‘Land is the only thing that lasts life to life’ (Louise Erdrich, Tracks, Harper Perennial, 1988, p. 33). Assess how land is represented, and what it signifies, in Native American cultural materials of your choice (you are not restricted to fiction, like Erdrich’s work, but may venture into other forms such as autobiography, poetry, painting, photography and film).
‘Red Power’ (an important strand of Native American activism in the 1960s and 1970s). Reflecting on your study of selected cultural materials produced recently, how powerful is the Indigenous American community now?
Nikhil Pal Singh argues that, for all the official rhetoric of colour blindness, ‘whiteness became the privileged grounding and metaphor for the empty abstraction of U.S. citizenship’ (Blackness is a Country, Harvard UP, 2005, p. 21). Is the United States, at bottom, a white nation?
‘How I Found America’ (the title of a 1920 short story by Anzia Yezierska). Take two or three US immigrant narratives and compare and contrast how they describe finding America (your examples might range across periods and ethnicities, and potentially include autobiographical writing as well as fiction).
‘Living in two or more competing languages troubles the expectation that communication should be easy, and it upsets the desired coherence of romantic nationalism and ethnic essentialism’ (Doris Sommer, Bilingual Aesthetics, Duke UP, 2004, p. 19). Assess the poetics and politics of bilingualism in two or three American texts of your choice.
‘We are faced each day with living inside or resisting the borders that we have created or that have been imposed on us’ (Edward Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall, U of Texas P, 2014, p. 226). Do the American cultural materials you have studied serve to dismantle borders, or to reimpose them?
Study Activities
The Chippewa writer Gerald Vizenor describes the ‘Indian’ as a figure ‘deadeningly imaged’ in forms such as captivity narrative, photography and New Age advertising (Vizenor and A. Robert Lee, Postindian Conversations, U of Nebraska P, 1999, p. 15). Assemble your own exhibition of reductive representations of Native Americans in contemporary US culture, drawing your examples from both texts and images.
While Native American unity has long been crucial in the face of white power, this should not inhibit awareness of differences, also, among Indigenous communities. Visit the websites of Native American nations – examples might include those of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes (Oklahoma), the Great Lakota, Dakota, Nakota Nation (Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota) and the Pueblo of Laguna (New Mexico) – and consider what these disclose of cultural, economic, historical and political variations across Native America.
Many immigrant communities in the United States have faced hostility, expressed variously in physical violence, bureaucratic harassment and cultural demonisation. These communities have not been powerless to resist, however, but have developed multiple forms of solidarity and affirmation. Take one of America’s ethnic minorities – Armenian, Brazilian, Chinese, Ethiopian, Greek, Iranian, Polish, etc. – and document and evaluate the ways in which it has represented itself in a sometimes-phobic host nation.
The publication of The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, edited by Marc Shell and Wener Sollors (New York UP, 2000), is among the most important contributions to American literary study in the twenty-first century so far. This chunky volume includes, together with their translations into English, writings produced in the United States in languages ranging from Arabic and Chinese to Welsh and Yiddish. In the process, what we understand by ‘American literature’ is radically modified. But the anthology was published several decades ago now and will benefit from updating. Find examples, then, of non-Anglophone writing published in the US since 2000 and assess their cultural and political implications.
The Mexican-American writer Luis Alberto Urrea describes the border zone between Mexico and the United States as a ‘contested region’ of great interest, ‘being rewritten every day’ (‘Read Your Way Through the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands’, The New York Times, 14 June, 2023, n.p.). Explore mappings of this border territory in various media. The potential archive is very rich, extending in genre too from documentary to fantasy, but excellent starting points would include the music of Nortec Collective (1999-), Ana Castillo’s novel So Far from God (1993), Tommy Lee Jones’s film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) – and, indeed, Urrea’s own work, such as the memoir, Nobody’s Son: Notes from an American Life (1998) and the novel, The House of Broken Angels (2018).
Online Resources
Native Americans – substantial archive of materials, both historical and contemporary, maintained by the US Department of the Interior
Cultural Survival – website of a movement, founded in 1972, that coordinates Native American activism in the US with the work of communities worldwide ‘to advance Indigenous Peoples’ rights and cultures’
The Dakota Pipeline Protest – curated by If Not Us Then Who, ‘a global, intercultural collective of storytellers dedicated to diversifying the voices in the climate debate’, and featuring a short documentary on Native American resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (discussed in our chapter)
Immigration to the United States, 1789-1930 – curated by Harvard University Library and bringing together more than 11,000 items that document the history of voluntary immigration to the United States from the signing of the Constitution to the onset of the Great Depression
Ellis Island – informative resource on this site in New York Harbor (now part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument, managed by the National Park Service), which processed twelve million incomers to the United States between 1892 and 1954
Irish American Journey – lovingly curated site that documents Irish settlement in the United States, with sections on the community’s contributions to such fields as film, literature, music, politics – and gangsterism
American Jewish Historical Society – ‘the oldest ethnic, cultural archive in the United States’, established in 1892: rich collection of texts and images documenting American Jewish history
Museum of Jewish Heritage – located physically in Battery Park in New York City, but global rather than narrowly US in focus, with a mission to inform ‘diverse visitors about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust’
United States Census Bureau – vast repository of demographic information gathered by the US Government since 1790
Pew Research Center: Hispanics/Latinos – resource exploring ‘the diverse views and experiences of Latinos in America’; eclectic in content, ranging from statistics on the nationwide spread of Mexican cuisine to a survey on the community’s attitude to machismo
Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande – fascinating resource housed by the Library of Congress: recordings of the varied musical traditions of Spanish-speaking peoples in Colorado and New Mexico, collected in 1940 by the linguist and folklorist Juan B. Rael
La Frontera: Artists along the U.S.-Mexico Border – New York photographer Stefan Falke’s painstaking documentation of contemporary artists in this frontier zone who celebrate hybridity, rather than practising cultural nationalism
Immigration and US Citizenship – site administered by the Government of the United States; helpful in detailing the mechanisms for becoming a US citizen, but also, ominously, includes a section on ‘immigration violations and the deportation process’
Roots Beyond Race – developed by the APM Research Lab, this site offers a trove of information on the contemporary United States, with sections including ‘Demographics’, ‘Migration and immigration’ and ‘Race, diversity and equity’
Haitian Immigrants in the United States – written by Beatrice Dain and Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute, this site on the scale, geographic distribution and economic activity of the Haitian diaspora in the US helps to counter recent phobic constructions of this community that we discuss in Chapter 3
America the Bilingual – repository of podcasts and other materials in ‘the pursuit of bilingualism in America for a healthier, stronger nation’