Review of \u3ci\u3e Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Gretchen M. Bataille

The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise the focus of this anthology. Most of its contributors analyze the problems raised by historical and contemporary representations in a series of essays that examine a range of interdisciplinary materials including postcolonial theory, WPA papers of the 1930s, popular films, and the production of collaborative personal narratives. Other contributors examine the ways in which Native thinkers and scholars engage and contest conventional representations, defining their societies and cultures on their own terms and providing critical perspectives on European colonization in such forms as fiction, oral histories, films, and traditional stories. The contributors are newer as well as established scholars in Native American studies, including Native writers Katherine Shanley and Louis Owens. Together, they aim both to provide critical perspectives on conventional representations and, in some cases, to offer challenging alternatives more consistent with the concerns of Native communities. The essays cover a wide range of subjects that focus for the most part on the twentieth century, and they include a number of topics that have already received scholarly attention as well as more original and innovative studies. Because one of the goals of Native American Representations is to examine critically who has the authority to represent Native peoples, a subject that has also been the focus of recent debates in the field, the collection would have been strengthened by more contributions by Native scholars and a greater emphasis on Native perspectives. In addition, the collection as a whole (with a couple of notable exceptions) is remarkably inattentive to images and voices of Native women, even though the silencing and marginalization of Native women is one consequence of the colonial processes that the volume seeks to criticize. Overall, however, Native American Representations provides a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship in the field on the complicated relationships among race, colonialism, and representation

Review of \u3ci\u3e Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Gretchen M. Bataille

The misrepresentation, commodification, and distortion of indigenous identities have existed from the moment of first contact between Native peoples and Europeans, Editor Gretchen Bataille observes in the introduction to Native American Representations. The problems are familiar to literary scholars: power relations produced by colonization determine who has the authority to represent Native peoples in the broader culture, and these representations in turn tend to reinforce European dominance and to obfuscate the violence, and even the fact, of colonization. The questions of how Native peoples have been represented throughout the centuries of colonialism, by whom, and for what purposes comprise the focus of this anthology. Most of its contributors analyze the problems raised by historical and contemporary representations in a series of essays that examine a range of interdisciplinary materials including postcolonial theory, WPA papers of the 1930s, popular films, and the production of collaborative personal narratives. Other contributors examine the ways in which Native thinkers and scholars engage and contest conventional representations, defining their societies and cultures on their own terms and providing critical perspectives on European colonization in such forms as fiction, oral histories, films, and traditional stories. The contributors are newer as well as established scholars in Native American studies, including Native writers Katherine Shanley and Louis Owens. Together, they aim both to provide critical perspectives on conventional representations and, in some cases, to offer challenging alternatives more consistent with the concerns of Native communities. The essays cover a wide range of subjects that focus for the most part on the twentieth century, and they include a number of topics that have already received scholarly attention as well as more original and innovative studies. Because one of the goals of Native American Representations is to examine critically who has the authority to represent Native peoples, a subject that has also been the focus of recent debates in the field, the collection would have been strengthened by more contributions by Native scholars and a greater emphasis on Native perspectives. In addition, the collection as a whole (with a couple of notable exceptions) is remarkably inattentive to images and voices of Native women, even though the silencing and marginalization of Native women is one consequence of the colonial processes that the volume seeks to criticize. Overall, however, Native American Representations provides a valuable addition to the growing body of scholarship in the field on the complicated relationships among race, colonialism, and representation

Review of \u3ci\u3eCoyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier\u3c/i\u3e By Carlton Smith

Delivered at the World\u27s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner\u27s now-famous frontier thesis speech, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, contends with only one other nineteenth- century development in terms of popularity and influence: Buffalo Bill\u27s Wild West Show. These narratives provided complementary visions of Western history that centered on white males, marginalizing women and people of color. Together they shaped both academic and popular perceptions for most of the twentieth century . It is this racialized and gendered vision of the West that Carlton Smith takes as the starting point for Coyote Kills John Wayne. Contemporary Western fiction, Smith contends, challenges the masculinist foundations of conventional narratives and transforms the frontier into a transcultural borderland. Smith analyzes a range of texts and films that offer alternative visions of the frontier; these include William Vollman\u27s Arctic narratives, Sergio Leone\u27s Western films, Thomas McGuane\u27s fiction, as well as works by Native novelists Leslie Marmon Silko, Thomas King, and Louise Erdrich. The juxtaposition of these texts is one of the strengths of Coyote, offering vastly different conceptions of the West that resist the hegemonic impulses of conventional narratives. At the same time, this juxtaposition provides an opportunity to think of the West as the site of complicated, often violent interactions between cultures, a history suppressed or obfuscated in Turner\u27s speech and Buffalo Bill\u27s Wild West. In this respect, however, Coyote Kills John Wayne replicates rather than challenges the cultural work of these narratives. Smith\u27s primary concern is with the ways in which contemporary Western texts perform postmodernism by providing inquiries into the constructedness of identity and the role of semiotics in creating discursive formations. These disruptive strategies, Smith contends, undermine fixed identities, imperial narratives and even the frontier itself. Smith\u27s analyses of Western texts demonstrate how they bear out the theories of Homi Bhabha, Frederic Jameson, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and others. This use of postmodern theory elides differences between texts with fundamentally divergent concerns. In Smith\u27s analysis, for example, Silko\u27s Almanac of the Dead and Leone\u27s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly absurdly perform essentially the same cultural work, although Silko\u27s novel examines the devastating colonial history of the Americas while Leone\u27s film is primarily concerned with Western filmic conventions. This approach results in serious misreadings of both primary and secondary sources by reducing texts deeply concerned with colonial dominance, political resistance, and complex cultural relations to forms of semiotic appropriation that ultimately bear little relation to the historical contexts that shape them

Cultural Cartographies: The Logic of Domination and Native Cultural Survival

18 p