American Indian Literature

Beginning in the mid-1960s and throughout the 1970s, a new generation of American Indian writers surprised the mainstream literary establishment by publishing an unprecedented range of innovative poetry, autobiography, fiction, non-fiction, journalism, and mixed-genre works of undeniably high quality. Neither ''American literature'' nor ''American Indian literature'' would ever mean quite what they had in the past, and the assumed distinctions between these categories - written vs. oral or transcribed, sophisticated vs. primitive, familiar vs. exotic - were increasingly questioned by gifted and diverse Indian writers who not only published in all genres but, importantly, began to produce their own body of relevant scholarship. Although many individuals participated in this explosion of Native writing, it is the Kiowa and Cherokee author N. Scott Momaday who is credited with inaugurating this period as the beginning of a contemporary ''renaissance'' for American Indian literature. Momaday’s reputation was secured in 1969, when his provocative debut novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and captured the attention of critics. For the first time, the dominant culture in the United States formally acknowledged that twentieth-century American Indians could produce a written literature that was intellectually demanding and “serious.” Early critics noted the novel’s sophisticated techniques of narration and they were intrigued by the novel’s depiction of social alienation in its Indian protagonist and his desperate need to recover a viable identity within his community. These themes resonated with non-Indian audiences of the time, and they could be labeled as “modern” and “universal” rather than exclusively “Indian.” The novel’s striking ambiguities, however, are clearly anchored in its Native contexts, and the difficulty of resolving these ambiguities has insured a steady stream of response by two generations of readers and scholars.

Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s WarLiterary Indians: Aesthetics and Encounter in American Literature to 1920Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary NationModernity and Its Other: The Encounter with North American Indians in the Eighteenth Century

Mapping Jewish American Literary Studies in the New Century

Book Review| June 01 2012 Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature / When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature. By Teuton, Christopher B.. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press. 2010. xxii, 272 pp.$40.00.When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. By Rifkin, Mark. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2011. viii, 440 pp. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $35.00. Audra Simpson Audra Simpson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2012) 84 (2): 457–459. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1587719 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Audra Simpson; Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature / When Did Indians Become Straight? Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. American Literature 1 June 2012; 84 (2): 457–459. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-1587719 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The Midrashic Impulse

ACCORDING TO HENRY GIROUX, AN EFFECTIVE MULTICULTURAL PEDAgogy motivates students to engage diverse voices and perspectives without lapsing into a homogenized brand of American pluralism.' Introducing college students to Native American literature requires multiple points of reference to dislodge stereotypes of American Indians imparted by the dominant culture (from Hollywood films to New Age shamans) and to reflect the variety and complexity of American Indian cultures and worldviews.2 For many students, reading American Indian literature becomes a first-time lesson in history and geography. Additionally, as students grapple with testimonies of the painful legacies of colonization -such as histories of genocide, forced assimilation, or Indian removal -they need access not only to critical interpretative tools but also to affective and subjective modes of response. Cultivating diversity in the classroom is not enough. We also need to offer students ways to apprehend the uneven power relations that shape both American Indian literature and familiar, canonical, or popular traditions of American history, biographies, and fiction. The following pages focus on two writing projects that promote classroom dialogue and diversity on one hand and problematize or unsettle some issues of authority on the other. The collaborative life stories exercise and anonymous team journals allow students to share their varied, sometimes intensely emotional and conflicted responses to the reading and, at the same time, to think critically and reflectively about how to negotiate between conflicting stories and alternate histories.

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a r y S c h o la r s h ip 2001: T h e Y e a r in R eview G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Since the founding of Western American Literature (WAL) some thirty-five years ago, western American literary scholarship has come of age. N o less than in the study of other regional and national literatures, scholars in our field now deploy a variety of critical tools in their work, from the New Critical to the New Historical, Marxist, feminist, post­ colonial, ecocritical, and biographical. In this essay I review a selection of such essay-length scholarship published during the last calendar year. (I omit all books commissioned for review in WAL.) Much of this scholarship— indeed, nearly half of it— focuses on Native American and Chicano/a literature, though Willa Cather remains the most stud­ ied individual western writer with Cormac McCarthy and Sherman Alexie a distant second and third. In addition to several monographs and collections of essays, three special issues of scholarly journals were devoted to western American lit-crit: one on Cather in American Literary Realism (ALR), another on “The Literature and Popular Culture of the U.S.- Mexican Border” in Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, a third on “Representations of American Indians in Contemporary Narrative Fiction Film” in Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL). In all, the scholarship on western American literature last year demonstrates yet again that “the West” has borders that are fluid in a literary no less than in a geographical sense. N i n e t e e n t h - a n d E a r l y T w e n t i e t h - C e n t u r y F i c t i o n All reports of James Fenimore Cooper’s demise seem to be prema­ ture. Diane Price Herndl in “Style and the Sentimental Gaze in The Last of the Mohicans” (Narrative 9:259-82) contrasts Cooper’s novel with Michael M ann’s 1992 movie “to think through some contradic­ tory positions on sentimentalism, the gaze, and the politics of race.” More to the point, Herndl suggests that Cooper uses sentimental tropes ironically to criticize sentimentality and that Mann grafts a sentimental style onto a historical narrative— all to conclude that there may be gazes that are not about desire or control (in the Lacanian or Foucauldian senses) but about “concern.” A very theoretical essay, though a useful corrective (I think) to standard interpretations of “the gaze.” Andrew G a r y S c h a r n h o r s t Doolen’s ‘“ Snug Stored Below’: The Politics of Race in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers” (Studies in American Fiction 29:131-58) claims, though not entirely persuasively, that the first novel in the Leatherstocking saga allegorizes the “underlying current of racial violence that unsettles the formation of an ideal republic.” In “Go East, Young Man: Class Conflict and Degenerate Manhood in Mark Twain’s Early Writings” (WAL 36:233-57) Joseph L. Coulombe examines the ways in which Twain massages his western nanatives, partic­ ularly Roughing It, much as he had done in The Innocents Abroad, to appeal to a genteel eastern readership— which may in turn account for the osten­ sible “inconsistencies” in the text. My own note “A Coda to the TwainHarte Feud” (WAL 36:81-87) documents Twain’s unwillingness to aid Harte’s destitute daughter Jessamy in 1907 and how news of her predica­ ment colored his memories of Harte in his autobiographical dictation. Sara E. Quay’s “American Imperialism and the Excess of Objects in McTeague” (ALR 33:209-34) notes how Frank Norris’s novel equates things with characters and relates the fetishizing of such objects as N oah’s ark figurines, gold coins, and clothing to late-nineteenth century dreams of empire and anxieties over ethnic difference. Despite its engaging title, Jane Kuenz’s “The Cowboy Businessman and ‘The Course of Empire’: Owen Wister’s...

Louise Erdrich's 20th Century Novels in the Context of Native American Literary and Cultural Traditions (Problems, Symbolism, Main Images)

Reviewed by: Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry Molly McGlennen (bio) Dean Rader and Janice Gould, eds. Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2003. 294 pp. There has been a lack of critical attention toward Native American poetry to date. As editors Dean Rader and Janice Gould of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry note in their introduction, only a handful of book-length texts are devoted entirely to native poetry, despite the burgeoning field of Native American literary criticism, and despite the extensive attention to Native American fiction, autobiography, and oral traditions. As Speak to Me Words shows, native poetry needs its own critical studies because the poets are developing a site of unique native discourse as well as a forum to continue the fight against prejudice and injustice. While native poetry often has a minimal presence at conferences and in college [End Page 104] classrooms, Speak to Me Words labors to fill this gap and lay the groundwork for subsequent critical attention to contemporary Native American poetry. In this way, it is a book of beginnings. It respects poetry's demand for astute close reading and honors the spirit that native poets invoke through their creative expression. Because of the enormous task upon which Speak to Me Words embarks, the breadth of its coverage of native poetry as a genre is overwhelmingly varied; however, despite the diversity of approaches, the essays each note similar notions of native poetry's power and healing capacity. Speak to Me Words reflects upon as many trajectories of native poetry as the text's space allows: Fourteen essays in all, not including Rader and Gould's dialogical and candid introduction, the collection includes older essays alongside brand new ones (for example, Simon Ortiz's well-known 1993 essay "Song/Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception" beside Robert Nelson's new essay "Dawn/Is a Good Word: Naming an Emergent Motif of Contemporary Native American Poetry"), female and male voices, and native and non-native authors. What is more, eight of the fourteen essays are exclusively about native women's poetry; three of the authors identify as Two-Spirit. At its very best, the essays in the collection provide criticism that recognizes the significant distinction of native poetry as a genre. The authors analyze what the poetry is doing both because of and in spite of the fact the poetry is written by native people. Each essay in the collection explores how scholars of Native American poetry are not only reading, discussing, and analyzing the work, but also how native poetry is positioning itself alongside and distinct from the American canon. Eric Gary Anderson's essay, "Situating American Indian Poetry," complicates notions of genre that stem from Western literary traditions and asks "can American Indian literature be properly and best taught, critiqued, and understood by way of non-native categories such as genre?" (34). His essay goes on to address hard questions about what characterizes native poetry, showing how the writing itself collapses western constructs while expressing its primary concern: to give back to and sustain community. Janice Gould's "Poems as Maps in American Indian Women's Writing" illustrates native women poets' preoccupation with mapping as [End Page 105] well as the significance of cartography as a tool to restore balance and allow healing. In acknowledging the spirit in poetry, Gould is not alone. Marilou Awiakta's "Daydreaming Primal Space: Cherokee Aesthetics as Habits of Being" examines the use of native knowledge as a means to—once again—live "poetry as a habit of being" (61). Carter Revard's essay "Herbs of Healing: American Values in American Indian Literature" argues how Native American poetry not only stands up against the Western classics, but also how it adds to this canon by taking poetry one step further: native poetry has the power to cure. Other essays in the collection utilize specific tropes and motifs in order to situate native poetry; for instance, Daniel Heath Justice's "Beloved Woman Returns: The Doubleweaving of Homeland and Identity in the Poetry of Marilou Awiakta," utilizes Cherokee basketweaving, while Janet McAdams...

The African Atlantic: West African Literatures and Slavery Studies Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi BOOKS REVIEWED Rebellious Histories: The Amistad Slave Revolt and the Cultures of Late Twentieth-Century Black Transnationalism ByMatthew J. Christensen Albany: State U of New York P, 2012. xiv + 188 pp. 9781438439709 paper. Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature By Laura T. Murphy Athens: Ohio UP, 2012. ix + 243 pp. 9780821419953 paper. SLAVERY STUDIES, COLONIALISM, AND AFRICAN LITERATURES Within African literary and cultural studies, work on the representations of domestic West African slavery or the historical slave trades across the Atlantic and the Sahara has been sparse. Laura Murphy and Matthew [End Page 149] Christensen address this paucity in two books with strikingly different perspectives and outcomes. Whereas Murphy focuses on metaphorization and veiled communications in representations of slavery, Christensen emphasizes direct contestations of slavery’s meanings and overt appropriations of symbolic narratives and icons that critique enslavement and its legacies of political and cultural dispossession. In his explicitly transnational study, Christensen examines the memorializations of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt in the United States and Sierra Leone as a site of contestation over the meanings of emancipation and political independence. Murphy studies representations of the slave trade in Ghanaian and Nigerian literatures. Both scholars examine texts and events from about the third decade of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twenty-first century. In reading these contributions together, I frame my observations within an appraisal of the disjunctures among a globalizing slavery studies, African literary scholarship, studies of slavery narratives in the North Atlantic world, and the much researched study of slavery in the Americas. This wide gesture is necessary because as much as these books can be read as studies in African and African American literatures, they beckon toward larger cross-disciplinary conversations about the histories and representations of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. Hitherto, most of the work on slavery in Africa has been produced outside literary scholarship. Such work, produced by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, legal scholars, and archeologists on the historical and contemporary practices of capture, enslavement, and bondage constitutes the cross-disciplinary field of slavery studies. Although much of the work in the field through the last three decades of the twentieth century was historical, the rise of contemporary slavery studies, the attention to human trafficking, and the increasing recognition of globalized labor exploitation have transformed historical slavery studies into contemporary global slavery studies. Increasingly, the slave trade is recognized as a globalizing force with multiple historical locations and participants. New and forthcoming journals and book series—such as the Journal of Global Slavery or Brill’s Studies in Global Slavery—continue to transform the field. It is thus imperative for scholars to historicize their studies of any form of slavery and slave trade within a larger landscape and temporality of co-extensive practices of enslavement and freedom. The transformations I list above influence my reading of Murphy and Christensen. While a simple Google search will reveal countless conferences and publications on the histories and forms of slavery and bondage in Africa, it will produce far fewer search results on the representations of slavery in African literatures. This disjuncture is historical. Slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and abolition are acknowledged as catastrophic and traumatic events in Caribbean and American literatures. Hence, scholars studying representations of slavery in the Americas find a ready body of codified literatures overtly addressing its traumatic legacies. There is also a great interaction between scholars of Caribbean and American literatures of slavery and scholars of slavery studies in the Americas. Colonial conquest reconfigured Africa’s internal relationship to domestic slavery and the internal slave trades such that scholars of slavery in African literatures must take into account how colonialism impacted how slavery is remembered and represented. That is to say that all accounts of slavery and slave trade must be provincialized, i.e., taken out of any singularizing (North Atlantic or putatively global) narrative [End Page 150] and rescaled within a local nexus of meanings and historical mechanisms.1 For West African literatures, such provincializing gestures must take account of colonialism and its successor or related projects such as anticolonialism, independence, arrested decolonization...

176 WesternAmerican Literature the United States for the multicultural, hemispheric reality ofthe next century.” These are stories and voices ofAmerica’s past, present, and, most assuredly, its future. GREG SÁNCHEZ Loyola University Chicago Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed­ ited by Gerald Vizenor. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993. 223 pages, $14.95.) Thanks to the University of Oklahoma Press for making available in paper­ back this still-relevant and stimulating study of Native American Indian litera­ tures. The vogue of literary theory in English and literary studies seemed to have run its course by the beginning of the 1990s. Paul Bove published, in 1992, a book whose title encapsulated the prevailing opinion that we are all now working In the Wake ofTheory. This collection, however, edited by noted Native American and postmodern crafter of fictions, Gerald Vizenor, overwhelmingly suggests that the requiem for theory may have been sung much too early. Ahead of its time upon publication in 1989, Narrative Chancedemonstrates that postmodern theory need not be unreadable. More importantly, this vol­ ume of essays forges important connections between developments in postmodern theory and the literature ofAmerican aboriginal peoples. Far from imposing the theoretical methodology of a dominant white culture upon the literatures of non-white and oppressed writers, Narrative Chance reveals that postmodern theories harmonize closely with the forms and stories of Native American Indian literatures. Vizenor’spreface and introduction are challenging reading. His aphoristic style recalls Friedrich Nietzsche, the trickster of modern philosophy, and his main point is that the trickster figure in Native American literature defines that literature as inherently postmodern. The essays which follow Vizenor’s intro­ duction pursue the occasion for applying contemporary literary theory to Native American Indian literatures. Karl Kroeber contrasts HouseMade ofDawn, by N. Scott Momaday, with the more authentic story-telling of Colville Indian Peter Seymour, while Kimberly Blaeser insists upon the postmodern impact of Momaday’s art. Arnold Krupat offers an illuminating “Bakhtinian” reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller, and Gretchen Ronnow writes a remarkably intelligible Lacanian reading of Ceremony. James Ruppert offers a “readerresponse ” to D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded, and James Silberman ranges over the full spectrum of contemporary theory in a delightful and literary essay on Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine. Alan Velie, Louis Owens, and Vizenor him­ self elaborate on the trickster theme in Native American literatures, and Elaine A.Jahner explores “metalanguages”in Native American discourse. Reviews 111 This volume is a readable contribution to contemporary literary theory, and an important collection of analyses of Native American literature. SCOTT R. CHRISTIANSON Radford University AllMyRelatives: Community in ContemporaryEthnicAmericanLiteratures. ByBonnie TuSmith. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. 216 pages, $34.50.) About a decade ago, sociologist Robert Bellah and his associates claimed that Americans have lost the language for expressing communal values. In this ambitious and insightful book, however, Bonnie TuSmith asserts that in the works of ethnic American writers the vision of community is very much alive. Four main chapters deal with the four broad ethnic American groups— Asian American, African American, Native American, and Chicano/a. For each of these groups, TuSmith examines two major writers, one male and one female, whose works appeared after the civil rights movement and who have consciously drawn from their ethnic backgrounds: Frank Chin and Maxine Hong Kingston,John Edgar Wideman and Alice Walker, N. Scott Momaday and Leslie Marmon Silko, Tomás Rivera and Sandra Cisneros. In most cases, the synopses are too brief to help those who are unfamiliar with the works under discussion. And the author rarely deals with such relevant questions as “What do these texts suggest about the community or communities outside their own?”and “How are their visions of their own ethnic communities affected by their attitudes towards the American community as a whole?” TuSmith nonetheless accomplishes important things with this book. Filled with cultural and socio-historical insights, her readings successfully refute ear­ lier misreadings by those who interpreted and evaluated the works from Eurocentric perspectives. Her analysis of the linguistic patterns in each work is exceptionally brilliant. More significant, her courage to cross cultures is inspir­ ing: a first-generation Chinese American...

Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady: A Bibliography of Primary Material and Annotated Criticism by Marion Richmond, Canadian Publishing Foundation This bibliography of primary material and annotated criticism extending from the publication date of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881 is based, in part, on the checklists compiled by Maurice Beebe and William T. Stafford, published in the first Henry James special number of Modern Fiction Studies 3 (Spring, 1957): 73-81, 90, and the second Henry James special number of the same journal 12 (1966): 117-35, 15861 . The main sources of the Beebe and Stafford checklists are Lyon N. Richardson's bibliography in Henry James: Representative Selections (New York: American Book Company, 1941), reprinted in The Question of Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. F. W. Dupee (New York: Henry Holt, 1945); Eunice C. Hamilton's "Biographical and Critical Studies of Henry James: 1941-1948," American Literature 20 (1949): 424-35; Viola R. Dunbar's "Addenda ..." to the preceding, American Literature 22 (1950): 55-61; and Lewis Leary's Articles on American Literature: 1900-1950 (Durham: Duke U P, 1954). Also incorporated are items for the period 1881-1905 derived mainly from Roger Gard's Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968). Beginning in 1963 one of the main sources is American Literary Scholarship: An Annual (Durham: Duke U P, 1963-1981). Main sources after 1965 are: Abstracts of English Studies. Boulder, Colorado: Colorado U; Calgary, Alberta: Calgary U P, 9 (1966)-26 (September, 1983). American Literary Realism: 1870-1910. Arlington: Texas U, 1 (1967)-16 (Autumn, 1983). American Literature. Durham: Duke U P, 38 (1966-1967)-56 (March, 1984). Budd, John, Comp. Henry James: A Bibliography of Criticism: 1975-1981. Westport, CN; London: Greenwood P, 1983, passim. Gerstenberger, Donna and Geroge Hendrick. The American Novel: A Checklist of Twentieth Century Criticism on Novels Written Since 1789. Vol. II. Criticism Written 1960-1968. Chicago: Swallow P, 1970: 197-200. Henry James Review. Baton Rouge: The Henry James Society, Louisiana State U, 1 (November, 1979)-5 (Fall, 1983). Holman, C. Hugh. Comp. The American Novel Through Henry James. [2nd ed.]. Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing (Goldentree Bibliographies in Language and Literature), 1979: 78-96. Journal of Modern Literature. Philadelphia: Temple U, 1 (1971)-5 (April,1976). McColgan, Kristin Pruitt. Henry James, 1917-1959: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1979. Modern Fiction Studies. Lafayette, IN: Modem Fiction Club of Purdue U, 12 (Spring, 1966)-29 (Winter, 1983). Modern Language Association: Abstracts of Articles in Scholary Journals. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1971-1974. Modern Language Association: International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 1966-1982. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America. New York: Modem Language Association of America, 81 (1966)-99 (May, 1984). Ricks, Beatrice. Henry James: A Bibliography of Secondary Works. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1975: 104-21; 230-399. Scura, Dorothy Mclnnis. Henry James, 1960-1974: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1979. Taylor, Linda J. Henry James, 1866-1916: A Reference Guide. Boston: Hall, 1982, passim. This bibliography includes reviews, criticism in books, and articles in literary journals. It also includes introductions to various editions of the Portrait, and articles dealing with other authors and other Volume 7 164 Numbers 2-3 The Henry James Review Winter-Spring, 1986 subjects in which this novel is discussed in some detail. In accordance with the selection criteria adopted by Beebe and Stafford, dissertations, newspaper reviews (except for a sampling of the early newspaper reviews), foreign language criticism, and routine discussions in handbooks and histories of literature are not included. Unsigned reviews are set out in the Appendix. The annotated criticism includes only articles of at least seven consecutive pages together with the shorter classic essays. The constraints of space also made it necessary to exclude all annotated criticism from foreign journals. The material is presented in alphabetical order according to the authors' surnames. Unless otherwise indicated in square brackets all publication dates are of first editions. Publishing facts in most instances have been transcribed from the title page; therefore, the stated names of the...

American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings argues that film noir style evolved out of American literature prior to the 1930s and continues to evolve long after the classic films that defined its presence in cinema. While many critics suggest that the film noir tradition ceased after the mid-1950s, labeling similar films produced later as ‘neo-noir’, Harold Hellwig contends that film noir itself has continued to evolve beyond cinema to include television series such as CSI, Have Gun Will Travel, and Frasier, among others. Hellwig posits that, rather than being a single genre in and of itself, film noir comprises several genres, including detective procedurals, science fiction, the Western, and even comedy. This book examines different elements of American film noir – including the characters and settings it is often defined by – and its contexts within different adaptations in both film and television. Scholars of film studies, American literature, and media studies will find this book of particular interest.

Reviewed by: The Life of William Apess, Pequot by Philip F. Gura Joshua David Bellin (bio) The Life of William Apess, Pequot philip f. gura Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015 216 pp. Why do we need a new biography of William Apess? When numerous scholars including Barry O’Connell, Bernd Peyer, Robert Allen Warrior, Maureen Konkle, and others have authored substantial biographical studies of the antebellum Pequot activist, I think that’s a fair question to ask. To justify its existence, a new biography of Apess should uncover new materials, forge new links, propose new directions, offer new interpretations, or attract new audiences (or all of the preceding). If not, the argument could be made that it’s redundant. Measured against the foregoing, how does Philip F. Gura’s The Life of William Apess, Pequot fare? Modestly. On the plus side, Gura’s book does suggest several new contexts for Apess’s life; though based largely on established sources—Apess’s own writings, as well as those of O’Connell and other Apess scholars—and structured largely on the oft-rehearsed plotline of Apess’s rise and fall, the book offers compelling hints about the foundations of Apess’s religious and political radicalism, as well as useful background regarding the world in which he lived. Less productively, Gura makes a plea for Apess’s historical significance that is anything but new. Even more problematically, the author claims for his book an audience that, given what his book is, I do not consider realistically within its reach. In his prologue, which delves into the circumstances of Apess’s death, Gura asks how Apess was so quickly forgotten in his own time and has remained so little remembered in ours. Writing that “today [Apess] is known primarily among scholars of Native American studies,” Gura argues that “Apess deserves the same widespread recognition as others in the antebellum period who questioned the sincerity of the nation’s ongoing commitment to democracy, a cohort of reformers that includes Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, champions of women’s rights; Frances Wright and Orestes Brownson, of the dignity of labor; and William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, David Walker, and Frederick Douglass, of African American freedom and equality” (xiii–xiv). Few scholars of American or Native American literature will dispute this assertion of Apess’s importance; indeed, many have made statements like it before. The question of [End Page 212] whether a book such as Gura’s is likely to raise Apess’s public profile is, however, worth asking. Gura submits that Apess’s general anonymity is attributable to the fact that his biographers thus far “have too often aimed [their] works at scholarly communities rather than at the larger public” (xvi). However true this may be, Gura’s book—which is published by a scholarly press, blurbed by scholarly reviewers, and packed with scholarly apparati—strikes me as insufficiently distinct from the studies he criticizes to achieve ends other than theirs. (Indeed, the fact that he contrasts Apess’s obscurity with the supposed renown of figures like Fuller, Wright, and Walker underscores his own faithfulness to a “scholarly community”; for who, other than a statistically tiny pool of historians and literary critics, has ever heard of these people?) If by “widespread recognition” Gura means “recognition among highly educated people,” then his mission has already been accomplished: Apess is at least as well known among those with advanced degrees as is, say, Brownson. If, however, the goal is to make Apess better known to a “larger public” of nonacademics, I would suggest that what we need is not a “straightforward account of Apess’s life and times” (xvi) but a narrative history such as those written by Erik Larson or David McCullough, whose books wear their immense scholarship lightly, appealing to a mass audience not through erudition but through brisk storytelling, vivid character portraits, and (on occasion) deviations from strict documentary accuracy in the interest of spinning a good yarn. Gura’s book offers none of this. It is, instead, a carefully researched and clearly written—a straightforward—scholarly reconstruction of Apess’s life, with few flourishes and much documentation. It covers such...

Stephanie J. Fitzgerald’s Native Women and Land implicitly challenges literary nationalist approaches to Native literary studies by calling for a conversation among Native studies, gender studies, postcolonial theory, and ecocriticism. In particular, Fitzgerald asks how ecocriticism would change if it centered on Native studies. While not claiming to offer a simple answer, she notes that foregrounding Native peoples in the discussion requires us to reconsider what we mean by terms like “nature” or “the environment.” She goes beyond articulating sovereignty and dispossession in terms of control or loss of land, focusing instead on the ability to articulate and theorize these categories. Fitzgerald argues that environmental degradation can be seen as another form of Indigenous dispossession. An Indigenous-centered ecocriticism makes it possible to intervene in the narrative that enables environmental dispossession.In each chapter, Fitzgerald uses a variety of texts to look at different forms of environmental dispossession. In the first chapters, she focuses on the traumatic impact of forced removal and displacement on Native peoples’ relationship to landscapes. While Native peoples can create narratives for the lands to which they are removed, it requires “giving up remembering” the relations they have to their original homelands (39). At the same time, Fitzgerald also addresses contemporary forms of environmental dispossession, particularly climate change. She expands the scope of Native peoples in her analysis by addressing dispossession among Native peoples who are not federally recognized, such as the Tongva of California and the Houma of Louisiana. She notes that they are often subject to a doubled environmental dispossession, as they have no means of federal redress and often do not have support from other tribes.Throughout her book, Fitzgerald notes that disaster is never gender neutral, and she highlights the importance of a feminist analysis in supporting resistance to environmental dispossession and defining what counts as Native literature. In particular, her last chapter focuses not on literary texts as commonly understood but on the social media activism of the Idle No More movement. She argues that Idle No More organizes Indigenous performance and creativity to create narratives that challenge settler-state commodification of land. At the same time, this woman-led movement also challenges what protest can look like by encouraging broad participation from all Native peoples and structuring the movement in a less hierarchical manner.Fitzgerald brilliantly demonstrates the importance of an Indigenous-centered ecocriticism. More important, she challenges the assumption that attention to Indigenous specificity prevents us from putting Native struggle in conversation with all struggles for social justice on both a theoretical and a political level. Her book is thus a call to action for not only an Indigenous-centered approach to ecocriticism but also an Indigenous-centered approach to social justice.While Fitzgerald proposes a theoretically expansive approach to Native studies, Mark Rifkin’s Beyond Settler Time argues for a fundamental division between what he terms settler time and Native time. Rifkin takes up this analysis in two different ways. First, building on the work of Vine Deloria, he contends that a singular form of temporality cannot be presumed. Second, following Philip Deloria, he argues against a modernity that either precedes or anomalously encompasses Native people. He asks, “How might we think about Native temporal frames of reference as allowing for continuity as well as for complex and varied change without reinstalling the notion of a singular, neutral present?” (14). Doing so, Rifkin claims, allows Native peoples to be understood not as refusing the modern but as expressing alternative articulations of time and history entirely.Rifkin makes the compelling argument that histories and temporalities are multiple rather than singular. However, given his claim that he wants to avoid a “homogenizing dichotomy between Natives and non-Natives” (42), his distinction between settler and Native time becomes less understandable. For instance, he recognizes that Afropessimist analysis suggests that black peoples may not share the same temporality with white life. But then he states, “Aligning Natives with other racialized groups as fellow people of color also can efface the specificities of indigeneity as well as displace the questions of to what extent arrivants’ experiences of time draw on settler colonial frames of reference, even as they remain outside of the phenomenology and privileges of whiteness” (43). This statement raises a couple of questions. If, per Afropessmistic analysis, the creation of the slave is the creation of the nonhuman, in what way can the slave or those who live in the afterlife of slavery be said to exist in the same frame of reference as the human? Further, how did Native peoples somehow manage to be the only peoples who remained unaffected by settlers and settler frames of reference?Rifkin’s sharp analysis of the film Lincoln (2012) illustrates the limitation of his distinction between settler and Native time. He focuses on one character, Ely S. Parker, who appears briefly but has no speaking role. Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca, was Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary and, according to Rifkin, functions as an allegory in which Native peoples cannot enter the historiographic imagination of the Civil War. The Civil War is imagined as “the ever-present possibility of a break with the past . . . through which the inherent democratic tendencies of the nation can be materialized” (51). Thus, this narrative of the Civil War cannot even recognize the fact that Abraham Lincoln sanctioned the largest mass execution in US history, the execution of those who took part in the Dakota Uprising of 1862. Parker, argues Rifkin, provides a fleeting possibility of seeing alternative temporalities centered on the ongoing Indigenous struggles against dispossession in which “Native histories, polities, sovereignties, and futures cease to be exceptional” (94). But what if, borrowing from Saidiya Hartman’s work in Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1997), we applied her concept of “the nonevent of emancipation” (116) to the exceptionalization of Indigenous dispossession? Rifkin explains that such analyses are beyond the scope of his book. But such analyses trouble the meaningfulness of differentiating between settler time and Native time. Further, they can lead to a more fruitful framework—one actually evidenced by Rifkin’s approach—that takes into account multiple, intersectional, and relational temporalities that can be used to destabilize the notion of a singular history and temporality.While Fitzgerald’s and Rifkin’s works move beyond simple, legalistic understandings of sovereignty to develop a radical imaginary of what decolonization could be, David J. Carlson’s Imagining Sovereignty focuses on a legal and literary analysis of sovereignty as the nexus of the Indigenous-settler dispute. Carlson generously reads Native scholars across the political spectrum regarding sovereignty and notes that many scholars eschew a politics based primarily on legal recognition of the settler state. Although Carlson is not opposed to a more radical politics of decolonization, he sees the importance of continuing to engage in legal battles, even though the conditions are still imperfect. Imagining Sovereignty is a helpful genealogy of sovereignty as a Western legal, Indigenous, and literary construct. Whereas Fitzgerald’s work intervenes in Native literary nationalism, Carlson limits his literary genealogy of sovereignty almost exclusively to this school of thought, although not uncritically. Carlson’s book is particularly noteworthy for its careful readings and its invaluable political and intellectual history of sovereignty. However, one obvious absence is a lack of engagement with any Native feminist or queer studies approaches to sovereignty.Taken together, Fitzgerald, Rifkin, and Carlson provide thought-provoking and engaged analyses of Indigenous narratives of sovereignty, land, temporality, and decolonization. They convincingly demonstrate, as Fitzgerald emphasizes, that “literature matters when we talk about Native land tenure and dispossession” (15).