Dale Chihuly (1941 -). Dale Chihuly Corning Museum of Glass.
Robert Dale Parker - WordPress.com · 2013. 2. 2. · Robert Dale Parker Tradition, Invention and...
Transcript of Robert Dale Parker - WordPress.com · 2013. 2. 2. · Robert Dale Parker Tradition, Invention and...
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Robert Dale Parker
Tradition, Invention and
Aesthetics in Native American
Literature
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1968: Native American literary renaissance
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Native American Literature
dominant Caucasian perspective
• surprise at existence and quality of Native American literature
• goes against long-held stereotypes of Indians in North America
• focus on orality, poetry
Native American perspective
• long history of telling stories, and aesthetic pleasure in language
• increasing numbers of very talented writers
• profound aesthetic concerns: “aesthetic taste has a thousand faces”
• may simultaneously address social concerns
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issues chosen by (and for) Indian writers
four topics
• young men’s threatened masculinity
• the oral
• the poetic
• renegotiations of what the dominant culture understands as authority
four themes
• gender
• sexuality
• stereotypes
• appropriation of Indian culture and intellectual property
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ideologies of masculinity
• contact with Europeans has deprived Indian men of their traditional roles
• western presumption of male role as breadwinner
• Indian men misread what they do as ‘nothing’ (i.e. don’t have 9-5 jobs)—uncertain, passive masculinity
• can be understood as Indian epistemology of ordinary everyday living
• intersecting ideologies of labour, masculinity, capitalism, race, and culture
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aesthetic forms
the oral
• often understood that European literary forms are in print, while Indian forms are oral
• privileging of print forms (modern, intellectual, rational, complex) over oral (traditional, spiritual, folklore, simplistic)
the poetic
• conflation of the oral with the poetic
• rewriting of Indian literary forms as poetry rather than as narrative fiction
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pleasure in text
• extraordinary sense of ordinary beauty in Indian writing, pleasure in routine, in continuity of daily life, in “being”
• abstract descriptions of form claimed by Europeans in fact have no cultural specificity
• de-Europeanizing forms of literature claimed by white writers and theorists
• de-colonizing stereotypical forms deemed Indian, or even produced as Indian by white writers and theorists
• Parker bucks the current trend of trying to find an authentic Indian form
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challenging essentialism
• Thomas King argues that there are a wide diversity of Native Americans and Native Canadians who are all considered Indians
• refusal to speak for all Indians by Indians, whereas white people often volunteer for this job
• he says “to put anybody into a role like that, particularly a non-Native, is maddening” (1063)
• on/off reservation
• full-blood, half-blood, etc.
• speak tribal language
• traditional vs white educations
• university educated vs uneducated
• raised by birth family vs. adopted out to white families
• etc.
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Smoke Signals How to be a real Indian
• independent film (1998)
• screenplay by Sherman Alexie based on short story “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona”
• predominantly Native American cast, crew, writers, etc.
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stereotypes and essentialism
• does this film seem to challenge or reinforce essentialism and stereotypes with respect to masculinity and traditional roles of Native men?
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next week
Tuesday
• Alan Lawson
• The Anxious Proximities of Settler (Post)Colonial Relations
• p. 1210
Thursday
• Kincaid
• A Small Place
• p. 1224