Abstract
Porter offers a fascinating exploration of the limitations of genre in relation to certain horror literature produced by authors who identify as American Indian. She explores the horror genre as a context within which the Native dispossession foundational to the nation’s identity has been addressed, even if this has been in oblique or heavily sanitized forms. The chapter details how Native writers from diverse traditions across time have used horror both to perpetuate vital elements of Indigenous culture and to reframe and rebalance popular narratives surrounding what should and should not be feared. Her specific analytical focus is the windigo condition, the psychotic urge to consume and advance the self at the expense of all others that so often animates evil in its various incarnations.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel (1960) and The Return of the Vanishing American (1968). For more on horror as a transnational response to colonization, see Hudson, Dale. 2014. “Vampires and Transnational Horror” in A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Although the horror genre is conventionally traced to the Inquisition in Europe, it has deep Dublin Protestant roots in the works of Sheridan le Fanu, author of Camilla (1872); Charles Maturin , Oscar Wilde’s grand-uncle and author of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula (1897).
- 2.
See also Porter, Joy. 2007. “Population Matters in Native America.” In America’s Americans: Population Issues in U.S. Society and Politics, edited by Philip Davies and Iwan Morgan. London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, School of Advanced Study. According to United States Census data, the American Indian and Alaskan Native population grew by 1.5 percent between July 2014 and 2015 to a total of 6.6 million.
- 3.
Hamlet’s phrase to Horatio [(1.5.167–168) was echoed in 2002 in Donald Rumsfeld’s use of the established business/military phrase, “unknown unknowns,” with reference to the supply or otherwise of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists by the government of Iraq. Rumsfeld’s term had its provenance in work done in 1955 within psychology and went on to prompt discussion by Slavoj Žižek and others of what they deemed the more important category, unknown knowns, that is, things we do in fact know but would prefer not to and, thus, pretend accordingly. Such things are very often contemplated within the horror genre.
- 4.
For more on how the fictional became real in this period and the hostility Early Modern Europeans expressed toward fictional entities, such as commercial corporations, see Henry S. Turner. 2016. The Corporate Commonwealth: Pluralism and Political Fictions in England, 1516–1651. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- 5.
Mundus Novus Albericus Vespuccius Laurentio Petri de Medicis salute plurimam dicit appear as Vespucci Reprints.
- 6.
See also Brightman, Robert A. 1988. “The Windigo in the Material World.” Ethnohistory 35.4: 337–379.
- 7.
For more on Puritan violence against Native peoples, see Buchanan, Daniel P . 1998. “Tares in the Wheat: Puritan Violence and Puritan Families in the Nineteenth-Century Liberal imagination.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8.2: 205–236.
- 8.
Soldier Blue was not a popular success in the United States but was elsewhere, including the United Kingdom.
- 9.
NAGPRA continues to make slow progress under the oversight of the Secretary of the Interior. Some tribes, such as the Zuni, do not hold with repatriation back to Zuni lands partly because they have no ceremony to rebury the dead. The United States’ largest tribe, the Navajo Nation, traditionally connects disease with interaction with the remains of the dead, making repatriation problematic.
- 10.
Ironically, Irish faeries (daoine sídhe) may have been invaded peoples who retreated under mounds (possibly Mesolithic hunter-gatherers supplanted by Neolithic farmers c. 4500 B.C.E). A tribe who worshipped the goddess Danu, the Tuatha Dé Danann, are said to be the original inhabitants of Ireland, defeated along with the Firbolg by invading Milesians from Spain (O’Kelly 1989, p. 135).
- 11.
See Ruppert, James. 1995. “Mediation in Contemporary Native American Writing.” In Native American perspectives on Literature and History, edited by Alan R. Velie, 7–23. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Mary Louise Pratt uses the idea of an “autoethnography” to refer to “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (1992, p. 7).
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Porter, J. (2018). The Horror Genre and Aspects of Native American Indian Literature. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_4
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