Residential School Gothic and Red Power: Genre Friction in Rhymes for Young Ghouls

Abstract

Rhymes for Young Ghouls is a hyper-stylized film, extremely conscious of the way narrative conventions are organized into genres. In telling a story about a Mi'kmaw girl's leadership of a revenge plot, the film juxtaposes the genres—and the very different models of time-space—of the Gothic novel and the Red Power-era exploitation film. I read this jolting combination as a critical intervention into what I call Residential School Gothic, a dominant discourse on the historical wrong of Indian residential schooling which has emerged in Canada over the past two decades. The film's immanent critique of this public narrative template for telling stories about residential school exposes some of the crucial ways in which Residential School Gothic serves to reconfirm a settler common sense about liberal progress.