Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison provides a personal inquiry into the significance of African-American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to \"put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature\". Author of \"Beloved\", \"The Bluest Eye\", \"Song of Solomon\", and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the 19th and 20th centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her argument is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence.

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

What constitutes the pervasive cultural assumptions known to us as "America?" Since the American hemisphere actually encompasses a variety of national identities, can it make sense to speak of a unified "American" identity? Can a place for marginalized identities be established within the cultural mainstream? Comparative American Identities maps out a dynamic terrain of "New World" cultural identities, questions and problems. The essays attempt to locate "America" as a cultural and historical site of plurality and division, a discursive space of multiple differences which becomes, paradoxically, the ground for a new notion of American unity.

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text.

Black Literature and Literary Theory

Illustrations Introduction PART I LITERARY MEMORY 1 Towards a Poetics of Mnemonic Strategy in Narrative Texts Testimonies: recourse to mental mnemonic resources Interlude: the testimony of Olaudah Equiano Palimpsests: recourse to manifest mnemonic resources PART II MNEMONIC FICTIONS OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC 2 Caryl Phillips, Cambridge The poetics of memory: the art of montage The politics of memory: empowering culture 3 David Dabydeen, A Harlot's Progress The poetics of memory: the art of ekphrasis The politics of memory: empowering the individual 4 Toni Morrison, Beloved The poetics of memory: the art of musicalization The politics of memory: empowering the collective Conclusion Appendix: Source Passages Adapted in Cambridge Bibliography Acknowledgements

Re-Membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory

How has the American Indian captivity narrative been used to explain the human condition? How does it serve to interpret the meaning of pain and suffering, gender, and the primitive-civilized dichotomy? In Captured by Texts, Gary L. Ebersole explores these questions, showing that our fictional interpretation of captivity can construct a world of meaning that liberates us in the face of adversity, pain, and loss of identity.

Book Review: Captured by Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity

If' Willa Cather's adopted Nebraskan prairies constitute the homesteads of her Western literature, the Southwest qualifies as her favorite travel destination. Cather returns to treasures hidden in the area's majestic mesas in three narratives of discovery: The Song of the Lark, The Professor's House, and Death Comes for the Archbishop.1 In considering the reasons why Willa Cather and so many other women writers and artists were attracted to the Southwest, critics have most often noted the allure of the region's striking landscape.2 The canyons and crevices depicted in Cather's fiction have been called the "most thoroughly elaborated female landscape," rich with erotic and maternal imagery (Moers 258).Also in the Southwest are stretches of open land that seem to have played a key role in drawing Cather to the area and inspiring her art, as Judith Fryer argues:

The Indian-Detour in Willa Cather's Southwestern Novels

It would require a pretty good scholar in arithmetic to tell how many stripes he had inflicted, and how many birchrods he had worn out, during all that time, in his fatherly tenderness for his pupils. . . . Moreover, he had written a Latin Accidence, which was used in schools more than half a century after his death; so that the good old man, even in his grave, was still the cause of trouble and stripes to idle schoolboys. Â—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair

Talking Back to Schoolteacher: Morrison's Confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness; as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest.... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticizing all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter 217) Elizabeth Oakes Smith's critical reputation has suffered the fate of many of those "scribbling" women writers Hawthorne disparaged whose prolific publications were well received by a vast audience yet rejected by later critics as too didactic or sentimental. [1] Today Oakes Smith is remembered primarily for her essays on the topic of women's rights, collected in Woman and Her Needs (1851); her notoriety as a feminist reformer seems to have eclipsed her achievements as a writer of poetry and fiction. [2] It may seem surprising, then, that in The Prose Writers of America (1847) Rufus W. Griswold described Oakes Smith as "a woman of a most original and poetical mind, who has succeeded, perhaps better than any other person, in appreciating and developing the fitness of aboriginal tradition and mythology for the purposes of romantic fiction" (38). Oakes Smith was in fact widely recognized for her representations of Native Americans. Her work was included in Henry R. Schoolcraft's The American Indians, Their Histor y, Condition and Prospects, from Original Notes and Manuscripts (1851), and she was believed to have influenced writers such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. [3] But the "purposes" of white writers' romantic portrayals of Native Americans to which Griswold alludes are varied and complex, and thus Oakes Smith's Indian fiction offers an opportunity both to explore her feminist ideas in a new context and to expand our understanding of the genre of nineteenth-century "Indian" fiction itself. In choosing this form, Oakes Smith recognizes the captivity tale's power to place readers in what Gary L. Ebersole describes as "an ultimate boundary situation where human existence, identity, and ultimate meaning are called into question as the captive's world is turned topsy-turvy" (7). Use of the word "captivity" implies a state from which someone in this boundary situation would seek to be liberated, yet many authors were intrigued by the potential freedoms that white women could discover by assuming the perspective of "wild" Indians. In contrast to Mary Rowlandson's struggle for her physical and spiritual redemption in America's first published captivity narrative (1682), stories of transculturated women such as James Seaver's A Narrative of the Life of Mary Jemison (1824) challenged authors and readers to consider the appeal of Indian life to once "proper" Christian women. Captive Mary Jemison actively chose not to return to "civilized" life, and this loyalty to her Indian husband and adopted culture se emed an affront to white society. Oakes Smith uses this familiar captivity narrative form subversively, creating novels that are "exploratory" in the way that Susan K. Harris has interpreted mid-nineteenth-century women's fiction. By allowing her heroines to make Indian territory their home, Oakes Smith's narratives illustrate the function that Harris describes in texts where women venture beyond the domestic sphere: "Exploratory novels undermine cultural ideologies, expanding readers' horizons of acceptable female behavior as they posit alternatives to conventional roles" (200). For nineteenth-century fiction writers, captivity provided a testing ground to reevaluate the place of white women in a society grappling with issues of human rights: feminism, abolitionism, and Indian removal. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/25679351.pdf

Puritan Daughters and "Wild" Indians: Elizabeth Oakes Smith's Narratives of Domestic Captivity

[W]hat we accomplish in this new Church is seen by God and not by men our enclosure covers all, and it is difficult to speak of what one does not see. Marie de 'l Incarnation Guyart, Letter to her son, 9 Aug. 1668 (Word from New France 337) Working within convent walls in seventeenth-century Quebec, Marie de l'Incarnation Guyart recognized her invisibility and generated a vast body of literature that reveals the extent of her spiritual and physical trials as a religious woman and early colonist. Her narratives of travel, frontier life, and encounters with native peoples paradoxically emerge from her seclusion as a cloistered nun, locating the convent at the center--not the periphery--of colonial settlement and American experience. Guyart's detailed accounts of the religious calling that led her to the New World and of her experiences as an immigrant span a time period of nearly fifty years, from 1625 to 1671. In addition to writing two autobiographies and letters estimated to have numbered from eight to twenty thousand, Guyart composed instructional catechisms and dictionaries in French and Indian languages. During her lifetime, Guyart's letters were circulated in France and cited in The Jesuit Relations, the published annual reports of Jesuit missionaries in Canada. Her writing, like that of other seventeenth-century religious women, was subject to the scrutiny and editing of male clergy who published her work not as literature, but as writing of practical, spiritual, and historical value. (1) In this respect, Guyart resembles Mary Rowlandson, whose authorship depended upon the usefulness of her captivity narrative's Calvinist moralizing and justification for Indian war. While Rowlandson's single work, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, occupies a prominent place in American literary history, Guyart's voluminous and wide-ranging body of writing has long been treated as a valuable source of Catholic, French, and Canadian history, a reason her work now appears in twentieth-century critical editions, including translations into English. (2) Until recently, the importance of Marie de l' Incarnation's work to American literary history has been veiled by the religious vows that separate her from a strongly Protestant tradition. In his introduction to a 1989 edition of selected writings by Guyart, John Farina writes, "One searches in vain for signs of how the American experience,' whether it be the presence of the frontier or some other combination of factors, shaped her spirituality in any profound way. That, doubtless, was a function of the fact that she lived not in a lively British colony but in a cloister in Quebec" (1). Farina's assessment has been challenged by feminist scholars who approach Guyart's work as both American and literature, countering the tendency to idealize Guyart as a mystic and missionary apart from colonial America and its literary production. (3) Carla Zecher reads Guyart's correspondence "as belonging to an emergent New World literature, rather than as the production of a seventeenth-century French epistoliere or mystic (without, however, denying the validity of those approaches)" ("Life on the French-Canadian Hyphen" 39). Carla Mulford, Angela Vietto, and Amy E. Winans extend this critical trajectory in Early American Writings, a multicultural anthology that includes letters written by Marie de l' Incarnation and that models what Philip Gould describes as "a new kind of early American studies that reads beyond the U. S. nation" (305), one that "disrupt[s] the Protestant narrative of American culture" (316). The constraints under which Guyart entered the convent, traveled to Canada, and wrote do not signal her removal from the American experience so much as they complicate cultural narratives of captivity and freedom. As one of the first white, middle-class, European women to settle in North America, Guyart is comparable to New England pilgrims, but embarks upon a distinct, divinely revealed religious errand of her own, and it is a mission that forces her to redefine her role as a woman. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/25679629

Captivity, Freedom, and the New World Convent: The Spiritual Autobiography of Marie de l'Incarnation Guyart

Homeland security "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492." - slogan on t-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers printed with image of Native American warriors As we enter the '90s, the FBI's slaughter of "AIM militants" has long since been completed and hidden from view. ... concerning the form and function of the FBI, things have never been "OK." -Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers "The history [of US treatment of Native Americans] is bad enough -there's no need to embellish it." - Russell Thornton to Scott Jaschik in "A New Ward Churchill Controversy," Inside Higher Ed American Indian conspiracy theories evoke a particular sense of uneasiness in a society built upon Native lands, a phenomenon evident in the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill, a writer, activist, academic, and self-identified Native American who has himself been denounced for spreading lies. For several decades, Churchill has been piecing together a narrative of American history in which a conspiratorial US government perpetuates crimes and covers them up with propaganda and lies. With Jim Vander Wall, he published two polemical exposes characterizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a government agency whose main function is not to fight crime-and thus keep Americans safe-but to actively repress political diversity through counterintelligence programs targeting Indians and other citizens: Agents of Repression: The FBI's secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. In addition to challenging the public image of the heroic G-man, Churchill has repeatedly flaunted the ugly g-word that undermines many cultural myths of America's founding: genocide. The colonization of the Americas is explicitly linked to acts of genocide in the titles of a full four of Churchill's books, most recently in A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present? Churchill's version of American history takes issue with the common understanding that the decimation of Native American populations by European diseases such as small pox was "accidental" and not part of a larger conspiracy to commit genocide. Despite the controversial nature of this earlier writing, Churchill did not receive national attention until 2005 when the media noticed an essay he wrote on September 11, 2001, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." Whereas Churchill's books protesting govern ment-sponsored domestic terrorism and genocide failed to raise public outcry against him or the government, this article's invocation of Malcolm X's response to John F. Kennedy's assassination-"it was merely a case of 'chickens coming home to roost'" -gained him instant notoriety. After protestors at Hamilton College cited the 9/11 essay to oppose the Kirkland Project Panel with Ward Churchill-scheduled for February 3, 2005 but officially cancelled "due to threats of violence"2 - a media frenzy and national debate ensued. Churchill's writing and speeches had compared the United States to Nazi Germany in previous discussions of genocide without receiving much notice, but his description in this article of the "little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers" evoked widespread indignation. The reference stems from his argument that many of the workers at the World Trade Center were specifically targeted by terrorists as "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire," not as "innocent civilians." The attack, he contends, was retaliatory, a strike back for years of oppressive US policies aided by the stockbrokers, lawyers, and government employees in the World Trade Center. Beyond blaming foreign policy for eliciting this strike, Churchill argues that many of the citizens who died were guilty of complicity: he connects government and civilian employees as coconspirators driven to protect their capitalist interests. …

Caroline M. Woidat

Papers

The Indian-Detour in Willa Cather's Southwestern Novels

Talking Back to Schoolteacher: Morrison's Confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved

Puritan Daughters and "Wild" Indians: Elizabeth Oakes Smith's Narratives of Domestic Captivity

Captivity, Freedom, and the New World Convent: The Spiritual Autobiography of Marie de l'Incarnation Guyart

The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture