Red Matters
Red Matters: Native American Studies
Arnold Krupat
Series: Rethinking the Americas
Copyright Date: 2002
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Pages: 184
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fhtk2
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Red Matters
Book Description:

Arnold Krupat, one of the most original and respected critics working in Native American studies today, offers a clear and compelling set of reasons why red-Native American culture, history, and literature-should matter to Americans more than it has to date. Although there exists a growing body of criticism demonstrating the importance of Native American literature in its own right and in relation to other ethnic and minority literatures, Native materials still have not been accorded the full attention they require. Krupat argues that it is simply not possible to understand the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West without engaging America's treatment of its indigenous peoples and their extraordinary and resilient responses. Criticism of Native literature in its current development, Krupat suggests, operates from one of three critical perspectives against colonialism that he calls nationalism, indigenism, and cosmopolitanism. Nationalist critics are foremost concerned with tribal sovereignty, indigenist critics focus on non-Western modes of knowledge, and cosmopolitan critics wish to look elsewhere for comparative possibilities. Krupat persuasively contends that all three critical perspectives can work in a complementary rather than an oppositional fashion. A work marked by theoretical sophistication, wide learning, and social passion, Red Matters is a major contribution to the imperative effort of understanding the indigenous presence on the American continents.

eISBN: 978-0-8122-0068-3
Subjects: Sociology
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-iv)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. v-vi)
  3. Preface
    Preface (pp. vii-xii)
  4. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. xiii-xiv)
  5. Chapter 1 Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Perspectives on Native American Literatures
    Chapter 1 Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Perspectives on Native American Literatures (pp. 1-23)

    Criticism of Native American literatures today proceeds from one or another of the critical perspectives I call nationalist, indigenist, and cosmopolitan. The nationalist and indigenist positions sometimes overlap, and both nationalists and indigenists tend to see themselves as apart from and in opposition to the cosmopolitans. Nonetheless, as I will try to show, nationalist, indigenist, and cosmopolitan positions are all overlapping and interlinked so that each can only achieve its full coherence and effectiveness in relation to the others. All three positions may be enlisted for the project of an anticolonial criticism, as all three may also operate to reproduce...

  6. Chapter 2 On the Translation of Native American Song and Story: A Theorized History
    Chapter 2 On the Translation of Native American Song and Story: A Theorized History (pp. 24-47)

    This chapter reprints an essay published ten years ago in Brian Swann’s edited volume On the Translation of Native American Literatures. After a good deal of reflection, I decided to leave it in its original form with only this prefatory note to serve as an explanation of that decision. As the preceding chapter should have made clear, translation in the figurative mode that I have called anti-imperial translation is of particular concern to the cosmopolitan critic. This concern brings the cosmopolitan critic into regular contact with the indigenist whose knowledge can relativize and even destabilize the knowledges that support imperialism,...

  7. Chapter 3 America’s Histories
    Chapter 3 America’s Histories (pp. 48-75)

    This chapter’s title means to point to the fact that the history of America most of us know is not the only history of America. The indigenous oral tradition, for example, abounds with narratives that the contemporary Wyandot historian Clifford Trafzer calls, “the first history of the Americas” (474). This is “history,” Trafzer notes, “in the native sense of the word,” but not only in the “native sense,” for Trafzer claims that these narratives of monster slayers, women falling from the sky, and emergences from deep within the earth “reflect actual incidents that occurred in world history” (486 n.2, my...

  8. Chapter 4 From “Half-Blood” to “Mixedblood”: Cogewea and the “Discourse of Indian Blood”
    Chapter 4 From “Half-Blood” to “Mixedblood”: Cogewea and the “Discourse of Indian Blood” (pp. 76-97)

    Published in 1927, and until recently thought the “first” novel by a Native American woman,² Mourning Dove’s Cogewea: The Half-Blood was paid little critical attention until 1978, when Charles Larson commented upon it in an appendix to his American Indian Fiction in regard to the issue of dual authorship. Mourning Dove — or Hum-ishu-ma, also known as Christine Haines and Christine or Chrystal Quintasket — this is to say, had completed a first draft of the novel in the years 1912–14, but, after meeting Lucullus Virgil McWhorter, a white businessman with a keen interest in Native American culture and in federal...

  9. Chapter 5 The “Rage Stage”: Contextualizing Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer
    Chapter 5 The “Rage Stage”: Contextualizing Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (pp. 98-122)

    Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1996) begins in the “winter” of 1968–69,¹ in the delivery room of “An Indian Health Service hospital,” on “this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation” (3). There a dark-skinned boy is born to a fourteen-year-old Indian² woman who has apparently agreed to give him up for adoption. The transfer of the infant to his adoptive parents is violent: “A man in a white jumpsuit” and a “white helmet” (6) arrives in a helicopter and seizes the boy. Then, as the helicopter lifts off, the “helicopter gunman locks and loads, strafes the reservation...

  10. Notes
    Notes (pp. 123-142)
  11. Bibliography
    Bibliography (pp. 143-160)
  12. Index
    Index (pp. 161-167)
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