The MSVU Research Office is pleased to be hosting the next installment of its Black and Indigenous Speaker Series featuring Krista Collier-Jarvis (nekm/she/her). Krista is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at MSVU, a PhD Candidate at Dalhousie University, and an Affiliate with Thinking through the Museum.
Her presentation is titled “Too Ghoul for School: Colonial Gazing, Monstrosity, and Representing the Unrepresentable in Rhymes for Young Ghouls.”
This event will take place online (via Teams) on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Atlantic Time.
All are welcome. RSVP to speakerseries@msvu.ca.
From Krista’s presentation abstract: “Within the dearth of residential school diaries, fictional representations, such as Rhymes for Young Ghouls, provides Indigenous survivors and their descendants a method of representing the unrepresentable. The late Jeff Barnaby (Mi’kmaq) was an intergenerational school survivor who never intended to make a film about residential schools, but that is what Rhymes for Young Ghouls is, an Indigenous horror film about one Mi’kmaw girl’s experience living beneath the colonial gaze and temporarily within the walls of the fictional St. D’s residential school. The residential school system was predicated on a kind of colonial gazing that dehumanized, policed, and assimilated Indigenous bodies, but in Rhymes, monstrosity is wielded by the Indigenous characters as a tool of resistance—I argue that by embodying monstrosity willingly, the Indigenous characters can both subvert and move through the colonial gaze, disrupting its various forms of surveillance.”
Krista is a member of the Mi’kmaq First Nation and a third-generation residential school survivor. She teaches Indigenous ways of knowing and being, American literature, popular culture, and climate fiction. Her doctoral research looks at zombie narratives to develop an Indigenous-infused, multispecies approach to contagion and climate change. She has recently published on uncanny play in Pet Sematary and has an article on Blood Quantum forthcoming in a collection about Indigenous and Aboriginal Gothic.
About the Black and Indigenous Speaker Series
Hosted by the MSVU Research Office, the Black and Indigenous Speaker Series highlights the scholarly work of Black and Indigenous scholars from across Turtle Island. The purpose of this series is to initiate important conversation by inviting Black and Indigenous scholars to share their knowledge, worldviews, and their contributions to their respective academic field.