ABSTRACT
When Susan Stanford Friedman notes in Planetary Modernisms that modernity’s ruptures “occur during periods of rapid, often brutal conquest” and generate “creative relocations,” she cites jazz as a key example of a form through which “dynamic kinesis” takes shape. Building from Friedman’s observation, this essay explores how Indigenous jazz poetry articulates many creative locations where Indigenous and Black epistemologies and aesthetics meet. Focusing on the writing of Muscogee Creek poet and musician and US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo and African American/Diné singer Radmilla Cody, the essay considers the sources and contexts for each artist’s performances and argues for a conception of Indigenous modernism as a tribally specific mobilization of multiple traditions, temporalities, and vernaculars. By attending to the ways that Harjo’s and Cody’s work resonates within their respective Native cultures and crosses racial and temporal categories, this essay proposes an intersectional methodology for Indigenous modernist studies.
