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ABSTRACT
Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson's speculative fiction novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) is set in a near future dystopian Toronto and contains many African and Caribbean supernatural and folkloric characters. This article focuses on the zombie, which traditionally functions as a symbol of powerlessness, and argues that Hopkinson's book expands the relations of power that this figure is commonly employed to probe. More specifically, the essay suggests that, in Brown Girl in the Ring, the zombie symbolizes black people's history of oppression, exploitation, and demonization. Furthermore, through reading the novel alongside emotion discourse and Vodou psychology, the article contends that the zombie in Hopkinson's book can be understood as being symbolic of the consequential shame that members of the African-Caribbean diaspora may experience from a legacy of oppression, which, significantly, includes internalizing a white Western perception of their African and Caribbean cultural inheritance.
Caribbean-Canadian Nalo Hopkinson's work of speculative fiction Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) contains many supernatural and folkloric beings that derive from Africa. In this novel the literary genre frequently changes-from science fiction, to magical realism, to folktales-and symbols and their meanings appear to be constantly shifting, which may render the text somewhat fragmented and confusing. However, I will argue that the figure of the zombie, which is rarely overtly mentioned in the book, draws together all the elements that make up the novel, enabling a reading that encompasses the brutal history and emotional legacy that African people have experienced from the transatlantic slave trade via the Caribbean and North America to present-day Toronto, while at the same time revealing ways to emotionally heal this trauma for the African- Caribbean diaspora.
Some of the text's folkloric figures are the focus of a previous article on Brown Girl by Giselle Liza Anatol. Principally, her article investigates the soucouyant, a female Caribbean vampire, and examines the ways that folk discourses, due to being predominantly patriarchal, "undermine women's sense of independence and power" (35). This particular feminist approach leads Anatol to conclude that the novel fails to fully humanize folkloric "bad women"-that is, the soucouyant and La Diablesse, another figure-and that, as a consequence, "certain mores and archetypes remain intact" (35). Anatol's somewhat derogatory assessment arises, I suggest, because she does not position...