Monsters and Power: Indigenous and Writers of Color Reimagine the Monstrous

This course examines how contemporary Indigenous writers and writers of color deploy monstrosity as a powerful tool for critiquing systems of oppression and imagining decolonized futures. Through close reading of horror literature, Gothic fiction, and speculative works by authors including Toni Morrison, Stephen Graham Jones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Carmen Maria Machado, we explore how marginalized communities transform the monster from a figure of fear into an agent of resistance. The course investigates three key literary traditions: Black Gothic's engagement with the afterlife of slavery, Indigenous horror's decolonial hauntings, and Latinx borderlands literature's mestiza consciousness. Students develop skills in literary analysis while engaging with critical frameworks from monster theory, Afropessimism, decolonial theory, and borderlands studies. Rather than simply inheriting Euro-American Gothic traditions, the writers we study reveal how the real monsters are often the systems and institutions that determine who gets to be human and who gets relegated to the realm of the non- or inhuman. This course demonstrates how literature functions as a form of cultural resistance, exposing ongoing colonial violence while imagining alternatives beyond oppressive structures.