Abstract
'Maritime culture and literature are shot through with spectral, spookish, and supranatural motifs and narratives associated with Gothic traditions, and landed perspectives on the "alterity" and alienness of the ocean (Probyn, Eating) yield myriad imaginings of haunting, uncanny, and eldritch realms and beings that align with Gothic imaginaries. Yet as Emily Alder, in a special issue of Gothic Studies, has pointed out, these complex intersections between the Gothic, seas, and seafaring are largely unexplored, and "the main question is why they are so rarely examined" (1-2). Whereas Alder's selection represents the North Atlantic and Northern European "nautical" Gothic traditions, this multidisciplinary collection, Gothic in the Oceanic South, explores the rarely considered uncanniness of the oceans and waterways of the Southern Hemisphere, a haunted global precinct stretching across the Pacific, Southern, and Indian Oceans that Meg Samuelson and Charne Lavery define as "the oceanic South" and "hemispheric South" (Lavery and Samuelson; Samuelson and Lavery). They define the "oceanic South" as "a category that draws together the dispersed landmasses of the settler South, the decolonized and still colonized South, the 'sea of islands' comprising Indigenous Oceania, and the frozen continent of Antarctica" (38). Our project is to investigate the Gothic proclivities of these southern waters and oceans of this vast region, and it is also stimulated by Margaret Dolly's description of Oceania as defined by a "double vision" (532), between Oceanic and settler-colonial epistemologies. This frisson invites scrutiny of the regional myths and materialities, the colonising and decolonising effects of the uncanny and the sublime.' (Introduction)
