Postcolonial Gothic

Abstract

Teaching the postcolonial Gothic provides us and our students with a rich set of issues, theories, and potential problems as well as delights. The Gothic itself, ambiguous, a mix of the realistic and the imaginary, asks us to step back from any straightforward historical realism and read at the very core of what literature and the arts are about, i.e. representation and interpretation, the symbolic, and the use of strategies of estrangement and engagement to explore and challenge cultural, social, psychological, and personal issues. Reading the Gothic demands a certain kind of estrangement; defamiliarization on the one hand and imaginative leaps of faith on the other. Students engaged with the Gothic are likely to have to become adept at deconstruction, reading between the lines of the seemingly bourgeois hegemonic text to seek the meanings and challenges of the Gothic’s strange, fantastic disturbances and disruptions. Reading postcolonial writing is another potentially fraught experience. They are presented with cultural difference and the demand that such a gap of knowledge be at least a little bridged with necessary contextual information, and some understanding of different worldviews beyond the facts of the everyday reality of the differences posed by geography, climate, or history. Postcolonial texts are strange sometimes even to those whose cultures have produced them. Because of their postcolonial nature they query, undercut, question, and problematize the imposed, internalized values and interpretations of history and of the colonizers’ worldviews.