Stephen Graham Jones’ Structural Emergences

• In Event: Speculative Fiction as a Genre of Emergence

Abstract

Stephen Graham Jones is known for his wide-ranging and genre-bending literary production—writing horror, crime fiction, science fiction, and experimental fiction that does not easily fit into any generic frames. In this paper, I argue that genre-bending and experimental techniques allow Jones to enact a generative collapse of settler colonial frames. Building on the work of Patrick Wolfe, Gerald Vizenor, and Carol Warrior, I argue that Jones’s Indian Country Trilogy highlights how the structural frames of settler colonialism attempt to constrict Native people within fixed material and epistemological boundaries in an attempt to eliminate them through both physical genocide and assimilation. Jones unsettles these frames by blending elements of historical, experimental, and science fiction. Through this blending, Jones conveys a conception of Native collectivity that refuses Euro-American boundaries, such as those that treaties, legal statutes, and blood quantum regulations impose.

Historical and science fiction come together through Jones’s deployment of time travel, which both highlights the entrenchment of settler colonialism and offers opportunities to imagine Native identity and collectivity outside of settler colonial frames. By integrating this science fiction motif with elements of historical fiction, such as portrayals of figures like Custer and events like the Marias Massacre, Jones highlights the persistence of what Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination.” But time travel also foregrounds the continuity of Native survivance and demolishes concepts of Native identity grounded in Euro-American epistemology and law. Experimental formal elements across the three novels—including the use of chapter breaks, sentence structure, punctuation, font, and page layout—foreground Jones’s concern with boundary-crossing. These formal elements disrupt reader expectations and create a sense that the reading experience itself is generatively collapsing. Forcing readers to dwell in this space of collapse, the Indian Country Trilogy encourages approaches to interpretation that break with rigid Euro-American epistemology.

Overall, I argue that the collapse of frames—legal, formal, and generic—is a condition of emergence, giving rise to resistant modes of being and relation that draw on indigenous North American philosophies while also refusing essentialized conceptions of indigeneity. Analyzing the formal elements of Jones’s work illuminates the way speculative, historical, and experimental fiction can converge to engage structural violence, reassert indigenous thought, and produce new political imaginaries.

Author

• Gabriella Friedman, Cornell University