Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the Postcolonial in Gothic Studies

Abstract

This article theorises decolonial Gothic as a novel approach to Gothic fiction from formerly colonised regions and communities. It responds to an emerging body of Gothic production, which situates itself in a world shaped by persistently racialised distributions of social and environmental precarity, and where colonial power is thus an enduring material reality. To address such fiction, the article proposes, requires a reassessment of the hauntological frameworks through which Gothic and the (post)colonial have hitherto been brought into contact. Forged in the cultural climate of late-twentieth-century postmodernity, these hinge on the assumption of an epochal break, which renders colonial history a thing of the past; thus, they fall short of narratives that engage with active formations of colonial power. Accordingly, the article outlines an alternative approach, positioning Gothic fiction in the context of the capitalist world-system, which – into the present – is structured by colonial categories of race, heteropatriarchal categories of gender, and instrumentalising discourses of nature as plunderable resource.