Shrouds of White Earth


Book Description

--Pointed, absorbing novel about an indigenous artist’s long journey of creativity and coming-of-awareness from White Earth Reservation to Paris




Before and after the Horizon


Book Description

This companion volume to an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York reveals how Anishinaabe (also known in the United States as Ojibwe or Chippewa) artists have expressed the deeply rooted spiritual and social dimensions of their relations with the Great Lakes region. Featuring 70 color images of visually powerful historical and contemporary works, Before and After the Horizon is the only book to consider the work of Anishinaabe artists overall and to discuss 500 years of Anishinaabe art history.




Imagining Sovereignty


Book Description

“Sovereignty” is perhaps the most ubiquitous term in American Indian writing today—but its meaning and function are anything but universally understood. This is as it should be, David J. Carlson suggests, for a concept frequently at the center of various—and often competing—claims to authority. In Imagining Sovereignty, Carlson explores sovereignty as a discursive middle ground between tribal communities and the United States as a settler-colonial power. His work reveals the complementary ways in which legal and literary texts have generated politically significant representations of the world, which in turn have produced particular effects on readers and advanced the cause of tribal self-determination. Drawing on western legal historical sources and American Indian texts, Carlson traces a dual genealogy of sovereignty. Imagining Sovereignty identifies the concept as a marker, one that allows both the colonizing power of the United States and the resisting powers of various American Indian nations to organize themselves and their various claims to authority. In the process, sovereignty also functions as a point of exchange where these claims compete with and complicate one another. To this end, Carlson analyzes how several contemporary American Indian writers and critics have sought to fuse literary practices and legal structures into fully formed discourses of self-determination. After charting the development of the concept of sovereignty in natural law and its permutations in federal Indian policy, Carlson maps out the nature and function of sovereignty discourses in the work of contemporary Native scholars such as Russel Barsh, Gerald Taiaiake Alfred, D’Arcy McNickle, and Vine Deloria, and in the work of more expressly literary American Indian writers such as Craig Womack, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gerald Vizenor, and Francisco Patencio. Often read in opposition, the writings of these indigenous authors emerge in Imagining Sovereignty as a coherent literary and political tradition—one whose varied discourse of sovereignty aptly reflects American Indian people’s diverse political contexts.




Picturing Worlds


Book Description

Paying attention to the uses that Anishinaabe authors make of visual images and marks made on surfaces such as rock, bark, paper, and canvas, David Stirrup argues that such marks—whether ancient pictographs or contemporary paintings—intervene in artificial divisions like that separating precolonial/oral from postcontact/alphabetically literate societies. Examining the ways that writers including George Copway, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Gordon Henry, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, and others deploy the visual establishes frameworks for continuity, resistance, and sovereignty in that space where conventional narratives of settlement read rupture. This book is a significant contribution to studies of the ways traditional forms of inscription support and amplify the oral tradition and in turn how both the method and aesthetic of inscription contribute to contemporary literary aesthetics and the politics of representation.




"Songs from the Cell


Book Description




Chair of Tears


Book Description

The best stories create traditions, and this novel by celebrated Native American writer Gerald Vizenor is a marvelous conjunction of trickster stories and literary ingenuity. Chair of Tears is funny, fierce, ironic, and deadly serious, a sendup of sacred poses, cultural pretensions, and familiar places from reservations to universities. The novel begins with generous stories about Captain Eighty, his young wife, the poker-playing genius named Quiver, and their children and grandchildren who live on a rustic houseboat. Captain Shammer, an extraordinary grandson reared on the houseboat and with no formal education, is appointed the chairman of a troubled Department of Native American Indian Studies at a prominent university. Shammer is a natural enterpriser and ironic showman in the tradition of trickster stories. He arrives at the first faculty meeting dressed in the uniform of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. Native students celebrate his conversion of the department into an academic poker parlor and casino, and a panic radio station. The most sensational enterprise is the training of service mongrels to detect the absence of irony. An irresistible novel of original ideas, Chair of Tears gets to the heart of questions about identity politics, multiculturalism, pedantry, and timely virtues.




Native American Survivance Memory and Futurity


Book Description

According to Kimberly Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor is "the most prolific Native American writer of the twentieth century," and Christopher Teuton rightfully calls him "one of the most innovative and brilliant American Indian writers" today." With more than 40 books of fiction, poetry, life writing, essays, and criticism, his impact on literary and cultural theory, and specifically on Indigenous Studies, has been unparalleled. This volume brings together some of the most distinguished experts on Vizenor's work from Europe and the United States. Original contributions by Gerald Vizenor himself, as well as by Kimberly M. Blaeser, A. Robert Lee, Kathryn Shanley, David L. Moore, Chris LaLonde, Alexandra Ganser, Cathy Covell Waegner, Sabine N. Meyer, Kristina Baudemann, and Billy J. Stratton provide fresh perspectives on theoretical concepts such as trickster discourse, postindian survivance, totemic associations, Native presence, artistic irony, and transmotion, and explore his lasting literary impact from Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart to his most recent novels and collections of poetry, Shrouds of White Earth, Chair of Tears,Blue Ravens, and Favor of Crows. The thematic sections focus on "Truth Games': Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics;" "'Chance Connections': Memory, Land, and Language;" and "'The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions': History and Futurity," documenting that Vizenor's achievements are sociocultural and political as much they are literary in effect. With their emphasis on transdisciplinary, transnational research, the critical analyses, close readings, and theoretical outlooks collected here contextualize Gerald Vizenor's work within different literary traditions and firmly place him within the American canon. terary impact from Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart to his most recent novels and collections of poetry, Shrouds of White Earth, Chair of Tears,Blue Ravens, and Favor of Crows. The thematic sections focus on "Truth Games': Transnationalism, Transmotion, and Trickster Poetics;" "'Chance Connections': Memory, Land, and Language;" and "'The Many Traces of Ironic Traditions': History and Futurity," documenting that Vizenor's achievements are sociocultural and political as much they are literary in effect. With their emphasis on transdisciplinary, transnational research, the critical analyses, close readings, and theoretical outlooks collected here contextualize Gerald Vizenor's work within different literary traditions and firmly place him within the American canon.




Native Provenance


Book Description

Gerald Vizenor's Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native creativity. With erudite and sweeping virtuosity, Vizenor examines how ethnographers and others converted the inherent confidence of native stories into uneasy sentiments of victimry. He explores the connection between Native Americans and Jews through gossip theory and strategies of cultural survivance, and between natural motion and ordinary practices of survivance. Other topics include the unique element of native liberty inherent in artistic milieus; the genre of visionary narratives of resistance; and the notions of historical absence, cultural nihilism, and victimry. Native Provenance is a tour de force of Native American cultural criticism ranging widely across the terrains of the artistic, literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interpreting native stories. Native Provenance is rife with poignant and original observations and is essential reading for anyone interested in Native American cultures and literature.




Imaginary Europes


Book Description

The 20th century has witnessed crucial changes in our perceptions of Europe. Two World Wars and many regional conflicts, the end of empires and of the Eastern Bloc, the creation and expansion of the European Union, and the continuous reshaping of Europe’s population through emigration, immigration, and globalization have led to a proliferation of images of Europe within the continent and beyond. While Eurocentrism governs current public debates in Europe, this book takes a special interest in literary and cinematographic imaginings of Europe that are produced from more distant, decentred, or peripheral vantage points and across differences of political power, ideological or ethnic affinity, cultural currency, linguistic practice, and geographical location. The contributions to this book demonstrate how these particular imaginings of Europe, often without first-hand experience of the continent, do not simply hold up a mirror to Europe, but dare to conceive of new perspectives and constellations for Europe that call for a shifting of critical positions. In so doing, the artistic visions from afar confirm the significance of cultural imagination in (re)conceptualizing the past, present, and future of Europe. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.




Color


Book Description

"Color" by Countee Cullen. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.




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