ABSTRACT
Politics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Native American Literature: Across Every Border assesses the status in theory of contemporary Native American literature in relation to the recent political turn in Native American literary studies. While a “Native American Renaissance” in the late 1960s brought international acclaim to Native American literature and created an impressive roster of Native American literary celebrities, political criticism within Native American literary studies lagged behind as a minor concern. In the 1970s and early 1980s, formalist, biographical, and ethnographical approaches dominated the Native American literary-critical scene. In recent years, the situation has changed with politically oriented scholarship moving to the fore, actively rethinking the status-the nature, function, and value-of the Native American literary text. Among these new perspectives, disagreement is rampant. Some critics see contemporary native writing as a nation-building “literature of resistance,” some see a “cosmopolitan” capitulation to metropolitan cultural values, some see the creation of a distinctive and new “American” voice, some see the creation of a genuinely “world” literature, and some see the literature of a global indigenous sovereignty movement. While this book does not undertake to write the history of the contemporary period in Native American literature and criticism-roughly speaking, the late 1980s to the present-it does acknowledge that the major critical treatises composed during the period’s early moments laid down the roots from which today’s political criticism is emerging and taking new forms.
