The national uncanny : Indian ghosts and American subjects

Resource Information

The work The national uncanny : Indian ghosts and American subjects represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in Boston University Libraries. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The national uncanny : Indian ghosts and American subjects

Title remainder

Indian ghosts and American subjects

Statement of responsibility

Renée L. Bergland

Creator

• Bergland, Renée L., 1963-

Subject

• American literature
• American literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism
• American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• Amérindien (peuple) -- fantôme | littérature américaine (Etats-Unis) -- 19e s. -- 20e s
• Amérindien (peuple) -- fantôme | littérature amérindienne -- Etats-Unis -- 20e s
• Criticism, interpretation, etc
• Das Unheimliche
• Frontier and pioneer life in literature
• Frontier and pioneer life in literature
• Geschichte
• Gespenst
• Gespenstergeschichte
• Ghost stories, American
• Ghost stories, American -- History and criticism
• Indianer (Motiv)
• Indianer <Motiv>
• Indians in literature
• Indians in literature
• Literatur
• Literatur
• Supernatural in literature
• Supernatural in literature
• USA
• USA
• 1800 - 1999

Genre

• Criticism, interpretation, etc

Language

eng

Summary

Although spectral Indians appear with startling frequency in US literary works, until now the implications of describing them as ghosts have not been thoroughly investigated. In the first years of nationhood, Philip Freneau and Sarah Wentworth Morton peopled their works with Indian phantoms, as did Charles Brocken Brown, Washington Irving, Samuel Woodworth, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others who followed. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Native American ghosts figured prominently in speeches attributed to Chief Seattle, Black Elk, and Kicking Bear. Today, Stephen King and Leslie Marmon Silko plot best-selling novels around ghostly Indians and haunted Indian burial grounds. Renée L. Bergland argues that representing Indians as ghosts internalizes them as ghostly figures within the white imagination. Spectralization allows white Americans to construct a concept of American nationhood haunted by Native Americans, in which Indians become sharers in an idealized national imagination. However, the problems of spectralization are clear, since the discourse questions the very nationalism it constructs. Indians who are transformed into ghosts cannot be buried or evaded, and the specter of their forced disappearance haunts the American imagination. Indian ghosts personify national guilt and horror, as well as national pride and pleasure. Bergland tells the story of a terrifying and triumphant American aesthetic that repeatedly transforms horror into glory, national dishonor into national pride

Member of

• Reencounters with colonialism--new perspectives on the Americas

Cataloging source

DLC

Index

index present

LC call number

PS173.I6

LC item number

B47 2000

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography