Unsettled Remains

Description

Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic examines how Canadian writers have combined a postcolonial awareness with gothic metaphors of monstrosity and haunting in their response to Canadian history. The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada’s colonial past and with the voices and histories that were repressed in the push for national consolidation but emerge now as uncanny reminders of that contentious history. The haunting effect can be unsettling and enabling at the same time.

In recent years, many Canadian authors have turned to the gothic to challenge dominant literary, political, and social narratives. In Canadian literature, the “postcolonial gothic” has been put to multiple uses, above all to figure experiences of ambivalence that have emerged from a colonial context and persisted into the present. As these essays demonstrate, formulations of a Canadian postcolonial gothic differ radically from one another, depending on the social and cultural positioning of who is positing it. Given the preponderance, in colonial discourse, of accounts that demonize otherness, it is not surprising that many minority writers have avoided gothic metaphors. In recent years, however, minority authors have shown an interest in the gothic, signalling an emerging critical discourse. This “spectral turn” sees minority writers reversing long-standing characterizations of their identity as “monstrous” or invisible in order to show their connections to and disconnection from stories of the nation.

Informations

• Publié par: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Date de parution: 27 août 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554588008
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

UNSETTLED REMAINS
UNSETTLED REMAINS
CANADIAN LITERATURE AND THE POSTCOLONIAL GOTHIC
EDITED BY
CYNTHIA SUGARS AND GERRY TURCOTTE
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Unsettled remains : Canadian literature and the postcolonial gothic / Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55458-054-5
1. Gothic revival (Literature)-Canada. 2. Postcolonialism in literature.
3. History in literature. 4. Ambivalence in literature. 5. Canadian fiction (English)-20th century-History and criticism. I. Sugars, Cynthia, [date] II. Turcotte, Gerry
PS8191.G6U57 2009 C813 .0872909054 C2009-900095-4
2009 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image by Rosalie Favell, I awoke to find my spirit had returned (1999), from the series Plain(s) Warrior Artist.
Cover design by Blakeley Words+Pictures.
Text design by Daiva Villa, Chris Rowat Design.
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
INTRODUCTION Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte
CHAPTER ONE Catholic Gothic: Atavism, Orientalism, and Generic Change in Charles De Guise s Le Cap au diable Andrea Cabajsky
CHAPTER TWO Viking Graves Revisited: Pre-Colonial Primitivism in Farley Mowat s Northern Gothic Brian Johnson
CHAPTER THREE Coyote s Children and the Canadian Gothic: Sheila Watson s The Double Hook and Gail Anderson-Dargatz s The Cure for Death by Lightning Marlene Goldman
CHAPTER FOUR Horror Written on Their Skin : Joy Kogawa s Gothic Uncanny Gerry Turcotte
CHAPTER FIVE Familiar Ghosts: Feminist Postcolonial Gothic in Canada Shelley Kulperger
CHAPTER SIX Canadian Gothic and the Work of Ghosting in Ann-Marie MacDonald s Fall on Your Knees Atef Laouyene
CHAPTER SEVEN A Ukrainian-Canadian Gothic?: Ethnic Angst in Janice Kulyk Keefer s The Green Library Lindy Ledohowski
CHAPTER EIGHT Something not unlike enjoyment : Gothicism, Catholicism, and Sexuality in Tomson Highway s Kiss of the Fur Queen Jennifer Henderson
CHAPTER NINE Rethinking the Canadian Gothic: Reading Eden Robinson s Monkey Beach Jennifer Andrews
CHAPTER TEN Beothuk Gothic: Michael Crummey s River Thieves Herb Wyile
CHAPTER ELEVEN Keeping the Gothic at (Sick) Bay: Reading the Transferences in Vincent Lam s Bloodletting Miraculous Cures Cynthia Sugars
CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
INTRODUCTION Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic
Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte
Dead bodies can talk if you know how to listen to them, and they want to talk.
-Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead
How is it we can live / with how we forget them.
-Steven Heighton, Graveyard in the North Country
Postcolonial and gothic discourses have for some time been paired in critical invocations of the unhomely or spectral legacies of imperialism and globalization. 1 This legacy, which appears in the form of unresolved memory traces and occluded histories resulting from the experience of colonial oppression, diasporic migration, or national consolidation, is readily figured in the form of ghosts or monsters that haunt the nation/subject from without and within. In Specters of Marx , Jacques Derrida insists that [h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony (1994, 37), and the recognition of the always already phantom that haunts the literary, the political, the social, and the corporate has compelled writers to seek out appropriate metaphors to represent such phenomena. Homi Bhabha is perhaps the most well-known postcolonial theorist to invoke the Freudian uncanny as a way of articulating the ambivalence of colonial power structures, although Frantz Fanon, a practising psychiatrist, had used Freudian theory years before to elucidate the psychology of colonialism ([1952] 1967; [1961] 1966). Edward Said s ground-breaking study, Orientalism (1978), explored the ways the Orient emerged in colonialist documents as a discursive construct characterized by exotic and gothic fantasies of fear and desire. In 1989, this project was applied in a settler context by Terry Goldie, who used a similar approach to uncover the ways the figure of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand literatures was disseminated through gothic tropes of savagery, sexuality, and primitivism. Contemporary critical texts such as Avery Gordon s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (1997) and Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs s Uncanny Australia (1998) argue that the postcolonial nation is haunted by ghost stories and that the reappearance of these suppressed stories or histories produces an uncanny and haunted space in the narratives of nationhood. In the context of Canadian literary and cultural studies, such critics as Diana Brydon (1995; 2003), Justin Edwards (2005), Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul (2006), Sneja Gunew (2004), Jonathan Kertzer (1998), Alan Lawson (1995), Roy Miki (1998), Stephen Slemon (1990), Cynthia Sugars (2003; 2004a and b; 2006a and b), and Gerry Turcotte (1998a and b; 2004) have made use of the notion of unhomely unsettlement to describe various engagements with, and subjections to, the post-colonial Canadian nation-state. 2
This volume engages with the intersection of gothic modes of influence in a settler-invader postcolonial context. In particular, it attempts to unpack the manifestations of the Gothic in Canada as a transplanted form. Alan Lawson and Stephen Slemon describe the inherent, yet often occluded, instability of settler-invader locations, specifically their in-between positioning between two origins of authority and authenticity: the originating world of Europe, the imperium [and] that of the First Nations, whose authority the settlers not only effaced and replaced but also desired (Lawson 1995, 29). Both critics highlight aspects of ambivalence, liminality, mimicry, boundary dissolution, and epistemological destabilization that characterize the negotiations that occur in these locations. Viewed in this way-and, admittedly, positioned from the perspective of a White settler rather than that of an Aboriginal subject-settler locations would seem to invite gothic figuration, not only in terms of the monstrous or grotesque (as Margot Northey outlines in her study) but also in terms of subjective and national interiority and unsettlement. It is the latter categories that more typically characterize the postcolonial Gothic in Canadian literature, which is concerned less with overt scenes of romance and horror than with experiences of spectrality and the uncanny. In many of these works, there is an aura of unresolved and unbroachable guilt, as though the colonial/historical foundations of the nation have not been thoroughly assimilated. If early instances of the Gothic in Canadian literature, as in John Richardson s 1832 novel Wacousta , were concerned with terror in the face of the unknown wilderness (see Hurley 1992; Turcotte 2009a), a more recent strain of gothic literature in Canada has been less preoccupied with an overtly externalized and alien sense of gothic otherness that is out there and more concerned with an interiorized psychological experience of gothic uncanniness and illegitimacy.
The uncanny is one among many possible manifestations of the Gothic, yet it provides a key hinging point for expressions of territorial and historical dispossession and inauthenticity. The term uncanny, as Sigmund Freud defines it, is integrally linked to the paradox of home and unhomeliness -those moments when the familiarity of home (or what should be the familiarity of home) is infected by unhomeliness and elicits an uncanny or unsettling experience ([1919] 1956). Instances of this effect include scenes where the distinction between past and present, real and spectral, civilized and primitive, is tenuous and disjunctive. When the uncanny is combined with the Gothic, elements of the supernatural, the monstrous, or the paranormal are foregrounded. When these are conjoined with the postcolonial, it takes a variety of possible tacks: fears of territorial illegitimacy, anxiety about forgotten or occluded histories, resentment towards flawed or complicit ancestors, assertions of Aboriginal priority, explorations of hybrid cultural forms, and interrogations of national belonging and citizenship. All of these phenomena point to the continuing legacy of colonial history in settler-invader cultures, lingering traces that reveal the return of the colonial moment in the narratives through which our ambiguously postcolonial cultures characterize themselves and their tendentious histories (Lawson 1995, 32, 20). Even more crucial are fears that the Gothic is itself a mode that can never be i