The Postcolonial Gothic: Time and Death in Southern African Literature

Abstract

Summary Typically, death, violence, evil (metaphysical or actual), madness, enclosure, doubling, dangerous sexuality, incest, archaicism, ruins, haunting, monsters, bats, rats, cats, eschatological religiosity and hyperbolically tawdry dark aesthetics come to mind when the word “Gothic” is used. In other words, the Gothic immediately conjures up Eurocentric or quasi-Eurocentric imagery. This makes perfect sense when one considers that Gothic sensibilities and art are far more likely to arise, and have arisen, within cold northern climes with medieval heritages than in sunny southern ones. Nevertheless, there is a Southern Gothic, and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Flannery O'Connor, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner produced more psychological and socially violent Gothic works than their European counterparts. My concern in this article is to explore the Southern Gothic of the USA in relation to key southern African texts in order to define what a southern African Gothic might resemble. What I discover is that the Gothic is not merely a fetishisation of the macabre and grotesque, social or aesthetic; it also involves the fantastic and sublime, often conveyed via a wry self-reflexivity in relation to time and mortality. Gothicism as a form of thanatophilia is invariably related to time and timelessness – different time scales that relativise human consciousness. I want to use the exploration and definition of the southern African Gothic to say something more generally about the Gothic in the postcolonial and the postcolonial in the Gothic. The argument that I want to make is twofold: (1) that southern African Gothicism, whilst in many ways undeveloped, conveys something of the transhistorical imagination that is vital to postcolonialism in general and (2) that alterity is approached by this Gothicism. Thus this paper attempts to restore the mythopoeic to southern African texts that were often analysed only via the materialistic and then to read that mythopoesis back into the sociohistorical and literary-critical context.