"Transnational Narratives of Conflict and Empire, the Literary Art of Survivance in the Fiction of Gerald Vizenor" (original) (raw)
Related papers
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2018
Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road (2005) and Gerald Vizenor’s Blue Ravens (2014) offer literary representations of the Great War combined with life narratives focusing on the personal experiences of Indigenous soldiers. The protagonists’ lives on the reservations, which illustrate the experiences of racial discrimination and draw attention to power struggles against the White dominance, provide a representation of and a response to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in North America. The context of World War I and the Aboriginal contributions to American and Canadian wartime responses on European battlefields are used in the novels to take issue with the historically relevant changes. The research focus of this paper is to discuss two strategies of survival presented in Boyden’s and Vizenor’s novels, which enable the protagonists to process, understand, and overcome the trauma of war.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 2018
Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road (2005) and Gerald Vizenor's Blue Ravens (2014) offer literary representations of the Great War combined with life narratives focusing on the personal experiences of Indigenous soldiers. The protagonists' lives on the reservations, which illustrate the experiences of racial discrimination and draw attention to power struggles against the White dominance, provide a representation of and a response to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in North America. The context of World War I and the Aboriginal contributions to American and Canadian wartime responses on European battlefields are used in the novels to take issue with the historically relevant changes. The research focus of this paper is to discuss two strategies of survival presented in Boyden's and Vizenor's novels, which enable the protagonists to process, understand, and overcome the trauma of war.
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 53 (2018): 375-394., 2018
Joseph Boyden's Three Day Road (2005) and Gerald Vizenor's Blue Ravens (2014) offer literary representations of the Great War combined with life narratives focusing on the personal experiences of Indigenous soldiers. The protagonists' lives on the reservations, which illustrate the experiences of racial discrimination and draw attention to power struggles against the White dominance, provide a representation of and a response to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in North America. The context of World War I and the Aboriginal contributions to American and Canadian wartime responses on European battlefields are used in the novels to take issue with the historically relevant changes. The research focus of this paper is to discuss two strategies of survival presented in Boyden's and Vizenor's novels, which enable the protagonists to process, understand, and overcome the trauma of war.
By My Heart": Gerald Vizenor's Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point
2015
Gerald Vizenor's 2006 publications Almost Ashore and Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point illuminate Anishinaabe nationhood, citizenship, and self-determiniation through an ironic transnational framework constituted from a particular landscape, set of stories, relationships, and memory. Through the apparatus of poetry, and specifically through the lens of "by my heart" (a phrase that echoes through Vizenor's collections), Vizenor reveals Anishinaabeg determining the locales and ideals of the nation, despite discourses of dominance that would preordain and reduce Anishinaabe experience to an urban/reservation dichotomy and normalize colonial conquest.
The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History. James H. Cox
MELUS
How do American Indian writers engage and challenge the political and representational forces that have oppressed them for centuries? With The Political Arrays of American Indian Literary History, James H. Cox addresses this question that has vexed scholars of Native American studies for decades. By modeling a new method for interpreting literature by Indigenous North Americans, Cox traces what he calls the writers' "political arrays" to illuminate the "nuances, ambiguities, and ambivalences of the politics of Native American and Indigenous writing" (3). Such arrays, he argues, move in unpredictable, sometimes contradictory directions that are often undesirable to contemporary scholars of American Indian literature, who have been conditioned by the Red Power Movement and the literary Native American renaissance to prioritize anti-colonial resistance in Indigenous texts. Even if undesirable or somewhat invisible when Native texts do not explicitly discuss politics, they "nevertheless enter the world as documents implicated in the struggle for and conflict over power" (143). As a starting point for its method, Political Arrays challenges Native studies scholars to examineand set aside-our own "political allegiances" (3). In so doing, Cox urges, we can see the "full range of political expression by American Indian writers beyond the literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s that, by serving as the field's primary political touchstone, has obscured the rich political diversity of the last hundred years of American Indian literary history" (17). Cox issues the challenge and then takes it up himself, recovering, reviewing, and rereading a vast archive of Indigenous writing, which includes speeches, letters, plays, novels, editorials, essays, screenplays, and detective fiction. Following current conventions in the field and Cox's lead in Political Arrays, in this review, I use variously the collective terms to describe North American Indigenous people. The book's five chapters, introduction, and conclusion are meticulously researched, reading as nearly equal parts historiography and literary criticism. Cox offers examples of "political arrays" in the introduction; one such array reveals the connections among the "nodes" of Louis Erdrich's 1980s novels, Peter Matthiessen's compliments on Love Medicine (1984) and The Beet Queen
Mapping out Native American space in contemporary Anishinaabe literature
University of Kent, 2019
The literary production of contemporary Anishinaabe writers Louise Erdrich, David Treuer and Gerald Vizenor outline imaginary geographies based in Northern Dakota and Minnesota that also branch out towards transnational spaces. By reading contemporary Anishinaabe fiction as literary cartography, this thesis reveals the complex maps of interaction that connect reservation spaces with a much wider range of environments by both integrating and expanding upon Indigenous histories of mobility to include border-crossings and international exchanges. The networks that emerge suggest the possibility of a more expansive Native space that nevertheless asserts Anishinaabe selfdetermination and sovereignty. This project aims to answer Lisa Brooks's question "What be perceived as threatening and therefore undesirable. In spite of this, "indigenous tribes claim that their sovereignty is an inherent, aboriginal right, and thus not 'given' to them by the federal government" (174), and will not be deterred by the "colonial ambivalence" manifested by the U.S. government but will maintain the premise that they are sovereign and have a right to self-determination until these rights are acknowledged. The notion of tribal sovereignty is also employed to reclaim cultural and intellectual Indigenous traditions, and as such it has strongly influenced Native American literary criticism. In his 1999 landmark book, Red on Red, Craig S. Womack expressed "the conviction that Native literature, and the criticism that surrounds it, needs to see more attention devoted to tribally specific concerns" (1). He thus situates the long history of Native literature that preceded the time of contact at the core of American literature. In his analysis, Womack vows to "concentrate on the idea that Native literary aesthetics must be politicized and that autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty serve as useful literary concepts," and explains that "literature has something to add to the arena of Native political struggle (11). Published in 2006, American Indian Literary Nationalism also has the purpose of encouraging scholars to ground criticism in tribal intellectual traditions rather than systematically draw from western theory. One of the premises of literary nationalism is that Indigenous writing evolved according to its own cultural codes, so that the language tools of the coloniser, instead of disrupting tradition, were incorporated into a longestablished culture of writing. Louise Erdrich explains that in Ojibwe, the words for book and rock painting are almost identical (Books and Islands 5), thus establishing a continuity between traditional pictorial art and contemporary literary works. In The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast, Lisa Brooks adds that in the Abenaki language, which is close to Anishinaabemowin, the root word awighasignifies draw, write, and map, so that awikhigan, which "originally described birchbark messages, maps, and scrolls, came to encompass books and letters" (xxi). From the pictographic traditions of birchbark scrolls 16 and wampum belts to textual literacy, the purpose of Indigenous writing is to express the relationship of cooperation and interdependence that unites all the beings who share Native space, or what the author calls "the common pot" (3), with the implication that writing is inherently spatial: Awikhiganak [birchbark scrolls] and wampum were facets of an indigenous writing system that was based on 'cartographic principles'. The graphic symbols used in both forms represented the relationships between people, between places, between humans and non-humans, between the waterways that joined them […] the writing that came from Europe was incorporated into this spatialized system. (12-13, italics in the original) Spatial by nature, writing emerges out of interaction with the land. Before contact, the forests inhabited by hunters were "full of marks and signs" left by animals, in which the hunters themselves took part: "hunters left family blaze marks on trees to avoid competition within a watershed and left awikhiganak to inform other family members where the good hunting was or what space they might cover in their journey" (49, italics in the original). Thus, an Indigenous writing tradition involves the negotiation of complex relationships between beings sharing the same space. James Cox argues that Brooks's work "establishes a literary genealogy that begins with the codices" (The Red Land to the South 194), and that this new "literary history [...] challenge[s] the dominance of the Native American renaissance in American Indian literary studies" (195) by emphasising a much longer, continuous tradition of textual production. Further, the land itself constitutes a form of text. In her travel memoir Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), Louise Erdrich constantly makes links between the islands featuring rock paintings drawn by her ancestors and the books which are so central to her own life: "these islands, which I long to read, are books in themselves" (3). If islands are texts, then they are deciphered by subjects moving through the land, which is what Brooks suggests in one of her chapter subtitles: "The
The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature
The Journal of American Culture, 2006
Invisible, marginal, expected-these words trace the path of recognition for American Indian literature written in English since the late eighteenth century. This Companion chronicles and celebrates that trajectory by defining relevant institutional, historical, cultural, and gender contexts, by outlining the variety of genres written since the 1770s, and also by focusing on significant authors who established a place for Native literature in literary canons in the 1970s (Momaday, Silko, Welch, Ortiz, Vizenor), achieved international recognition in the 1980s (Erdrich), and performance-celebrity status in the 1990s (Harjo and Alexie). In addition to the seventeen chapters written by respected experts-Native and non-Native; American, British, and European scholars, the Companion includes bio-bibliographies of forty authors, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline which details major works of Native American literature and mainstream American literature, as well as significant social, cultural, and historical events. An essential overview of this powerful literature.