This chapter examines select fiction and memoirs dealing with biocultural precarity. Adapting the work of Samantha Frost, which resonates with Donna Haraway’s “natureculture,” it proposes that the late twentieth century has seen the emergence of texts that foreground somatic and genetic precarity, together constituting a toxic state of human nature itself. The former, visible in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, has an exogenous etiology that emanates from a cultural condition (invisible, residual industrial chemicals) and whose manifestation is in the very nature of Animal’s corporeality. Genetic precarity, seen in memoirs dealing with, say, Huntington’s disease (Mona Gable’s, Therese Crutcher-Marin’s, Sarah Foster’s), has its etiology in the genetic material passed on from generation to generation, again altering irrevocably the nature of the human. In both cases, however, the embedding of the human with her/his toxified nature within specific cultural practices – from family to biomedicine – means that the biological precarity and toxic nature are instantiations of biocultural precarity.

This chapter looks at how the postcolonial negotiates the Gothic. Both are informed by a degree of suspicion about European Enlightenment rationalism and its constructs, but the Gothic also depends on colonial European elements – the Devil as Black, the Oriental artefact, obeah – for its effects. The postcolonial Gothic needs these effects – for the scream, as I argue, is central to the Gothic – but cannot use the same instruments because, by definition, postcolonialism adopts a critical and questioning attitude to colonial European discourses as well. By looking at a number of texts, especially the Caribbean Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, the South African André Brink’s Devil’s Valley, the Australian Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs, and the British-Indian Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, I show how the Gothic villain or the Gothic secret is manipulated by postcolonialism to combine its critical perspectives with the Gothic’s generic requirements.