The Generative Refusal of Mixtape Narratives and Hybrid Monsters in Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels

Abstract

The Generative Refusal of Mixtape Narratives and Hybrid Monsters in Stephen Graham Jones's Mongrels Kathryn Walkiewicz (bio) In 2013, eve tuck (Unangaxˆ) and c. ree published "A Glossary of Haunting," the first in a series of collaborative texts written by Indigenous and Asian American feminists that theorize the decolonial potential of horror and haunting. tuck and ree's inaugural piece disrupts the standard form and genre of the "glossary" to problematize how a typical glossary visually and discursively taxonomizes knowledge production. The essay does so in the name of "righting (and sometimes wronging) wrongs; about hauntings, mercy, monsters, generational debt, horror films, and what they might mean for understanding settler colonialism, ceremony, revenge, and decolonization."1 Their mixed-media approach and use of horror to right (and sometimes wrong) wrongs is part [End Page 403] of a broader theoretical turn to horror and the monstrous by Indigenous scholars, writers, and artists who seek to upend the dialectical logics that hold settler colonialism in place. While billy-ray belcourt (Driftpile Cree), brendan hokowhitu (Ngāti Pūkenga), maile arvin (Kanaka Maoli [Native Hawaiian]), and jeff barnaby (Mi'kmaq) all engage the monstrous, the spectral, or other staples of horror in their scholarship, film, and poetry, Blackfeet writer stephen graham jones is arguably the most well-known and prolific twenty-first-century Indigenous horror writer to do so.2 jones has authored over a dozen novels and countless short stories. While much of his writing pokes and prods at the spaces where horror and Indigeneity brush up against one another, his 2016 novel Mongrels explicitly meditates on some of the same questions about monstrosity taken up by the previously mentioned writers and artists. More specifically, Mongrels interrogates how the werewolf of horror might interrupt the racializing capitalist project of settler colonialism. Scholars of Jones's extensive body of work have compellingly argued for the significance of his contributions to Native American literature and contemporary U.S. fiction, but my interests here lie slightly elsewhere.3 In this essay, I am interested in Mongrels as a case study to think through werewolves specifically and Indigenous horror writing more broadly as part of the "generative refusal" work that Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) and other Indigenous artists and theorists call for.4 Generative refusal invites acts of Indigenous resurgence that reject state recognition as necessary for self-determination. I argue that Indigenous speculative fiction, especially Jones's use of what I term "mixtape narratives," provides a fruitful way not only to refuse the call of hegemonic settler life but to work against it productively—if horror as a genre of cultural expression has scripted the radical Other, especially the Indigenous/Black Other, as monstrous, then contending with [End Page 404] the genre is not only helpful but necessary. Horror, which organizes fear, anxiety, and other bad feelings, can be wielded to redirect these negative affects back at white supremacy. Accompanying Jones's mixtape narrative style is the trope of the El Camino, the werewolf family car that functions as a mobile site of home and kinship. Like the werewolves of the novel, the El Camino is a shifty, hybrid, and aberrant mongrel that signals a paradoxical orientation to hegemonic U.S. life. Mongrels' use of the werewolf (and the El Camino) allows Jones to center questions about colonization, race, poverty, and movement while avoiding essentializing traps. It is not unique among Jones's writings in doing so, but I argue it is the novel that does so most successfully. In Mongrels, Jones brings together some of the more experimental structural and stylistic elements of his earlier writings with some of the more character-driven narratives of his recent work, like Mapping the Interior (2017) and The Only Good Indians (2020).5 Mongrels resists the discourse of inclusive multiculturalism that centers colonial and racializing power structures by emphasizing monstrous mongrels who reject divisions between the human and other-than-human. This essay begins with a brief overview of the monster as a hybrid figure. I then analyze monstrous depictions of Indigeneity and the rise of the Native werewolf in the first two decades of the twenty-first century to contextualize Jones's reworking...