Failed Heterotopias: The Postcolonial Gothic in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and Anna Burns’s Milkman

Abstract

‘Failed Heterotopias’ reads three contemporary postcolonial gothic novels, Anna Burns's Milkman (2019), J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999), and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997) using Michel Foucault’s understanding of heterotopias alongside Homi Bhabha’s term unhomeliness. What emerges is an understanding of how the ‘post’ in postcolonial literature belies the way power continues to function in these societies. These readings reveal how histories of oppression persist even after the end of colonialism. The structures that emerge to take their place continue to buttress imperial standards that often result in the containment and enclosure of threatening forces. For this essay, those threats are women who attempt to imagine an alternative way of being in the world – through literary escapes, communal living, and forbidden love affairs. Such moments suggest that the heterotopic possibilities presented by these characters are foreclosed through patriarchal, racist, classist, and sexist forces at work in the texts. By reading these scenarios across a range of Anglophone novels, this essay uncovers patterns of oppression that, while varying across time and space, show the ways in which power, no matter who holds it, continues to push those most oppressed further from the centres of power.