Settlement and Imperialism

doi:10.1017/9781009071550.006

4 - Settlement and Imperialism

from Part I - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022

Johan Höglund

Edited by

Stephen Shapiro and

Mark Storey

Show author details

Stephen Shapiro: Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Mark Storey: Affiliation:
University of Warwick

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

Keywords

settler colonialism imperial horror Capitalocene extractivism neoliberalism Charles Brockden Brown Nathaniel Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe H. P. Lovecraft King Kong

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror , pp. 60 - 75

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071550.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Barnard, Philip, and Shapiro, Stephen. “Introduction.” In Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker: With Related Texts. New York: Hackett Publishing, 2006. ix–xlii.Google Scholar

Bergland, Renée L. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000.Google Scholar

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.Google Scholar

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker: With Related Texts. 1799. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006.Google Scholar

Crosby, Alfred W. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.CrossRef Google Scholar

Defoe, Daniel. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 1719. London: Henry Lea, 1850.Google Scholar

Duncan, Rebecca, and Cumpsty, Rebekah. “Introduction: The Body in Postcolonial Fiction after the Millennium.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 22, no. 5 (2020): 587–605.CrossRef Google Scholar

Dunlap, Thomas R. “Remaking the Land: The Acclimatization Movement and Anglo Ideas of Nature.” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 303–19.Google Scholar

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Stein and Day, 1960.Google Scholar

Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.Google Scholar

Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65.Google Scholar

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Young Goodman Brown and Other Tales. 1835. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar

Hodes, Martha. Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History. New York: New York University Press, 1999.Google Scholar

Höglund, Johan. The American Imperial Gothic: Popular Culture, Empire, Violence. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014.Google Scholar

Höglund, Johan. “Imperial Horror and Terrorism.” In The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature, ed. Corstorphine, Kevin and Kremmel, Laura R.. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 327–37.Google Scholar

Jackson, Robert. “A Southern Sublimation: Lynching Film and the Reconstruction of American Memory.” The Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 2 (2008): 102–20.Google Scholar

Keetley, Dawn. “We’re All Infected”: Essays on AMC’s the Walking Dead and the Fate of the Human. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014.Google Scholar

Koch, Alexander, et al. “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492.” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36.CrossRef Google Scholar

Löfflmann, Georg. “Hollywood, the Pentagon, and the Cinematic Production of National Security.” Critical Studies on Security 1, no. 3 (2013): 280–94.CrossRef Google Scholar

Lovecraft, H. P. The Colour Out of Space. 1927. London: Read & Co., 2020.Google Scholar

Marzec, Robert P. “Enclosures, Colonization, and the Robinson Crusoe Syndrome: A Genealogy of Land in a Global Context.” boundary 2 29, no. 2 (2002): 129–56.Google Scholar

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West. 1885. London: Picador Classic, 215.Google Scholar

McLeman, Robert, and Smit, Barry. “Migration as an Adaptation to Climate Change.” Climatic Change 76, nos. 1–2 (2006): 31–53.Google Scholar

Mogen, David, Sanders, Scott Patrick, and Karpinski, Joanne B. Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, ed. Mogen, David, Sanders, Scott P., and Karpinski, Joanne B.. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London and New York: Verso, 2015.Google Scholar

Moore, Jason W. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Moore, Jason W.. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016. 78–115.Google Scholar

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.Google Scholar

Neeson, Jeanette M. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.CrossRef Google Scholar

Newitz, Annalee. Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.CrossRef Google Scholar

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010.Google Scholar

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.Google Scholar

Shapiro, Stephen. “Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula’s World-System and Gothic Periodicity.” Gothic Studies 10, no. 1 (2008): 29–47.Google Scholar

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219.CrossRef Google Scholar

Turner, Frederick Jackson. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” 1893. In The Frontier in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1920. 1–38.Google Scholar

Vitale, Alex S. The End of Policing. London: Verso, 2017.Google Scholar

Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Decline of American Power: The US in a Chaotic World. New York: New Press, 2003.Google Scholar

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.Google Scholar

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. 1979. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.Google Scholar

Yelling, James Alfred. Common Field and Enclosure in England 1450–1850. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1977.CrossRef Google Scholar