Gothic Realism and Other Genre F(r)ictions in Contemporary Black Canadian Writing

Abstract:Focusing on works by Wayde Compton and Esi Edugyan, this essay analyzes the mix of realism, the gothic, and other speculative forms in contemporary Black Canadian writing to consider the kind of literary-historical and political work this mix performs. I address current debates about the “genre turn” (Rosen) as well as the (re)turn of/to realism in contemporary literature, and I argue that a supplementary logic governs the introduction of the speculative or gothic within realism in Black Canadian works attentive to the occlusions of the historical archive. The friction between realism and the speculative more than “highlight[s] the gaps . . . in the national imaginary” (16), as Cynthia Sugars has argued of the gothic: it also allows writers to introduce a different epistemology, a different ontology, and a different model of the social. In writing both in the “realist prose” (Chakrabarty 35) of the current political arrangements and the languages those arrangements cannot or will not speak, Compton and Edugyan not only make perceptible sites of knowing and being that are outside of the present order but ground collective socio-political imagining anew.