Abstract
“Indigenous Alterations” briefly outlines the long history that Indigenous authors writing in the gothic mode are forced to contend with and discusses problematising elements and definitional challenges posed by the “Indigneous gothic” label. The chapter puts forth the argument that Anna Lee Walter’s Ghost Singer (1988) is a particularly effective example of an Indigenous author’s use of gothic tropes to counter “the discourse of Indian spectrality”, an early American mode of thought that presupposed America’s Indigenous peoples long dead. The author also privileges recognition of epistemological differences in Indigenous culture likely to affect gothic expression (which originates in Western Enlightenment thinking).
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Schoch/Davidson, A.E. (2020). Indigenous Alterations. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_9
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