Gothic Children’s Fiction in the Classroom: Decolonising Britishness

An article by Chloé Germaine Buckley, originally written for The National Association for Teaching of English (NATE).

Coram Boy, and City of Ghosts

Introduction

A picture of Queen Elizabeth II; images from a Royal Wedding; a Beefeater palace guard; a London bus and a bust of Winston Churchill. These images connote stereotypical ideas of ‘Britishness’ associated with the aristocracy, the capital city, military victory and, above all, whiteness. In my research, I’ve found that such images adorn school displays across England in state schools required to promote ‘‘fundamental British values’’ since 2011. The promotion of British Values in schools works in concert with history and literature curriculums that elide aspects of Britain’s imperial history and can operate to reinforce the idea of Britishness as whiteness. All this occurs, of course, against a wider backdrop of cultural nostalgia and a forgetting, or even a whitewash, of the violence of the past. A 2016 poll found that four out of ten Britons viewed the Empire as a good thing and colonialism as something of which to be proud. What might be done in the classroom to challenge these trends? I propose gothic fiction as a resource for countering dominant historical narratives and ideas about British identity. The books I discuss here use the Gothic to interrogate aspects of British history elided by the FBV project. They point to Britain’s imperial history and offer a rejoinder to the Government’s insistence that ‘British Values’ equate to democracy, respect for the rule of law and mutual respect and tolerance of those from different faiths and religions. Furthermore, the Gothic can create a space in which the contradictions in our ideas of Britishness can be explored. It also provides a mode through which to share alternative stories and models for identity.

Ideology and Policy

Fundamental British Values were first outlined in the U.K. government’s counter-terrorism strategy, Prevent, and later made into educational policy. All teachers are required to uphold and promote ‘fundamental British values, including democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs’. Many scholars and commentators on education have expressed concerns about the policy’s ethical and pedagogical objectives. One critique has been to show that the root of FBV lies in Islamophobia, tracing the values to language used by then Prime Minister David Cameron in speeches attacking Muslim communities. Education researchers have shown that some teachers feared that the promotion of ‘British’ values in school would exclude minority groups already under siege from racist elements in Britain, elements that have since been emboldened by a right-wing media and the febrile political discourse of the EU referendum and its aftermath. Other critics argue that the promotion of FBV reduces opportunities to explore issues of belonging, belief, and nationhood in the classroom. In 2014, Michael Rosen wrote an open letter to then secretary for Education, Michael Gove, asking what was so British about his British values? This was one of many critiques from Rosen, and others, on curriculum changes made during Gove’s tenure.

Other changes included amendments to the History and English curriculums to complement the government’s ideological project. In 2014, Cameron announced his desire for every schoolchild to learn about ‘great’ British documents, such as the Magna Carta. With these recommendations, Cameron was supporting a narrative of British superiority, presenting Britain as a progressive democracy without any room for critique. Accordingly, requirements for the teaching of history suggest students should learn ‘how Britain has influenced the wider world’ (Department for Education, 2013). These policies prompted criticism from teachers and academics. Writing for Teaching History magazine, teacher Abdul Mohamud laments that Empire has ‘become a somewhat neglected aspect of our history teaching because of the various controversies it challenges us with’ (2016). Academic historian Deana Heath (2016) also decries the changes in policy as a whitewash, noting that while the curriculum does cover aspects of Empire, it avoids tackling the actual impact of Empire on colonised peoples or exploring its ongoing effects.

Looking into history, we can also see that the changes enacted in this period echo an imperialist notion of education from the height of Empire. A 1905 Board of Education report Children’s Literature in Education argues that schoolboys ought to ‘learn something of their nationality […] and how the mother country in her turn founded daughter countries beyond the seas’. Joseph Bristow’s study of children’s literature in this period uses sources such as this to show how imperialism shaped the ideological dimensions of subjects studied in school. A similar pattern of ideological influence is clear in the period between 2011 and 2014. This imperialist strain in education, which resurfaces in the reforms enacted by Cameron and Gove, has a perceptible effect on attitudes towards Britishness. The promotion of FBV in schools has done little to recognise Britain’s history of brutal colonialism, undemocratic military rule over territories like India and Ireland, and a marked intolerance for local languages and traditions.

Gothic History/ Gothic Fiction

There is scope in the English classroom to challenge these troubling trends with the inclusion of class readers that offer alternative historical narratives. Writer of children’s fiction, Celia Rees has stated that ‘the gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the gothic’ pointing to the potential of the gothic mode, in particular, to uncover aspects of the past that lie buried. Indeed, postcolonial writers have long used the Gothic to challenge the legacy of imperialism and reveal the traumas of colonialism. As gothic scholars Andrew Smith and William Hughes argue, the ambivalences and ambiguities of the Gothic ‘provide a space in which key elements of the dominant culture can be debated’.

There are several contemporary writers for children and young adults who use the gothic in this way, returning their readers to moments in Britain’s past that we have too-easily forgotten. Notable examples include Jamila Gavin’s Coram Boy (2000), which deals with child exploitation and slavery, Bali Rai’s City of Ghosts (2009), which interrogates the Amritsar massacre perpetrated by British soldiers in 1919, Catherine Johnson’s The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (2015), which is set in eighteenth-century Bristol and examines the orientalism, racism and sexism of the mercantile classes, and Tanya Landman’s Hell and High Water (2015), which likewise explores early colonialism through the transportation of convicts. As an aside, Candy Gourlay’s award-winning Bone Talk (2019) draws on the Gothic, but examines the genocide carried out in the Philippines by American soldiers. These books are examples of ‘writing back’ to Empire in the sense suggested by Bill Ashcroft et al. in The Empire Writes Back (1989), although the writers are citizens of Britain rather than of formerly colonized countries. As I have argued elsewhere in my research on British postcolonial writers, Gothic written within and about the former colonial centre is concerned with the repercussions of imperialism, with experiences of racism, dislocation, and alienation within Britain itself.

Using aspects of the Gothic mode, even elements of what Patrick Brantlinger has called the ‘Imperial Gothic’ (1990), these writers draw attention to Britain’s past in order to address ongoing inequalities in the present. First, they figure the Imperial past as that which haunts the present, both as trauma, and as the source of present and future violence. Often, they depict British officials as Gothic Villains, not as paragons of justice and democracy. Concomitantly, the Imperial Centre is figured as the heart of darkness and the source of violence. Unlike in more conservative gothic and horror tales, which usually seek to destroy or expel the monster, there can be no expulsion, when the heart of darkness is located within government buildings, aristocratic mansions and the churches of Britain. City of Ghosts (2009) is particularly poignant as it combines an account of the Amritsar massacre with a first world war narrative, undercutting that nostalgic idea of Britain often conjured up in war remembrance and memorialisation. Indeed, Rai clearly links war to colonial violence. The novel offers itself as explicitly educational, seeking to redress the balance for British schoolchildren who learn little or nothing about the Empire in the classroom.

Of course, historical fiction is often also trying to say something about the present and the attitudes, inequalities and violence revealed in these novels have their legacy in Britain today. As Gurminder Bhambra (2017) argues, for example, a resurgence of nostalgic nationalism and a lack of knowledge about Britain’s imperial past lies behind much of the Vote Leave campaign, which led to the United Kingdom voting to leave the European Union in 2016. Postcolonial Gothic fiction is not only about critique, though, it is about (re)asserting histories that have been erased and giving voice to those written out of British history. Despite the work carried out by programmes such as ‘Black History Month’, we remain strikingly ignorant of the role played by BAME people in British history, a history that stretches much further back than Windrush. As Catherine Johnson remarks, when Elizabeth the first was on the throne she complained about the amount of black people in Britain. Johnson is one of the writers for the forthcoming BBC series Black Tudors, based on Miranda Kaufman’s 2017 book. As Cat shows in her children’s fiction, too, black people were present in Britain not only as slaves or former slaves, but as members of British society across classes and professions.

Cosmopolitan Values?

Gothic fiction might be used in the classroom, then, to provide much-needed counter-voices. Learning through dialogue is essential to building a more multiple, inclusive notion of British identity. Indeed, in each of the novels mentioned here, Gothic darkness is tempered with a kind of cosmopolitan hopefulness. Following Kwame Anthony Appiah’s assertion that ‘no shard of the mirror can reflect the whole’, these writers ask readers to engage with other viewpoints and values, and, crucially, to use their imaginations place themselves in the position of even those who have committed terrible acts, as well as in the place of the victims of these atrocities. This gothically-inflected cosmopolitanism, which does not erase the violence of the past nor the inequalities of the present, is precisely what the notion of Fundamental British Values lacks, and what the imaginative space of children’s Gothic can provide. Robert Fine suggests that cosmopolitanism is founded on the basic presupposition ‘that the human species can be understood only if it is treated as a single subject, within which all forms of difference are recognised and respected’. Importantly, cosmopolitanism repudiates the vulgar form of nationalism gaining purchase in the UK and complicates ideological and political demands for ‘integration’. What these Gothic texts recognize is that there is nothing new in diversity and the mixing of people, and that what needs to change, what cosmopolitanism can help with, is promoting the awareness of this diversity. In contrast to narrow conceptions of Britishness, these Gothic novels recognize the diverse nature of British identity and the coexistence of multiple values. They also focus on those excluded from national conversations about Britishness, on identities marginalised by nostalgic, imperialist nationalism.

In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, then Prime Minister, Theresa May, took opponents of the vote to task by saying that ‘if you’re a citizen of the world, then you’re a citizen of nowhere’. Perhaps she was unaware that she was getting into an argument with classical Greek philosopher, Diogenes, who, in dissenting from his native city state, made the declaration of being ‘a citizen of the world’. Implicit in May’s comment was the threat to remove rights from the unpatriotic. Indeed, this threat is reality for many who do not fit the increasingly narrowing conception of British citizenship: asylum seekers detained in horrific conditions; migrants and their British-born children denied residency; EU citizens used as bargaining chips in the government’s Brexit negotiations; and young British Muslims on the receiving end of hate crime and police surveillance. Cosmopolitanism understands that the fundamental right to have rights is – to quote Fine again – ‘best suited to the identity of world citizens and not to that of citizens of one state against another’. Why I think these Gothic texts are so important is not only that they highlight aspects of Britain’s imperial past germane to its present, but that they offer a much-needed cosmopolitan perspective on issues of rights, civic belonging, and national identity.

For free classroom resources related to the issues and the texts discussed in this article, please visit the Resources area of the MCYS site:

MCYS perspectives

Gothic Children’s Fiction in the Classroom: Decolonising Britishness

Introduction

Ideology and Policy

Gothic History/ Gothic Fiction

Cosmopolitan Values?

Further Reading