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"Alexie, Sherman"
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Sherman Alexie
This narrative gives teen readers an intimate portrait of Alexie, from his birth, when he was diagnosed with hydrocephalus, and youth on the Spokane Indian Reservation to his establishment as a rising star in American literature. Among his acclaimed books are Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Reservation Blues, and Indian Killer, and his screenplay Smoke Signals.
Book
“The Triumph of the Ordinary”: Mental Reservation, Racial Profiling and Construction of a Human Social Community in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians
In Ten Little Indians, Sherman Alexie presents nine poignant and emotionally resonant stories about Native Americans’ struggle with alienation and stereotypes. Instead of focusing merely on the ethnic identity of American Indians, Alexie writes about a particular group of people sharing similar circumstances and addresses their common humanity, namely their search for love and respect in urban spaces. Alexie questions the authenticity of Indian identity and asserts that a “mental reservation” exists in the minds of Indian people which significantly influences their perceptions of self and community. Race, as a medium of seeing “the other” permeates U.S. society, especially in the wake of terrorist attacks. However, racial profiling has proven to be an ineffective means of detecting criminals and criminal activities, and has obstructed social relationships, bringing emotions of fear, loneliness and grief to urban Indians. In response to the modernity crisis, Alexie explores the American Indian cosmopolitanism in Ten Little Indians, and envisions a human social community based on reciprocity and mutual respect. His concerns regarding ordinary people’s life experiences and their ways of forming healthy relationships exhibit his considerable hope for “the triumph of the ordinary”.
Journal Article
Unhomed at Home: A Postcolonial Reading of Sherman Alexie’s “The Search Engine”
\"The Search Engine\" is a short story by Native American writer Sherman Alexie. The story depicts a quest undertaken by a young urban Indigenous woman to find an enigmatic Indian poet and, by extension, her own postcolonial self. This article proposes to read Alexie's \"The Search Engine\" through the lens of postcolonial criticism to investigate the text's anticolonialist ideology and approaches to resist the colonialist domination and deal with the postcolonial condition. The analysis reveals that the text presents an anticolonialist sentiments through marginal characters who are conditioned by the sense of unhomeliness as a result of their socioeconomic disadvantages. The text then subverts the colonialist ideology by secularising Christian terminologies and revisiting a literary canon from the point of view of the underclass. Finally, the text suggests that conflicting postcolonial identities can be reconciled and hybridised through respect and recognition at an individual level.
Journal Article
Sherman Alexie : a collection of critical essays
Sherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America.
Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.
eBook
That Dream Shall Have a Name
The founding idea of \"America\" has been based largely on the expected sweeping away of Native Americans to make room for EuroAmericans and their cultures. In this authoritative study, David L. Moore examines the works of five well-known Native American writers and their efforts, beginning in the colonial period, to redefine an \"America\" and \"American identity\" that includes Native Americans.
That Dream Shall Have a Namefocuses on the writing of Pequot Methodist minister William Apess in the 1830s; on Northern Paiute activist Sarah Winnemucca in the 1880s; on Salish/Métis novelist, historian, and activist D'Arcy McNickle in the 1930s; and on Laguna poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and on Spokane poet, novelist, humorist, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, both in the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Moore studies these five writers' stories about the conflicted topics of sovereignty, community, identity, and authenticity-always tinged with irony and often with humor. He shows how Native Americans have tried from the beginning to shape an American narrative closer to its own ideals, one that does not include the death and destruction of their peoples. This compelling work offers keen insights into the relationships between Native and American identity and politics in a way that is both accessible to newcomers and compelling to those already familiar with these fields of study.
eBook
Editor's Introduction
\"Rather than a conventional coming-of-age story,\" Perez writes, \"Flight makes a powerful statement about Native people in YA fiction and U.S. culture more broadly by plotting Zits' narrative absence into presence and the teenager's unwillingness to vanish permanently.\" By reading Flight alongside Alexis's other works and through this critical lens, Perez concludes, we can see how Alexie \"mov[es] beyond temporality, genre, and narrative convention\" in order \"to imagine stories that reject an American literary tradition with an historical and political investment in vanishing Natives.\" Moving from the comic rendition of Smith's Dalmatian family in The One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) and The Starlight Barking (1967) to Jones' more somber story of exile in Dogsbody (1975), Baker shows how both authors serve the utopian goal of \"reorient[ing] [our] conceptual frameworks\" to break down unnecessary and oppressive boundaries, and to make possible more liberating definitions of love and connection.
Journal Article
Inhabiting Indianness: Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and the Phenomenology of White Sincerity
[...]a strange racial alchemy is at work . . . a meaningful if somewhat delirious interplay between race, culture, and indigeneity\" (60). Because Marie \"did not dance or sing traditionally, and because she could not speak Spokane,\" she \"was often thought of as being less than Indian\" (33). Indian Killer suggests that the sincerity of these men's inclinations, whether toward physical violence or violent benevolence, is articulated through a prosthetic relationship to notions of Indianness that can cir- culate as both supplement for and agent of whiteness's wounds. [...]we see Mather able to imagine himself the victim of Marie's intransigent refusal to become a feature of his positive portraiture; Wilson able to imagine himself as the very last of his tribe so as to supplement his experience of whiteness's emptiness; and Truck Schultz able to imagine Indians as engaged in a race war against whites so as to position whiteness as a wounded subject position in need of violent defense. [...]the act of perceiving supervenes one's ability to remain consciously aware of it.
Journal Article
The Battle of Tohotonimme and Sherman Alexie's \The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire\
In an interview published in The New Yorker celebrating the twentieth anniversary of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in 1993, Spokane novelist Jess Walter describes Sherman Alexie's \"The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire\" as one of his all-time-favorite stories. In that story Alexie recounts a Native American version of the Battle of Tohotonimme that occurred in mid-May 1858, details of which are familiar to many who live in the inland Pacific Northwest. McFarland examines Alexie's \"The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,\" which concerns both the battles and their aftermath, including the horse slaughter that occurred after Colonel George Wright's defeat of the Northern Plateau tribes at the Battles of Four Lakes and Spokane Plains in Sep 1858.
Journal Article
Desorientado y renovado por los viajes en el tiempo: la historia como carga o/y oportunidad en Flight, de Sherman Alexie
Zits, el protagonista de Flight (2007), de Sherman Alexie, es un adolescente nativo americano que tiene serias dificultades para definir su identidad y encontrar un espacio en la sociedad norteamericana contemporánea. La ausencia de sus padres y el cruel sistema de adopción al que se ve sometido le convierten en un joven rebelde y disfuncional que está a punto de cometer una masacre. Sin embargo, justo antes de apretar el gatillo, 'viaja a través del tiempo' para revisar algunos de los episodios clave en la historia nativo-americana en la piel de personajes que pertenecen a diferentes grupos étnicos y sociales. Este viaje imaginario permite al autor --y a Zits--indagar en los motivos de los conflictos que pudieran explicar la situación de los indios americanos hoy en día. El viaje en el tiempo demuestra ser un marco de ficción que ayuda a Alexie--y sus lectores--a estudiar estos acontecimientos históricos desde puntos de vista inusuales para discernir lo que los documentos oficiales han ignorado u olvidado a propósito. Flight es pues un valioso ejemplo de metaficción historiográfica en la que el escritor consigue tanto recuperar fragmentos del pasado colectivo de su pueblo como establecer nexos entre esos episodios y su situación en el mundo actual.
Journal Article
Telling Identities: Sherman Alexie’s War Dances
Sherman Alexie's collection of stories and poems, War Dances (2009), plays with fictions, with the art of constructing stories, identities, and, thus, interpretations of the world.' By probing the juncture between reality and representation, Alexie asks the oldest questions in a fresh, new voice: How do people attempt to know each other and to narrate experience? He launches investigations into the power of the imagination and the tricky reach of language as it articulates lived lives and selves. His polyphonic text enters the canons of contemporary US and world literature, where it can converse with great writers of the past and present. It's no surprise that Alexie, unbounded by national boundaries, evokes creative free thinkers from other lands and genres as well, most strikingly, Kafka (29), Dickens (52), Tennyson (81), and Blake (163). He implicitly conjures Baudelaire and Wilde with his repeated characterization of fiction as (amoral) lying or precious artifice (180-81).
Journal Article