First Nations Phantoms & Aboriginal Spectres: The Function of Ghosts in Settler-Invader Cultures
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines a number of recent ghost stories produced by minority writers in Australia and Canada—from Tracey Moffatt to Thomas King—to highlight the way such tales have been used to interrogate dominant systems of control. If Derrida is correct that ‘haunting is central to any hegemony’, but also that we must learn to ‘talk’ with ghosts, then the way the spectres of minority and dominant structures are negotiated says a great deal about relations of power, especially in the context of race, ethnicity and whiteness. This paper argues that where once Indigenous and minority ethnic writers were metaphorised as spectral within dominant hegemonic structures in order to effect actual political disenfranchisement, contemporary writers and filmmakers have repossessed the spectres of nation to critique, interrogate and reverse such deterritorialising practices. The contestatory politics that have played out as a result of these strategic interventions have in effect ‘ghosted’ dominant players, highlighting the racial dimensions of whiteness and spectralising dominant agency in complex and intriguing ways.This paper will examine films such as Atanarjuat and Bedevil, and novels by Thomas King and Tomson Highway to consider the way this spectral discourse has come to dominate contemporary texts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".