Global Indigenous Horror

Contributions by Katrin Althans, Jayson Althofer, Naomi Simone Borwein, Persephone Braham, Krista Collier-Jarvis, Shane Hawk, Jade Jenkinson, June Scudeler, and Sabrina Zacharias

Global Indigenous Horror is a collection of essays that positions Indigenous Horror as more than just a genre, but as a narrative space where the spectral and social converge, where the uncanny becomes a critique, and the monstrous mirrors the human. While contentions swirl around the genre category, this exploratory anthology is the first critical edited collection dedicated solely to ways of theorizing and analyzing Indigenous Horror literature. The essays, curated by scholar Naomi Simone Borwein, ask readers to consider what Global Indigenous Horror is--and to whom.

The volume opens with a preface by international bestselling horror writer Shane Hawk (enrolled Cheyenne-Arapaho, Hidatsa, and Potawatomi descent), followed by an overview of Global Indigenous Horror trends, aesthetics, and approaches. The carefully selected contributions explore Indigenous Horror literature and mixed-media narratives worldwide, unraveling the intricate dynamics between the local and global, traditional and contemporary, and human and monstrous. Contributor chapters are grouped not by geographical or cultural variation, but along a spectrum, from a strong emphasis on ways of knowing to a critical inspection of Horror through Indigenous Gothic aesthetics across cultural boundaries and against and beyond nation states.

Naomi Simone Borwein is an academic and a poet. A research associate at Western University in London, Ontario, she teaches at the University of Windsor, which sits on the traditional territory of Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations. Borwein holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she studied Aboriginal literature and ways of knowing with Murri scholar Brooke Collins-Gearing. Borwein’s research spans from heterogeneous Indigenous literatures, Horror and the Gothic, global anglophone literatures, and historiography to experimental mathematics and its philosophy, and she has published across a broad spectrum of topics. Her research on Indigenous Horror has been reviewed as groundbreaking.