Postcolonial and Cultural Haunting Revenants—Letting the ‘Right’ Ones in

Abstract

This chapter considers how postcolonial Gothic women writers expose the double oppression of gender and race, using figures of the ghost, vampire and zombie, revenants reminding us of hidden histories, a silenced past. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) begins this process rewriting Charlotte Brontë’s nineteenth-century Gothic classic, Jane Eyre (1847), using characteristics of the literary Gothic to expose colonialism, racism and sexism and to rewrite perspectives on history, focusing on the demonising and abjection of the foreign female Other, a mad woman kidnapped and incarcerated. The author argues that Rhys rewrote how imperial and colonial history was represented, developed more recently with Malaysian Beth Yahp’s cultural hauntings, Singaporean Sandi Tan’s exposure of the imperial deceits and ghostings of the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in the Second World War, and Singaporean Catherine Lim’s Gothic social critiques in her ghost stories, and exposure of conspicuous consumption and worship of success at the expense of humane behaviours.