Madeleine Reddon

Assistant Professor

I study 20th and 21st century Indigenous literature in relation to global and modernist avant-garde traditions. My research and teaching are guided by anti-colonial and decolonial reading practices. I ask how the disciplinary apparatus of literary studies reproduces colonial knowledge production and turn to the literary archive as a repository for alternative models of reading and interrelation.

My current book project, Inheritances, pursues an unexamined network of aesthetic affiliations between Indigenous writers, African American writers, and the surrealist avant-garde. In particular, I am interested in literature that explores the intergenerational experience of dispossession and the persistence of kinship in spite of collective experiences of genocide, enslavement, and dispossession. Working alongside Indigenous literary nationalisms, which insist that we must first understand Indigenous epistemological, political, cultural, linguistic, and spiritual contexts to read Indigenous literature, my research seeks to develop sensitive and capacious methods for reading Indigenous literature concerned with the interruption or perceived loss of such contexts.

I am also a member of the Métis Nation of Alberta, born and raised in Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton, Canada.

Education

• BA Honours, English Literature, University of Alberta (2012)
• MA, English Literature, University of British Columbia (2015)
• PhD, English Literature, University of British Columbia (2022)

Research Interests

• Indigenous Literature, 1890 to the present
• Global modernist and avant-garde literatures
• Psychoanalysis
• Indigenous Studies
• Indigenous and Black Feminisms
• Postcolonial and Cultural Studies
• Anticolonial Thought
• Critical Theory

Publications/Research Listings

Academic Writing:

• “Turned in and Away: The Convolutions of Impossible Incorporation in the Narratives of Chester Himes,” Philosophies, vol. 9, no. 2, April 9, 2024
• “Paranormal Encounters: Notes on Indigenous Horror,” Global Horror Film: Trauma, Borders, and Shifting Visions, Ed. Samirah Alkassim and Ziad Foty, Cognella Press, in press 2023.
• “Indigenous Modernism: Dehabituating Reading Practices,” Canada and Beyond, Special Issue: Counterclockwise, Vol. 8, (2019) pp. 10-20.

Pedagogical and Public Writing:

• “Literature Guide: Summited with Sedna, the Mother of Sea Beasts by Alootook Ipellie,” Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island Website, Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2021.
• “George Kenny Biography.” The People and the Text: Indigenous Writing to 1992 Website.