Concocting Terrorism off the Reservation: Liberal Orientalism in Sherman Alexie’s Post-9/11 Fiction

Sherman Alexie is arguably the most visible Native writer today (among those, to be more specific, who participate in or are associated with the category of “Native American literature”). A prolific novelist, poet, screenwriter, essayist, and short story writer, Alexie commands large audiences (and honoraria) wherever he reads or speaks, and all of his recent books have become bestsellers. Given his exalted status in the American cultural zeitgeist, Alexie has been the subject of much discussion among literary critics, book reviewers, and cultural commentators, conferring to Alexie both a direct and emblematic role in conversations about American literary multiculturalism. Alexie is something of an exemplar of a new epoch of American literature, then, one in which an ossified national identity has been decentered and replaced with a postmodern internationalism. In this essay I want to explore his representation of Arab and Muslim characters in the framework of what I call liberal Orientalism, which, roughly defined, is a representation of Islam and the East more broadly rooted in the liberal principles of American multiculturalism. Unlike the unmodified Orientalism, liberal Orientalism is not an attempt to invent or oversee but a mode of representation, one in which moral questions arise from a nexus of issues central to the United States’ relationship with the Muslim World. It is a form of Orientalism that is used liberally and one that is deeply engaged with the idea of a liberal society.

In Alexie’s recent fiction, Muslims are always metonymical of tacit intimations about America as a fundamentally good multicultural experiment whose conflicting mores are problematic but not ruinous, unlike the external violence that has afflicted the United States. Muslims occupy this metonymy without participating in the multicultural experiment; they are too busy supplementing it by inflicting the violence. In this sense, they act as a catalyst for a type of American self-examination that transcends unicultural participation; this self-examination encompasses the anxieties of military and colonial violence as it is deployed in response to forms of terroristic violence that contravene the anguished principles of liberal democracy. Some basic questions allow us to look at the presence of liberal Orientalism in Alexie’s post-9/11 fiction: Why are his modern-day terrorists inevitably Ethiopian or Muslim? Why does he confine acts of Muslim terrorism to a fantastical reproduction of the oversexed Muslim male? And why do Muslim taxi drivers in Alexie’s work seem to care so much whether or not their passengers are Jewish? I will examine these issues through critique of Alexie’s short story collection Ten Little Indians and his novel Flight.

In her introduction to the edited collection Shades of the Planet, which painstakingly explores America’s new literary epoch, Wai Chee Dimock suggests that “what we nominate as ‘American literature’ is simply an effect of that nomination, which is to say, it is epiphenomenal, domain-specific, binding only at one register and extending no farther than that register” (4). Shades of the Planet is valuable, but even its comprehensive focus does not account for Native literature, which has a uniquely intricate relationship with the category of American literature, in keeping with the complex affiliations of national identity among Indians. Because North America’s Indigenous peoples predate the taxonomical criteria that underline “American literature,” they simultaneously complement and complicate the category. Much recent Native literary criticism has attempted to extract Indian art from an “American” orientation in favor of national identifications that cohere with tribal polities (Justice; Weaver, Womack, and Warrior). Alexie amplifies the ambiguities of American national identity: on the one hand, he is frequently held up as an emblem of a new multiethnic America, but on the other hand he reveals the limits of the American celebration of literary multiethnicity.

Alexie’s comment in a MELUS interview illuminates the basic conflicts of “American literature” as a category, especially in relation to the categories of “Native” and “American.” Asked about the critical focus on possible connections between ethnic writing and experience, Alexie responds,

I think it’s lazy scholarship. For instance, Gerald Vizenor and...