A HAUNTOLOGICAL READING OF HELEN OYEYEMI’S THE ICARUS GIRL AND STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES’ THE ONLY GOOD INDIANS

Date

2026-6-8

Author

Çavuş, Zeynep

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

104
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This thesis aims to explore spectrality and ghostly manifestations of the inherited past in The Icarus Girl by Helen Oyeyemi and The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones using the framework of hauntology described by Derrida in his Specters of Marx while also embracing a postcolonial lens on the topic to pursue a critical reading of these two works written respectively by a Nigerian-English and a Blackfeet Native American author. This thesis argues that in both novels, personal and communal traumas of prolonged colonial histories are interconnected and inseparable, and both novels reflect the internalization of the colonial gaze of the other. The hauntological reading of these two novels explores spectrality, examining how ghostly motifs relate to the characters’ colonial pasts and how they respond to repetitions and returns of what has been deeply suppressed in the collective psyche. Despite the two novels’ varying geographical and historical contexts, this thesis seeks to show that their similarities are prominent in terms of haunting in a personal as well as communal sense.

Subject Keywords

hauntology, postcolonial gothic, spectrality, Oyeyemi, Jones

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119443

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis