An American haunting: the horror of colonisation and the power of spirits in Euro-American and indigenous American Gothic 1980s - 2000s

Abstract

This thesis is presented in two sections. The first explores the ideological and material underpinnings of the image of the Indigenous burial ground and the Indigenous spectre in American imperial Gothic works from the 1980s to the 2010s. This section also focuses on what is lost in criticism and how colonial ideology perpetuates itself in the academy when scholars take the erasure of Indigenous peoples in such texts for granted. The second section focuses on how works by Indigenous authors in the same period use the symbol of the Indigenous graveyard and the Indigenous spectre not as a symbol of death, but a symbol of empowerment and transcendence of colonial powers. Vizenor’s concept of survivance is crucial to understanding how Indigenous horror confronts the systems of colonialism and capitalism, finding power even in death and ultimately subverting the American imperial Gothic structures of domination.