| Summary: | Abstract This thesis investigates issues of representation and the social identity of the colonized by conducting a textual analysis of a fictive, construct that I dub the halfbreed girl, and of the ways in which selected metisse writers, poets, artists and performers respond to that stereotype in their respective works. Using methodologies in literature and the visual/performing arts, this thesis interrogates matters of social process: specifically, settler-colonialism’s discursive management of the social identities – in effect, the social place – of metis women, and how metis women negotiate this highly raced and gendered identity space. Emphasizing Canadian contexts, the images examined are drawn from North American settler-colonial pop-culture texts produced in the late nineteenth- through the early twentyfirst centuries; the metisse responses to them are gathered from the same time period. The thesis includes American-produced images of the halfbreed girl due to the historic relationship between the two nations and the significant consumption of mass-produced American pop-culture media by Canadians – historically and currently. The first tier of the study demonstrates how the figure of the halfbreed girl is rendered abject through textual strategies that situate her at the intersection of the dichotomies, civilization/savagery and Madonna/whore, generating the racialized Princess/squaw polemic. The logic of the Princess/squaw polemic further reticulates into three sub-binaries: White/Indian, mimesis/regression, and naturalness/degeneracy, compounding the abjection of the halfbreed girl, who oscillates along and between these binaries, relegating her to a state of perpetual liminality in the settler-colonial master narrative. The thesis also finds that these textual strategies tend to reflect the processes of social abjection to which metis women were subjected in actuality, as exemplified by the deteriorating social status of historical metisses in nineteenth-century Canada. The second tier of the study ...
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