Tuesday 24 April 2018

Appendix 1: The Left Hand of Empire: the Fantastic and the Irrational in the Culture of Colonialism.


This is one of two term papers written as practice and a way of getting my thoughts together in preperation for my masters thesis which I have published on this blog here. It has been e put up here for the sake of completion. The other one has been posted here.




Introduction, Colonialism without Monsters


What is empire without its monsters?  In the historiography of the culture of empire the monsters seem conspicuously absent.  This may be because of an old Leavisite tendency in cultural studies and cultural history that favors a canonical approach to texts, wherein there is a certain prejudice against the fantastic (perhaps for reasons outlined below).  This is not important, but the fact is, much scholarly work on the subject of imperial culture[1] does not address this particular aspect.  Without the authors having intended it, one gets the impression of a well functioning “para-literary wing of the imperial project”[2], where the heroic literature of childhood turns boys into soldiers and men are absolved of any empathy by the Orientalism of the subject populations.  There is no guilt, no fear and all is rational.  No one is overwhelmed by their emotions and terror is unknown.

Not only does this prospect seem like a massive injustice to the range and complexity of the human condition, but it also ignores an important part of the actual operation of culture in the context of imperialism.  Writing within the context of the independence struggle in Algeria[3], in his introduction to Memmi’s The Coloniser and The Colonised Jean-Paul Sartre observes that the apparatus of the colonial system relies on oppression and the dehumanising of the colonised[4].  This will work itself out in the cultural discourses around the colonial project.

I. Structures of feeling and Authority


As Edward Said has put forward in his (in?)famous monograph Orientalism, the pursuit of knowledge of the Orient by scholars, map makers and colonial administrators-turned anthropologists etc. wasn’t merely an act of passive observation[5].  Applying a Foucaultian power discourse analysis to these activities he makes a compelling argument that this was actually a process of the making of the East by the West, often with a specific objective with regards to the Imperial project.  For example, he looks at the politics inherent in cartography, in which maps become practical tools of imperial penetration into unknown land.  He also notes that along side these rational discourses of the imperialist project, there existed an entire discourse of the imaginative[6].  In this essay it is my contention that this other discourse, which takes place only on the margins of the dispassionate scientific/scholarly world of orientalism, mainly within the world of the arts, is no less significant to the formation of the imperial hegemony than its rational counterpart, which it both underlies and in some ways sustains.  Through examining the two discourses in conjunction with each other we can possibly uncover an imperial structure of feeling for an emotional history of the phenomenon.

At this point it seems prudent to expand on what is meant by the term structure of feeling in the context of this essay.  In describing his own theoretical basis in the essay “Sociology and literature” Raymond Williams describes a ‘structure of feeling’ as “certain common characteristics in a certain group of writers …(and) others, in a particular historical situation”[7].  Going on from that basic assertion, and drawing on the theories of Frankfurt School, Marxists Lukács and Goldman, he extrapolates out a notion of a structure of feeling as a relation between those that produce the literature that inculcates a particular “organising view” of the world and which comes to operate in consciousness[8].  Like Marx’s notion of Capital, it is a cultural process whereby the mentality daily re-creates itself.  In the present application then, we can describe the Imperial “Structure of Feeling”, as doing the same, i.e. recreating the necessary colonial mentality in the discourses of the colonisers and their home countries, and so through the system of representations of the monstrous and inhuman does the structure re-create the colonised as unhuman and monstrous.

This was also an emotive process as the images themselves were loaded with emotional significance.  In fact, some theorists might go so far as to say that it could only have been through the solicitation of emotion and irrational impulses that the natural sympathy we as social animals feel for other members of our species could have been suppressed to create the necessary condition of dehumanisation that colonialism requires.  For example, to Theodor Adorno the Authoritarian Personality was based on the suppression of certain taboo emotions that arise from being the subject of authority and their projection onto minority groups.  Although he was writing in a different context (post-Nazi Germany)[9] and there have been some criticisms of the specifics of his approach[10], a proportion of what he has laid down (in collaboration with the other authors of The Authoritarian Personality) seems pertinent to the colonial situation, if only because varying degrees of authority need to be maintained by the colonial power.

Specifically, according to Adorno;
The authoritarian personality is characterised by the following: hostility to people of inferior status; shows contempt for weakness; is rigid and inflexible; is intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty: is unwilling to introspect feelings; will uphold conventional values and ways of life. 

This belief in convention and intolerance of ambiguity combine to make minorities 'them' and the authoritarian's membership groups 'us'

Authoriarians also project onto these groups their own unacceptable anti social impulses, especially sexual and aggressive impulses.  Their prejudice serves an ego - defensive function, which protects them from unacceptable parts of themselves.[11]

One important point made by Adorno, which is of tremendous significance to understanding the history and culture of colonialism, is how random irrational actions are inherent in the system.  Whether this is the bizarre psycho-sexual behaviour of the Japanese soldiers during the rape of Nanking, the recent treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Grahib, or a much smaller act, such as the British colonial administrator and Anthropologist ‘Cocky’ Hahn (allegedly) kicking a near naked Ovambo woman ‘between her legs’[12], these actions are not merely the result of over worked irresponsible individuals.  Rather, these actions should be seen as the inevitable result of the irrationality at the heart of the authoritarian structures necessary for the operation of the colonial system.

II. Languages of Monstrosity


This now leads to some real epistemological questions of how specific irrational discourses were constructed in history, how they were disseminated and how we may be able to reach them.

It is my contention that many answers to these questions can be found in some recent Cultural Studies’ approaches to the Fantastic and the emerging inter disciplinary field of Teratology.  It is in the horror stories, racist caricatures, and random details in the official accounts that we can draw out some of the emotions that lurk behind the post enlightenment dispassionate exterior.  Fantastic literature presents an arena of almost pure imagination on the part of the writer where ideas and symbols come together and he (and it is usually he) can tether his vision to what reality means in his time and place, to the extent that he wishes.  Of course any fictive narrative account is constructed imaginatively to some degree, even if it is based on “Real Life”[13], but the Gothic Horror genre is unique as a form of literature that is intended to produce a fearful response or a feeling of psychological disquiet.  These are stories that are meant to provoke our fears and anxieties, so naturally they will be the site of representations of the fears and anxieties of society at large (or at least among the classes that produce and consume this sort of literature).

Taken together, we can see that the symbols that are common through any civilization can constitute a language, by which I mean a system of signs and referents used to convey meaning or to represent.  While some common theories of the phenomenology of symbols seem to emphasise “the structure of symbolic language for its own sake[14]” there is a long-standing tradition that treats language as a social phenomenon that is only explicable when it is understood as a dialogic practice.  This approach, most commonly associated with Valentin Voloshinov and other early Soviet academics[15] but there are elements of it in more recent work such as Geertz’s social Anthropology[16], and has a broad application in understanding a complex of symbolic language in a social-historical context.

The Voloshinovian concept of language also gives us an indication of the social and symbolic nature of consciousness.  In the 1960s, Schachter’s famous experiment[17] found that the articulation of an emotional/chemical impulse (in that case through the administration of epinephrine) wasn’t as important to determining the way the emotion is experienced by the individual as the form of words given to it by the participant, based on the context.  Transposed to the colonial situation, one might say that the heat and stress of living in a colony in the tropics might engender a strong psycho-physiological response, but the social symbolism of the colonial experience may determine how this manifests itself as a specific emotion.

If the body of monstrous images in a society represents a language, then the monsters and the stories associated with them are the grammar and sentence structure of that language.  According to Judith Halberstam;

the monster’s body is a machine that…produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait…The monster functions…when it is able to condense as many fear producing traits as possible into one body[18].

In other words, the monster articulates numerous - even contradictory - social emotions, and by doing so recreates them.  The recent emergence of the field of teratology, the study of monsters, can therefore provide some insight into the specific functioning of monsters in relation to historical processes, such as colonialism.  For example, some critics have suggested that Frankenstein, which doesn’t overtly deal with the subject, derives much of its power as an articulation of social anxieties by drawing on the imagery of the Negro in enlightenment discourses around the abolition of slavery[19].

III. Enlightenment and the making of the Gothic unconscious


This brings us on to one of the major themes in the field of teratology, which despite the relative newness of the discipline constitutes (possibly the only) operational paradigm and certainly isn’t without relevance to the colonial monster.  This is the idea of the enlightenment as watershed in the development of the fantastic, and particularly the monstrous in western civilisation.  Whether it’s E. Michael Jones, who writes from a conservative catholic perspective[20], or Marxist oriented literary theorists like Baldick and Monleon[21] or a postmodernist like Halberstam, the social forces unleashed by political revolution in France and industrial Revolution in Britain are quite reasonably presented as creating a revolution (and counter-revolution) in the arts which established new forms of literature and a new lexicon of monstrous images. 

Indeed, as Chris Baldick points out, it is precisely at this time that the word “Monster” takes on its modern connotations.  Monster comes from the same Latin root as demonstrate and (as Foucault mentions in Madness and Civilisation[22]) until this period is something or someone that is to be shown.  This is how it is used by William Shakespear, though even in the early 17th century it is picking up the connotation of ingratitude, particularly the ingratitude of children towards their parents[23] (which would have carried obvious political connotations in a patriarchal state).  In the context of the French Revolution, it is these elements which are picked up on by conservative commentators in Britain, particularly Edmund Burke, to be deployed in their discourses around the revolution[24].  It is this imagery that is then transposed by Mary Shelly, who was both the daughter of enlightenment radicals and a significant late enlightenment thinker in her own right, into the nexus of allegories that was to become her most famous novel, Frankenstein, which is widely regarded as a milestone in, if not the beginning of, the modern Horror and Science Fictional genres and the foundation of one of the great Myths of the modern age[25].  

It is also the period that sees significant penetrations by the west into the “Far East” of the world, Tippu Sultan’s rebellion in Mysore on the Indian sub-continent, the successful slave up-rising on Saint-Domingue in the Carribean plantation complex and the, “birth of modern Orientalism”,[26] with Napoleon’s failed invasion of Egypt.

Furthermore, it is the time of a huge conceptual and epistemological shift in western thought where the notions of the rational and reason emerge in western discourses.  Science brings with it the notion of provability, a category of intellectual authority based on observation rather than faith or political power.  While the degree to which this actually represented “better” evidence or just a system of authority more orientated to the needs of the new political elites has been raised recently by the Foucaultian tradition in postmodernism, the Mythic effect of science cannot be underestimated.  The effect on the Orientalist discourse is described by Edward Said as follows;

The very language of Orientalism changed…It’s descriptive realism was upgraded… and became a means of creation.[27]

And so the irrational discourse was pushed away from the mainstream of western political economy and “serious” philosophies.  The irrational, emotional and super-natural were relegated to the margins of “scientific” discourse, classified as the “unreason” of a bygone era[28].  Although the power and influence of the institutions of Christianity meant that that particular form of the supernatural would have a continuos presence in western life, the currency of the Bible as a basis of intellectual authority was massively de-valued in the subsequent centuries and the process of secularisation was begun.  From then on when an enlightenment figure like Adam Smith, T.W. Malthus wanted to put forward an economic system that included divine providence as on of its components, he could only allude to it in terms of collective human action (i.e. The Market).  Without the institutional power of the church, other forms of supernatural belief didn’t even fare so well.

Prior to this shift in western thought, the two discourses shared a common space in the intellectual space.  The great thinkers of the previous centuries often had interests across the range of science and mysticism, one need only think of recent discoveries about Sir Isaac Newton’s alchemical investigations, or John Dee, the Magus at the Elizabethan court during the renaissance.  Dee was a noted authority on a number of subjects and saw no contradiction between expertise in cartography, mathematics and scrying[29].  Going back a few more centuries we can see how this undifferentiated structure of feeling worked with regards to colonial culture.  The History and Topography of Ireland by Gerald deBarri[30], (aka Geraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales) is a classic text of Medieval Orientalism from that age of the expansion of “Western” culture into the European hinterlands.  Its subject is the construction of Ireland as the other. Drawing together contemporary accounts of its history, mainly to indicate the fecklessness of its overlords and the vastness and richness of its countryside in a manner to entice any young Norman Aristocrat looking for a quick acquisition of land.  It also constructs the Irish as the colonial other.  Their customs are backward and strange, their religion degraded and their morals beyond the contempt of any true Christian.  The Irish are constructed as monstrous with their rituals of bloodletting to make oaths, drinking the blood of cattle and other transgressive body horrors.  What the country needs, it says implicitly all the way through, is the guidance of a more civilized peoples[31].  Significantly, it is also full of descriptions of miraculous occurrences, prophecies and monstrous births.

In Ardornian terms, one might say that as pre-enlightenment societies were structured around naked authority, particularly when that had a legitimacy based on metaphysics, of course the irrational and symbolic would have been more prevalent in the discourses of the time.  So the marginalising the irrational discourse by the young revolutionaries of the enlightenment can be read as the de-legitimising of the old order.

While in the enlightenment unreason was marginalised (often literally[32]) within the margins of culture there coalesced the gothic genre in art and fiction.  Thoughts and feelings that had been pushed out of public discourse came to rest here and this would remain the home of de-validated ideas and social anxieties until the present day.  This unending flow of the effluvia of the enlightenment would pool into the spawning grounds of monsters, monsters that were capable of reproduction.

At the same time, it is important to note how the division between Reason and Unreason was itself an important element in the constitution of otherness between the colonial powers and the colonised[33].  The feminist historian Joan Wallach Scott has remarked on the tendency to couch the division of rational and irrational in gendered terms[34].  In the colonial situation, the natives are often depicted as effeminate or womanly in various ways while the propagandists of empire in their depiction of the colonial adventurer strove for an ideal of masculinity.  These issues are no less evident in the monstrous construction of the racial other.  Judith Halberstam suggests that monsters are the products of categorical ambiguities, in race and gender/sexuality[35].  In his influential essay on Dracula[36], Stephen Arata indicates how the image of the vampire as a foreigner and his ambiguous gender and sexuality all combine into a Victorian nightmare of the colonisation of the Imperial heartlands from the margins.

One interesting thing to note about the relationship between these discourses is the way in which they inhabit the modern myth of the (false) dichotomy between brain functions in the left and right hemispheres of the brain.  Despite this view now having been thoroughly discredited, it is a persistent subject of magazine articles and is apparently being taught in schools[37].  Significantly, they are often overtly associated with bogus pop-psychological notions of an implicit biological gender difference, specifically that women or effeminate men have a more developed right hemisphere.  One might reasonably ask how long it will be before someone says something similar about the brains of Islamic terrorists or Chavistas in Venezuela?  Also, this idea has a lot of currency in contemporary popular culture, which acts as the means of transmission[38].  That we still have such things happening in this day and age is a testament to the pervasiveness of this created division between the “Real” and “Fantasy”, and its application.

Another important point raised by these applications of the discourses as we have been discussing them is the way in which the rational operates in relation to the irrational.  One of the important contributions made to our understanding of culture and meaning by Jacques Derrida is to take the Sassurian notion of difference and show how the binary oppositions that, according to Sassure, create meaning in language, are “rarely neutral and always express relations of power“[39].  Taking this into our consideration, we can see how the binary opposition between the rational and irrational in post enlightenment discourses expresses a power relation in favour of the rational discourse.  By being overtly fictive, the narratives of the fantastic validate the “non-fictive” Orientalist constructions (even as they inform them).  Concurrently, even the overtly fantastic stories contain elements, usually in their setting, that are implicitly non-fictive or at least based on the non-fictional, that are validated as fact in relation to the fantastic elements in the story.

Thus, for example, the authorial authority gives an air of informed opinion to W. Carlton Dawe’s racist musings on Chinese society in ‘Coolies’[40].  Here he talks about the cargo of Chinese coolies the ship is carrying as being inordinately (and fantastically) filthy in relation to pilgrims to Mecca the ship often carries.  The idea that Muslim pilgrims making the Haj are “human sewers”[41] is validated as the specialist knowledge of sailors in the far east, i.e. it can become part of the nexus of absorbed social prejudices that Gramsci refers to as, “common sense”[42].

That said, it would be unfair to take a totalising or homogenous view of culture as being entirely geared towards a societal project.  While ‘Coolies’, (which ends with the narrator heroically power-hosing to death his entire contingent of mutinous Chinese labourers) might rightly be seen as an imperial wish-fulfilment fantasy, there are many other stories that are no less racist but are filled with anxiety and trepidation at the entire imperialist project.  The best-known of all the late-gothic novellas[43] for example deals with the implicitly racist anxiety over the colonial adventurer “going native“, i.e. becoming as horrific as the very people he’s supposed to be bringing enlightenment to.  Furthermore, in some stories we can see some manifestations of guilt and anxiety over the easy appropriation of land and resources through the murder and dispossession of the native peoples.  Monsters in particular have always had an implicit element of dire warning not to go too far in any particular endeavor.  As Jeffery Cohen reminds us with his Fifth thesis, “The Monster Policies the Borders of the Possible”[44].  They can be both the product of hubris[45] and the punishment for it.  This is also of course the classic rendering of the primogenitor of nearly all the late modern monster stories, the Frankenstein Myth, which ironically is not how the story was in the original edition of the book but swiftly overcame the authorial intent to the point of being incorporated by Shelly into the second edition[46].

In Edward Lucas White’s Lukundoo[47] we can read many of these aforementioned elements, a monstrification of the African other, anxieties at dispossession, but also at the consumption of the European invader by Africa itself.  The story itself concerns the fate of an African explorer and anthropologist, Ralph Stone.  Stone is the paradigm of the explorer, a “notable leader of men”, a linguist extraordinaire with a great knowledge of local custom.  The incident that precipitates the events in the story is a rendition of the myth of the European invader breaking the authority of native superstition to be replaced with the authority of the white male.  The specific details are alluded to but the effect is spelt out quite explicitly and in biblical terms;

We had heard of him two years before, south of Luebo in the Balunda country, which had been ringing with his theatrical strife against a Balunda witch-doctor, ending in the sorcerer's complete discomfiture and the abasement of his tribe before Stone. They had even broken the fetish-man's whistle and given Stone the pieces. It had been like the triumph of Elijah over the prophets of Baal, only more real to the Balunda.[48]

As the narrator and his party approach the place were Stone is encamped more details emerge.  It seems that the adventurer had been stricken with a mystery ailment ‘something like carbuncles’[49].  Considering that obscure tropical diseases, and venereal disease in particular, were often the actual punishment for transgressing the boundaries of the occident it seems significant that the author chooses to make this the means of retribution for this fictional transgressor.  As they get to the camp, what actually emerges is that tiny African bodies, copies of the aforementioned Balunda witch-doctor, are pushing their way up through Stone’s skin and tormenting him in thin reedy voices so that he has to slice them off with a razor.  Here we can see embodied horrors about tropical disease combined with the fear of the invader being consumed from within by what he has invaded.  The African continually rising through the skin of the white explorer to be sliced off every time is like the continuos and unrelenting resistance of Africa to colonial domination.  Not just breaking skin, but also talking, the heads of the ‘minnikins’ engage in a running dialogue with Stone as he lies in his sickbed, almost like a guilty conscience.  Interestingly Stone’s eruptions say more than all the other African figures in the story, in fact the only other African character whose words we hear, second hand from one of the white characters, is from the civilised trading port of Zanzibar at the coast.  The Africans that are indigenous to the region the story is set in are completely silent, except for the monster.

The element of guilt is spelt out in the final words between Stone and his tormentor;

"Has she forgiven me?" Stone asked in a muffled strangle.
"Not while the moss hangs from the cypresses," the head squeaked. "Not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain will she forgive.[50]"

The “She” here is entirely ambiguous, one might say that it’s one of the women in stones life alluded to earlier, but considering the imagery used and who is speaking that doesn’t seem likely.  No, this is the gothic unconscious representing the soul of Africa to itself.  We will not be forgiven, it says, not while the moss hangs from the cypresses, not while the stars shine on Lake Pontchartrain can we be forgiven.[51]

IV. Problems and conclusions


There are some cautionary notes with the approach as outlined so far which are worthy of comment.  The first is that the approach relies on a sort of application of psychoanalysis to culture, which is problematic in some ways.  Firstly because deep psycho-analysis has a way of degenerating into an insoluble circular discourse of self-referential logic which says much more about the analyst than the subject[52].  While these criticisms aren’t entirely escapable, the historical method can bring in two important mitigating factors that balance out the problems of working completely within the realm of thought, i.e. context and empirical validity.  While contextualising an action, statement or document doesn’t automatically provide an explaination for its specific form, taken in concert with similar phenomena of the same type, it can provide a degree of probability of relevance for interpretations thereof.  Which leads us to a second criticism, that of displacing psychoanalytic methods from their therapeutic context.  Something that, it is hoped, ought to have been demonstrated so far is that collective psychology is as capable of being analysed as the undividual.  For example, Jeremy Crickler makes a strong case that social neurosis that charachterise societies in certain epochs can be the result of a mass forgetting of traumatic incidents from within recent memory[53].

There is also an epistemological issue there with regards to how the thoughts of individual writers can actually relate to society at large.  Stories are not just the product of society, but of writers.  Writing is a very specific, if heterogeneous, profession and the profession requires the writer to exercise his creative talents in a manner unlike any other.  To find an answer to this criticism, we must go back to Williams’ structure of feeling.  Williams highlights a useful notion of there being a difference between a “possible” and “actual” consciousness[54].  Actual consciousness is the widest multiplicity of thought possible in a given social group.  Possible consciousness is the maximum degree of coherence for the thought of a social group[55].  In other words, we could say that the writer, whose work it is to construct narratives, gives coherence to the elements within the group, whether this is through the practical task of scholarly construction of those outside the group, or the articulation of the groups inchoate fears of the other through its monstrous representation.  Williams also emphasises the structures within works as a means of getting at these structures within the social groups that construct them.  For example, we could take Lukundoo with its fears of the uncharted monstrous space of the African interior and the dehumanisation of the explorer Stone, along with other stories with a similar internal structuring such as A Strange Goldfeild[56] or The Wendigo[57] as indicating a general disturbance at the dehumanising effect of the fringes of civilisation.

What I hope to have established is a theoretical approach to reading the history of colonial culture through the system of representations of monstrosity in popular literature as well as the orientalist scholarship and propagandist literature for a fuller understanding of the phenomena that takes the fullest possible spectrum of human emotion into consideration.  In this fashion, we can get below the surfaces of the mentalities of other times and into the dark undercurrents of human nature, and perhaps make the seemingly irrational explicable.  It is not the function of history to provide therapy, our subjects are usually well past any need for catharsis or absolution, what we can hopefully provide is some understanding and in understanding those that have gone before us, so understand ourselves.

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            - W. Carlton Dawe ‘Coolies’ pp172-184

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[1] Such as in the recent work by Bernard Porter among others.
[2] To borrow Paddy Magee’s characterisation of the “Troubles Novel”, P. Magee Gangsters and Guerillas p17
[3] First published as a review for Temps Modernes in 1957
[4] J.P. Sartre, ‘Introduction’ in A. Memmi, The Coloniser and The Colonised p.xxviii
[5] E. Said, Orientalism p2
[6] ibid, p8
[7] in R. Williams, Problems in Material and Culture p22
[8] ibid. p22
[9] See P. McVarnock, Lecture notes
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid
[12] P. Hayes ‘”Cocky” Hahn and the “Black Venus”, The making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa, 1915-46’pp344-348
[13] Indeed one could say that Elizabeth Gaskell’s slums, or Emile Zola’s Second Empire France are as much fantasy universes as Tolkien’s Middle Earth or one of William Gibson’s visions of the future.
[14] J. Parrington, ‘In Perspective; Valentin Voloshinov’
[15] Ibid.
[16] See the parable of the winks in C. Geertz, 'Thick Description: Towards an Interpretative Theory of Culture'
[17] S. Schachter and J. Singer ‘Cognitive Social and Physiological determinants of emotional states’
[18] J. Halberstam, Skin Shows; Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters p22
[19] See. H. Malchow ‘Frankenstein's Monster and Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain
[20] See, E. M. Jones, Monsters from the Id
[21] J. Monleon, A specter is haunting Europe: a Socio-historical Approach to The Fantastic
[22] M. Foucault, Madness and Civilisation pp.68-70
[23] C. Baldick, pp11-12
[24] ibid. pp13-14
[25] This is actually the main argument of Chris Baldick’s book, which is one of the most respected and most cited in the field.
[26] E. Said, p87
[27] ibid. p87
[28] J. Monleon, pp25-6
[29] Scrying – Seeking occult knowledge through trance induced by a Crystal, bowl of water or other light reflective or light altering object.
[30] G. De Barri, The History and Topography of Ireland c. 1185
[31] In other words a more honest rendering of modern orientalism.
[32] E.g. By the removal of cemeteries and the leprous and insane away from the town centres, J. Monleon. p30
[33] See Joanna DeGroot, ‘“Sex” and “Race”: the construction of language and image in the Nineteenth Century‘ pp37-60
[34] See her critique of E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, in J.W. Scott, Gender and the politics of history, pp.68-90
[35] J. Halberstam, p22
[36] S.D.  Arata, ‘The Occidental tourist; Stoker and Reverse Colonization’ in S.D. Arata (ed.),  Fictions of Loss in the Victorian ‘Fin de Siecle’ pp107-132
[37] E.g., see Sousa, D. A. How the Brain Learns: A Classroom Teacher’s Guide
[38] See for example A. Moore, From Hell ch4 or the lyrics to the popular song by The White Stripes ‘Fell in Love With A Girl’;
“these two sides of my brain
need to have a meeting …
my left brain knows that
all love is fleeting”
-J. White
[39] C. Hall, ‘Introduction; thinking the post colonial, thinking the empire’ p17
[40] W. Carlton Dawe ‘Coolies’ in Lamb, H. (ed.) A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror pp172-184
[41] ibid, p173
[42] See A. Gramsci,. Selections from Prison Notebooks pp332-4
[43] J. Conrad, Heart of Darkness
[44] J.J. Cohen, pp.12-16
[45] See the myth of Lycaon, ibid. p13
[46] C. Baldick,
[47] E.L. White, Lukundoo in Lukundoo and other stories
[48] ibid.
[49] ibid.
[50] ibid.
[51] This point also leads us to the question of whether the gothic unconscious, as a section of idea-space away from the mainstream discourse is an inherently subversive or radical space i.e. can we read Lukundoo as radical or conservative?  This is an interesting question and an important one at that, which certainly requires more space for discussion than is currently available, but may be addressed in a future project.  For more on the radical potential of horror in art please see, N. Carroll, The Philosophy of horror pp195-206
[52] See P. McVarnock
[53] J. Crickler, ‘Social Neurosis and Hysterical Pre-Cognition’ p492
[54] R. Williams, pp23-26
[55] ibid, pp23
[56] G. Boothby ‘A Strange Goldfeild’ in Lamb, H. (ed.) A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror pp200-206
[57] A. Blackwood, ‘The Wendigo’ in Bleiler, E.F. (ed.) The Best Stories of Algernon Blackwood pp158-208

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