The anxious reckonings of Postcolonial Studies with its own geographical boundaries, critical timeliness, and political relevance are by now defining moments in disciplinary lore. Prompted, among other things, by its tense relationship to its own post-ness – e.g. Appiah (1991), McClintock (1992), Shohat (1992), Hall (1999) – and by its need to foundationally define the form, structure, and object of its critique – e.g. Spivak (1999), Bhabha (1994), Gandhi (1998) – a high degree of metacritical introspection has been at the core of the regenerative energy of the discipline. In the face of the transnational turn in literary studies, however, the validity of a field constrained by its own definitional limits has been repeatedly called into question as a theory for the globalized, neo-liberal present. To what extent can the postcolonial account for the current morbidities in the global system – illiberal democracy, religious fundamentalisms, refugee displacements, climate change, state capitalism, jingoistic nationalism – as the colonial recedes into the past? In response, postcolonialists – e.g. Loomba et. al. (2005), Gregory (2004), Huggan (2008) have argued for redefining the postcolonial beyond temporal periodization towards an expansive, interdisciplinary, critical project that offers a methodological toolkit for deconstructing the persisting coloniality of the contemporary, in which current geopolitical morbidities are symptoms of overlapping imperial world-systems.

This panel seeks to extend this broader project by exploring how – given the pressures of competing histories with varying degrees of visibility – the uncanny has been a core modality through which postcolonial fiction has attempted to recontextualize the geopolitical present as the late-postcolonial: a culmination of larger, continuing histories comprising multiple, intersecting imperial and neo-imperial pasts. Characterized by its etymological duality – simultaneously homely and not – the Freudian unheimlich (or uncanny) is broadly defined as a destabilizing encounter/psychological experience that unsettles the divisions between past/present, remembered/repressed, surface/depth by virtue of being recognized as both at once. Thinking the postcolonial through the mechanics of the uncanny, therefore, moves beyond poetics towards politics: an ethical problematization of the assumed linearity of the postcolonial histories. In creating a transactional space where the spatio-temporal contours of the present are negotiated, the papers in this panel suggest, the uncanny can be instrumental in revealing elided histories and repressed coloniality at the heart of the global, the national, and the interpersonal.

To this end, the three papers in this panel examine – in conversation with each other and with the field at large – the potential for the uncanny as a methodological intervention in curating the geo-temporal archives of the postcolonial. Each paper extrapolates from dedicated textual analyses to establish the many ways in which coloniality continues to haunt the present while offering paths to expand postcolonialism’s fields of care and extending the scholarship on the uncanny. To ensure time for lively and stimulating discussion, each panelist will have fifteen minutes to present their work, after which the panel chair Laura Chrisman – whose pioneering work in rethinking the postcolonial underlies the rationale for this panel – will pose questions to the audience and panelists.

Taylor Eggån’s paper will start the discussion by turning attention to the ways in which oppressive colonial systems and the failures of the decolonial nation state circulate through the architecture and infrastructure of post/colonial cities. Juxtaposing the unsettling encounters that the protagonists of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born have with the scatological contamination that permeates the textual/urban/social surface, Eggån argues for the ability of the uncanny to reveal the psychic violence that is symptomatic of postcolonial urban experience. As the protagonists’ bodies are permeated – in their traumatic encounters with urban surface – by the uncanny sensation of being turned inside out, their subjectivities are evacuated. In focusing on how both novels thematically transform this psychic violence by metaphorizing postcolonial urbanity into extensions of a body in crisis – Eggån argues for ability of the uncanny to speak to the lasting effects of colonial infrastructures on the post/colonial subject.

Turning its attention to a different geography and scale, Désirée Díaz’s paper analyzes the uncanny as it manifests in Dominican author Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Omincule – an Afro-cyberpunk novel which takes place in a futuristic, dystopian Caribbean island that is succumbing to the effects of ecological and political disasters. In light of the novel’s deployment of forgotten Afro-Caribbean traditions as the only strategies of knowledge/power that can reverse postcolonial ecological decline, Díaz explores the uncanny tension between the disastrous effects of colonization and imperialism in the Caribbean and the region’s conflictive relationship to a traumatic past that is nonetheless foundational to the shaping of the same cultural, diasporic identities and epistemological tools the region must deploy in its reparative ecological practices. In so doing, Díaz weighs in on the potential for the uncanny to both reflect the frictive impacts of the postcolonial and to speak to the recent disciplinary focus on ecological crisis in the Anthropocene.

Offering another angle on the late-postcolonial uncanny, Sohini Banerjee’s contribution juxtaposes Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup to pick at the uncanny as the process of being unhomed, inextricably linked to questions of immigration, displacement and more currently: the refugee crisis. Building on the fact that both novels follow displaced protagonists who embody the uncanny ruptures in the life of their adopted landscapes, provoking, in turn, their homed counterparts, to recognize and re-evaluate their own modes of geo-political, psycho-social belonging, Banerjee explores the ways in which postcolonial histories manifest in the interpersonal distance that defines the self from the Other and the citizen from the immigrant. To this end, Banerjee outlines the ability of the uncanny to reveal how contemporary migrant routes and the “otherness” ascribed to refugees are in conversation with patterns of colonization, settler-colonial migrations across the globe, and imperially influenced, neo-liberally created global impoverishment. In so doing, Banerjee’s contribution paves a way for a disciplinary intervention in the literature around the refugee crisis often distanced from postcolonial histories by political rhetoric.