Hauzenberger, Georg
It's Not by Any Lack of Ghosts We're Haunted

First Nations Gothic and Spiritual Realism.

The writing of Canada's aboriginal peoples is, predictably, replete with colonial history and (post-)colonial horrors. It is also replete with myth - from the ubiquitous trickster to all sorts of ghosts that have come to haunt First Nations people in a (post-)colonial, globalized world. This study looks at four contemporary First Nations novels to trace these ghosts - Eden Robinson's "Monkey Beach", Tomson Highway's "Kiss of the Fur Queen", and Drew Hayden Taylor's "The Night Wanderer" and "Motorcycles and Sweetgrass". It explores the question of how a traditional Eurocentric mode, the gothic, at the heart of which lie both imaginary horrors and the (colonial) binary of 'self' and 'other', can be turned back on itself in a very deliberate 'writing back' paradigm to express very real colonial horrors. This study also centers on the phenomenon of spiritual realism, prevalent in post-colonial writing all over the world, a mode in which mythical and spiritual elements enter a narrative of undiluted social realism to create a hybrid, decolonizing life-world, facilitating and celebrating a recovery of indigenous identity and culture in a globalized world, balancing colonial history with First Nations heritage. 286 Seiten, broschiert (text & theorie; Band 14/Königshausen & Neumann 2014) leichte Lagerspuren/minor shelfwear