Topic
Narrating a Gothic Minneapolis: Indigenous Place-Making in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021)
This paper examines the city of Minneapolis from an Indigenous perspective in Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (2021), focusing on the exclusionary ways the urban environment is fashioned, followed by an analysis of the various ways in which the city is remade and renegotiated through place-making. The novel’s Indigenous characters experience the city as a gothic space, haunted by colonial history, displacement, incarceration, the spread of COVID-19, and police violence against Indigenous people and communities of color. Spatial racism is inscribed in the city’s infrastructure through practices such as redlining and, in recent years, the presence of ICE.
These conditions generate various forms of haunting that expose and critique the ongoing spatial exclusion of marginalized groups. Within this landscape, the Indigenous bookstore “Birchbark Books” functions as a counter-space that embodies Indigenous lived experiences and narratives. The novel emphasizes the material presence of Indigenous literature, most notably through the resurfacing of an ancient Indigenous-authored manuscript that documents historical erasure and displacement. This material reemergence stands in contrast to the absence and invisibility of Native people produced by colonial narratives and institutions. Furthermore, the novel portrays acts of resistance, protest, and solidarity in the wake of police brutality.
Bringing together literary and spatial analysis, this paper explores how urban space is represented and reimagined in The Sentence. Through a material-discursive approach (cf. Barad 2008) informed by recent studies of materiality in literature (cf. Ameel et al. 2020). I examine the representation of urban space in literature and connect it to the inhabitants’ everyday lived experience based on real-life events suffused with the literary mode of the gothic, asking how space is narrated in Erdrich’s novel.
Carolin Jesussek (Justus Liebig University Giessen)
Carolin Jesussek is a postdoctoral researcher and coordinator of the International PhD Program “Literary and Cultural Studies” (IPP) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. Her research interests include American gothic studies, contemporary literature, marginalization, space, metamorphoses, and environmental humanities.
She completed her PhD at the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2025. Her dissertation is titled “Gothic Materialism: Space, Ecosystems, and Marginalization in Contemporary North American Literature.” It focuses on the material and spatial dimensions of marginalization in contemporary gothic literature from North America. Carolin Jesussek has received the German Academic Scholarship Foundation’s (“Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes”) three-year scholarship to pursue her dissertation. She is co-editor of the collection Metamorphosis in the 21st century: Feminist, Queer, and Ecocritical Perspectives (forthcoming with Peter Lang) and has published on intertextual storytelling in MDPI Literature and Monstrum.