Alice in Monsterland: Neocolonial Investigation in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes

Abstract: J.G. Ballard’s idiosyncratic use of the detective genre in Super-Cannes (2000) investigates middle-class psychopathology and “ homeopathic violence” in a gated community, promising to uncover, but effectively concealing, the neocolonial dimensions of this narrative. The investigation into the corporate enclave in Super-Cannes triggers the transformation of the investigator into a perpetrator and, by extension, the reader into an accomplice. Slipping into their prescribed narrative and spatial roles, all participants become complicit with what they seek to expose, rehearsing the pre-existing historical script of violent whiteness, maleness, and privilege. The heterotopic space of the gated community splits and duplicates various subjects by means of assigned identity positions within Ballard’s ideological enclosure. However, the mechanism of false discovery that structures this spatial and metaphysical investigation also serves to distract from, and ultimately marginalize, the abuse of the neocolonial subaltern.