« Another look at someone else’s settler experiment: Jürgen Tampke (ed.), Wunderbar Country: Germans Look at Australia, 1850–1914, Routledge, 2022 [1982]
How can one not see it? Nader Hakim, Ghina Abi-Ghannam, Rim Saab, Mai Albzour, Yara Zebian, Glenn Adams, ‘Turning the lens in the study of precarity: On experimental social psychology’s acquiescence to the settler-colonial status quo in historic Palestine’, British Journal of Social Psychology, 2022 »

The horror of settler colonialism (again): Kali Simmons, ‘The Savage Screen: Vengeful Indigeneity in the Modern American Horror Film‘, Fear 2000: Horror Undying, 08/05/22

11Nov22

Abstract: To live under the conditions of settler-colonialism as an Indigenous person is to exist under a terrifying structure of dispossession and violence. And yet, American cinema has tended to imagine the opposite by rendering white settlers and the state as the victims of terrifying Indigenous others seeking violent revenge. This talk examines representations of Indigenous peoples in contemporary American horror cinema from the 1970s to the present, focusing on the trope of the vengeful Indigenous killer. I link these contemporary representations to early colonial texts which circulated during initial “contact” with Indigenous peoples and the colonization of the Americas in order to gesture towards a genealogy of the revenge trope. Although in recent years Hollywood has begun to render Indigenous peoples more sympathetically, these narratives nonetheless continue to perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Indigenous peoples that are premised upon western white supremacist and patriarchal worldviews. Indigenous filmmakers, writers, critics, and audiences have responded to this long history of harmful representation in their works and in doing so they expose these works’ foundational colonial ideologies and challenge longstanding national mythos.


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