Settlement and Imperialism

Johan Höglund

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

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

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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

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