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A Council of Dolls (2023), the latest novel by Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux Tribe), is an important contribution to the third wave of Indigenous writing that attests to its vitality and diversity. This article aims to refine and expand the characterization of this recent creative movement through an analysis of Power’s novel from the perspective of Indigenous trauma theory and Dakota history and onto-epistemology. It examines how, through reverse chronology and layered narrative, the novel articulates the transmission of trauma across generations; it delves into relationality and more-than-human ontologies through an analysis of the dolls that accompany the protagonist girls in and beyond boarding school; and it underscores how the novel vindicates open wounds to resist the silencing effects of narrative resolution, offering ethical witnessing in place of therapeutic closure. All in all, Power’s novel is a relevant decolonial intervention insofar as it offers a narrative model of healing grounded in Indigenous relational accountability and cultural continuity.

The belated publication of Sherman Alexie’s story “The Sin Eaters” as part of the collection The Toughest Indian in the World (2000) is worthy of the interest of biographic-textual scholars for its singularity. Not only did the author delay its appearance due to the very sinister tone of the story, but he decided to include it at the very heart of a collection, which is very different both stylistically and thematically. Paradoxically, however, the dystopian vision of the United States in the late 1950s offered by “The Sin Eaters” is an effective “counterweight” to the rest of the materials compiled in the collection. Assisted by the ideas of experts in the field of dystopian fiction, the article analyzes the story as an adequate counterpart and complement to the other, more promising, pictures offered in the volume.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade in its Dobbs decision in June 2022 came as a shock. Yet, upon reflection, the decision simply reinforced what history has shown: women’s rights and opportunities have always been subject to controls, fluctuations, and specious rationales. Dobbs is one in a long line of legal edicts in the U.S. and elsewhere that either allow or curtail and control female agency, including reproductive agency. The decision’s devastating consequences for U.S. women’s reproductive lives are damaging enough, but they are only part of the story. In addition to its hobbling effects on reproductive rights and justice, the Dobbs decision goes hand in hand with the underlying causes of today’s unparalleled environmental emergency. This article argues, through ecofeminist theory and feminist and Native American climate fiction, that Dobbs is a catalyst for understanding the role of patriarchy—as a particularly insidious form of androcentrism—in the destruction of our planet. Evidence is mounting to support claims made by ecofeminists since the 1970s: patriarchy and resulting masculinist values have been foundational to the extractive and exploitative attitudes and practices regarding marginalized peoples, colonized lands, and racialized entitlements to natural resources that have endangered the earth’s biosystems.

This chapter contains sections titled: Notes References and Further Reading

Ever since Bessie Smith's powerful voice conspired with the \"race records\" industry to make her a star in the 1920s, African American writers have memorialized the sounds and theorized the politics of black women's singing. InBlack Resonance, Emily J. Lordi analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. Focusing on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s,Black Resonancereveals a musical-literary tradition in which singers and writers, faced with similar challenges and harboring similar aims, developed comparable expressive techniques. Drawing together such seemingly disparate works as Bessie Smith's blues and Richard Wright's neglected film ofNative Son, Mahalia Jackson's gospel music and Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Man, each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice. In the process, Lordi demonstrates that popular female singers are not passive muses with raw, natural, or ineffable talent. Rather, they are experimental artists who innovate black expressive possibilities right alongside their literary peers. The first study of black music and literature to centralize the music of black women,Black Resonanceoffers new ways of reading and hearing some of the twentieth century's most beloved and challenging voices.

This is the first book to analyze our suburban literary tradition. Tracing the suburb's emergence as a crucial setting and subject of the twentieth-century American novel, Catherine Jurca identifies a decidedly masculine obsession with the suburban home and a preoccupation with its alternative--the experience of spiritual and emotional dislocation that she terms \"homelessness.\" In the process, she challenges representations of white suburbia as prostrated by its own privileges. In novels as disparate asTarzan(written by Tarzana, California, real-estate developer Edgar Rice Burroughs), Richard Wright'sNative Son, and recent fiction by John Updike and Richard Ford, Jurca finds an emphasis on the suburb under siege, a place where the fortunate tend to see themselves as powerless. From Babbitt to Rabbit, the suburban novel casts property owners living in communities of their choosing as dispossessed people. Material advantages become artifacts of oppression, and affluence is fraudulently identified as impoverishment. The fantasy of victimization reimagines white flight as a white diaspora. Extending innovative trends in the study of nineteenth-century American culture, Jurca's analysis suggests that self-pity has played a constitutive role in white middle-class identity in the twentieth century. It breaks new ground in literary history and cultural studies, while telling the story of one of our most revered and reviled locations: \"the little suburban house at number one million and ten Volstead Avenue\" that Edith Wharton warned would ruin American life and letters.

(Simpson 34- 35) In the first episode of Joss Whedon's short- lived but beloved series Firefly, set in 2517, the narrative pivots around the Firefly spaceship landing on a moon to load people and supplies for transport elsewhere in the galaxy- the crew, we find, keeps their bills paid by providing an off- thebooks intergalactic delivery service. Rather, it is to underscore that even though Native communities, our governance structures, the complexities of our social engagement, and the variety of our narrative traditions have always incorporated elements of futurity, prophecy, and responsibility- rooted strategies for bringing forth better futures, mainstream narratives represent a profound and pervasive inability to portray Native peoples and our continued existence in the present, let alone to project us forward into any potential futures. Limited Imaginings of the Future / Writing Ourselves into the Future Enjoying science fiction, fantasy, and horror narratives played a much loved and integral part of father- daughter time when I was growing up (and still does), but it became harder and harder, as I got older, to overlook many of the core ideas common across these genres. In spite of my initial excitement, the fact of the matter is that Firefly's inclusion of Native peoples in this one scene neither foreshadowed an Indian importance to the developing series storyline nor signaled a new way forward for Hollywood portrayals of Native peoples in science fiction. 2 The relatively recent releases of Avatar and the Twilight series present ample evidence that Hollywood's Indians...

Stephen Graham Jones’s 2020 horror novel The Only Good Indians follows the haunting and murder of four Blackfeet men by a vengeful monster called Elk Head Woman, who manipulates the settler gaze to make the men look to outsiders as the source of the violence, much as violence within real-life Indigenous communities is often illegible to those outside them. In borrowing and adapting the deer woman trope, the novel furthers Jones’s longstanding challenge to settler notions of Indigenous authenticity by both textually and metatextually countering the myth that Indigenous people have an innate connection to their culture. Instead, it offers a vision of kinship among characters with diverse ways of being “good Indians” as an alternative to essentialism that allows Indigenous people and artists, including writers of horror fiction, to escape the constraints of the settler gaze.

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 Toxinsexplores 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.

This book charts how the cartographies of American literature as an institutional category have varied radically across different times and places. Arguing that American literature was consolidated as a distinctively nationalist entity only in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, Paul Giles identifies this formation as extending until the beginning of the Reagan presidency in 1981. He contrasts this with the more amorphous boundaries of American culture in the eighteenth century, and with ways in which conditions of globalization at the turn of the twenty-first century have reconfigured the parameters of the subject. In light of these fluctuating conceptions of space, Giles suggests new ways of understanding the shifting territory of American literary history. ranging from Cotton Mather to David Foster Wallace, and from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Zora Neale Hurston. Giles considers why European medievalism and Native American prehistory were crucial to classic nineteenth-century authors such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville. He discusses how twentieth-century technological innovations, such as air travel, affected representations of the national domain in the texts of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. And he analyzes how regional projections of the South and the Pacific Northwest helped to shape the work of writers such as William Gilmore Simms, José Martí, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Gibson. Bringing together literary analysis, political history, and cultural geography,The Global Remapping of American Literaturereorients the subject for the transnational era.