Of bleeding skulls and the postcolonial uncanny: bones and the presence of Nonosabasut and Demasduit

Abstract

Based on three years of fieldwork in Newfoundland and the UK, this article considers the various materializations of a Beothuk man and woman, all of which have, at their heart, the skull as an ambivalent thing, at once a trace of their presence and a confirmation of their absence. These various processes of materialization, the author argues, are attempts to arrest the ambivalent movement between presence and absence, yet are themselves haunted by the thing itself, which is both insufficient to, yet in excess of, these materializations. In so doing, it engages with broader questions of the nature of the affective presence of human remains, particularly in the context of the postcolonial politic of belonging in settler societies.