19세기 카리브 문학을 통해 살펴보는 식민지 고딕 서사와 포스트휴머니즘 : 신릭 윌리엄즈의 『오비아 주술사 하멜』을 중심으로

Abstract

Focusing on Cynric Williams’s recently re-discovered novel, Hamel, the Obeah Man, this essay examines the ways how the Caribbean cultural tradition of obeah works in and for the genre of colonial gothic. The primary goals of this essay are threefold: 1) to introduce Anglophone Caribbean literature before the twentieth century to Korean literary scholarship, 2) to examine how the trope of the traditional gothic gets re-appropriated in the colonial scene, and 3) to facilitate further discussions on posthumanism—through the concepts of “parahuman” or “creolized mode of personhood”—found in the nineteenth-century colonial literature.BR As most of the existing critical readings point out, it is undeniable that Hamel’s betrayal against his fellow slaves at the end of the novel could be viewed as Williams’s own limit as a white author who sought to restore the colonial order in the tumult of various slave revolts in the Caribbean regions during the early nineteenth century. My investigation into the figure of “duppy,” however, may offer an interesting example of how the different approaches that the colonizer and the colonized have on the concept of the “human” could energize both the studies of nineteenth-century colonial literature and the discourse of posthumanism with new meanings.