Drawing Indians: The Politics of Representation in Jeff Barnaby’s Rhymes for Young Ghouls

초록

Jeff Barnaby’s 2013 film, Rhymes for Young Ghouls, examines the history and legacy of Canada’s residential school system by focusing on Aila, a teenaged girl on the fictional Red Crow Reserve in the 1970s, and how her family and young life are shattered by the violence unleashed on First Nations Peoples by the residential school system and the Canadian government. This essay argues that Rhymes for Young Ghouls uses art as a form and medium of resistance to genocide and cultural erasure, not only in particular scenes through the artwork of Aila and her mother or through the incorporation of the graphic novel format into the storytelling of the film, but also through the medium of film itself. Contextualizing this argument by the current Change the Mascot Movement and theories of the politics of representation in popular culture texts, this essay connects the usage of art as a form of resistance in and by the film with a larger discussion of the politics of representation for Othered peoples in general.

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