Decolonial Gothic: Beyond the

Postcolonial in Gothic Studies

Rebecca Duncan , The Linnaeus University Centre for

Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies,
Linnaeus University

Abstract:
This article theorises decolonial Gothic as a novel approach to Gothic fiction from
formerly colonised regions and communities. It responds to an emerging body
of Gothic production, which situates itself in a world shaped by persistently
racialised distributions of social and environmental precarity, and where colonial
power is thus an enduring material reality. To address such fiction, the article
proposes, requires a reassessment of the hauntological frameworks through which
Gothic and the (post)colonial have hitherto been brought into contact. Forged in
the cultural climate of late-twentieth-century postmodernity, these hinge on the
assumption of an epochal break, which renders colonial history a thing of the past;
thus, they fall short of narratives that engage with active formations of colonial
power. Accordingly, the article outlines an alternative approach, positioning Gothic
fiction in the context of the capitalist world-system, which – into the present – is
structured by colonial categories of race, heteropatriarchal categories of gender,
and instrumentalising discourses of nature as plunderable resource.

Keywords: Postcolonial Gothic; Decolonial Gothic; Coloniality; Gothic and

capitalism; Postmodern Gothic.

Over the last several years, critics have begun to comment on a shift in
the aesthetics and concern of postcolonial Gothic fiction. In South African
Gothic (2018), I outlined this transformation in detail as a post-millennial
turn away from the spectral rhetoric that had characterised writing of
the late twentieth century, and towards more ‘sensational scenes of

Gothic Studies 24.3 (2022): 304–322

Edinburgh University Press
DOI: 10.3366/gothic.2022.0144
© Rebecca Duncan. The online version of this article is published as
Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits commercial use,
distribution and reproduction provided the original work is cited.
www.euppublishing.com/gothic

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bodily disintegration’ inspired by the subgenre of horror.1 I argued that

this corporeal lexicon ‘register[s] a bewildering and violent experience’ of
the nominal postcolony, encoding a reality in which past oppressions are
compounded by new forms of precarity.2 The turn to horror is thus worth
considering, as I suggested in a different essay, because it marks ‘a deeper
shift that pertains to basic postcolonial assumptions about imperial
formations of power: what is not dead, after all, cannot come back as a
ghost’.3 Making the same point, Sarah Ilott sees ‘contemporary post-
colonial Gothic [as] referenc[ing] the continuation of colonial violence
and its legacies, rather than its haunting remainder’.4 Though Ilott notes
that this development demands a concomitant theoretical adjustment,
pointing to ‘a newly materialist turn in postcolonial studies that rejects […]
postmodern postcolonialism’, her own analysis nonetheless retains the
language and conceptual framework of the postcolonial.5 In this article,
I contribute further to this ongoing conversation by examining instead
how concepts drawn from decolonial thinking offer a different entry point
to Gothic’s engagement with enduring colonial power.
I will disentangle post- from decolonial approaches more fully in
what follows, but for now it will be helpful to highlight the different
relationship each takes to what the critics discussed below variously refer
to as ‘macronarratives’6 or ‘master narratives’, in each case paraphrasing
Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1983).7 For Lyotard,
‘grand narrative[s]’ are the ‘metadiscourse[s]’ that serve the purpose of
legitimating ‘knowledge […] [and] the institutions governing social
bonds’.8 The concept is in intended to highlight the constructed nature
of assumptions that have organised Western society, and to reveal their
origins in ‘the Enlightenment narrative’, which places humanity on a
progressive trajectory out of a state of nature and into an emancipated
condition, where nature is to be controlled through rational knowledge.9
For Lyotard, the age of modernity is defined by a faith in the explanatory
power of this narrative, but comes to an end in the late-twentieth century
when a rising ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ marks the onset of
what he calls the postmodern condition.10
As Arif Dirlik writes in a formative essay from 1994, postcolonial
criticism should be understood as in some sense ‘a child of postmodern-
ism’, and – accordingly – it ‘repudiates all master narratives’.11 In
particular, postcolonial thought addresses the logic of racial and cultural
superiority that is woven into modernity’s discourse of progress, and
how this has been used to imagine colonised people as less-
than-rational, primitive, or closer to nature. ‘[P]ostcolonial criticism
takes the critique of Eurocentrism as its central task’, Dirlik confirms,
because ‘the most powerful current master narratives are the products of

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a post-Enlightenment European constitution of history’.12 A critique of

Eurocentrism is also central to decolonial thinking. However, where the
postcolonial perspective sees the master narrative of modernity as no
longer adequately describing the world, decolonial thinking seeks
to illuminate how the key pillars of this discourse – categories of race,
but also of gender and nature – remain hardwired into the socio-
economic/ecological relations that bind regions and communities
unevenly together into the present day.
Decolonial thinking thus sheds particular light on the crises and
inequities of the millennial present, excavating a colonial master narrative
that continues to structure distributions of security and precarity in the
face of climate emergency, for example, or pandemic illness. As it intends
to make this organising matrix visible, decoloniality also aims to recentre
historically marginalised ways of being and knowing, and it is here – with
the experience of those who occupy what Walter D. Mignolo calls ‘the
colonial difference’13 – that a connection to the visceral Gothic forms
I have mentioned above becomes discernible. I will elaborate on this
resonance in due course; at this point, I turn back to the theoretical
scaffolding of the postcolonial Gothic, in order to illuminate the new
perspectives that open up with a decolonial view.

Postcolonial Gothic
The term ‘postcolonial Gothic’ usually refers to Gothic fiction that takes
the interrogation of colonialism as its objective, and which often entails
highlighting the blindspots, conspicuous silences and failures of colonial
narratives. The most widely canonised example of this strategy is perhaps
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which the author reclaims the
monstrous figure of Bertha Mason from Jane Eyre’s colonial imaginary,
revealing in the process Brontë’s reliance on colonial tropes of irrational
savagery. Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974) – written in
apartheid-era South Africa – provides another apt demonstration. Here,
the corpse of an anonymous African man refuses to remain buried in
white-owned land, thus confronting the colonial regime in question with
the violence on which it is predicated. A last example is offered by Helen
Oyeyemi, in whose Icarus Girl (2005), Jessamy, the eight-year-old
British-Nigerian protagonist, is haunted by a Yoruba cultural heritage
with which her English upbringing has provided her only little, and often
racialised, contact.
The conception of the postcolonial at work across these fictions clearly
reflects Dirlik’s ‘critique of Eurocentrism’. Gothic is mobilised as a means
of denaturalising colonial conceptions of identity and the world, revealing
that – despite the faith with which they have been implemented – such

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constructions are only constructions, and inevitably doomed to fail.

In this way, Gothic in these texts also suggests a relationship between
the postcolonial and the postmodern, and to further unpack this
tripartite connection (Gothic/postcolonial/postmodern), it is worth
noting that Postcolonial- and Gothic Studies broadly share the same
late-twentieth-century moment of constitution. As Neil Lazarus points
out, postcolonial criticism did not exist as a self-describing or coherent
field before the late-1970s.14 The emergent discipline, which took
shape – Gurminder K. Bhambra writes – chiefly around ‘the work of
diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia’, thus grew up
suffused by ideas related to the postmodern turn in the Euro-American
academy.15 ‘Out of th[is] intersection of postmodern and postcolonial
discourses’, Elleke Boehmer summarises, ‘emerged a postcolonial criti-
cism which champions […] those aspects of postcolonial narrative that
illustrate and adumbrate the theory’.16
It is also in the penultimate decade of the last millennium that Jerrold
E. Hogle and Andrew Smith locate the advent of ‘serious critical attention
to “Gothic” literature’, citing David Punter’s important 1980 study – The
Literature of Terror – as an inaugural landmark.17 Accordingly, much of
the scholarship that has come to shape the field of Gothic Studies over the
last three decades draws from the corpus of thinkers canonised in the
late-twentieth century under the general sign of postmodernity. A small
and selective sample of these contributions would include Hogle’s
reading of gothic ‘counterfeiting’ through Jean Baudrillard,18 Fred
Botting’s Foucauldian accounts of gothic transgression and heterotopia,19
or Dale Townshend’s conception of gothic hospitality through Jacques
Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.20
Arguably, what has enabled such diverse connections between the
Gothic and theory associated with the postmodern condition, is the sense
in which, from the outset, Gothic fiction has always handled the master
narrative of modernity with some degree of suspicion. In its early
iterations, Gothic can be understood, as Terry Castle suggested, as
‘the toxic side effect’ of Enlightenment culture, which – as it asserts the
infinite knowability of the world – also inadvertently augments that
which resists rationalisation to monstrous and threatening proportions.21
Fleshing out a similar point, Botting locates the genesis of Gothic ‘in the
awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality’,
and traces a historical trajectory in which ‘Gothic figures have continued
to shadow the progress of modernity with counternarratives displaying
the underside of enlightenment and humanist values.’22 From these
perspectives Gothic at least incipiently entertains the possibility that the
project of Enlightenment is limited, and thus enables a denaturalisation

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of Enlightenment culture and rationality. This in turn lends itself to

postmodern engagements broadly informed by an incredulity towards
master narratives, and to postcolonial approaches which – shaped by the
same scepticism – interrogate such master narratives in their specifically
colonial forms.
In particular, postcolonial Gothic, in both criticism and fiction, has
capitalised on the sense in which Gothic can be said to haunt the
Enlightenment project, as one negative iteration on which it depends for
coherence. On this view, Gothic clings to Enlightenment as a constitutive
and thus ineradicable residue, and in doing so exposes the discursive
construction of modernity’s putative ontologies, which consequently
appear limited and fragile. In this way, Gothic as haunting becomes a
means for hollowing out the narrative of modernity, revealing this to be
precisely only a narrative, spectral and imperfect. It is something like this
approach – indebted to Derridean hauntology23 – that Punter lays out
when he conceptualises postcolonial Gothic as ‘history written according
to […] a logic of haunting’, where haunting is not only a means of retrieving
violent colonial pasts, but more fully a strategy of wilfully flawed
representation. As Punter writes of the ghosts in Arundhati Roy’s God of
Small Things, these spectres enable ‘the ‘tell[ing] of a story, while reminding
us that the story cannot be told’.24 Hence he emphasises the ‘fragmentary
nature’ of Roy’s text, which for him stems from the ‘sense that it is always
haunted by other stories that have been more or less forcibly suppressed’.25
This concern with the limits of narrative expresses a wider questioning
of representation that Lazarus, in his extended reconstruction of
Postcolonial Studies, sees as the central thrust of this discipline. ‘It
would not be too much to suggest’, he writes, ‘that one defining gesture of
scholarship in the field has consisted precisely in its critique of a specific
set of representations’.26 As we have seen, however, postcolonial Gothic
does not only interrogate colonial narratives. Rather, it drives at the
deeper possibility that narrative in all its forms – and by extension
representation – is unavoidably doomed to fail. Indeed, the key value
Tabish Khair ascribes to Gothic in postcolonial contexts is its unusual
capacity for registering alterity, which he suggests even ‘postcolonial
fiction sometimes erases […] in its justifiable desire to explain, narrate,
correct the errors and oversights of colonial narratives’.27 Similarly, for
Punter, postcolonial Gothic’s ghosts witness an ‘exclusion […] that is a
function of representation itself, the impossibility of gathering together
the evidence on which any ‘true’ account might be based’.28
Khair and Punter’s comments are especially noteworthy for the clarity
with which they reflect a critical shift that, in Lazarus’s view, distinguishes
the specifically postcolonial perspective: with the emergence of

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postcolonial studies as discipline, he writes, ‘the critique of Eurocentric

representation was increasingly subsumed by a critique of representation
itself’.29 This development is visible, he goes on, in the rise of criticism
predicated on ‘the assumption […] that the desire to speak for, of, or even
about others is always shadowed – or perhaps even overdetermined – by
a secretly or latently authoritarian aspiration’.30 In its prioritisation of
haunting as a means of foregrounding the partiality and artifice of
discourse, it would appear that postcolonial Gothic entertains similar
reservations.

Beyond Haunting
All of this returns us to the postmodern postcolonial condition, of which it
will now be clear that postcolonial Gothic is to some extent a product.
Exemplifying the mistrust of representation that for Lazarus is the central
gesture of postcolonial critique, this body of criticism bears the imprint of
a scholarly and cultural context shaped by declining faith in the
explanatory power of narrative generally. Haunting is the trope through
which this suspicion is figured in postcolonial Gothic in particular, and it
is with this insight in mind that we might come back to that shift away
from spectral vocabularies, identified by Ilott and myself, in post-
millennial fiction from (putatively) postcolonial regions of the world.
Reading across a diverse corpus, Ilott maps a new Gothic ‘oeuvre more
attuned to the lingering […] effects of empire’.31 These are texts, she shows,
that abandon the aesthetics of haunting in favour of a ‘more materialist’
lexicon, which is deployed to skewer ‘increased precarity, poverty and
enforced displacement’, along with the ‘the outcomes of environmental
disaster and warfare’, and the ‘the pillaging of natural resources and racial
hierarchisation’.32 The world in which Ilott places these new postcolonial
Gothic fictions closely resembles Lazarus’s own conception of the early
twenty-first century: a period inaugurated by the US-led invasion and
occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and one that has been concomitantly
shaped by the conjunction of ‘violence and military conquest with
expropriation, pillage, and undisguised grabbing for resources’.33
Importantly, Lazarus’s point in outlining this situation is to assert the
necessity of addressing the ‘the long and as-yet unbroken history […] of
capitalist imperialism’ in any discussion of the relationship between
colonial past and millennial present.34 It is worth noting, then, that
though Ilott positions the Gothic texts she examines as ‘a means of
re-engagement with the lived realities of twenty-first century postcolonial
societies in the face of systemic violence’, she stops short of identifying
the system in question.35 The point here is not to cast aspersions on Ilott’s
readings; her conclusions resonate directly with my own, as I have already

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shown. Rather, it is to highlight a structural limitation inherent in the

framework of the postcolonial within which her analyses of Gothic
operate. For, as Dirlik puts it, ‘postcoloniality is designed to avoid making
sense of […] and to cover up […] global capitalism’.36
To understand this argument, we should return to Lazarus’s com-
mentary on developments in the new millennium, which he locates as
only a recent and conspicuous effect of the system of capitalist production
that – though reconfigured in the late twentieth century – has tied
regions of the world together across the age of formal colonialism and
into the present. Indeed, the period following decolonisation coincides
with the dawn of what is now routinely referred to as capital in its
neoliberal form. This – as Lazarus emphasises – is a response to
economic decline following the post-war boom,37 and one which sought
to reinstate profitability through widespread deregulation, privatisation
and the retraction of social provision. Largely overseen by Thatcher in the
UK and Reagan in the US, the neoliberalization of the world economy
entailed financialization and deindustrialisation in the Global North in
particular, and the outsourcing of industry and production to cheaper
sites across the Global South.
This latter was enacted to a great extent through the implementation by
international finance institutions of Structural Adjustment Programmes
(SAPs) in newly independent, former colonies: in return for much-needed
loans, SAPs required new nations to restructure their economies in such a
way that they remained amenable to foreign interests – including foreign
interests in cheap labour and resources, and in ready markets for
imported goods.38 As a result, Lazarus writes, ‘SAPs became a favoured
means of disciplining postcolonial states, domesticating them and
rendering them subservient to the needs of the global market’.39 Their
effects are visible in the crippling levels of debt that continue to bind
so-called ‘developing’ economies to institutions rooted in the ‘developed’
world. They are evident, also, in the international division of labour
that structures multinational corporations across sectors as diverse
as agriculture, mining, tech, or the garment industry, as well as in the
disproportionate accumulation of environmental fallout from these
operations across the global south.
This is not, notably, an account of the postcolonial period char-
acteristically offered by classical postcolonial studies, which has
more often – as Dirlik writes – ‘been silent on […] contemporary
capitalism’.40 Rather than as a transition in the history of capitalist
relations, postcolonial theory has tended to understand the late-twentieth
century – the moment of its own genesis – in the way we have already
seen: as what Lazarus terms an ‘epochal transformation from one

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overarching world order (“modernity”) into another (“postmodernity”)’.41

At stake in this foundational claim – that master narratives have ‘become
fundamentally obsolete’42 – is thus a slippage between discourse and
materiality, in which a rejection of colonialism’s systematising regimes of
representation blurs into a refusal to acknowledge actually existing
capitalism as an organising system.
The consequences, as Dirlik notes, are serious. ‘The confounding of
ideological metanarratives with actualities of power […] ignores the
possibility that ideological fragmentation may represent not the dissol-
ution of power but its further concentration’.43 In other words, by
pronouncing the history of capitalism just another obsolete narrative,
postcolonial theory passes up on the imperative to intervene in capital’s
ongoing violences. Indeed, in Dirlik’s sharply critical view, this gesture
may be more integral that incidental to the constitution of postcolonial
studies: he sees, in the late-twentieth-century formalisation of the
discipline, the institutional consecration of a mode of conceptualising
colonial relations that ‘diverts criticism of capitalism to the criticism of
Eurocentric ideology’ alone.44 This, he argues, reflects an effort on the
part of the Euro-American academy – itself embedded in the economic
order – to assuage potential dissent by ‘control[ling it] from the inside
through the creation of classes amenable to incorporation into or alliance
with global capital’.45 Hence, his point that the postcolonial is not only
ill-suited to analyses of capitalism, but in fact designed to frustrate efforts
in this vein.
Notwithstanding the rich theoretical strand that seeks to rethink the
postcolonial through the history of capital – a strand represented by
Lazarus and Dirlik themselves – postcolonial Gothic, as a mode of writing
and a critical approach, has more often taken narrative fragmentation as a
key objective of postcolonial critique, alongside the foregrounding of
representational failures. Haunting, as the device through which this
project works, thus registers the assumption of the ‘epochal transform-
ation’ to which Lazarus refers. Tacitly beginning from the premise that old
categories cannot describe the world any longer, postcolonial Gothic may
thus be ill-equipped to address a contemporary moment in which the
persistent efficacy of precisely these categories is visible as enduringly
racialised social and environmental precarity. It is in this moment that the
turn away from spectral aesthetics should be situated, and in this moment,
too, that an alternative reading framework might be explored.

Gothic in the World-System

I have suggested that the relationship between postcolonial criticism and
Gothic Studies has largely rested on a conception of Gothic informed by

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the critical climate of the postmodern condition – one that foregrounds

the sense in which Gothic fiction can be understood as a counternarrative
to the Enlightenment programme of progress and rational emancipation.
In making versions of this argument, however, critics have also frequently
drawn attention to the material context in which Gothic first emerged in
eighteenth-century Britain, and these discussions provide a perspective
from which Gothic’s engagement with post/colonial power might be
rethought. As Punter reminds us,
the period that saw the birth of the Gothic novel was that in which the early
forces of industrialisation were producing vast changes in the ways people
lived and worked. Rural patterns of life were being broken up by the
enclosure of land and by the labour demands of urban centred industry.
The stability of an at least theoretically long accepted social structure was
being dissolved amid the pressure of new types of work and new social
roles.46

Gothic appears, as these lines indicate, amid a radical restructuring of

socio-economic and -ecological relations, which takes place during the
emergence in Britain of capital in its industrial form. The threats and
anxieties encoded in gothic figures can thus be interpreted as at least in
part deriving from the disorientation that breeds in these shifting
circumstances, as established relationships between social groups and
their environments are fragmented and reconfigured in new and alien
forms. This is the sense towards which Hogle points, when he writes that
early Gothic presents ‘characters […] as torn between the enticing call of
aristocratic wealth […] beckoning back to the Middle ages and the
Renaissance, on the one hand, and a desire to overthrow these past orders
of authority in favour of […] rising middle-class ideology […] on the
other’.47 Botting, too, highlights Gothic’s genesis ‘at a time of bourgeois
and industrial revolution’, and asserts in line with Hogle that its
‘fascination with a past of […] violence, magical beings, and malevolent
aristocrats’ thus needs to be understood as ‘bound up with the shifts from
feudal to commercial society’.48
These readings of Gothic’s emergence are perhaps most obviously
valuable for their acknowledgement of material context. More impor-
tantly, however, they also raise the possibility that what has come to be
called ‘Gothic’ literature was, at its inauguration, a cultural response to
the restructuring of capitalist relations – a phenomenon that, as my
discussion of neoliberalization above attests, has recurred across the
five-century-long history of capitalism as globalizing system. This in
turn opens room for a perspective in which Gothic is only one – albeit
hegemonized – historical example of the mediation through narrative of

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transformations in the system of capital. This is the view taken by Stephen

Shapiro, who suggests, for instance, that Thomas More’s Utopia (1551)
can be read as a ‘proto-Gothic’ text to the extent that it registers, via
an uneasy supernatural aesthetic, ‘the revolution of communal farming
and village social relations caused by England’s [sixteenth-century]
incorporation within global trade flows’.49 Similarly, as Shapiro
points out, the witchcraft tales effulgent among seventeenth-century
Britain’s rural populations can be seen as encoding their bewildering and
violent experience of displacement and proletarianization through the
large-scale enclosure of the formerly common land on which they had
lived.50
This last example is especially helpful for elucidating a connection to
Gothic’s lexicon, since the magical figure of the witch explicitly emerges
from folk beliefs that predate the transformation of peasant communities
into waged labourers. It thus functions as what Shapiro calls a
‘problem-concept’, that casts capital’s novel depredations – the ‘violation
of peasant collectivity’51 – in the familiar idiom of an older cosmology.
This strategy is replicated, as we have seen with Botting and Hogle above,
in Gothic’s predilection for theatrically reproducing pre-Enlightenment
figures and settings, and loading these with dread and threat. For Shapiro,
the difference between the two instances of supernatural production lies
with eighteenth-century British society, for whom industrialisation
constitutes an intensification of capitalist relations, rather than their
initiation. ‘Modern Gothic is consequently a tautology,’ he writes, ‘since
‘Gothic’ is the modern mode for representing the reinstallation of
capitalist conditions for […] [a] public, which has already been irreversibly
separated from the cognitive field of oral, folk customs’, and who thus
instead turn to Medieval aristocrats and atavistic superstition as ‘the next
closest bed of prelapsarian associations for (northern) Europeans living
within later phases of capitalist development’.52
In the first instance, then, Shapiro’s analysis historicizes Gothic fiction
within a longer tradition of supernaturalist mediations of capitalist
development in Europe,53 but it is also with his account that a revised
connection to the colonial begins to come into view. This is because
capital is not only historically durable, but geographically extensive;
by the mid-nineteenth-century, when Marx and Engels wrote their
‘Manifesto’, it had already ‘chased the bourgeoisie over the whole
surface of the globe’.54 The roots of this expansion, and indeed of our
contemporary globalized economy, lie – as Immanuel Wallerstein
argues – in the long sixteenth century, with the colonization of the
Americas.55 During this period, the polities of Western Europe set out to
claim the land and resources of the so-called New World, and to extract

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value from them cheaply, first through the coercion of an Indigenous

workforce, and then through the enslavement of captive Africans
transported to the colonies via the triangular trade. The vast wealth
derived from this strategy of dispossession and exploitation was then
carried back to the metropole, contributing substantially to the rise and
further of expansion of Europe as the centre of global power. According to
Wallerstein, this history lays the foundation for the ‘capitalist world-
system’ in which we still live, setting up an ‘axial division of labour’
between ‘peripheral’ and ‘core’ regions, which he argues endures as the
model for geopolitical dynamics into the present.56 ‘Core-periphery is a
relational concept’,57 Wallerstein is at pains to point out. Rather than a set
of essential features, it describes the process through which certain parts of
the world are peripheralized through colonisation, and transformed into
exporters of primary commodities for the benefit of colonising core
zones.
Wallerstein’s conception of the world-system, in which regions of the
world are sutured unequally together by the division of labour, thus
provides an account of colonisation as a key form of capitalist expansion:
colonisation is, in a crucial sense, the means through which agents of the
powerful cores gain access to new sources of labour and raw materials at
as low a cost as possible. The perspective here sheds a grim light on
late-twentieth century Structural Adjustment, illuminating the extent to
which this can be understood as seeking to preserve the earlier
world-systemic function of newly independent colonies: as Lazarus
confirms, SAPs worked to ensure ‘that postcolonial states would retain
their peripheral status, neither attempting to delink themselves from the
world-system nor […] participating in it from any position of parity’.58
Thus – returning to Shapiro – if (proto)Gothic fiction negotiated the
experience of (re)induction into capitalist relations in Europe, then
supernatural responses to the arrival or intensification of these same
relations in the (post)colonies can be read in similar terms.59 Indeed,
Shapiro makes this point himself, highlighting the appearance of folkloric
monsters in colonized East and West Africa, and linking these to
‘economic cycles’ that entail first colonial conquest, and then the later
restructuring of the socio-economic system this instantiated.60
These insights offer a means of addressing the conspicuous question
mark that lingers over the ascription of the term ‘Gothic’ to supernatural
traditions from beyond the Euro-American purview. Glennis Byron,
for example, notes ‘a concern that identifying and reading these
[non-Western] texts as Gothic is … a kind of colonial imposition’.61
While this remains to some extent a legitimate worry, the assumption on
which it rests – that Gothic is fundamentally different from other

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supernatural traditions – is complicated by the possibility that Gothic

may be one name for a wider form of cultural response to changes in the
socio-ecological order under capitalist conditions. It is worth noting, in
this respect, that in one of their influential studies, the anthropologists
Jean and John Comaroff explicitly – and unexpectedly – summon the
paradigm of Gothic criticism to address the emergence in post-apartheid
South Africa of popular occult beliefs and practices around the figure of
the zombie labourer. Though this magical being has long been a feature of
sub-Saharan folklore and cosmologies, the Comaroffs argue that its
contemporary iteration crystallises anxieties attendant on South Africa’s
incorporation into the neoliberal world-economy – a development they
liken directly to the rise of ‘Gothic fiction in late-eighteenth-century
England, where industrialisation was similarly restructuring the nature of
work and place’.62 In response to labour casualisation and unemployment
(the immediate effects of privatisation and deregulation in the South
African context), the undead worker appears as a way of mediating the
pervasive threat of extreme exploitation, and – as a figure of cheap labour
par excellence – to explain the mystifying and devastating disappearance
of stable jobs. In this way, write the Comaroffs, the South African ‘living
dead join a host of other spectral figures – vampires, monsters, creatures
of Gothic “supernaturalism” – that have been vectors of an affective
engagement with the visceral implications of the factory […] the market,
the mine’.63

Decolonial Gothic
Thus far, and drawing on Shapiro’s argument, I have traced a revised
account of the Gothic, beginning from European industrialisation and
extending backwards, forwards and outwards from there. This con-
ception does the valuable work of decentring the Gothic as a hegemonic
literary category, marking it as naming only one historical iteration of a
much larger cultural phenomenon, which is tied to the transformation of
capitalist relations. However, while this account usefully makes visible the
resonances between the Gothic and other instances of supernatural
production, I would like to suggest across the remainder of my argument
that there is nonetheless something specific about Gothic production
from those regions and communities historically subject to colonial rule.
Here, the decolonial approach I have begun to describe above becomes
salient, enabling, as I will show, a synthesis of perspectives on the Gothic
that emphasise the foundational role of capitalism, with those that
underscore the master narrative of Enlightenment.
Over the more prosaic term ‘colonialism,’ thinkers affiliated to the
decolonial school prioritise the concept of ‘coloniality’, coined by the

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Peruvian sociologist and philosopher Aníbal Quijano in his important

essay ‘Coloniality of Power’.64 While ‘colonialism’ refers only to the period
of formal domination that ends around the mid-twentieth century,
the concept of coloniality can be understood as an effort to grapple
with the contemporary world order, in which states of privilege and
insecurity continue to be distributed according to a racial principle on
both intra- and international scales. For the Caribbean author and
theorist Sylvia Wynter, ‘all our present struggles with respect to race […]
[and] ethnicity’ can be understood as effects of coloniality, including
‘struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate
change, [and] the sharply unequal distribution of the earth’s resources’.65
‘The racial axis has a colonial origin and character’, writes Quijano in the
same vein, ‘but it has proven to be more durable and stable than
the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. Therefore, the model
of power that is globally hegemonic today presupposes an element
of coloniality’.66 Capitalism is central to the theory that Quijano goes
on to elaborate, but – as he writes – ‘there is nothing in the social
relation of capital itself’ that can account for the racialisation of inequality
across the geopolitical landscape, either historically or in the present.67
To explain this, Quijano turns to the Eurocentric master narratives
consolidated during the Enlightenment period, showing how their roots
emerge in conjunction with the axial division of labour between Europe
and the early American colonies, and how they operate to legitimate the
extractive and exploitative processes that characterise this transoceanic
relation.
‘The idea of race in its modern meaning’, writes Quijano, ‘does not have
a known history before the colonization of America’, where it is invented
to organise ‘a racist distribution of labour and the forms of exploitation
of colonial capitalism’.68 Race is thus ‘a mental category’69 that makes
the world legible to capital’s fundamental demand for a peripheralized
population, but – importantly – it is also bound up with other discursive
categories that perform an analogous function. It is modelled, as Quijano
shows, on ‘the much older principle of […] gender […] domination’,70 and
is structurally inseparable from the composition of extra-human nature as
an object to be plundered. ‘Capitalism’s governing conceit is that it may
do with Nature as it pleases’ confirms the environmental historian Jason
W. Moore.71 He emphasises also that ‘Nature’ is a thoroughly racialised
and gendered Eurocentric construct: ‘indigenous peoples, enslaved
Africans, nearly all women […]. From the perspective of imperial
administrators, merchants, planters, and conquistadores, these humans
were […] regarded as part of Nature, along with the trees and soils and
rivers – and treated accordingly’.72

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Coloniality is thus a term that sheds light on the categories of gender,

race and nature that inhere in the DNA – so to speak – of the
world-system. For Mignolo, this inextricable conjunction of capital and
epistemology gives rise to what he calls the colonial difference: a subject
position situated within coloniality’s invented matrix of race, gender and
nature, which thus bears the brunt both of its epistemic impositions and
of the material degradations these legitimate. Though it is a site of
extreme violence, the colonial difference is also, Mignolo emphasises,
potentially a ‘locus of [decolonial] enunciation’:73 it provides a vantage on
the world-system from which coloniality can be identified, and from
which it might thus begin to be reconfigured. ‘Border thinking’ is
Mignolo’s term for this critical work, and refers to ‘a politics of knowledge
that is both ingrained in the body and in local histories’.74 Border
thinking begins in the colonial difference. It arises with a lived experience
of marginalisation, which may stem from the sense of inhabiting
Eurocentric discourse with ‘different bodies, sensibilities [and] memories’
to those for whom it was designed. Border thinking may also make
recourse (where possible) to non-Western epistemologies and cosmolo-
gies (to ‘modes of thinking that have been disqualified […] since the
Renaissance’),75 and overall – as Ramón Grosfoguel summarises – it
works to ‘resignify and transform dominant forms of knowledge from
the point of view […] of subaltern subjectivities’. In these ways, border
thinking serves the key decolonial intention of ‘put[ting] the colonial
difference at the centre of knowledge production’.76
With this last comment, the specificity of Gothic production in the
(putative) postcolony begins to shift into focus, and once again the
Comaroffs’ analysis of post-apartheid zombie lore is instructive.
Considered with Mignolo’s argument in mind, it is clear that these
occult discourses do not only register the violent experience of capitalist
transformation, but do so from the particular position of the colonial
difference. Anxieties around the threat of zombification emerge amid
communities historically subject to racist dehumanization in South Africa,
and to the material marginalisation and exploitation that this racism has
been implemented to validate. As they articulate these conditions in a
visceral lexicon of the evacuated human body, drawing – to do so – on
elements of African folklore and cosmology, zombie tales can thus be
understood to enabling border thinking by recentring the experience and
knowledge of those peripheralized through the operation of coloniality.77
From this perspective, the undead worker emerges as a figure loaded
with decolonial potential, and such potential inheres also, I would
suggest, in the Gothic fictions to which Ilott has referred, and which
encode – in her words – ‘the lived realities of twenty-first century

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postcolonial societies’.78 Like South African zombie lore, these narratives

can be read as figuring conditions of life in the colonial difference. They
do so in a way that consciously highlights the inequality of social and
environmental precarity, thus attesting to the ongoing alliance between
Eurocentric master narratives and capital as the still-dominant mode of
organising intra- and international relations.79 The category of postcolo-
nial Gothic, predicated as this is on the obsolescence of master narratives
generally, thus appears at odds with the operation of Gothic in these texts.
A range of contemporary fictions can be cited, in closing, to illustrate
my argument here, not least among which are two recent collections of
short stories from South Africa that explicitly ground their gothic
vocabularies in the occult discourses of which zombie lore is one
example. In the introduction to his edited anthology Hauntings (2021),
Niq Mhlongo identifies urban legend as one master code for contempor-
ary South African writing around the supernatural. Popular tales about
haunted stretches of highway, often involving the vengeful spirits of
women who died ‘at the hands of a brutal man’,80 serve as inspiration for
fiction that registers the violence and precarity of life in the contemporary
townships, and the specifically gendered terms in which this often plays
out. As Mohale Mashigo writes in the preface to Intruders (2019) – her
own collection of speculative stories – the transformation into literary
narrative of ‘South African folklore and urban legend’ provides a means
through which ‘to imagine […] this Africa we occupy right now’.81 Notably,
Mashigo sees the articulation of this reality in terms that resonate with
Mignolo’s own: as a means to complicate inherited categories that ‘don’t
fit’, and to find a narrative form that grows out of the embodied location
of writing. Such a form would be – as Mashigo puts it – ‘“my size”’.82
Other Gothic fiction from beyond South Africa can similarly be
understood as recentring the experience and knowledges of those
peripheralized through coloniality. For example, the Senegalese director
Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019) presents labour casualisation in contem-
porary Dakar as the impetus for characters making the treacherous sea
crossings to Europe, and approaches this reality through a plot structured
around the possession of the living by the dead. The backdrop to all
of this is the Atlantic Ocean: a reminder of the Middle Passage which
sutures the effects of Structural Adjustment in the present to the violent
origins of the world-system.83 Also taking up the issue of forced
migration – this time from South Sudan – Remi Weekes’s His House
(2020) represents the radical unhomeliness of a refugee couple’s
experience in Britain, the night witch that follows them across the ocean
serving both as a figuration of the traumatic violence from which they have
fled, and as an expression of the alienation they face in a country where

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the value of human life clearly remains ordered in racial terms.84 The film
thus dramatizes the experience of the colonial difference, underscoring a
pervasive coloniality that outlasts formal colonial rule.85
The same strategy is evident – lastly – in the recent series Betaal
(2020), directed by Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan.86 Here,
coloniality is vividly imagined as a battalion of zombified British imperial
soldiers, which reappears in a contemporary India where an extractivist
corporation is seeking to gain access to land and resources through the
violent dispossession of the Indigenous Adivasi people. Betaal thus
combines the plundering of the biosphere with racialised displacement,
and links these contemporary processes directly to the era of formal
colonial occupation, using the symbology of the undead both to insist that
this age has yet to be concluded, and to capture the sense of threat that
suffuses life lived under such conditions.87
The fictions in this brief and inexhaustive survey demonstrate
decolonial Gothic as I have theorised it across this article. They mobilise
supernatural figurations of threat and anxiety to grapple not with
colonialism or its aftereffects, but with coloniality as the enduring alliance
between Eurocentric master narratives of race, gender and nature, and
capitalism as a set of economic/ecological relations that link regions and
communities unequally together. Decolonial Gothic is written from the
vantage of those materially and epistemically peripheralized by this con-
junction of knowledge and power, emerging as a mode of expressing con-
ditions in diverse colonial differences, and in this way centralising the
experiences of those inhabiting these sites of violence. More than simply a
literary language for precarity, decolonial Gothic is thus also a narrative
form that affirms peripheralized regions and communities as loci of know-
ledge production, and – more properly – of the border thinking necessary
to make the world illegible to the coloniality of power. It is in this latter func-
tion that Gothic can be said to engage in the ongoing work of decoloniality.

ORCID
Rebecca Duncan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8780-417X

Acknowledgements
Research for this article was initiated during a Crafoord Foundation
Postdoctoral Fellowship, and completed with the generous support of a
Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Fellowship, both based at the Linnaeus
University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies
(Linnaeus University). I am grateful to Johan Höglund, Rune Graulund
and Karl Emil Rosenbæck for their comments during the early phases
of writing.

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 Gothic Studies 24 (2022)

Notes
1. Rebecca Duncan, South African Gothic: Anxiety and Creative Dissent in the Postapartheid
Imagination and Beyond (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2018), 140.
2. Ibid., 147.
3. Rebecca Duncan, ‘South African Gothic’, in Twenty-First-Century Gothic, ed.
Xavier Aldana Reyes and Maisha Wester (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2019), 235.
4. Sarah Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic,’ in Twenty-First-Century Gothic, ed. Xavier Aldana
Reyes and Maisha Wester (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 24.
5. Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, 24.
6. Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 107.
7. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (1994): 334.
8. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984),
xxiii.
9. Ibid., xxiii.
10. Ibid., xxiv.
11. Dirlik, ‘Postcolonial Aura,’ 348, 334.
12. Ibid.
13. Walter D. Mignolo, ‘The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference’, South
Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2002), 59.
14. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 10.
15. Gurminder K. Bhambra, ‘Post- and Decolonial Dialogues’, Postcolonial Studies 17, no. 2
(2014): 115.
16. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 237.
17. Jerrold E. Hogle and Andrew Smith, ‘Revisiting the Gothic and Theory: An
Introduction’, Gothic Studies 11, no. 1 (2009): 1.
18. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Ghost of the Counterfeit – and the Closet – in the Monk’,
Romanticism on the Net 8 (1997), https://doi.org/10.7202/005770ar
19. Fred Botting, Gothic (London: Routledge, 1996); Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic Darkly:
History, History, Culture’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter
(Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), 13–24.
20. Dale Townshend, ‘Guests, Ghosts and Hosts: Towards an Ethics of Gothic Hospitality’,
in Hospitalities: Transitions and Transgressions, North and South, ed. Merle A. Williams
(London: Routledge, 2020), Taylor & Francis Ebook, chap. 3.
21. Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of
the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8.
22. Botting, Gothic, 1.
23. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt and the Work of Mourning, trans.
Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994)
24. David Punter, ‘Arundhati Roy and the House of History’, in Empire and the Gothic: The
Politics of Genre, ed. Andrew Smith and William Hughes (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2003), 195.
25. Ibid., 194.
26. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 114, emphasis in original.

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27. Tabish Khair, The Gothic, Postcolonialism and Otherness: Ghosts from Elsewhere
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 109.
28. Punter, ‘House of History’, 195.
29. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 128, emphasis in original.
30. Ibid., 146, emphasis in original.
31. Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, 22.
32. Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, 24.
33. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 15.
34. Ibid.
35. Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, 23.
36. Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura’, 354, emphasis in original.
37. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 7.
38. Ibid., 7–9.
39. Ibid., 9.
40. Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura’, 331.
41. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 14.
42. Ibid.
43. Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura’, 347.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 354.
46. David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present
Day. Volume 2: The Modern Gothic (London: Longman, 1996), 192.
47. Jerrold E. Hogle, ‘The Gothic in Western Culture’, in The Cambridge Companion to
Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 4.
48. Fred Botting, ‘In Gothic Darkly’, 13.
49. Stephen Shapiro, ‘Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic
Periodicity’, Gothic Studies, 10, no. 1 (2008): 31.
50. Ibid., 32.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 33 emphasis in original.
53. In a forthcoming chapter, Shapiro highlights the specifically decolonial possibilities
attendant on this perspective. See Stephen Shapiro, ‘The World-System of Global
Gothic, Horror, and Weird’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, ed. Rebecca
Duncan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2023).
54. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) and
Alienated Labour (1844)’, in The Globalization and Development Reader: Perspectives on
Development and Global Change, 2nd edn, ed. J. Timmons Roberts, Amy Bellone Hite,
and Nitsan Chorev (Chichester: Blackwell, 2014), 31.
55. Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham: Duke
University Press).
56. Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis, 23, 28.
57. Ibid.
58. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, 9.
59. See the introduction to this Special Issue for a discussion of this argument as it is made
by the Warwick Research Collective; see also Sharae Deckard et al., Combined and
Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2015).
60. Shapiro, ‘Transvaal/Transylvania’, 33.
61. Glennis Byron, ‘Global Gothic’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter
(Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), 370.

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 Gothic Studies 24 (2022)

62. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, ‘Alien-nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and
Millennial Capitalism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 794.
63. Ibid., 796.
64. Aníbal Quijano, ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America’, Nepantla:
Views from the South, 1, no. 3 (2000): 533–580.
65. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards
the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument’, The New Centennial
Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 260.
66. Quijano, ‘Coloniality’, 533.
67. Ibid., 538.
68. Ibid., 534, 537.
69. Ibid., 535.
70. Ibid.
71. Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital
(London: Verso, 2015), chap. 1.
72. Jason W. Moore, The Rise of Cheap Nature’, in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature,
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland: PM Press, 2016), 79,
emphasis in original.
73. Mignolo, ‘Colonial Difference’, 61.
74. Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (De)coloniality, Border
Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience’, Confero 1, no. 1 (2013): 132.
75. Ibid., 136, 133.
76. Ramón Grosfoguel, ‘World-Systems Analysis and Postcolonial Studies’: A Call for
Dialogue from the ‘Coloniality of Power’ Approach’, in The Postcolonial and the Global,
ed. Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2007), 103.
77. A fuller discussion of the limitations and possibilities of the Comaroffs’ argument in
the context of Gothic Studies can be found in my chapter, ‘Introduction: Globalgothic
Beyond Globalisation’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, ed. Rebecca
Duncan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2023).
78. Ilott, ‘Postcolonial Gothic’, 23.
79. See also my ‘De/zombification as Decolonial Critique: Beyond Man, Nature and the
Posthuman in South African Fiction and Folklore, in Decolonizing the Undead:
Rethinking Zombies in World-Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Giulia Champion,
Roxanne Douglas and Stephen Shapiro (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 141–58.
80. Niq Mhlongo, ‘Introduction’, in Hauntings, ed. Niq Mhlongo (Johannesburg: Jacana,
2021), 9.
81. Mohale Mashigo, Intruders (Johannesburg: Picador Africa, 2018), xv.
82. Ibid., xiv.
83. Atlantique, Dir. Mati Diop, 2019, Netflix.
84. His House, Dir. Remi Weekes, 2020, Netflix.
85. For an illuminating analysis of His House as decolonial gothic, see Sheri-Marie
Harrison, ‘Decolonial Gothic’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic, ed.
Rebecca Duncan (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2023).
86. Betaal, Dir. Patrick Graham and Nikhil Mahajan, 2020, Netflix.
87. See Johan Höglund, ‘The Adivasi and the Undead: From (Post)Colonial Carnage to
Necrocene Apocalypse in Betaal (2020)’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 2
(2022): 199–211.

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