Decolonial (Re)Visions of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Author Spotlight – Moritz Ingwersen

Moritz Ingwersen is Assistant Professor of North American Literature and Culture at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He holds a joint PhD in Cultural Studies and English from Trent University, Ontario and the University of Cologne. Building on a dissertation on intersections of science fiction and science studies, his research and teaching focus on speculative fiction, the posthumanities, ecological criticism, and North American Indigenous literatures. His publications include articles on J. G. Ballard, China Miéville, N. K. Jemisin, and Neal Stephenson.

Article

“Reclaiming Fossil Ghosts: Indigenous Resistance to Resource Extraction in Works by Warren Cariou, Cherie Dimaline, and Nathan Adler”

Abstract

Against the backdrop of recent Anthropocene critiques, this article offers a discussion of Indigenous resistance to resource extraction in Warren Cariou’s “An Athabasca Story” (2012), Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017), and Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler’s Wrist (2016). Employing elements of gothic, horror, and science fiction, all three works invoke modes of human-geologic enmeshment to imagine Indigenous resistance to settler-colonial fossil fuel industries via the resurgence of fossils who refuse to be commodified. Building on the theoretical work of Kathryn Yusoff and others, I examine their mobilization of fossil metaphors as emancipatory expressions of a type of geologic subjectivity that generates a dislocation of Eurocentric demarcations between the human and the inhuman. Reclaiming fossils, I argue, implies a material-discursive dimension of decolonization that complements the physical repatriation of looted ancestral bones and Indigenous artifacts with the production of self-determined Indigenous narratives of geologic corporeality.

 

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