Post Apartheid Gothic

Post-Apartheid Gothic: White South African Writers and Space analyzes the representation of space in recent works by South African writers. By combining analytical tools borrowed from Gothic studies with geocritical and postcolonial approaches, Mélanie Joseph-Vilain assesses the literary mechanisms utilized by Damon Galgut, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Lauren Beukes, Justin Carwright, and Lynn Freed to negotiate the complexities of post-apartheid identities in their fiction. Joseph-Vilain argues that the literary representations of emblematic places, real or imagined (the home, the farm, the city or the “non-places” of dystopia), express and reveal anxieties linked to the sharing of space in post-apartheid South Africa. The text successively (re-)visits the places that have been shaping South African white writing since Olive Schreiner’s African Farm—in other words, its topoi, both in the etymological sense of “place” and in the literary sense of recurring themes or arguments. Joseph-Vilain argues that these Gothicized topoi have provided writers with tools to explore the deep anxieties generated by the redefinition of South African society as the Rainbow Nation. While focusing specifically on the South African avatars of the Gothic and their interaction with local forms and genres like the plaasroman, the text also discusses the impact of globalization on South African literary, cultural, social, and political identities.

The term ‘Gothic’ has rarely been brought to bear on contemporary South African fictions, appearing too fanciful for the often overtly political writing of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the first book-length exploration of Gothic impulses in South African literature, this volume accounts for the Gothic currents that run through South African imaginaries from the late-nineteenth century onwards. South African Gothic identifies an intensification in Gothic production that begins with the nascent decline of the apartheid state, and relates this to real anxieties that arise with the unfolding of social and political change. In the context of a South Africa unmaking and reshaping itself, Gothic emerges as a language for long-suppressed histories of violence, and for ongoing experiences at odds with utopian images of the new democracy. Its function is interrogative and ultimately creative: South African Gothic challenges narrow conceptions of the status quo to drive at alternative, less exclusionary visions.

The term ‘Gothic’ has rarely been brought to bear on contemporary South African fictions, appearing too fanciful for the often overtly political writing of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. As the first book-length exploration of Gothic impulses in South African literature, this volume accounts for the Gothic currents that run through South African imaginaries from the late-nineteenth century onwards. South African Gothic identifies an intensification in Gothic production that begins with the nascent decline of the apartheid state, and relates this to real anxieties that arise with the unfolding of social and political change. In the context of a South Africa unmaking and reshaping itself, Gothic emerges as a language for long-suppressed histories of violence, and for ongoing experiences at odds with utopian images of the new democracy. Its function is interrogative and ultimately creative: South African Gothic challenges narrow conceptions of the status quo to drive at alternative, less exclusionary visions.

This dynamic multidisciplinary collection of essays examines the uncanny, eerie, wondrous, and dreaded dimensions of oceans, seas, waterways, and watery forms of the oceanic South, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern and Indian Oceans, and around Australasia, Oceania, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa. Presenting work from leading scholars, the chapters contend with the contemporary fears and repressions associated with the return of environmental traumas, colonial traumas, and the spectres of the precolonial deep past that resurface in the present. The book examines the manifestations of these Gothic aesthetics and propensities across a range of watery spaces – seas, oceans, waterholes, and swamps – in vessels, ports, shorelines, journeys, strandings, and transformations, in amphibious bodies and the drowned, all of which promote haunted engagement with the materiality of water. This collection renews the interdisciplinary breadth of Gothic criticism and the relevance of Gothic affect and sensibility to understanding the histories and cultures of the oceanic South through an exploration of the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans, waterways, and aqueous forms of the Southern Hemisphere, haunted by colonial and precolonial imaginings of the Antipodes, the legacies of imperialism, and the “double vision” between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies, and the encroaching menace of climate change. Comprising diverse contributions from screen, literary, and cultural studies, environmental humanities, human geography, and creative practice in ecological sound art, and poetry, the collection examines the uncanny and the sublime in watery fictions and authentic settings of a range of aqueous southern forms – ocean surfaces and depths, haunted shallows and reefs, moist mangroves, moss and lichen, the awesome horror of tidal apocalypse. This book will be illuminating reading for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, area studies, and Indigenous studies.

The subject matter of this thesis all boils down to how identity is performed in South Africa: Diepe Grond focuses on identity in the Apartheid period and African Gothic in the Post-Apartheid period. Both these plays are written by South African playwright, Reza De Wet. I aim to examine the work of this playwright who exposes uncomfortable issues about South Africa's scarred past, its unstable present, and its precarious future: issues that are ignored far too often. She presents worlds in which different cultures and beliefs are not separate, yet form interweaved tapestries depicting the inherent hybridity of every South African citizen. De Wet finds a way to use language, (English and Afrikaans), culture and heightened realism to create new realities onstage, which question and challenge the existing state of society and culture in South Africa.

A transnational and transmedia companion to the post-millennial GothicKey FeaturesCovers key areas and themes of the post-millennial Gothic as well as developments in the field and revisions of the Gothic traditionConsitutes the first thematic compendium to this area with a transmedia (literature, film and television) and transnational approachCovers a plurality of texts, from novels such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (2005), Helen Oyeyemi's White Is for Witching (2009), Justin Cronin's The Passage (2010) and M.R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (2014), to films such as Kairo (2001), Juan of the Dead (2012) and The Darkside (2013), to series such as Dante's Cove (2005-7), Hemlock Grove (2013-15), Penny Dreadful (2014-16) Black Mirror (2011-) and even the Slenderman mythos.This resource in contemporary Gothic literature, film and television takes a thematic approach, providing insights into the many forms the Gothic has taken in the twenty-first century. The 20 newly commissioned chapters cover emerging and expanding research areas, such as digital technologies, queer identity, the New Weird and postfeminism. They also discuss contemporary Gothic monsters - including zombies, vampires and werewolves - and highlight Ethnogothic forms such as Asian and Black Diasporic Gothic.

Nordic Gothic traces Gothic fiction in the Nordic region from its beginnings in the nineteenth century, with a main focus on the development of Gothic from the 1990s onwards in literature, film, TV and new media. The volume gives an overview of Nordic Gothic fiction in relation to transnational developments and provides a number of case studies and in-depth analyses of individual narratives. It creates an understanding of this under-researched cultural phenomenon by showing how the narratives make visible cultural anxieties haunting the Nordic countries, their welfare systems, identities and ideologies. Nordic Gothic examines how figures from Nordic folklore function as metaphorical expressions of Gothic themes and Nordic settings are explored from perspectives such as ecocriticism and postcolonialism. The book will be of interest to researchers and post- and- undergraduate students in various fields within the Humanities.

The explosion of interest in the gothic in recent years has coincided with a number of seismic political changes that have reshaped the world as we know it. Neoliberal Gothic explores that world, considering the ways in which the exponential increase in the cultural visibility of the gothic attests to the mode's engagement with the most significant dynamics of our age. These include the triumph of free market economics, the revolution in information and communication technologies, the emergence of global biotechnologies, the increasing power of transnational corporations, the US-led 'War on Terror' and the global financial crisis of 2008. Through analysis of texts drawn from literature, film, television, theatre and the visual arts (from the Europe to South East Asia, Africa to North and South America) the collection examines the ways in which the representational strategies of the gothic mode are ideally suited to an exploration of the dark side of neoliberal enterprise.

The turn of the twenty-first century has witnessed an expansion of critical approaches to African literature. The Routledge Handbook of African Literature is a one-stop publication bringing together studies of African literary texts that embody an array of newer approaches applied to a wide range of works. This includes frameworks derived from food studies, utopian studies, network theory, eco-criticism, and examinations of the human/animal interface alongside more familiar discussions of postcolonial politics. Every chapter is an original research essay written by a broad spectrum of scholars with expertise in the subject, providing an application of the most recent insights into analysis of particular topics or application of particular critical frameworks to one or more African literary works. The handbook will be a valuable interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of African literature, African culture, postcolonial literature and literary analysis. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138713864_oachapter4.pdf