Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies
Chadwick Allen
Abstract
What might be gained from reading Native literatures from global rather than exclusively local perspectives of Indigenous struggle? This book proposes methodologies for global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency. Through demonstrations of distinct forms of juxtaposition—across historical periods and geographical borders, across tribes and nations, across the Indigenous–settler binary, across genre and media—this book reclaims ... More
What might be gained from reading Native literatures from global rather than exclusively local perspectives of Indigenous struggle? This book proposes methodologies for global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency. Through demonstrations of distinct forms of juxtaposition—across historical periods and geographical borders, across tribes and nations, across the Indigenous–settler binary, across genre and media—this book reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archive from North America, Hawaii, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia that have been largely left out of the scholarly conversation. It engages systems of Indigenous aesthetics—such as the pictographic discourse of Plains Indian winter counts, the semiotics of Navajo weaving, and Maori carving traditions, as well as Indigenous technologies like large-scale North American earthworks and Polynesian ocean-voyaging waka—for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts.
Keywords:
Native literatures,
Native literary studies,
self-representation,
Indigenous agency,
Indigenous aesthetics,
Navajo,
Maori
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2012 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780816678181 |
| Published to Minnesota Scholarship Online: August 2015 |
DOI:10.5749/minnesota/9780816678181.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Chadwick Allen, author
Associate Professor, English, The Ohio State University
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