American Indian literary nationalism is the name of an intellectual and activist movement within Native American literary studies that began in the late 20th century in the United States. It asserts that Native American literatures should be discussed as cultural works from separate, distinct nations, rather than as from ethnic groups of the United States.
Simon J. Ortiz's 1981 essay "Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism" is generally held to be the most significant precursor of the movement. Activists build their justification for an American Indian Literary Nationalism on Kimberly Blaeser's argument for a critical approach to Indigenous literature that begins with the meaning a text itself produces.
American Indian literary nationalists hold that American Indian literature is best studied through the lens of American Indian cultural and philosophical traditions. When the earliest works now categorized as nationalist were first published, this "grounded" approach ran counter both to the ethnologically inflected literary criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s, and also to the postmodern critical methods that had largely succeeded these in the 1990s.
The nationalists considered the first of these approaches as an attempt to keep Native cultures primarily as the object of Anglo-American study, while the second relied too strongly on Eurowestern models and thus again served to deprive Native peoples of a legitimate voice.
Nationalist criticism, by contrast, would keep crucial political issues, such as tribal sovereignty, at the forefront. Critics believed that rather than treating American Indian literatures as another ethnic literature within the American canon, these works should be seen as the product of separate nations, and studied as such.
Robert Allen Warrior's book Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Traditions was the first full-length work of nationalist criticism. In it, he discusses the Osage novelist John Joseph Mathews and the Standing Rock Sioux philosopher Vine Deloria, Jr., placing both in a specifically American Indian intellectual context.
This book was followed by Jace Weaver's That the People May Live, which proposes an ethic of "communitism" as a key way to understand tribal literatures. Finally, Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism completed the emergence of the three key thinkers of the movement. Womack's book was the first full-length monograph to concentrate on the literary output of a single tribal nation, leading some to label it "tribalcentric". [1]
Elvira Pulitano's Toward a Native American Critical Theory (2003) made multiple statements about the work of Warrior and Womack that the three major nationalists held to be inaccurate. Weaver, Warrior and Womack collaborated (along with Abenaki scholar Lisa Brooks) on American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006), a positional statement of the nationalist cause.
Edward Bellamy was an American author, journalist, and political activist most famous for his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of numerous "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of his political ideas.
Nationalism is an idea or movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it presupposes the existence and tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining its sovereignty (self-governance) over its perceived homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. There are various definitions of a "nation", which leads to different types of nationalism. The two main divergent forms are ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism.
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A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.
Postcolonial literature is the literature by people from formerly colonized countries, originating from all continents except Antarctica. Postcolonial literature often addresses the problems and consequences of the decolonization of a country, especially questions relating to the political and cultural independence of formerly subjugated people, and themes such as racialism and colonialism. A range of literary theory has evolved around the subject. It addresses the role of literature in perpetuating and challenging what postcolonial critic Edward Said refers to as cultural imperialism.
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Native American studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the history, culture, politics, issues, spirituality, sociology and contemporary experience of Native peoples in North America, or, taking a hemispheric approach, the Americas. Increasingly, debate has focused on the differences rather than the similarities between other ethnic studies disciplines such as African American studies, Asian American studies, and Latino/a studies.
The Native American Renaissance is a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in the 1983 book Native American Renaissance to categorise the significant increase in production of literary works by Native Americans in the United States in the late 1960s and onwards. A. Robert Lee and Alan Velie note that the book's title "quickly gained currency as a term to describe the efflorescence on literary works that followed the publication of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn in 1968". Momaday's novel garnered critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969.
Ameen Rihani (Amīn Fāris Anṭūn ar-Rīḥānī; Arabic: أمين الريحاني / ALA-LC: Amīn ar-Rīḥānī; November 24, 1876 – September 13, 1940) was a Lebanese-American writer, intellectual and political activist. He was also a major figure in the mahjar literary movement developed by Arab emigrants in North America, and an early theorist of Arab nationalism. He became an American citizen in 1901.
Ganesh Narayandas Devy is an Indian cultural activist, literary critic and former professor of English. He is known for the People's Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him. He is credited with starting the Bhaashaa research and Publication Centre. He writes in three languages—Marathi, Gujarati and English. His first full-length book in English is After Amnesia (1992). He has written and edited close to ninety books in areas including Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Education, Linguistics and Philosophy.
Craig Womack is an author and professor of Native American literature. He self-identifies as being of Creek and Cherokee descent, but is not enrolled with any Native American tribe. Womack wrote the book Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, a book of literary criticism which argues that the dominant approach to academic study of Native American literature is incorrect. Instead of using poststructural and postcolonial approaches that do not have their basis in Native culture or experience, Womack claims the work of the Native critic should be to develop tribal models of criticism. In 2002, Craig won Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Winner. Along with Robert Allen Warrior, Jace Weaver and Greg Sarris, Womack asserted themselves as a nationalist, which is part of an activist movement. The movement significantly altered the critical methodologies used to approach Native American literature.
Louis Dean Owens was a novelist and scholar who claimed Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish-American descent. He is known for a series of Native-themed mystery novels and for his contributions to the then-fledgling field of Native American Studies. He was also a professor of English and Native American studies, and frequently contributed articles, literary criticism and reviews to periodicals. Owens died by suicide in 2002.
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Robert Warrior, is a scholar and Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas. With Paul Chaat Smith, he co-authored Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee. He is generally recognized, along with Craig Womack, as being one of the founders of American Indian literary nationalism. Warrior served as president of the American Studies Association from 2016 to 2017.
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