Abstract
This essay discusses two novels by Gibraltarian writer M. G. Sanchez, Jonathan Gallardo (2015) and Solitude House (2015). In both novels, the protagonists are haunted by ghosts from the past, emerging from otherworlds, or parallel worlds, whose boundaries have become permeable. I argue that Sanchez’s literary otherworlds offer an incisive critique of border consciousness and residual colonialism in Gibraltar. In terms of genre, Sanchez’s writing oscillates between the postcolonial gothic and magical realism. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’, I argue that Gibraltar itself emerges as a spectre of colonialism, reminding both Britain and Europe of their history of colonial exploitation that comes back to haunt them in the shape of the victims of global carbon capitalism.
Highlights
British-European EntanglementsAs debates around Brexit suggest, the British are at least partly in denial about the extent and the strength of their ties with Continental Europe
Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘hauntology’, I argue that Gibraltar itself emerges as a spectre of colonialism, reminding both Britain and Europe of their history of colonial exploitation that comes back to haunt them in the shape of the victims of global carbon capitalism
Summary
As debates around Brexit suggest, the British are at least partly in denial about the extent and the strength of their ties with Continental Europe. The most prominent among these myths is that of Britain’s ‘island story’, which casts British aloofness as a geographical fact – the English Channel, cutting off Britain from mainland Europe, with the White Cliffs of Dover serving as a bulwark against invasion (Christinidis 2015) To this day, the Crown holds the Channel Islands, geographically much closer to France (see Kamm and Sedlmayr 2008; Habermann 2018a) while Gibraltar, on the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, is a British Overseas Territory, captured by an Anglo-Dutch force in 1704, and ceded to Britain ‘in perpetuity’ in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Gibraltar itself emerges as a spectre of colonialism, reminding Europe of its history of colonial exploitation that is returning to haunt the continent in the shape of the victims of globalisation
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