The ‘postcolonial Gothic’: absent histories, present contexts1

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The research for this project was partially enabled by research grant R -103-000-057-112 from the National University of Singapore's and the Ministry of Education's Academic Research Fund. The conference was held at the Research Center for Commonwealth Studies, Paul Valéry University, Montpellier 3, from November 8–10, 2007. Doctoral dissertations include Barish Ali's ‘The Postcolonial Gothic: Haunting and Historicity in the Literature After Empire’ (PhD. dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2005); a representative article concerning pedagogy is Gina Wisker, ‘Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic’, Pedagogy 7.3 (2007), pp. 401–425. Penang, where Lee lived for most of his life, is now in Malaysia. Whereas the state of Malaysia was created from a merger of the independent state of Malaya and other former British colonies in 1963, and indeed sees itself as Malaya's successor state, I nonetheless want to stress that Lee's engagement with nationalism comes at a time where a Malayan, rather than a Malaysian, social imaginary was envisioned. Judie Newman, ‘Postcolonial Gothic: Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the Sobhraj Case’ in Victor Gage and Allan Lloyd Smith (ed.), Modern Gothic: A Reader (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 171–187: (171). See Gina Wisker, Key Concepts in Postcolonial Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 147–155. Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 77. Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism’ in Smith and Hughes (ed.), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 1–12 (2). Smith and Hughes, ‘Introduction: The Enlightenment …’ p. 4. Smith and Hughes, ‘Introduction: The Enlightenment …’ p. 4. Newman, p. 185. David Punter, ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’ in Smith and Hughes (ed.), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, pp. 192–207 (206). Andrew Teverson, ‘The Number of Magic Alternatives: Salman Rushdie's 1001 Gothic Nights’ in Smith and Hughes (ed.), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, pp. 208–228 (223). Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Defining the Relationships between Gothic and the Postcolonial’, Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003), pp. 1–6 (1). Lily G. N. Mabura, ‘Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun’, Research in African Literatures 39.1 (Winter 2008), pp. 203–222. Ibid., p. 205. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor, 1994), p. 209. See also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Teresa A. Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 2; Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 6–8. Teverson does, to be fair, begin with a rather elegant meditation on how the Gothic many call national narratives into question, drawing on V.J. Mishra's notion of a ‘Gothic sublime’ that offers not transcendence but dissolution (212). However, his essay does not engage with the specific contours of Indian national history and historiography, but rather looks at Rushdie's response to eighteenth and nineteenth century Orientalism. Philip Holden, ‘Other Modernities: National Autobiography and Globalization’, Biography 28.1 (Winter 2005), pp. 89–103 (89). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Ed. London: Verso, 1991), p. 9. Gayatri Spivak, ‘Frankenstein and Devi's Pterodactyl’ in Smith and Hughes (ed.), Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, pp. 56–68 (62). Robert Miles, ‘Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic’ in Fred Botting and Dale Townshend (ed.), Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. (London: Routledge, 2004), 4 vols. Vol 1. pp. 192–211 (208). Schmitt, pp. 163–166. Goddu, p. 11. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London: Verso, 1983), p. 83. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. I. The Process of Capitalist Production [4th Ed. 1890, trans. Ben Fowkes, 1976] (London: Penguin Classics, 1990) p. 928. Ibid., p. 929. Moretti, p. 89. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 108. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 60. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1: An Introduction (Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 141, p. 144. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 34. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 14–16. Whereas attempts to conceive of Malaya as a future independent nation-state go back to the early twentieth century, Malayan nationalism only flowered substantially as a political movement after World War 2. J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: New York University Press, 1956), p. 304. Charles Hirschman, ‘The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications’, Journal of Asian Studies 46 (1987): pp. 555–582 (569). Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press: 2000): pp. 32–33. Salvador P. Lopez, Literature and Society: Essays on Life and Letters (Manila: University Book Supply, 1940), p. 229. Miguel A. Bernad, Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree: Essays on Philippine Literature in English (Manila: Bookmark, 1961) p. 54. Ibid., p. 60. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought 42. Nick Joaquin, Tropical Gothic (St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1972), p. 134. Ibid., p. 131. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 6. Joaquin, p. 132. Ibid., p. 125. Ibid., p. 129. E. San Juan Jr., Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988), p. 40. Joaquin, p. 141. Ibid., p. 111. Ibid., p. 118. Ibid., p. 122. Sylvia Mendez Ventura, ‘Sexism and the Mythification of Women: A Feminist Reading of Nick Joaquin's “The Summer Solstice” and Alfred Yuson's “The Hill of Samuel”’in Thelma B. Kintanar (ed.), Women Reading … Feminist Perspectives on Philippine Literary Texts (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press, 1992), pp. 146–162 (154). Joaquin, p. 110. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 113. Moretti, p. 83. T. N. Harper, The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 26 Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, p. 37. Lee Kok Liang, The Mutes in the Sun and Other Stories (Kuala Lumpur: Rayirath, 1963), p. 6. Ibid., p. 2. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 176. Lee, p. 11. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid, p. 8. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Work of Anthropology: Critical Essays, 1971–1991 (Philadelphia: Harwood, 1991), p. 226. Holden, p. 88. Manuel Luis Quezon, The Good Fight (New York: Appleton-Century, 1946), p. 198. Joaquin, p. 139.