Review of Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature By Dee Horne
In Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998), Louis Owens critiques a formative study of post-colonial literature, The Empire Writes Back (1990), because it "ignores entirely the impressive body of literature written by American Indian authors." Such an "omission,&qu...
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DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
2001
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| Online Access: | https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2235 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3235/viewcontent/BR_Bernardin.pdf |
| Summary: | In Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (1998), Louis Owens critiques a formative study of post-colonial literature, The Empire Writes Back (1990), because it "ignores entirely the impressive body of literature written by American Indian authors." Such an "omission," he suggests, is symptomatic of American Indian literature's marginalization even within marginalized literary studies. Dee Horne's Contemporary American Indian Writing: Unsettling Literature seeks to remedy this omission by reading selected First Nations authors through the lens of post-colonial theory. Horne's overarching goal is to explore the ways in which American Indian writers, to borrow Audre Lorde's formulation, use the "master's" linguistic and narrative "tools" to dismantle the "master's house," an act, Horne writes, akin to "dancing along the precipice." The guiding theoretical questions of her study, drawn from Bakhtin, Said, and Bhabha, as well as King, Silko, and Rose, are enfolded in her opening discussion of "subversive mimicry" and "creative hybridity" as dual strategies used by American Indian writers "to dismantle the colonial discourse and its rules of recognition" while offering alternatives to that discourse in the form of transformative, fluid visions of American Indian identity. Each chapter then focuses on how major First Nations authors wield "trickster" strategies, ranging from satire and silences to subversive stereotyping and shame, in order to "unsettle the colonial relationship" while creating "dialogues in which settlers may participate in the process of decolonization." By focusing on six First Nations writersLee Maracle, Ruby Slipperjack, Jeannette Armstrong, Beatrice Culleton, Tomson Highway, and Thomas King-and by bringing attention to some of the cultural matrices informing each text, whether Ojibway or Okahagan, Metis, or Cree, Horne suggests a more mobile American Indian literary studies moving across what is to many Indian nations an arbitrary boundary-line. Given the absence of First Nations ... |
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