Download or read book Landfill Meditation written by Gerald Vizenor and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 1991-11-22 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen stories by the man N. Scott Momaday has called "the supreme ironist among American Indian writers of the twentieth century." In these fourteen stories Gerald Vizenor leads his crossblood characters out of romantic thickets into a new tribal world of psychotaxidermy, laser holograms, and urban ceremonies. Dancing with tricksters, animals, and language is never dangerous in this collection. With the comic pleasures of tribal tricksters, Vizenor's fantastic characters arise from the burdens of racialism and noble savagism. Martin Bear Charme, in the title story, owns a reservation and conducts seminars on refuse meditation, pantribal fantasies, and animal languages. He restores the sublime connections between the refuse and the refusers, and earns a fortune at the same time. Almost Browne, another crossblood transformer, was born in the back seat of a hatchback, matured with computers, and projects laser demons over the reservation. Other crossbloods win a summer ice sculpture contest, own sovereign sections of interstate highways, and discover instant coffee.
Download or read book Listening to the Land written by Lee Schweninger and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For better or worse, representations abound of Native Americans as a people with an innate and special connection to the earth. This study looks at the challenges faced by Native American writers who confront stereotypical representations as they assert their own ethical relationship with the earth. Lee Schweninger considers a range of genres (memoirs, novels, stories, essays) by Native writers from various parts of the United States. Contextualizing these works within the origins, evolution, and perpetuation of the “green” labels imposed on American Indians, Schweninger shows how writers often find themselves denying some land ethic stereotypes while seeming to embrace others. Taken together, the time periods covered inListening to the Landspan more than a hundred years, from Luther Standing Bear’s description of his late-nineteenth-century life on the prairie to Linda Hogan’s account of a 1999 Makah hunt of a gray whale. Two-thirds of the writers Schweninger considers, however, are well-known voices from the second half of the twentieth century, including N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, Vine Deloria Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Louis Owens. Few ecocritical studies have focused on indigenous environmental attitudes, in comparison to related work done by historians and anthropologists.Listening to the Landwill narrow this gap in the scholarship; moreover, it will add individual Native American perspectives to an understanding of what, to these writers, is a genuine Native American philosophy regarding the land.
Download or read book Loosening the Seams written by A. Robert Lee and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Native America can look to few more inventive contemporary writers than Gerald Vizenor. This work discusses his childhood in the Minneapolis of the Depression and World War II to his becoming a professor of Native American Studies at the University of Berkeley.
Download or read book Earthdivers written by Gerald Robert Vizenor and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These narratives compare earthdivers in myths who brought dirt up from the watery earth to form land, with present-day earthdivers, mixed bloods, who dive into urban areas connecting dreams to the earth
Download or read book Gerald Vizenor written by Kimberly M. Blaeser and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenor's concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She details Vizenor's efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment, and invites political action and explores the place of Vizenor's work within the larger context of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory.
Download or read book The Literature of Waste written by S. Morrison and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing material and metaphoric waste through the Western canon, ranging from Beowulf to Samuel Beckett, Susan Signe Morrison disrupts traditional perceptions of waste to better understand how we theorize, manage, and are implicated in what is discarded and seen as garbage. Engaging a wide range of disciplines, Morrison addresses how the materiality of waste has been sedimented into a variety of toxic metaphors. If scholars can read waste as possessing dynamic agency, how might that change the ethics of refuse-ing and ostracizing wasted humans? A major contribution to the growing field of Waste Studies, this comparative and theoretically innovative book confronts the reader with the ethical urgency present in waste literature itself.
Download or read book Waste Away written by Joshua Reno and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though we are the most wasteful people in the history of the world, very few of us know what becomes of our waste. In Waste Away, Joshua O. Reno reveals how North Americans have been shaped by their preferred means of disposal: sanitary landfill. Based on the author’s fieldwork as a common laborer at a large, transnational landfill on the outskirts of Detroit, the book argues that waste management helps our possessions and dwellings to last by removing the transient materials they shed and sending them elsewhere. Ethnography conducted with waste workers shows how they conceal and contain other people’s wastes, all while negotiating the filth of their occupation, holding on to middle-class aspirations, and occasionally scavenging worthwhile stuff from the trash. Waste Away also traces the circumstances that led one community to host two landfills and made Michigan a leading importer of foreign waste. Focusing on local activists opposed to the transnational waste trade with Canada, the book’s ethnography analyzes their attempts to politicize the removal of waste out of sight that many take for granted. Documenting these different ways of relating to the management of North American rubbish, Waste Away demonstrates how the landfills we create remake us in turn, often behind our backs and beneath our notice.
Download or read book Shadow Distance written by Gerald Vizenor and published by Wesleyan University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging collection of fiction, essays, poetry and more by the acclaimed Native American author of Bearheart and Interior Landscapes. Gerald Vizenor is one of our era’s most important and prolific Native American writers. Drawing on the best work of an acclaimed career, Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader reveals the wide range of his imagination and the evolution of his central themes. This compelling collection includes not only selections from Vizenor’s innovative fiction, but also poetry, autobiography, essays, journalism, and the previously unpublished screenplay “Harold of Orange,” winner of the Film-in-the-Cities national screenwriting competition. Whether focusing on Native American tricksters or legal and financial claims of tribal sovereignty, Vizenor continually underscores the diversities of modern traditions, the mixed ethnicity that characterizes those who claim Native American origin, and cultural permeability of an increasingly commercial, global world.
Download or read book That the People Might Live written by Jace Weaver and published by New York : Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Loyalty to the community is the highest value in Native American cultures. Taking his sense of community as both a starting point and a lens, this book offers fascinating discussions of Native American written literature. Drawing upon the best of Native and non-Native scholarship, the author adds his own provocative thoughts and eloquent writing to help readers to a richer understanding of these too often neglected texts.
Download or read book Parallel Encounters written by Gillian Roberts and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2014-03-24 with total page 525 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays collected in offer close analysis of an array of cultural representations of the Canada–US border, in both site-specificity and in the ways in which they reveal and conceal cultural similarities and differences. Contributors focus on a range of regional sites along the border and examine a rich variety of expressive forms, including poetry, fiction, drama, visual art, television, and cinema produced on both sides of the 49th parallel. The field of border studies has hitherto neglected the Canada–US border as a site of cultural interest, tending to examine only its role in transnational policy, economic cycles, and legal and political frameworks. Border studies has long been rooted in the US–Mexico divide; shifting the locus of that discussion north to the 49th parallel, the contributors ask what added complications a site-specific analysis of culture at the Canada–US border can bring to the conversation. In so doing, this collection responds to the demands of Hemispheric American Studies to broaden considerations of the significance of American culture to the Americas as a whole—bringing Canadian Studies into dialogue with the dominantly US-centric critical theory in questions of citizenship, globalization, Indigenous mobilization, hemispheric exchange, and transnationalism.
Download or read book Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins written by John Blair Gamber and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins, John Blair Gamber examines urbanity and the results of urban living—traffic, garbage, sewage, waste, and pollution—arguing for a new recognition of all forms of human detritus as part of the natural world and thus for a broadening of our understanding of environmental literature. While much of the discourse surrounding the United States’ idealistic and nostalgic views of itself privileges “clean” living (primarily in rural, small-town, and suburban settings), representations of rurality and urbanity by Chicanas/Chicanos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, on the other hand, complicate such generalization. Gamber widens our understanding of current ecocritical debates by examining texts by such authors as Octavia Butler, Louise Erdrich, Alejandro Morales, Gerald Vizenor, and Karen Tei Yamashita that draw on the physical signs of human corporeality to refigure cities and urbanity as natural. He demonstrates how ethnic American literature reclaims waste objects and waste spaces—likening pollution to miscegenation—as a method to revalue cast-off and marginalized individuals and communities. Positive Pollutions and Cultural Toxins explores the conjunction of, and the frictions between, twentieth-century U.S. postcolonial studies, race studies, urban studies, and ecocriticism, and works to refigure this portrayal of urban spaces.
Download or read book Dreams of Fiery Stars written by Catherine Rainwater and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-08-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Since the 1968 publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a new generation of Native American storytellers has chosen writing over oral traditions. While their works have found an audience by observing many of the conventions of the mainstream novel, Native American written narrative has emerged as something distinct from the postmodern novel with which it is often compared. In Dreams of Fiery Stars, Catherine Rainwater examines the novels of writers such as Momaday, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich and contends that the very act of writing narrative imposes constraints upon these authors that are foreign to Native American tradition. Their works amount to a break with—and a transformation of—American Indian storytelling. The book focuses on the agenda of social and cultural regeneration encoded in contemporary Native American narrative, and addresses key questions about how these works achieve their overtly stated political and revisionary aims. Rainwater explores the ways in which the writers "create" readers who understand the connection between storytelling and personal and social transformation; considers how contemporary Native American narrative rewrites Western notions of space and time; examines the existence of intertextual connections between Native American works; and looks at the vital role of Native American literature in mainstream society today.
Download or read book American Mythologies written by William Blazek and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This challenging new book looks at the current reinvention of American Studies: a reinvention that, among other things, has put the whole issue of just what is ‘American’ and what is ‘American Studies’ into contention. The collection focuses, in particular, on American mythology. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either classical European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwa mythology and contemporary U.S. culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America. Michael K Glenday’s analysis of Jayne Anne Phillips’ work and explores in it the contexts where myth and dream interact with each other. Betty Louise Bell is one of four essayists in this collection who focus their criticism on authors of Native American heritage. In the first part of ‘Indians with Voices’, Bell carefully argues that Roy Harvey Pearce’s seminal Native American studies text Savagism and Civilization fails to acknowledge its white elitist assumptions about what constitutes The American Mind and views Native Americans along a primitive-savage binary that helped to create a twentieth-century ‘national mythos of innocence and destiny’. Other essays include Christopher Brookeman’s study of the impact of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer’s non-fiction writing about heavyweight boxing.
Download or read book Cosmodernism written by Christian Moraru and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 442 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of the emerging cultural model of "cosmodernism"
Download or read book Diasporic Literature and Theory Where Now written by Mark Shackleton and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theoretical innovations of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, James Clifford and others have in recent years vitalized postcolonial and diaspora studies, challenging ways in which we understand ‘culture’ and developing new ways of thinking beyond the confines of the nation state. The articles in this volume look at recent developments in diasporic literature and theory, alluding to the work of seminal diaspora theoreticians, but also interrogating such thinkers in the light of recent cultural production (including literature, film and visual art) as well as recent world events. The articles are organized in pairs, offering alternative perspectives on crucial aspects of diaspora theory today: Celebration or Melancholy?; Gender Biases and the Canon of Diasporic Literature; Diasporas of Violence and Terror; Time, Place and Diasporic “Home”; and Border Crossings. A number of the articles are illustrated by discussions of particular authors, such as Caryl Phillips, Salman Rushdie, and Michael Ondaatje, and the range of reference found in this volume covers writing from many parts of the world including contemporary Chicana visual art, Asian diaspora writers, and Black British, Afro-Caribbean, Native North American, and African writing.
Download or read book Native American Survivance Memory and Futurity written by Birgit Däwes and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 11 Ecstatic Vision, Blue Ravens, Wild Dreams: The Urgency of the Future in Gerald Vizenor's Art -- Contributors -- Index
Download or read book The Myths That Made America written by Heike Paul and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2014-08-31 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essential introduction to American studies examines the core foundational myths upon which the nation is based and which still determine discussions of US-American identities today. These myths include the myth of »discovery,« the Pocahontas myth, the myth of the Promised Land, the myth of the Founding Fathers, the melting pot myth, the myth of the West, and the myth of the self-made man. The chapters provide extended analyses of each of these myths, using examples from popular culture, literature, memorial culture, school books, and every-day life. Including visual material as well as study questions, this book will be of interest to any student of American studies and will foster an understanding of the United States of America as an imagined community by analyzing the foundational role of myths in the process of nation building.
