Abstract
ABSTRACT This article examines gothic representations of the sugarcane plantation in literature from Fiji. Focusing on Indo-Fijian texts, including Totaram Sanadhya’s ‘The Story of the Haunted Line’ (1922) and Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters (1988), it shows how ghostly encounters and uncanny returns evoke not only the haunting memories of indenture but also the violent rushes and energy-depleting crashes generated by sugar. As a ‘vampire crop’, sugar is seen to exacerbate the slow violence of food insecurity, the threat of mosquito-borne disease, the gendered exhaustion of fertility and the speculative organisation of life into sources of ‘cheap energy’. In imagining sugar’s gothic ecologies, the texts ground human subjects within the multispecies work/energy system of the plantation, anticipating the ‘ghosts’ of its social, economic and environmental legacies.
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