In accordance with Gina Wisker and Tabish Khair, (Post-) Colonial studies and Gothic fiction overlap in the theory of ‘Othering’ or ‘Otherness’, meaning the process of categorising a group, an individual or an object as the ‘other’. In Wisker’s view, the theory of ‘Othering’ “exclude[s] and destroy[s] or recognize[s] the rich differences of an Other we construct in order to somehow feel clearer and more secure about our own stable identities” (“Postcolonial Gothic” 169). Tabish Khair argues “the Other is seen as a Self waiting to be assimilated … or the Other is cast as the purely negative image of the European Self, the obverse of the Self” (4). Hence, the Other is characterised by its inferiority towards the European identity. Bill Ashcroft …show more content…
First, considering marginalization as well as depreciation, characters in postcolonial discourse tend to “re-animate the traumas of their colonial past to produce Gothic narratives” (Gelder 181). Consequently, postcolonial writings are comparable with Gothic stories in terms of portraying places and/or individuals being haunted by those spirits, who had been oppressed in the imperial past. Furthermore, Gothic concepts of transgression can be adapted to postcolonial reading by challenging the colonisers’ morality in exploiting not only the Other’s lands and goods, but also devaluating their values and traditions in order to create a community assimilated to the Western World. Thus, while Gothic stresses transgression in terms of challenging nature, reason and rationality, postcolonial discourse transgresses threshold of pivotal humiliation and disregard of general human rights. In addition, the concept of colonial Gothic writing differs in the settings it emphasises. On the one hand, writers can focus on the Other’s influence in one’s familiar surroundings, particularly Great Britain. On the other hand, the plot can concentrate on the coloniser’s experiences abroad, indicating the encounter between the coloniser and native people in a, for the coloniser, foreign and strange place (cf. Warwick 261). The coloniser’s experience abroad indicates anew Otherness, meaning, “both landscape and people are seen as uncanny, beyond the possibilities of explanation in European terms” (ibid. 262). In Gothic fiction, the action of the stories moves mainly to foreign countries too. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto takes place in Southern Europe, emphasising the idea that the terror and horror depicted in the story will never come to one’s familiar surroundings. Hence, Gothic novels coincide with the coloniser’s experiences abroad, illustrating