.
Ključne reči: gotika, postkolonijalizam, istorija, gotski ambijent, granice, čudovišta, položaj žene

"Women's Colonial Gothic Writing, 1850-1930: Haunted Empire" is the first extended critical study of Colonial Gothic writing by nineteenth and early twentieth-century women who lived within the borders of the British Empire during its height. Women were some of the first authors to examine the negative effects of colonialism in the nineteenth century, but were one of the last groups to have their writings recognized as legitimate and worthy critiques of the British colonial experience. Much of their fiction uses ghosts and other paranormal events to comment on social issues such as race, gender, class, and imperialism, thus making these Gothic texts something more than just a good scare. This book will expand on recent critical interest in women’s involvement with the Gothic to explore how these writers appropriated the genre – and its emphasis on fear, racial otherness, identity, and sexual deviancy – in order to take these anxieties into the farthest realms of the British Empire. When read in light of the Colonial Gothic, the unique histories and social structures of these individual colonies are thus transformed into wide-reaching critiques of power structures and the impact colonialism had on both the British colonizers and the local populations. As many of these women were truly cosmopolitan – frequently moving back and forth from Great Britain to the various locations of empire, their writing gives us a unique view of the colonial experience, especially for women during this period. The varied subject matter in their fiction reflects a broad range of colonial experience: from imperialism in Africa and the dehumanizing effects of the ivory trade, to the destructive aftereffects of slavery in Jamaica and the violent consequences of imperial rule in India. Grisly death and violent crime are frequently present in these works, as are more personal stories of the harsh realities of settler life in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Women’s Colonial Gothic thereby insists on bringing to light the darker, hidden motives and untold stories that complicate the contemporary narratives which foregrounded British expansion as a noble quest that would improve the lives of colonist and colonizer alike.   

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Reclaiming Women’s Colonial Gothic Writing

Chapter 2: Susanna Moodie, Colonial Exiles, and the Frontier Canadian Gothic

Chapter 3: Gothic Romance and Retribution in the Short Fiction of Isabella Valancy Crawford

Chapter 4: Generations of the Female Vampire: Colonial Gothic Hybridity in Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire

Chapter 5: Mary Kingsley and the Ghosts of West Africa

Chapter 6: The African Stories of Margery Lawrence

Chapter 7: Colonial Gothic Framework: Haunted Houses in the Anglo-Indian Ghost Stories of Bithia Mary Croker

Chapter 8: Animal Gothic in Alice Perrin’s East of Suez

Chapter 9: The Past Will Not Stay Buried: Female Bodies and Colonial Crime in the Australian Ghost Stories of Mary Fortune

Chapter 10: Fear and Death in the Outback: Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies

Chapter 11: Katherine Mansfield and the Troubled Homes of Colonial New Zealand

Chapter 12: Conclusion: “cicatrice of an old wound”