SMITH, Andrew e
HUGHES, William (Ed). Empire and the Gothic:
The Politics of a Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Considers relations between the Gothic and theories of
post colonialism, how writers use gothic to represent images of colonial power
against which a post-colonial identity is asserted. One central issue is how
late writers respond to, and so renegotiate, earlier gothic constructions of a
postcolonial politics, one which, paradoxically has its roots in the colonial
context of the date 18th century.
Gothic images of alienation, fragmentation and
otherness are read through postcolonial ideas relating to alterity. The
intersection between gothic and postcolonialism would be the presence of a
shared interest in challenging post-enlightment notions of rationality.
In Gothic, as in Romantism in general, this challenge
was developed through an exploration of feelings, desires and passions which
compromised the enlightment project of rationality calibrating all forms of
knowledge and behaviour. The Gothic, on the other hand, celebrates the
irrational, the outlawed, the socially and culturally dispossessed.
Postcolonial criticism has tended to focus on how the
epistemic shift from Renaissance humanism to enlightment humanism registered a
corresponding shift from knowing to understanding. This new enlightment
humanism placed the stress on how the subject knows, rather than what he or she
knows. Such a shift makes the (Cartesian) subjects the measure of all things,
and this conceptualization of humanity was reliant on defining the human in
relation to the seemingly war- human. [Some humans are more humans than others,
more substantially the measure of all things]. Racial hierarchies which would
come to underpin colonialism
The gothic uses non-human figures to challenge the
dominant humanist discourse and becomes a literary form that can be read
through post-colonial ideas.
The process of refusal of the other results of a
series of binary oppositions such as orient/ocident, black/white
civilized/savage come to underpin colonialist ideas. One consequence of this is
that Enlightment generates its own opposite, in such a way that the subject is
precariously defined through historically (and therefore provisional)
oppositions. This science will also try to account for what they cannot know,
drawing attention to its own failings and producing its own doubles.
One of defining ambivalences of the gothic is that its
labeling of otherness is often employed in the service of supporting, rather
than questioning, the status quo. This is perhaps the central complexity of the
form because it debates the existence of otherness and alterity in order to
demonise such otherness. (consolidating the orientalism Said talks about).
Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences,
provide a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance and
defiance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space in which
key elements of the dominant culture become debated, affirmed and questioned.
This volume addresses two related issues: 1) Analysing work by writers whom we
consider to be writing out of a postcolonial context (Rushdie, Arundhati Roy,
J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Farrel). These writes have used the Gothic in their writings
to examine how mages of the otherness have been made to correspond to
particular notions of terror, in terms of political uprising of racial anxieties
(reassessment). 2) Gothic writings
produced within a colonial context.
