Abstract
While their fantasies of interracial and transnational alliances do not always succeed, the texts I have discussed in the first two chapters of this book evince a certain interest in the political and aesthetic possibilities of utopian thinking. Key elements of the romance, including the heterosexual couple, are transformed and reimagined in the process, allowing for new versions of both romance and politics. In the next two chapters I turn to texts that present the more utopian strain of romance not as a narrative vehicle for moments of progressive transformation in social relationships, but as the means by which forces of colonialism and globalization harness affect to projects of exploitation and bodily harm. Suspicious of romance’s colonial roots and seductive affects, these texts draw upon a tradition that has historically served as the generic dark side to the romance’s lofty thinking: the gothic. Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, with its monstrous gothic (anti)heroine; Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, with its imprisoned women and invisible workers; and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest, with its living organ banks for wealthy Western clients, all draw upon the gothic in new and innovative ways that demonstrate the relevance of the form for the era of neocolonialism and globalization.
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Notes
Andrew Smith and William Hughes, “Introduction: The Enlightenment Gothic and Postcolonialism,” Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–2.
James Proctor and Angela Smith, “Gothic and Empire,” in The Routledge Companion to the Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 97.
Gina Wisker, Horror Fiction: An Introduction (New York: Continuum, 2005), 174. Qtd. in
Lily 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), 205. See also Wisker, “Crossing Liminal Spaces: Teaching the Postcolonial Gothic,” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 7.3 (2007): 401–25.
David Punter and Glennis Byron, “Postcolonial Gothic,” in The Gothic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 55.
See Giselle Liza Anatol, “Speaking in (M)other Tongues: The Role of Language in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 938–53;
Louise Bernard, “Countermemory and Return: Reclamation of the (Postmodern) Self in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and My Brother,” Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (Spring 2002): 114–37;
Jana Evans Braziel, “Alterbiographic Transmutations of Genre in Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Biography of a Dress’ and Autobiography of My Mother,” A/B: Auto/Biography Studies 18.1 (2003): 85–104; and
Gary E. Holcomb and Kimberly S. Holcomb, “I Made Him: Sadomasochism in Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother,” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 969–76.
See Moira Ferguson, “A Lot of Memory: An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” Kenyon Review 16.1 (Winter 1994): 176–7.
See Penguin’s “Reading Group Guide” for Kincaid’s novel at of_my_mother.html. The novel was also marketed directly to African American readers. An excerpt from the section in which Xuela meets Roland appeared in Essence in March 1996, and the online African American Literature Book Club lists the book as one of its “10 best sellers.” Nathaniel Sheppard, “New Club Brings Black Authors Online,” Emerge 9.9 (August 1998): 30.
See Greg Thomas, The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power: Pan-African Embodiment and Erotic Schemes of Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 108.
Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 88–9. Qtd. in
Cedric Gael Bryant, “‘The Soul Has Bandaged Moments’: Reading the African American Gothic in Wright’s ‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’ Morrison’s Beloved, and Gomez’s Gilda,” African American Review 39.4 (Winter 2005): 548.
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume, 1996), 3–4. All further references to the novel are from this edition and will be cited within the text.
In an interview, Kincaid claims, “I wouldn’t have known my ideas of justice if I hadn’t read Paradise Lost, if I hadn’t been given parts of Paradise Lost to memorize.” Donna Perry, “Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 493–509, 507. Qtd. in Gregg, “How Jamaica Kincaid Writes,” 922.
Kathryn E. Morris, “Jamaica Kincaid’s Voracious Bodies: Engendering a Carib(bean) Woman,” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 954.
Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 103–50.
In a wonderful essay on shame about indigenous spiritual knowledge in West Indian fiction, Rhonda Cobham argues that Kincaid’s story about the beautiful river goddess who lures children to their death is “a particularly rich site for investigating how people imagine and interpret the connection between Africa and the Caribbean. The figure is immediately recognizable from her description as the West African Mammywata, known in Jamaica as ‘River Mumma’ and associated loosely with such traditional African goddesses as the Ibo, Uhamiri/Idemili, and the Yoruba, Osun.” See Cobham, “‘Mwen Na Rien, Msieu’: Jamaica Kincaid and the Problem of Creole Gnosis,” Callaloo 25.3 (2002): 871.
Selwyn Cudjoe, “Jamaica Kincaid and the Modernist Project: An Interview,” Callaloo 12.2 (1989): 403–4. Qtd. in Gregg, “How Jamaica Kincaid Writes,” 924.
For a representative positive review of the novel, see Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Life (and It’s Cheap) in a Colonized Culture,” New York Times (March 22, 1990). For a critique of the book’s supposed formal capitulation to Western readers, see E. San Juan, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the United States (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities International Press, 1992).
Rachel C. Lee, The Americas of Asian American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999), 74.
Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction,” The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002), 14. Italics in original.
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Penguin, 1990), 156. All further references to the novel are from this edition and will be cited within the text.
On the history of the bakla in the Philippines, see Viet Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 131–5; and
Victor Mendoza, “A Queer Nomadology of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,” American Literature 77.4 (December 2005): 815–16. On bakla identity in the diaspora, see
Martin Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
Juliana Chang, “Masquerade, Hysteria, and Neocolonial Femininity in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters,” Contemporary Literature 44.4 (Winter 2003), 642.
Fred Botting, The Gothic (New York: D.S. Brewer, 2001), 1.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4. I owe a debt to Andrea Fontenot here for her brilliant paper on the alliance between reproductive futurism and global capitalism in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men at the 2008 Modern Language Association conference.
Lawrence Cohen, “The Other Kidney: Biopolitics Beyond Recognition,” in Commodifying Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loïc Wacquant (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), 12. Shital Pravinchandra also discusses Cohen’s work in the context of Padmanabhan’s play in her essay “The Third-World Body Commodified: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest,” eSharp 8 (Autumn 2006): 6.
David Michaelson, Concerto for the Left Hand: Disability and the Defamiliar Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 199.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes develops this term in “The Ends of the Body: Commodity Fetishism and the Global Traffic in Organs,” SAIS Review 22.1 (2002): 65.
Helen Gilbert, “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest: Global Technoscapes and the International trade in Human Organs,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16.1 (2006): 127.
Manjula Padmanabhan, Harvest (London: Aurora Metro Press, 2003), 86. All further citations from the play are from this edition and will be cited within the text.
John Frow, “Bodies in Pieces,” in The Body in the Library, ed. Leigh Dale and Simon Ryan (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), 35–51, 49. Qtd. in Gilbert, “Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest,” 128.
Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
Rosellen Brown, “The Year in Fiction: 1990,” The Massachusetts Review 32.1 (Spring 1991): 130–1.
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© 2013 Emily S. Davis
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Davis, E.S. (2013). The Gothic Global: Capitalist Excesses, Postcolonial Returns. In: Rethinking the Romance Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137371874_4
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