Post-Apartheid Gothic Fiction

[alice malice]

In contrast to fictions of the South African  interregnum, which
reflect a perplexed unease most powerfully focussed on the future, the
narratives which emerge in the years after democracy – in the time
following from the 1994 election and the beginning of the Mandela
administration – frequently locate anxiety in the collective past.
This body of texts has been collected under the broad heading of the
‘transition’ and might further be linked together by a general concern
with recent South African history, and, more specifically, with the
un-burying of that which it  became the purpose of the apartheid
government to suppress. ‘[T]he most characteristic and pervasive
tropes in the writing of the period,’ Rita Barnard points out, taking
her cue from Shane Graham, ‘have been the archive, the palimpsest and
the excavation … all of which are concerned with the retrieval and
revelation of what is latent and repressed’ (Barnard 2012: 657). Of
course, the Gothic too is intensely interested in this project of
unearthing and constantly presents us with scenarios in which history
refuses to remain anterior but resurfaces insistently, disturbing the
present. Jerrold Hogle, in particular, situates the dynamic of
incessant return in an especially prominent position.

http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/guestblog/unburying-the-past-post-apartheid-gothic-fiction/

Punter, David and Glennis Byron. 2004. The Gothic. Malden, Oxford,
Victoria: Blackwell.

cited in this Dis on the Gothic in Pynchon, Lynch, Erickson.

http://etd.nd.edu/ETD-db/theses/available/etd-04162009-143040/unrestricted/PaiceB042009D.pdf
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