Book Description

American Indians and the American Imaginary considers the power of representations of Native Americans in American public culture. The book's wide-ranging case studies move from colonial captivity narratives to modern film, from the camp fire to the sports arena, from legal and scholarly texts to tribally-controlled museums and cultural centres. The author's ethnographic approach to what she calls "representational practices" focus on the emergence, use, and transformation of representations in the course of social life. Central themes include identity and otherness, indigenous cultural politics, and cultural memory, property, performance, citizenship and transformation. American Indians and the American Imaginary will interest general readers as well as scholars and students in anthropology, history, literature, education, cultural studies, gender studies, American Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. It is essential reading for those interested in the processes through which national, tribal, and indigenous identities have been imagined, contested, and refigured.