Abstract/Summary

Marlon James peoples A Brief History of Seven Killings with Gothic tropes: a “white duppy,” and a landscape haunted by buildings, forts, and plantations from Jamaica’s slave and colonial pasts. This article interprets these motifs alongside similar ones used in late twentieth-century Caribbean Gothic fiction. It argues that the theme of haunting in this genre and in James’s novel highlights both colourism’s legacy of terror on dark-skinned Caribbeans, and the archipelago’s inability to make a radical break from its pigmentocratic past initiated under slavery. In Brief History, the violence visited on Kingston’s dark-skinned communities by rude boys working under the aegis of Jamaica’s brown political elite (what Obika Gray terms “predation politics”) is another manifestation of the violence practised under slavery and colonization. Through the trope of zombification, characters are depicted as the living dead: semi-conscious individuals mentally enslaved to a colourist ideology that holds black lives cheaply.