[nativestudies-l] Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective

[Lisa Brooks]

Dear friends and colleagues in New England and beyond,

I hope you will all have the chance to check out a new release from 
University of Oklahoma Press:

Twelve of us have worked together to author a book titled _Reasoning 
Together: The Native Critics Collective_. 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.

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.

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.

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.

_Reasoning Together_ 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.  
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.

$24.95. University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 978-0-8061-3887-0. 
http://www.oupress.com/bookdetail.asp?isbn=978-0-8061-3887-9

-- 
Lisa Brooks
Assistant Professor of History and Literature
and of Folklore and Mythology
Harvard University
Barker 122 
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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