The Future Imaginary in Indigenous North American Arts and Literatures by Kristina Baudemann

Author:Kristina Baudemann [Baudemann, Kristina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Ethnic Studies, American, Native American Studies
ISBN: 9781000529890
Google: pHxTEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 58840350
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-12-30T03:12:47+00:00

The implication that the Ghost Dance spread like a virus of doom insinuates that the “Goliardic experiment” includes the actual recreation and renewed dissipation of said virus as a “mitochondrial type brew” (140) via the U.S. American drinking water supplies. Other references to the nature of the Goliards’ mission abound: Birdfinger, for instance, explains to Molly that “before the Goliards were the Goliards they had been a hairsbreadth away from being named after Jack Wilson” (273), a reference to the spiritual leader of the Ghost Dance wave of 1890, Jack Wilson, better known as Wovoka.

The fact that the sect then ended up naming themselves after the medieval Goliards, “wandering student[s] of song and revelry” (119), is a testimony to the altered strategy this new Ghost Dance movement is pursuing: in a disenchanted, postmodern reality, spiritual dances are devoid of meaning, and the world consists of texts. Rather than prophets, the Goliards thus see themselves in the tradition of the creators of the satirical verses of the Carmina Burana, as manipulators of the textual fabric history consists of. Larry’s Carmina Burana etchings hence function as a new enchantment, the only one that is yet possible: the elusive Latin phrases interfere with the Anglophone canon, hinting at civilizations older than the U.S. American one. The Carmina Burana itself is a trickster text in TFRR reminiscent of Vizenor’s “Manabosho Bestiary Curiosa” in The Heirs of Columbus (112) as well as of the medieval “bear codex” (25) containing the genetic sequence of Columbus’s Indigenous DNA.

The Goliards’ ultimate plan, then, seems to be to turn time back to before 1492, and the way to achieve their goal is by their obscure Ghost Dance. Hence the remark that “Sally’s prediction was a threat too” (TFRR 236; emphasis original) and that in the Goliards’ fatalist world, “chances were certainties” (243). Rather than subverting the mainstream narratives, the Goliards exploit their logic: if time is a linear causal sequence, “unspeaking the world” (TFRR 38), i.e., undoing the colonial apocalypse becomes possible by simply backtracking the chain of events and reversing causality. Rather than progressing into an all-white, civilized, manifest future, the Goliards implement their plan of setting the land back to a default state, that is, an all-Indigenous pre-civilized past. Like the Indigenous priests in H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu (1928), the Goliards serve a world order older than the modern nations; and, similar to the priests of Cthulhu, this world order will be recovered by and through text. Hence the consistent use of the lower-case “a” in “america” (140) throughout the novel, “[a]s if there’s another, yes” (140). The Goliards’ Ghost Dance is effective because, unlike the proponents of American expansionism and Manifest Destiny, they are aware of a different, older “america,” pre-Columbus. It is thus not surprising that the Goliards chose Clovis of all places for a headquarter and starting point of their secret mission.

Clovis is Jones’s version of Cthulhu’s green city of R’lyeh. Titled “[t]he Unemerald City” (269) – coated in an imagined

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