Making Kin with Monsters: Indigenous Horror Fiction and Settler Colonial Violence
18. Jan
As part of our lecture series, “Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes,” the Language Center / International Center would like to welcome you Moritz Ingwersen’s (TU Dresden) talk, “Making Kin with Monsters: Indigenous Horror Fiction and Settler Colonial Violence.”
- 18 January 2024 | 18:15-19:45
- C 40.606
Moritz Ingwersen will kick off his talk with an introduction to the renaissance of horror as a literary mode in contemporary Indigenous literatures from Canada. After contextualizing Indigenous horror in response to the spectralization of Indigenous subjectitvity in the settler-colonial gothic tradition (e.g., Indigenous ghosts, representation of Indigenous men as monsters, the "Indian Burial Ground" trope), he will provide context for the real horror of settler-colonial violence: residential schools and resource extraction. A variety of contemporary examples from Indigenous literature as well as film will be discussed to illustrate how Indigenous writers employ horror tropes to write against the settler-colonial tradition. The role of the monster in Indigenous works is often ambiguous, sometimes associated with the agents of colonial exploitation, but also frequently recoded as kin and ally in the articulation of decolonial resistance and Indigenous futurity.
For further information and additional dates, please see the Maple Leaf & Stars and Stripes webpage.