Carleton University
With comments by Hane Maung (University of Manchester)
This is the beginning of a larger project of mine where I look at the role that hauntings, specters and ghosts have played in the social history of North America, and North American obsession with ghosts. This project pulls apart the notion of a European specter, stemming from theological and literary examples from an indigenous notion of spirits in terms of the afterlife. This project looks at the notion of hauntings in a few different ways, building towards an understanding the hauntings directly relate to the colonial violence in the formation of North American western society and that these ghosts and specters keep appearing in our popular culture, social history and in our fears as a reminder of this injustice, which continues to this day. In this paper, will explore the notion of hauntings and specters as well. What I mean by that is the lingering presence of the horrors and atrocities that were committed and how they reappear in different sorts of ways. In previous research, I have found a connection between the idea of hauntings and that of trauma; In this paper, I will further explore these ideas how hauntings and specters keep the suffering and pain of victims alive even though they have passed on.
In particular, I will I explore popular cultural references to specters, ghosts, hauntings, and the like in the North American context in reference to the deceased indigenous populations. Why do Native American burial grounds show up in so many movies and stories? Why are colonizers so afraid of those who they systemically killed and tried to erase from the world? Furthermore, what can be done for the forgotten, those who have been erased, who have no one left to mourn for them? What ought to be done in those cases? These are all questions I will explore through the practice of memorialization, both an indigenous context and a settler colonial context, to see where this practice differs and how different cultures respect the dead.
The first section of the paper will look pull apart what I mean by a ghost, specter and haunting from a European viewpoint. I will look at William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and to explore what is understood as a ghost in the Western literature and its relation to injustice. I will then explore the notions of death, memory, mourning in this section as well to provide some foundation for the rest of the paper.
After we have an established notion of a ghost, I will look at contemporary ghost and horror stories and movies in North America, that focus on the trope of the ‘Ancient Indigenous burial ground’ and investigate why this is such a popular trope and why it is harmful. By only showing indigenous people as ‘evil specters’ and not as living, active, social beings, these tropes erase contemporary indigenous livelihood and recognition, will barely acknowledging the horrors and hardship that these communities have gone through. Further I will look at early American texts and ghosts stories that show their absolute fear of the unknown lands of North America, stemming from their puritan zeal and ignorance of the indigenous populations.
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