Marlena Tronicke

“What Have You Done?”: Hauntings of Saltwaters in the BBC’s Taboo 

Twenty-first-century Britain is obsessed with the Victorians, and fiction classified as ‘neo-Victorian’ has become the defining mode of contemporary British cultural production. Whilst this genre has often provided radical interrogations of Victorian discourses concerning gender, sexuality, and class, it is also strikingly Anglocentric, with critical inquiries into Britain’s colonial past playing a comparatively minor role. In Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire, Elizabeth Ho therefore justly identifies postcolonial readings as a blind spot in neo-Victorian studies that is remarkable insofar as “‘the Victorian’ [...] has become a powerful shorthand for empire in the contemporary global imagination” (2012: 5). One recent example that does engage with colonization and enslavement is the BBC’s Taboo (2018 – ), in which Tom Hardy’s sinister James Delaney returns to Regency London and continues to be haunted by what he experienced in Africa. Echoing a number of Victorian classics, not least Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the first series re-writes one of the darkest chapters in British colonial history: the East India Company’s involvement in the slave trade.

In this paper, I explore the spatial politics of Taboo in order to show how it is particularly through the motif of (salt) water that the programme unfolds its imperial critique. Water consistently features as a symbol of death and colonial power – in the various flashbacks of slaves drowning aboard a sinking slave ship, dead bodies floating in the ocean, or the British officials’ use of waterboarding. Whereas both the Americas and the African continent feature as absent presences, the recurrence of water thus spans a spatial imaginary of imperial power, its hidden crimes and cruelties only gradually rising to the surface. At the same time, however, through both the legal investigation into the sinking of the slave ship and Delaney’s fragmented memories, the colonized oceans return to haunt the British. That way, I argue, the colony as a traditionally coercive space of power, a Foucauldian heterotopia, is re-imagined as a space of resistance. In true neo-Victorian fashion, Taboo thus not only shines a light on a topic that in Victorian literature features as a mere footnote but also challenges pre-conceived power relations of colonizer and colonized. Most importantly, though, it foregrounds the cultural continuities between the nineteenth and twenty-first-century Britain, a world in which human beings continue to drown in postcolonial oceans and in which discourses of globalization either downplay the significance of decolonization or deliberately strengthen the re-awakening of empirical interests.