Anxieties of Education in Anglophone Settler-Colonial Schoolhouse Gothic

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My project examines the Schoolhouse Gothic (SG) genre in post-1960 American, Australian and Canadian film and literature. Just as the Gothic genre generally "re-emerges in times of cultural stress in order to negotiate anxieties for its readership," (Hurley 2002) so SG treats educational institutions as sites of anxiety about Western education in Sherry R. Truffin's theorisation of the genre (2008). SG sites areprimary/elementary and high schools, universities, and other educational settings in which authors employ Gothic devices-curses, traps, mental disintegration, monstrosity and violence-to narrate forms of institutional oppression. My comparative study forges connections between cultural anxieties and SG production in three settler-invader contexts.Analysing American, Australian and Canadian works by authors/filmmakers from Indigenous, settlercolonial and other heritages, produces the first study of a multinational range of SG works. This study employs a postcolonial, feminist politics of reading in light of Laura Donaldson's understanding of the "simultaneity of oppression" in her seminal "The Miranda Complex" (1988).Vital contexts for these works are thus the cultural tensions arising from second- and third-wave feminism and dawning awareness of acculturating Indigenous educational practice: movements which prompt a re-evaluation of educational practice and epistemological frameworks in the post-1960's period. Implementation of these discourses create tensions I call "anxieties of education." Settler-invader societies have persistently used education to uphold elitist hierarchies, enact Indigenous genocide and absolve states from responsibility by erasing and rewriting historical memory. But settler-invader cultural production has often been misinterpreted in the field of postcolonial studies, which treats settler-colonial nations as having less violent origins than colonies of occupation. However, work in recent decades has shown that in settler-colonial contexts "the violence done was often greater" due to "the elimination of the majority status of the indigenous population" and the indigenisation of settlers through nationalist discourse (Johnston and Lawson 2003; Slemon 1990; Moss 2003). My work is important because it brings settler-invader heritages to the fore by stressing their impact on the educational practices that are evident in SG narratives. Studying both film and literature will enable me to demonstrate the diversity of SG narratives, attesting to the genre's pervasiveness within popular culture and to chart SG's wider impact within public consciousness through visual and textual narratives and adaptations between the two.The University of Nottingham's research facilities, leading interdisciplinary American and Canadian Studies department and M4C's supportive skills workshops and wealth of research activity will support and enhance my study.