Business Unbegun: Spectral Subjectivities in the Work of Jackie Kay and Pauline Melville

Résumé 0

This essay explores the rhetoric of the ghostly in postcolonial literary and critical contexts. With reference to the work of Simon Gikandi and Salman Rushdie, it considers, firstly, the ways in which the vocabulary of ghostliness has been used to expose the violent origins of modern subjectivity in the bloody business of colonialism. At the end of empire, the ghosts of colonialism return with ‘unfinished business’ to haunt the scene of subjectivity and point to shadowy histories of subaltern subjecthood. The essay then considers a second form of postcolonial ghostliness: the haunting presence of those lives attenuated by colonial modernity’s quest for legitimate identity—projected lives which have not been allowed to develop and might be thought of as raising up ‘business unbegun’. These forms of spectral subjectivity are articulated in the work of Jackie Kay, whose writings on adoption and race both build and set such subjectivities against the embodied legitimate identities of modernity. The essay concludes by engaging with Pauline Melville’s short fiction, where the difficult business is raised of raising the forgotten ghosts of modernity and colonialism while enabling their exorcism in order to begin a new future.