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Dear friends and colleagues in New England and beyond,<br>
<br>
I hope you will all have the chance to check out a new release from
University of Oklahoma Press:<br>
<p class="MsoNormal">Twelve of us have worked together to author a book
titled <u>Reasoning
Together: The Native Critics Collective</u>. Each author considers the
field of
American Indian literary criticism by gauging its relationship to the
realities
of the tribal world and social activism. In a lively, occasionally
contentious,
dialogue, the writers perform community by commenting on each others’
essays
and analyzing issues of ethics in relation to close readings of
Native-authored
critical and imaginative texts. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">While a deeply passionate, sometimes even
compassionate,
volume, authors try to work through the ideas, and underlying
philosophies,
that have underscored some of the more acerbic recent public exchanges
that
have been less fully engaged with textual analysis and have failed to
identify
what is truly at stake. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The book takes up the issue of literary theory
neither to
denigrate it or assign it a messianic role but to analyze its relevance
to
Indian country. Closing the gap between theory and activism is a major
goal in
the materialist criticism that emerges as the authors reason together
and
celebrate spiritual traditions as potential sources for learning
material
realities.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">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 in 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. </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><u>Reasoning Together</u> maximizes Native
presence in its
round table of Native authors and its approach to putting them in
dialogue in a
cross-exchange reflected in their references to one another’s essays.<span
style=""> </span>Each participant is an author, not a
contributor. It deviates, radically, from the authority structures of
edited
volumes and challenges the aesthetics of individual literary
representation
through performed, rather than hypothetical, community.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">$24.95. <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype
w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Oklahoma</st1:placename></st1:place>
Press. ISBN
978-0-8061-3887-0.
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-8061-3887-9">http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-8061-3887-9</a> </p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Lisa Brooks
Assistant Professor of History and Literature
and of Folklore and Mythology
Harvard University
Barker 122
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138</pre>
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