Imaginary (Re-)Locations

Since the beginning of the so-called 'Native American Renaissance' in the late 1960s, literature by indigenous writers of the United States has undergone a tremendous development both with regard to the number and quality of works of fiction, poetry, drama and nonfictional prose published and to their formal and thematic variety and inventiveness. The same holds true of other forms of cultural expression. Similiar tendencies can be observed in Canada and Latin America. Imaginary (Re-)Locations collects a number of essays by leading American and German critics in the field and some recent literary texts by Native writers Kim Blaeser, Jeane Breinig, Julie Coburn, Gordon Henry, Jr., Gerald Vizenor, and Emma Lee Warrior. The scholarly papers study contemporary indigenous literature and culture from the United States as well as from Canada and Mexico. They address literary representations of such aspects as cultural and political identity formation, the position of Urban Indians, mixedblood identity and cultural transdifference, 'postindian' tricksterism, and the deconstruction of Hollywood Indians; in addition, they discuss Native and non-Native images, symbolic border zones, and the marketability of things Indian. Among the writers discussed in these essays are Louise Erdrich, Thomas King, N. Scott Momaday, Louis Owens, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor, who also contributed a scholarly essay of his own.