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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
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Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
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Bauerkemper, Joseph. "Narrating Nationhood: Radical Histories in Native Fiction," American Studies, University of Minnesota, August 2008. Advisor: David Noble and Carol Miller
Even a cursory consideration of the current political, social, economic, and environmental dysfunction that humans have created clearly indicates our dire need to reimagine and reformulate the ways in which we interact with each other and with the earth. This dissertation asserts that American Indian literatures serve as vital resources for this work. Native writing equips its readers to assert and acknowledge the sovereignties of indigenous peoples and nations. Furthermore, American Indian literatures encourage and enable the crucial work of radically reimagining community in ways that are relevant to our ever-changing world.
In order to substantiate these assertions, this dissertation presents the novels published by Creek/Cherokee writer Craig S. Womack, Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe, and Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko as potent and exemplary case studies. The project contextualizes its readings of these novels by positing an intimate relationship between particular philosophies of history and particular approaches to community formation. The dominant paradigm of linear, progressivist history has deeply informed and entrenched modes of community heavily invested in exclusionary and destructive political, social, economic, and ecological practices. By eschewing progressivist ideology in order to assertively and consistently immerse their novels in a processual understanding of history, Womack, Howe, and Silko give voice to concepts of community which I collectively term “literary indigenous nationhood.” These narrations are aligned in their functional and reciprocal orientations to place, in their embrace of diversity and difference without sacrificing community integrity, and in their commitment to a non-absolutist concept of sovereignty that not only acknowledges the necessity of interdependence but espouses it as an empowering and beneficial political, social, economic, and ecological value
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