Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in English and Writing Studies

Department

English

First Reader/Committee Chair

David Carlson

Abstract

Within Stephen Graham Jones’ novella Mapping the Interior, the connections between history and identity are analyzed and emphasized through the exploration of identity formation and the impacts of settler colonialism on the self. These connections are heightened through the novella’s use of horror, as the rhetoric of the normative and monstrous within the genre holds the potential for both resistance and oppression. Looking at the genre of horror as a whole, and at the subgenres of ghost stories and hauntings more specifically, the shifting structures of the Self and the Other as established by Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” and expanded upon by Adam Lowenstein within Horror Film and Otherness provide the framework for understanding Indigenous horror as a tool of resistance and expression of cultural fears. Using historical and intertribal understandings of the Ghost Dance religious movement, as well as analyzing the othering of Indigenous peoples through the ghostly as the groundwork for this project, the continued misrepresentations of Indigenous peoples through horror tropes are contrasted against Indigenous self-representations of hauntings to highlight the importance of cultural memory and intergenerational history on Indigenous identity as a culture and on an individual level. These frameworks, when used to embolden Indigenous perspectives on horror and the Self, highlight not only the space for iii resistance, but also the expressions of loss and cultural fear that are continued through ongoing settler colonialism.

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