The Undead South: U.S. Southern Literature after Settler Colonialism

Undergraduate

This course explores the abundance of horror and haunting in the literature of the U.S. South, a national space where the possibilities for regeneration are frustrated by a harrowing settler-colonial and plantation past. “Undead” tropes align with traditions of the Gothic and the grotesque; but these complex literary strategies also announce deeply material traces of historical and cultural trauma, particularly of Indian Removal and chattel slavery. We will consider modern iterations of the Southern Gothic as well as contemporary iterations in the work of African American and Indigenous authors. For many of the course authors, tropes and ghosts of Indigeneity serve as dialectical vehicles for discovery, repair, romanticization, and renunciation, and ultimately uncover the tangled afterlives of settler colonial crimes and dispossessions – not as regional aberration but as an uncanny, unending national inheritance. Students who have taken ENGL 63.06 may not take ENGL 040 for credit.