South African Gothic

South African Gothic provides the first sustained exploration of Gothic forms in South African literature. The book identifies dominant Gothic themes and motifs in late- and post-apartheid writing by both canonical and emerging authors, and it situates these Gothic trends in relation to earlier Gothic fictions written in the country during the colonial period.

South African Gothic locates the roots of late- and post-apartheid Gothic production in anxieties that proliferate over the transition from apartheid democracy, during a period of dramatic social and political change. It thus underscores the close relationship between Gothic imaginaries and the local contexts in which they emerge, pointing in particular to Gothic’s tendency to appear at times of seismic upheaval, when the established structures of a certain reality become fluid, uncertain and unpredictable.
South African Gothic argues that Gothic forms in South African literatures constitute strategies of what the book terms "creative dissent". South Africa’s contemporary Gothic fictions consistently interrogate the particular structures of the status quo in which they are produced; they retrieve and disclose the violences that inhere in both apartheid and post-apartheid configurations of reality. As they do so, they creatively re-imagine the terms of their presents: they conjure violence in the interest of critiquing and thus arresting the perpetuation of violence, recomposing the fragments of history into something new and potentially hopeful.

By Rebecca Duncan