Place, Affect, and Belonging: Popular Literature and First Nations at Both Sides of the Pacific

Abstract

This article will offer a reading on how crime fiction re-signifies stereotypes about Indigenous peoples and places that had often been constructed through popular genres such as crime fiction. I examine two novels from different yet relatable contexts: Scream Black Murder (1995) and Hot Line (2002). Published in English and Spanish, these texts were written by First Nations authors: Kamilaroi writer and academic Philip McLaren and Chilean novelist of Mapuche descent Luis Sepúlveda. Both foreground Indigenous characters and places through literary representations of affect against the sentimentalisation of minoritised identities. I read these novels as part of a growing body of popular texts that Tocco and Uxó call ‘trans-Indigenous crime fiction’ (Subalternity, relationality and (trans-)Indigeneity in Latin American crime fiction: Re-reading The Uncomfortable Dead. Crime Fiction Studies, 6 (1), 72–89), a sub-genre which has been brewing over the last decades on both sides of the Pacific, from Australia and the United States to Chile and Mexico, now including Indigenous authors who reclaim popular literary genres to subvert its tropes (Watson, Citation2019a, Deadly detectives: How Aboriginal Australian writers are re-creating crime fiction. AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 15 (1), 75). While acknowledging the specificities of different local contexts, my reading will examine their transnational commonalities in terms of affective resistance related to belonging and place, against settler state brutality.