cultural geographies essay: Indigenous spectrality and the politics of postcolonial ghost stories

This essay considers the politics of describing Indigenous peoples as ghostly or haunting presences. Focusing on the history of haunting tropes in Canadian cultural production and the recent re-emergence of the spectral Indigenous figure in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern Brit...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cultural geographies 2008-07, Vol.15 (3), p.383-393
Main Author: Cameron, Emilie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Canadian culture
Culture
Folklore
Geographers
Geography
Ghosts
Indigenous peoples
Mobilization
Native peoples
Politics
Popular culture
Postcolonialism
Power
Rhetorical figures
Spectra
Wilderness
Wilderness areas
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This essay considers the politics of describing Indigenous peoples as ghostly or haunting presences. Focusing on the history of haunting tropes in Canadian cultural production and the recent re-emergence of the spectral Indigenous figure in, among other places, a wilderness park in southwestern British Columbia, I argue that the mobilization of haunting tropes to make sense of contemporary settler-Indigenous relations reinscribes colonial power relations and fails to account for the specific experiences and claims of Indigenous peoples. At a time when cultural geographers are contemplating the possibilities of a `spectral turn', this essay asks what politics are involved in deploying a spectro-geographical approach to studies of the colonial and postcolonial.
ISSN:1474-4740
1477-0881
DOI:10.1177/1474474008091334