Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
LARC STUDENT PROFILES
jAMES ROSE
James Rose’s research focuses upon the self-representation of Indigenous American and First Nations Peoples in contemporary North American horror films. Within films such as Prey (Dan Trachtenberg, 2022), American Evil (Georgina Lightning, 2012), Don’t say its Name (Rueben Martell, 2021) and Slash/Back (Nyla Innuksuk, 2022), Indigenous creatives are writing, producing, directing and preforming within a growing body of genre films that act as counter-narratives to established colonial histories, decades of Hollywood mis-representation within the Western and, since the early 1970s, within the horror film. Emerging out of these Indigenous films are two key areas of consideration: the self-representation of Indigenous American and First Nations women as Post-Indians and the creation of films that function as survivance narratives.
Within the selected corpus of films, the role of the protagonist is undertaken by an Indigenous female who often navigates and negates a series of horrific threats to herself and her community. While these threats are presented as cinematically monstrous they are all, in some way, metaphorically functional as a means by which to address colonial legacies, generational trauma and the boarding school system, the ongoing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls crisis and issues of land rights. As these women overcome such threats, the films not only ‘film back’ in response to the violent histories of North American colonialism the monsters represent but also visually and verbally express a clear and focussed cultural autonomy, processes and practices, negating the vanishment so often imposed upon Indigenous American and First Nations Peoples and culture.
James is a widely published academic whose research has appeared in a number of edited collections and peer-reviewed periodicals and journals, both in print and online. His work has also been published in mainstream and educational magazines. While his PhD research has a sharp focus on the representation of North American Indigenous Peoples in horror cinema, his wider research encompasses contemporary British horror films and the work of the Brothers Quay alongside a growing interest in the representation of Trans bodies within genre cinema. And, because he is asked so often, his favourite horror film is split between Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Martin Rosen’s Watership Down (1978).
