The Pluralist Imagination From East to West in American Literature by Newmark Julianne

Author:Newmark, Julianne [Newmark, Julianne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General
ISBN: 9780803286337
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 2014-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

3

Transnational Pluralism and Native Sovereignty

The map that opens this chapter invokes many problems that this chapter seeks to address. Inasmuch as I have used maps at the outset of previous chapters to exhibit the disconnect between the organizational clarity of a gridded map and the cultural dynamics at work in a city, state, nation, or neighborhood, vis-à-vis new culturally pluralist conceptions of people and communities in those places, map 5 makes a somewhat more politically jarring point. In the context of Native land allotment in the post-1887 (post–Dawes Severalty Act) period, the ways in which Native and non-Native Americans came to see Native places often became a matter of named demarcation, a phenomena of naming and writing as ownership. The discordance between the cartographic project, then, and traditional Native understandings of the dynamism of named places drove the activist projects of many early twentieth-century Native writers. The boxed-out graphing of space revealed in map 5 signals the complex interactions that Charles Alexander Eastman and Zitkala-Ša waged against such simplistic cultural organizations. While these two writers have been faulted at times by current critics for what have been seen as their endorsements of or cooperation with Dawes-era assimilationist projects, my analysis here reveals them more complexly as writers and activists struggling against the absolutes of nativist political culture, out of which even land-use and cartographic practices can be said to descend. These writers offered a revised vision of possible places for Native people simultaneously in their home communities and among a transnationally conceived “American people.”1

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