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This essay, read against the frameworks of the male and female Gothic plots, unpacks and reconfigures the motif of "haunting" to address the interrelation between notions of sexuality, gender, and national belonging in two Malaysian short stories.
In their introductory essay to the collection Empire and the Gothic, Andrew Smith and William Hughes demonstrate the affinity between postcolonial literature and the Gothic, especially in both discourses' interrogation and rejection of the "Enlightenment notion of rationality" that consigns differences (including racial otherness) to marginal, demonized spaces (2). Smith and Hughes's collection provides an important contribution to the comparative studies between literatures of the East and West, especially with regard to aspects of the transgressive and the unspeakable. Asian literature is rich with narratives of haunting, the uncanny, and the monstrous, but lacks the trope or a critical heritage to discuss these matters. In the case of postcolonial writing, the deployment of such a critical tool is particularly helpful: postcolonial literature straddles the literary inheritance of both its pre-colonial and colonial histories, from which a synthesis of a post-colonial, and often nationalistic, literature is derived. Such a syncretism of literary cultures would not be without its resulting ambiguities and fissures, and this is where the Gothic-with its emphases on liminality, ambiguity, ghosts, transgressions, and taboos-proves most useful as an aesthetic tool to illuminate the palimpsests that become "repressed" in the process of writing the nation. Thus, rather than viewing a Gothic reading of postcolonial writings as once again submitting Asian-ness to a neo- Imperialistic gaze (a strategy that Gina Wisker employs in her reading of two South East Asian women writers'work as postcolonial Gothic in the essay "Showers of Stars"), I am of the opinion that reading postcolonial writings through a Gothic lens can provide interesting insights into the interstitial conditions, which are often fraught with fear and confusion, of the postcolonial subject.More importantly, however, is the critical dialogue that is afforded by such a comparative study. This kind of complementary reading will significantly sharpen the critical edges of both discourses.
Postcolonial literature within the Asian region has largely been dominated by South Asian, especially Indian, writers. This has often resulted in the eclipsing of writers in English, both commercially and critically, from other regions of...