The persona of Louise Bennett-Coverley's 1966 poem ‘Colonization in Reverse’ describes the arrival of the Windrush generation in England as a ‘joyful news’, but by the end expresses comedic concern for this mass migration's potential for creating ‘a devilment a England’ (Bennett 1983, 238). In one sense the source of the mischief is a struggle for resources. As Bennett-Coverley muses, ‘Oonoo see how life funny, / Oonoo see da tunabout, / Jamaica live fe box bread / Outa English people mout.’ There is also mention of the burden on public resources from scenarios in which ‘some [of the new migrants] will settle down to work / and some will settle fe de dole’ (238). These humorous lines are an ironic reflection on the extractive character of colonisation, and how in the immediate period after 1945, with the migration of the Windrush generation to England, this extractive relationship reverses. In the poem, the Jamaican speaker displays a comedic sense of satisfaction that after centuries of exploitative relations, colonial subjects get to migrate to the metropole and benefit directly from state resources in a manner that was viewed as stealing resources from legitimate British citizens.

While not a gothic text, ‘Colonization in Reverse’ is certainly a decolonial one, in the sense of a text that is concerned with the material workings of decolonisation. I will say more about this shortly, but for now, I begin with Bennett-Coverley's poem because I think it reflects an anxiety surrounding invasion and contamination from the colonies that also finds its way into late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gothic texts and continues to characterise the gothic until well into the twenty-first century. Maisha Wester notes that the gothic is ‘a discourse rather than just a fixed novelistic mode’, a ‘series of tropes and themes used to meditate upon a culture's various anxieties, particularly through discourses of Otherness’ (Wester 2012, 229). For H. L. Malchow, whom Wester is discussing, the gothic is ‘a language of panic, of unreasoning anxiety, blind revulsion, and distancing sensationalism’, a ‘language of terror’ that can also ‘be found throughout the discourse on racial difference’ (Malchow 1996, 4–5, emphasis in original).