Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand by Alison Rudd (review)

In Postcolonial Gothic Fictions from the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Alison Rudd explores the role that the Gothic has played in the literature of the four different settler nations named in the title—elaborating the many ways in which their colonial legacies have opened the way to hauntings, spatial dislocations, repressions, and anxieties that are synonymous with the genre. As Rudd’s survey of the field shows, this is familiar territory, bringing to mind recent works by Ken Gelder, Gerry Turcotte, Andrew McCann, Andrew Hock Soon Ng, and others. The introductory first chapter is well researched, but previous publications on postcolonial Gothic weigh heavily here, with Rudd’s argument becoming submerged by the many different sources cited. The difficulty of articulating the close affinity between the postcolonial and the Gothic sometimes leads to circular statements that fail to elucidate the book’s overall aim. “Identification of the thematic, structural and ideological elements that make up Postcolonial Gothic writing has led me to read these texts through the lens of the Gothic,” she writes at one point, “and so to an interpretation of the postcolonial, which in turn leads to a rearticulation of the Gothic.” A clearer sense of purpose from the outset would have helped to highlight the book’s most original contribution: to offer a comparative analysis of the way Gothic tropes circulate through the postcolonial literature of the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where earlier studies have tended to view each in isolation.

Taking as a departure point Stuart Hall’s observation that “we always knew that the dismantling of the colonial paradigm would release strange demons from the deep, and that these monsters might come trailing all sorts of subterranean material,” Rudd goes on to produce a detailed taxonomy of such unleashed forces. Focusing on four settler nations in separate chapters, she catalogs the ramifications of colonialism through the spectral and psychological symptoms specific to each. The second chapter investigates the divided psyche in Caribbean Gothic, with the discussion ranging over a diverse selection of poetry and fiction by Caribbean authors including Derek Walcott, Nalo Hopkinson, and Shani Mootoo. The central focus of the chapter is to articulate the “schizophrenic split” that recurs throughout the texts examined, between an attachment to place and a horror of its history—which weighs all the more heavily on the present because it is unresolved and repressed. The figure of the duppy is traced effectively here, to draw out the patterns of alienation and displacement that the different works share. A close reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is engaging in its exploration of the mirroring between colonizer and the colonized and the subversive potential of the zombie.

Chapter 3 maps postcolonial anxiety in Canadian Gothic fiction, looking at novels by writers including Margaret Atwood, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Eden Robinson, and Jamaican ex-patriot Nalo Hopkinson, whose work engages both Caribbean and Canadian contexts. The Gothic sensibility that inflects relationships to geography and history in postcolonial Canadian literature is the dominant theme here—marking out a range of territories from the northern wildernesses in Atwood’s Surfacing to the uncanny metropolitan spaces of urban Toronto in Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring. The different quests that their protagonists undertake, Rudd argues, bring them into contact with the Gothic landscape in a way that destabilizes or reconfigures identity—especially as it relates to larger questions of nationhood.

The fourth chapter, on the Australian Gothic, uses ideas of the uncanny and the abject to unravel questions of innocence and guilt in relation to a number of different tropes, including the recurring figure of the lost child and the monstrous apparition of the bunyip. It explores the concept of unhomeliness, where alien territories seem to resist settlement, and travelers encounter a range of threats—both real and spectral—as the residues of convictism and genocide continue to haunt a sometimes grotesque...