The World, the Text, and the Indian

Description

Since the rise of the Native American Renaissance in literature and culture during the American civil rights period, a rich critical discourse has been developed to provide a range of interpretive frameworks for the study, recovery, and teaching of Native American literary and cultural production. For the past few decades the dominant framework has been nationalism, a critical perspective placing emphasis on specific tribal nations and nationalist concepts. While this nationalist intervention has produced important insights and questions regarding Native American literature, culture, and politics, it has not always attended to the important fact that Native texts and writers have also always been globalized. The World, the Text, and the Indian breaks from this framework by examining Native American literature not for its tribal-national significance but rather its connections to global, transnational, and cosmopolitan forces. Essays by leading scholars in the field assume that Native American literary and cultural production is global in character; even claims to sovereignty and self-determination are made in global contexts and influenced by global forces. Spanning from the nineteenth century to the present day, these analyses of theories, texts, and methods—from trans-indigenous to cosmopolitan, George Copway to Sherman Alexie, and indigenous feminism to book history—interrogate the dialects of global indigeneity and settler colonialism in literary and visual culture.
List of Illustrations

Foreword
Jace Weaver

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Globalizing the Word
Scott Richard Lyons

1. Empire Treasons: White Earth and the Great War
Gerald Vizenor

2. Native American Literary Criticism in Global Context
Arnold Krupat

3. “Between Friends and Enemies”: Moving Books and Locating Native Critique in Early Colonial America
Matt Cohen

4. “The Search Engine”: Traversing the Local and the Global in the Native Archive
Phillip H. Round

5. Migrations to Modernity: The Many Voices of George Copway’s Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland
Scott Richard Lyons

6. Emerging from the Background: Photographic Conventions, Stereotypes, and the Ordinariness of the Indian
Kate Flint

7. Reading Global Indigenous Resistance in Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back
Eric Cheyfitz

8. Productive Tensions: Trans/national, Trans-/Indigenous
Chadwick Allen

9. “The Right to Enjoy All Human Rights”: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Potential for Decolonial Cosmopolitanism
Elvira Pulitano

Afterword
Shari M. Huhndorf

Contributors
Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438464466
• Langue: English

Extrait

The World, the Text, and the Indian
SUNY series, Native Traces

Jace Weaver and Scott Richard Lyons, editors
The World, the Text, and the Indian
Global Dimensions of Native American Literature
Edited by
SCOTT RICHARD LYONS
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2017 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lyons, Scott Richard, editor.
Title: The world, the text, and the Indian : global dimensions of Native American literature / edited by Scott Richard Lyons.
Description: Albany, NY : State University of New York Press, 2017. | Series: SUNY series, native traces | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016031438 (print) | LCCN 2016054550 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438464459 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438464466 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism—Theory, etc. | Indian authors—Political and social views. | Indians—Attitudes. | Indians in literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. | Colonization in literature. | Transnationalism in literature.
Classification: LCC PS153.I52 W67 2017 (print) | LCC PS153.I52 (ebook) | DDC 810.9/897—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031438
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mary Ann Lyons and George James Goggleye, Ojibwe globetrotters
Contents
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Jace Weaver
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Globalizing the Word
Scott Richard Lyons
Chapter 1. Empire Treasons: White Earth and the Great War
Gerald Vizenor
Chapter 2. Native American Literary Criticism in Global Context
Arnold Krupat
Chapter 3. “Between Friends and Enemies”: Moving Books and Locating Native Critique in Early Colonial America
Matt Cohen
Chapter 4. “The Search Engine”: Traversing the Local and the Global in the Native Archive
Phillip H. Round
Chapter 5. Migrations to Modernity: The Many Voices of George Copway’s Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany, Belgium, and Scotland
Scott Richard Lyons
Chapter 6. Emerging from the Background: Photographic Conventions, Stereotypes, and the Ordinariness of the Indian
Kate Flint
Chapter 7. Reading Global Indigenous Resistance in Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back
Eric Cheyfitz
Chapter 8. Productive Tensions: Trans/national, Trans-/Indigenous
Chadwick Allen
Chapter 9. “The Right to Enjoy All Human Rights”: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Potential for Decolonial Cosmopolitanism
Elvira Pulitano
Afterword
Shari M. Huhndorf
Contributors
Index
Illustrations 4.1 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Map and Illustrations of the Missions (Boston: 1843). Courtesy of American Antiquarian Society. 5.1 Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh—G. Copway (ca. 1860). Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-121977. 5.2 John William Orr, George Copway (Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh) (1851). William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, C2 1851 Co. 6.1 Thom Ross, Buffalo Bill’s Indians. Installation: La Tienda, Eldorado, Santa Fe, NM, 2011–2013. Photo: Kate Flint. 6.2 Thom Ross, Buffalo Bill’s Indians. Installation: La Tienda, Eldorado, Santa Fe, NM, 2011–2013. Photo: Kate Flint. 6.3 Robert Adamson, Ka(h)kewaquonaby, a Canadian chief (Peter [Kahkewaquonaby] Jones), c. 1845 © National Portrait Gallery, London. 6.4 Robert Adamson, Ka(h)kewaquonaby, a Canadian chief (Peter [Kahkewaquonaby] Jones), c. 1845 © National Portrait Gallery, London. 6.5 Valentine Bromley, Women Gathering Wood . Oil on canvas, 1876. 6.6 Nate Salsbury Collection, “Red Shirt, The Fighting Chief of Sioux Nation,” Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, NS-97. 6.7 Elliott and Fry, “Colonel W. F. Cody, ‘Buffalo Bill,’ ” Denver Public Library, Western History Collection, Z-2374. 6.8 Bishop and Christie, “The Lions (The Two Sisters)” in Pauline Johnson, Legends of Vancouver (Vancouver and Victoria: David Spencer, 1911), facing 1. 6.9 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Red Indian/Brown Indian,” from An Indian from India series, 2003. Courtesy of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and sepiaEYE. 6.10 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Quanah Parker and Annu, Before,” from An Indian from India series, 2001–2003. Courtesy of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and sepiaEYE. 6.11 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Daughter and Stepdaughter,” from An Indian from India series, 2001–2003. Courtesy of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and sepiaEYE. 6.12 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Tom Annu Before,” from An Indian from India series, 2003. Courtesy of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and sepiaEYE. 6.13 Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, “Tom Annu After,” from An Indian from India series, 2003. Courtesy of Annu Palakunnathu Matthew and sepiaEYE.
Foreword
Conferences are both the boon and bane of an academic’s existence. The annual meetings of professional associations are a time to connect with friends and colleagues you see far too rarely. And while you enjoy the host city, you also hope that you’ll hear at least one fresh and exciting paper or discover an emerging scholar of whom you were previously unaware.
The conferences we organize on a specific topic at our home institutions are something else. Certainly, catching up with friends and meeting new scholars with fresh perspectives can and often do occur. But unlike the academic sprawl of association annual meetings, these events are held for specific purposes and are more tightly focused. Though we wish it were different, they are uncertain generators of knowledge at best. Hardly ever does one see lightning captured in a bottle and a conference prove itself worthy of being put between the covers of a book (though far more wind up there than should). In my twenty-five years as a scholar of Native American studies, I have participated in only four that transcended the strictures of the form. Of those, I organized only one.
Globalizing the Word: Transnationalism and the Making of Native American Literature, organized by Scott Richard Lyons and held at the University of Michigan in May 2013, was such a conference. I was uniformly impressed by the quality of the presentations from among the best scholars of Native literature, and I enjoyed the spirited conversation. I presented material from my then-unpublished book The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 . Though I did not produce a piece for this volume, I have so much respect for the proceedings that I agreed to provide this foreword. I also solicited the project as the first contract in the Native Traces series under my editorship, which I inherited from Gerald Vizenor (who also spoke at the conference). The following year I asked Lyons to join me as coeditor of the series, which specializes in cutting-edge, out-of-the-box work in Native American studies. That’s how he ended up listed as both book editor and series editor.
During the last two decades, much of the critical conversation in Native American literary studies has been a disputation between the so-called nationalist and cosmopolitan positions. Cosmopolitan critics viewed nationalist scholarship as dangerous and separatist. Nationalists viewed cosmopolitans as emblematic of colonialism and assimilationist desire. That contest has largely been won by the nationalists. The differences between the two positions, however, were never as stark as a few remaining (and very disgruntled) critics would have you believe. In American Indian Literary Nationalism , the most fulsome explication of the nationalist position, for instance, coauthor Robert Warrior rather oddly felt compelled to state that while he was both a nationalist and a literary critic, he was not a “nationalist literary critic.”
Warrior’s chapter in that book was about his brief relationship with Palestinian critic Edward Said and his respect for that estimable scholar’s oeuvre. Warrior’s statement, while I believe it to be totally sincere and accurate, was unnecessary, as this present volume demonstrates. In borrowing and adapting the title of Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic , this volume encapsulates the transnational position.
In the debates of the last twenty years, I have been identified, both by others and self-affirmation, as a nationalist. Yet in 2014, in The Red Atlantic , I took what some regarded as a hard cosmopolitan turn. It would, of course, be both futile and silly to argue that things were no different for the indigenous peoples of the Americas after the Columbus event, as those indigenes became imbricated with European peoples, economies, and ideas. What my critics among my erstwhile nationalist allies failed to understand is that transnationalism is a capacious enough umbrella to shade both nationalists and cosmopolitans alike. This volume (especially Lyons’s introduction and Shari Huhndorf’s afterword) illustrates that fact clearly. As Lyons perceptively states in his introduction, it is a way “to promote movement in the field of Native American literary studies through (which is not the same thing as away from ) a ‘separatist,’ tribal-nationalist critic