Gypsies, tramps, and thieves: the contrapuntal rantings of a halfbreed girl
| dc.contributor.author | Anderson, Allyson | |
| dc.contributor.examiningcommittee | Trott, Christopher (Native Studies) | en_US |
| dc.contributor.examiningcommittee | Hee-Jung Joo, Serenity (English, Theatre, Film & Media) | en_US |
| dc.contributor.examiningcommittee | Reder, Deanna (Simon Fraser University) | en_US |
| dc.contributor.supervisor | LaRocque ,Emma (Native Studies) Committee: Trott,Christopher, Hee-Jung Joo, Serenity | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-09-04T16:10:30Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-09-04T16:10:30Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2019-05-10 | en_US |
| dc.date.submitted | 2019-09-04T16:05:22Z | en |
| dc.degree.discipline | Native Studies | en_US |
| dc.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) | en_US |
| dc.description.abstract | Abstract This thesis investigates issues of representation and the social identity of the colonized by conducting a textual analysis of a fictive, construct that I dub the halfbreed girl, and of the ways in which selected metisse writers, poets, artists and performers respond to that stereotype in their respective works. Using methodologies in literature and the visual/performing arts, this thesis interrogates matters of social process: specifically, settler-colonialism’s discursive management of the social identities – in effect, the social place – of metis women, and how metis women negotiate this highly raced and gendered identity space. Emphasizing Canadian contexts, the images examined are drawn from North American settler-colonial pop-culture texts produced in the late nineteenth- through the early twentyfirst centuries; the metisse responses to them are gathered from the same time period. The thesis includes American-produced images of the halfbreed girl due to the historic relationship between the two nations and the significant consumption of mass-produced American pop-culture media by Canadians – historically and currently. The first tier of the study demonstrates how the figure of the halfbreed girl is rendered abject through textual strategies that situate her at the intersection of the dichotomies, civilization/savagery and Madonna/whore, generating the racialized Princess/squaw polemic. The logic of the Princess/squaw polemic further reticulates into three sub-binaries: White/Indian, mimesis/regression, and naturalness/degeneracy, compounding the abjection of the halfbreed girl, who oscillates along and between these binaries, relegating her to a state of perpetual liminality in the settler-colonial master narrative. The thesis also finds that these textual strategies tend to reflect the processes of social abjection to which metis women were subjected in actuality, as exemplified by the deteriorating social status of historical metisses in nineteenth-century Canada. The second tier of the study finds that metisse auteurs are indeed cognizant of this social construction–and subsequent abjection–of themselves as an Indigenous ‘other’ in settler-colonial pop-culture discourse, and incorporate this awareness, along with elements of the stereotypical halfbreed girl, into their respective embodiments of metisse-ness in their selected works. However, they do not respond uniformly to images of the halfbreed girl that situate them as a liminal entity, nor necessarily receive them uncritically. Rather, their works exhibit variegated reactions—from internalization to various modalities of resistance—as they grapple with aspects of the halfbreed girl in their own performances and/or texts. | en_US |
| dc.description.note | October 2019 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | APA | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1993/34149 | |
| dc.language.iso | eng | en_US |
| dc.rights | open access | en_US |
| dc.subject | Indigenous | en_US |
| dc.subject | Women | en_US |
| dc.subject | Metis | en_US |
| dc.subject | Half breed | en_US |
| dc.subject | Representation | en_US |
| dc.subject | Pop Culture | en_US |
| dc.title | Gypsies, tramps, and thieves: the contrapuntal rantings of a halfbreed girl | en_US |
| dc.type | doctoral thesis | en_US |
| local.subject.manitoba | yes | en_US |