The critic Louis Owens has called the dominant theme in novels by Indian authors “the dilemma of the mixedblood, the liminal ‘breed’ seemingly trapped between Indian and white worlds” 40 . By Canadian law, Will, the protagonist in Medicine River, is considered “stateless.” The Indian Act which determines his status governs the life of 350,000 Canadian Indians as well as more than...
In the imaginative literature that has furnished much of the impetus for and intellectual backbone of the so-called “Native American Renaissance” since the late 1960s, the tribulations of urbanization have been a relatively frequent but nevertheless underdeveloped theme. This has been so although one of the side effects of this urbanization, immoderate consumption of alcohol, has...
History has recorded that the whites who came to America did not always acknowledge the existence of the Native Americans of North America, including the First Peoples of Canada, as that of a human race with a rich cultural heritage of its own. Instead, these interlopers created images that have varied considerably over the last half millenium reflecting both European and Native...
The descendents of the prehistoric peoples who lived in the Southwest of the United States fifteen hundred years ago, the Pueblo Indians have to this day preserved their identity and rich culture despite the assaults of Euro-American civilization. If certain traditional forms of Pueblo life seem to have changed little from, for example, ten centuries ago, it is because, for the...
Beginning early in the history of European presence in the James Bay region of subarctic Canada, numerous items of native Cree manufacture were sent, or taken back, to Europe. Although many of these older pieces have ended up in European museums, precise documentation of their origins has not. Only occasionally does sparse information identify either the geographic locale or the...
These alternative perspectives attributed to Native Americans result in large part from representations imposed on American Indian cultures by non-Natives. And these perspectives are at work both in the somewhat facile but popular and long-enduring collections of Native American excerpts, works such as Touch the Earth: A Self Portrait of Indian Existence 1971 compiled by T. C...
In a surprising admission, perhaps linked to suspicions in some quarters about its possible ties to alleged Nicaraguan Contra drug dealers in Los Angeles, the Central Intelligence Agency CIA removed its chief of Latin American espionage from his post, for endeavors to aid a friend and former colleague who had been arrested for violating narcotics laws in the Dominican Republic...
In one of his most often quoted interviews, William Faulkner said, “Life is motion and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure” qtd. in Cowley 138 . We may take this to mean that for Faulkner lack of motion had a purely negative connotation. His texts do not, however, present such a simple, straightforward picture. In certain action scenes...
To use the rubric “orientalist” in reference to the 20th-century American composerwriter Paul Bowles is to suggest not one but potentially many things, some of them obvious and others much less so. The one thing that I do not mean by calling Bowles an orientalist is the one thing that Orientalism for the past twenty years has become a code for: racism and imperialist sentiment...
Elmore Leonard’s picaresque crime novel Bandits 1987 is a popular novel by an author who in his many novels relies on the narrative strategies of westerns and crime stories. In his fiction Leonard explores the underside of contemporary American society, the world of unsuccessful criminals, corrupt cops, and pimps. In its own way Leonard’s writing gives voice to today’s cunning...
The American literary scene hosts today a small and somewhat marginal, but steadily growing group of displaced Balkan writers. Their writing is scattered, and difficult to construe as one group, mostly because of the difference in language and location. However, all of these authors more or less write about the same topics— of their émigré experiences, of their critical...
The most obvious parallel between the work of the American writers Philip Roth and David Mamet seems to be the amount of controversy that their texts have attracted over the years. Both have been accused of obscenity, for instance, and, more seriously, of misogyny. Roth has been labeled one of the “bad boys of contemporary American letters” Jones and Nance 160 , an author who...
Patrons of the motion picture industry in the US have been voicing in recent years a desire for a more stylistic and technically original aesthetics. This movement has manifested itself most noticeably in fans of the action-adventure genre. A pair of hip, young film directors have responded with stark portraits of a society negotiating its collective attitude about the past...
As Aristotle observed, we like those who resemble us and are in the same pursuits. Influenced by this view, many sociologists have conducted studies on the relationship between similarity and attraction. The majority of these studies prove that people live in conformity with those having similar physical appearances, social status, beliefs and values. Under contradictory...
One of the recent developments in American letters has been the recent awakening of interest in the essay form, considered for long a subgenre of literary nonfiction. “A greater number of essayists,” Scott Russell Sanders indicates, are “at work in America today, and more gifted ones, than at any time in recent decades” qtd. in Atkins 13 .
The term magic realism exerts, what Fredric Jameson calls, “a strange seductiveness” 302 , and is today as prevalent as ever despite attempts on the part of critics to modify or abandon it. Note 1 It has already been applied to describe European Post-Expressionist painting of the 1920s, Kafka’s works and especially the literature of South America. Recently, the concept of magic...
Since the memory of past experience contributes to our self-identity, the self is often thought to be an historical construct. And perhaps the most obvious aspect of history is that it is always repeating itself. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin asserts that when one “grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one,” one...
The Native American novelists Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie are two writers who ponder upon the predicament faced by all US minority cultures: how to transform themselves from marginalized cultures into emergent cultures capable of challenging and reforming the mainstream.
The phrase “poetical economy” in the title above intends to bring the contexts of political economy and the process of poetic production together, and this article aims at explicating the interaction between these two fields in Charles Olson’s work, particularly in The Maximus Poems. Within this framework, Olson’s work is not just a case in point which we can replace with any...
Since the times of slavery, the African-American woman has always been the racial and sexual Other in a white supremacist society. The economics of slavery has produced the normative stereotypical mental representations of black women in society as “Jezebel,” “Mammy” and “Sapphire.” “Jezebel” is oversexed and promiscuous; she is the sexual partner of the white master and...
Autobiography is essential to American literature, since it is not only a genre with the most significant origins and famous classics, but also “a necessity in order to say who we are and where we have been.” It is both a part of “our daily vernacular and our earliest heritage,” which can be traced back to the Puritan diaries and the travel narratives popular in the seventeenth...
Talât Sait Halman, who is one of the members of the Advisory Board of JAST, spent the Fall ‘96 semester as a visiting professor at Bilkent University. I took the opportunity to interview him.
American artists of ethnic background usually encounter many obstacles on their way to recognition by the art world because the latter is not familiar with what the former paint or sculpt: American Indian artists, for instance, almost always use their cultures songs, legends, traditions and religions as their source of inspiration. In the Southwest region, American Indians have...
If, in the patriarchal system, femininity is defined in terms of lack and absence, in contrast to the male presence, as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray contend see Moi for a discussion of Cixous’s and Irigaray’s work , the presence of the clitoris seems to challenge and endanger that presupposition. The female body may then be manipulated in such a way as to render that...
Sometime before 11 November 1918, the Ottoman Empire expired. Happily, Europe’s “sick man” did not die unattended; a host of kin survived to divide the legacy. Among the prospective inheritors were two giants, the United States and Great Britain. For Britain, her driving force was the maintenance of Empire. For the United States, mixed motives of idealism, business enterprise and...