Ghosts of the plantation: sugar, narrative energetics and gothic ecologies in Fiji

ABSTRACT

This article examines gothic representations of the sugarcane plantation in literature from Fiji. Focusing on Indo-Fijian texts, including Totaram Sanadhya’s ‘The Story of the Haunted Line’ (1922) and Subramani’s The Fantasy Eaters (1988), it shows how ghostly encounters and uncanny returns evoke not only the haunting memories of indenture but also the violent rushes and energy-depleting crashes generated by sugar. As a ‘vampire crop’, sugar is seen to exacerbate the slow violence of food insecurity, the threat of mosquito-borne disease, the gendered exhaustion of fertility and the speculative organisation of life into sources of ‘cheap energy’. In imagining sugar’s gothic ecologies, the texts ground human subjects within the multispecies work/energy system of the plantation, anticipating the ‘ghosts’ of its social, economic and environmental legacies.

KEYWORDS:

• Sugar
• energy
• gothic aesthetics
• plantation writing
• Fijian literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Jennifer Wenzel notes how ‘the relationship between realism and magic tends to be read as a binary opposition between the West and the rest, between a singular (European) modernity and multifarious worldviews variously described as pre-modern, pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment, non-Western, traditional, or indigenous’. Her term ‘petro-magic-realism’ offers a useful corrective to the delocalising association of ‘magic’ with non-Western ‘tradition’: ‘If petro-magic offers the illusion of wealth without work’, Nigerian writers such as Tutuola and Okri ground this ‘vision in a recognisably devastated, if also recognisably fantastic, landscape.’ (2006, 456). Pacific ghosts can of course be read outside of this ecocritical context, for example in plays by Vilsoni Hereniko and John Kneubuhl (see Heim 2017).

2. Sanadhya narrated his experiences to Banarasi Das Chaturvedi, a Hindi writer and anti-indenture campaigner, and his account was influenced by the latter’s thought (Kumar 2017, 163). ‘The Story of the Haunted Line’ was first published in the Benares-based Hindi journal Maryada around 1922 (Lal and Shineberg 1991, 107).

3. Marx was influenced by Justus von Liebig’s use of the term metabolism (Stoffwechsel).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caitlin Vandertop

Caitlin Vandertop is assistant professor at the University of Warwick. She taught previously at the University of the South Pacific’s Laucala campus in Fiji. She is the author of Modernism in the metrocolony: urban cultures of empire in twentieth-century literature (Cambridge University Press, 2020).