Native Authenticity

Description

An indispensable resource for readers, students, and scholars of Native literatures in North America, Native Authenticity offers a clear, comprehensive, and systematic look at the diversity of critical approaches to the idea of "Indian-ness." Some of the foremost transatlantic scholars of Native Studies in North America and Europe share their insights on this highly-charged aspect of the contemporary theoretical field of Native Studies. The issue of "authenticity" or "Indian-ness" generates a controversial debate in studies of indigenous American literatures. The articulation of Native identity through the prism of Euro-American attempts to confine "Indian" groups to essentialized spaces is resisted by some Native writers, while others recognize a need for essentialist categories as a key strategy in the struggle for social justice and a perpetually renewed sense of Native sovereignty. Pressure from neo-colonial essentializing practices is in conflict with a politics of cultural sovereignty, which demands a notion of "Indian" essence or "authenticity" as a foundation for community values, heritage, and social justice.

Contributors participate in a scholarly and pedagogical search for an intellectual paradigm for Native literary studies that is apart from, yet cognizant with, powerful colonial legacies. The complex politics of Polynesian authenticity versus Native indigeneity is engaged by Native Hawaiian writers as they negotiate conflicting demands upon personal and tribal identities. Related to this questioning is the authenticity debate in Canadian First Nations writing, where the claim to authenticity rests upon a claim to historical precedence; also related is the highly contentious claim by some Chicano/a writers to an indigenous heritage as a claim to authority and "American" authenticity. Essays in this volume are focused upon the diverse and sophisticated responses of Native writers and scholars, while offering comparative perspectives on Native Hawaiian, Chicano, and Canadian literatures.
Preface

Introduction
Contemporary Discourses on “Indianness”
Deborah L. Madsen

1. Questions about the Question of “Authenticity”: Notes on Mo’olelo Hawai’i and the Struggle for Pono
Paul Lyons

2. Cycles of Selfhood, Cycles of Nationhood: Authenticity, Identity, Community, Sovereignty
David L. Moore

3. “Back when I used to be Indian”: Native American Authenticity and Postcolonial Discourse
Lee Schweninger

4. The X-Blood Files: Whose Story? Whose Indian?
Malea Powell

5. Modernism, Authenticity, and Indian Identity: Frank “Toronto” Prewett (1893–1962)
Joy Porter

6. Transdifference in the Work of Gerald Vizenor
Helmbrecht Breinig

7. Traces of Others in Our Own Other: Monocultural Ideals, Multicultural Resistance
Juan Bruce-Novoa

8. Sacred Community, Sacred Culture: Authenticity and Modernity in Contemporary Canadian Native Writings
Richard J. Lane

In Conversation
Postindian Reflections: Chickens and Piranha, Casinos, and Sovereignty
Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee

Contributors
Index

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781438431697
• Langue: English

Extrait

Native Traces
Gerald Vizenor and Deborah L. Madsen, series editors
Native Authenticity
Transnational Perspectives on Native American Literary Studies
Edited by
Deborah L. Madsen

Cover, San Geronimo Feast in Taos , painting by Pierre Cayol.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Native authenticity : transnational perspectives on Native American literary studies / [edited by] Deborah L. Madsen.
p. cm.
   Includes bibliographical references and index.
   ISBN 978-1-4384-3167-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
   ISBN 978-1-4384-3168-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
   1. American literature—Indian authors—History and criticism 2. Indians in literature. 3. Indians of North America—Ethnic identity. 4. Authenticity (Philosophy) in literature. I. Madsen, Deborah L.
   PS153.I52N35 2010
   810.9'897—dc22                                                                                                         2009034852
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Preface
This book brings together original work by some of the foremost scholars of Native American studies in North America and Europe in order to map one specific and highly charged aspect of the contemporary theoretical field of Native American Indian studies. The issue of “authenticity” or “Indianness” generates a controversial debate in studies of indigenous American literatures. The articulation of Native American Indian identity through the prism of Euro-American attempts to confine “Indian” groups to essentialized spaces is resisted by some Native American writers, while others recognize a need for essentialist categories as a key strategy in the struggle for social justice and a perpetually renewed sense of Native sovereignty. This volume addresses the complexities of the efforts, both literary and scholarly, to negotiate the discursive space opened by the diverse reimaginings of indigenous identities. Pressure from neocolonial essentializing practices are in conflict with a politics of cultural sovereignty that demands a notion of “Indian” essence or “authenticity” as a foundation for community values, heritage, and social justice.
Contributors to this volume participate in the scholarly and pedagogical search for an intellectual paradigm for Native American literary studies that is apart from, yet cognizant of, powerful colonial legacies. Essays in this volume are focused upon the diverse and sophisticated responses of Native American Indian writers and scholars, while offering comparative perspectives upon Native Hawaiian, Chicano, and Canadian First Nations literatures. The complex politics of Polynesian authenticity versus Native American indigeneity is engaged by Native Hawaiian writers as they negotiate conflicting demands upon personal and tribal identities. Related to this questioning is the authenticity debate in Canadian First Nations writing, where the claim to authenticity rests upon a claim to historical precedence; also related is the highly contentious claim by some Chicano/a writers to an indigenous heritage as a claim to authority and “American” authenticity.
The primary issues explored in this collection could be summarized as colonialism and the possibilities for Native heritage in the present moment; the ongoing influence of Euro-American imperialism upon Native land rights and land title; the hermeneutic basis for articulating Native tribal sovereignty; and methodological issues for scholars (Native and non-Native) who want to resist the dangers of recapitulating in their own work the domination and destruction wrought historically in Native American Indian communities and upon the individuals of those communities. The introduction presents an overview of theoretical perspectives on these issues by tracing a range of definitions of what it means to be Indian.
In the first of the chapters presented here, Paul Lyons addresses the colonized condition of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific and especially Hawai'i. The political contexts of contemporary debates over indigeneity and “Indianness” emerge clearly from this essay. Lyons engages first the difficult ethical issue of how a non-Native critic can pose the question of Native authenticity. He goes on to discuss the dynamic nature of indigenous Pacific writing that at once resists confinement to the past while exploring specifically Pacific forms of storytelling, perception, and knowing.
David Moore, in the next essay, discusses relations between authenticity, individual and community identity formation, and tribal sovereignty. Moore's understanding of the permeability of communal boundaries (of both the U.S. and the tribes) offers a framework within which he traces the dynamic relationship between what he calls cycles of selfhood and cycles of nationhood in Native American writings from the period of the early Republic to the present. Moore's emphasis upon the foundational role of tribal sovereignty in the politics and culture of authentic “Indianness” is then taken up in Lee Schweninger's “‘Back when I used to be Indian’: Native American Authenticity and Postcolonial Discourse,” which addresses directly the context of colonization and U.S. imperialism raised by Moore. In this chapter, Schweninger argues that borrowing from postcolonial studies in order to theorize issues of authenticity can help readers of Native American literature to understand and address the postcoloniality of the United States. Like Lyons, he explores what it means for a non-Native scholar to engage the issue of Native authenticity. He works through the writings of such Native American authors as Louis Owens, Mark Turcotte, and Gerald Vizenor to identify the literary strategies by which authenticity can be resisted without reinstating it through essentialization. Within the context of U.S. influence over Native American cultural production, highlighted by Lee Schweninger, how is it possible to read the rhetoric of “Indianness”? In her essay, “The X-Blood Files: Whose Story, Whose Indian?” Malea Powell offers a mixed-blood view of recent developments within the field of Native American studies, with an emphasis upon indigenous responses to imposed colonial measures of authenticity such as blood quantum and federal recognition. Hers is a carefully nuanced interpretation of the ways in which “real” versus “fake” Indians have been defined, in order to distinguish modes of being, writing, and living “like” an Indian, in the works of prominent Native American theorists and writers.
Having introduced the issue of how to read the rhetoric of “Indianness,” the focus turns to the question, how is “Indianness” lived and written? Joy Porter's essay, “Modernism, Authenticity, and Indian Identity: Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett (1893–1962),” explores one complex example of living “Indianness” in the early twentieth century. The nickname “Toronto” derives from the Indian ancestry claimed by, and for, this Canadian poet as he moved in the influential literary circles of post–World War I England. Prominent members of the Bloomsbury set such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Virginia Woolf, and Lady Ottoline Morrell were counted among the admirers of his poetry and, importantly, his “Indianness.” Porter argues that, despite the veracity (or otherwise) of Prewett's indigeneity, his significance lies in the correspondence between the poetry he wrote and the desire of modernist sensibilities to encounter living embodiments of “Indian” stereotypes. The philosophical and hermeneutic bases upon which determinations of “Indian” versus “non-Indian” identity are made provide the focus of Helmbrecht Breinig's essay, “Transdifference in the Work of Gerald Vizenor.” His wide-ranging discussion of Vizenor's poetry and fiction addresses the tension or rhetorical indecidability between difference and binary differentiation that allows us to live with uncertainty but that Vizenor's work refuses to resolve. Distinguishing his concept of “transdifference” from Homi Bhabha's “hybridity” and Jacques Derrida's “différance,” Breinig argues that the simultaneous confrontation with contradict