This “spectral turn” sees minority writers reversing long-standing characterizations of their identity as “monstrous” or invisible in order to show their connections to and disconnection from stories of the nation. In recent years, however, minority authors have shown an interest in the gothic, signalling an emerging critical discourse. Given the preponderance, in colonial discourse, of accounts that demonize otherness, it is not surprising that many minority writers have avoided gothic metaphors. As these essays demonstrate, formulations of a Canadian postcolonial gothic differ radically from one another, depending on the social and cultural positioning of who is positing it. In Canadian literature, the “postcolonial gothic” has been put to multiple uses, above all to figure experiences of ambivalence that have emerged from a colonial context and persisted into the present. In recent years, many Canadian authors have turned to the gothic to challenge dominant literary, political, and social narratives. The haunting effect can be unsettling and enabling at the same time. Many of these texts wrestle with Canada’s colonial past and with the voices and histories that were repressed in the push for national consolidation but emerge now as uncanny reminders of that contentious history. The essays gathered here range from treatments of early postcolonial gothic expression in Canadian literature to attempts to define a Canadian postcolonial gothic mode. Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic examines how Canadian writers have combined a postcolonial awareness with gothic metaphors of monstrosity and haunting in their response to Canadian history. These writings could be read as poetical and political strategies of dissent that innovate within the genre of speculative fiction. We will try to examine a range of subversive metamorphoses of the female body in recent speculative fiction by Cecilia Eudave, Socorro Venegas, Mariana Enríquez, Samanta Schweblin, Valeria Correa-Fiz, Florencia del Campo, Agustina Bazterrica or María Fernanda Ampuero. This essay tries to analyse these speculative narratives which we will call hemispheric and which bear some resemblance from the north to the south of the continent, for different political and traumatic reasons, focusing especially on their cinematic deployment of the HomeSpace horror, childhood memories and physical and psychological boundaries which chain us to our ancestors’ memories. An important group of unusual creatures in the contemporary fiction of Latin American women authors seem to «crawl out of their skins» (Himani Bannerji). This paper interprets the way in which transnational writers use monstrosity and the uncanny to investigate the concept of the HomeSpace with dissent.
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