Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective

by Janice Acoose (Contribution by), Lisa Brooks (Contribution by), Tol Foster (Contribution by), Daniel Heath Justice (Contribution by), Phillip Carroll Morgan (Contribution by)

Overview

This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation.

Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justice takes on two prominent critics who see mixed-blood identities differently than he does in relation to kinship; Phillip Carroll Morgan uncovers written Choctaw literary criticism from the 1830s on the subject of oral performance; Kimberly Roppolo advocates an intertribal rhetoric that can form a linguistic foundation for criticism. Cheryl Suzack situates feminist theories within Native culture with an eye to applying them to subjugated groups across Indian Country; Christopher B. Teuton organizes Native literary criticism into three modes based on community awareness; Sean Teuton opens up new sites for literary performance inside prisons with Native inmates; Robert Warrior wants literary analysis to consider the challenges of eroticism; Craig S. Womack introduces the book by historicizing book-length Native-authored criticism published between 1986 and 1997, and he concludes the volume with an essay on theorizing experience.

Reasoning Together proposes nothing less than a paradigm shift in American Indian literary criticism, closing the gap between theory and activism by situating Native literature in real-life experiences and tribal histories. It is an accessible collection that will suit a wide range of courses—and will educate and energize anyone engaged in criticism of Native literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806138879
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	458
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Phillip Carroll Morgan, senior staff writer at Chickasaw Press, holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in Native American literature from the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Chickasaw Renaissance and coauthor (with Judy Goforth Parker) of Dynamic Chickasaw Women, which won the Independent Publishers Book Awards’ Gold Medal for Mid-West Regional Non-fiction in 2012. Morgan also wrote The Fork-in-the-Road Indian Poetry Store, which won the Native Writers Circle of the Americas' First Book Award for Poetry in 2002, and he is a coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008.


Kimberly G. Wieser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma and coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.
 

Craig S. Womack is Associate Professor in the English Department at Emory University, author of Drowning in Fire: A Novel and Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, and coauthor of Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective.

Table of Contents

A Single Decade: Book-Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997   Craig S. Womack     3
The Callout: Writing American Indian Politics   Sean Teuton     105
"Who Shall Gainsay Our Decision?": Choctaw Literary Criticism in 1830   Phillip Carroll Morgan     126
"Go Away, Water!": Kinship Criticism and the Decolonization Imperative   Daniel Heath Justice     147
Land Claims, Identity Claims: Mapping Indigenous Feminism in Literary Criticism and in Winona LaDuke's Last Standing Woman   Cheryl Suzack     169
Theorizing American Indian Literature: Applying Oral Concepts to Written Traditions   Christopher B. Teuton     193
Honoring Ni'Wahkomakanak   Janice Acoose     216
Digging at the Roots: Locating an Ethical, Native Criticism   Lisa Brooks     234
Of One Blood: An Argument for Relations and Regionality in Native American Literary Studies   Tol Foster     265
Samson Occom as Writing Instructor: The Search for an Intertribal Rhetoric   Kimberly Roppolo     303
Blind Bread and the Business of Theory Making, by Embarrassed Grief   LeAnne Howe     325
Your Skin Is the Map: The Theoretical Challenge of Joy Harjo's Erotic Poetics   Robert Warrior     340
Theorizing American Indian Experience   Craig S. Womack     353
Bibliography     411
Index     431