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Indigenous popular culture is currently one of the fastest-growing fields of cultural production both in Canada and the United States. Indigenous artists, writers, filmmakers, animators, comic book authors, designers, musicians—the list goes on—intervene powerfully into the archive and discourse of the popular, producing cultural products which not only participate in contemporary sensibilities on their own terms, but in fact redefine them to include Indigenous presences as well as non-Eurocentric symbolic and epistemological systems. In this course, we will look specifically at Indigenous genre fiction, with examples such as vampire fiction, futuristic fiction (science fiction, dystopian, post-apocalypse), fantasy, etc. We will identify the ways in which these texts play with Euroamerican genre conventions in order to, effectively, decolonize and indigenize the canon. In our discussions, we will also embed works of Indigenous genre fiction in the cultural context of Indigenous resistance and resurgence.
Primary Texts:
Drew Hayden Taylor, The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel. 2007. Toronto: Annick Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1-55451-099-3
Richard van Camp, “On the Wings of this Prayer.” Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction. Ed. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Holstein: Exile Editions, 2013. 164-173. ISBN 978-1-55096-355-7
Eden Robinson, “Terminal Avenue.” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Ed. Grace L. Dillon. Tucson: Arizona UP, 2012. 205-214. ISBN 978-0-8165-2982-7
Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder: The Kynship Chronicles (excerpts). Albuquerque: New Mexico UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8263-5012-1
Note: You will only have to purchase Drew Hayden Taylor’s novel and Daniel Heath Justice’s trilogy (the single volume edition cited above), the rest of the texts will be made available to you. |
