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Reviewed by:
  • Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations
  • Keavy Martin
Deanna Reder and Linda M. Morra, eds. Troubling Tricksters: Revisioning Critical Conversations. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2010. 348 pp. $34.95.

In this new addition to Wilfred Laurier University Press’s Indigenous Studies Series, Anishinabe author and scholar Niigonwedom James Sinclair has contributed two pieces: one academic and one creative. In the first, Sinclair [End Page 137] advocates for a community-oriented and contextualized understanding of Anishnaabeg stories, in contrast to the generalized and ahistorical interpretations produced by twentieth-century social scientists. Sinclair’s creative follow-up, meanwhile, depicts a young man who is tormented by a grotesque and un-idyllic trickster companion and who eventually is forced to find release under the waters of a household flood, lest he be consumed by the creature’s insatiable appetite and growing pile of excrement.

Allegorically, this situation speaks to the critical challenge faced by the authors of this volume. In the wake of the postmodern “trickster criticism” which, in the words of contributor Kristina Fagan, “offered a way of managing the issue of Indigenous ‘difference’ without requiring extensive research into the complexity of particular Indigenous peoples” (5), this volume attempts to reinvigorate critical discussions of the trickster through the lens of Indigenous literary nationalism. Under this paradigm, scholars aim to work in ways that engage with the political concerns of Indigenous communities and to draw their critical apparatus from specific Indigenous intellectual traditions. With its impressive lineup of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and creative writers, this volume demonstrates the fertility of the new, ethically engaged, Indigenous-centric literary critical model. Yet it also demonstrates how demanding literary nationalism is to put into practice and how firm the grasp of postmodern and postcolonial methodologies can be upon scholars of Indigenous literature. As reflected in Sinclair’s clever and uncanny tale, the postmodern trickster has been the faithful, long-term companion of many scholars of Indigenous literature. And even in the age of literary nationalism, he still occasionally threatens to consume our discussions.

The collection is structured into five sections that consider tricksters as they manifest in diverse cultural spaces. The first section, “Looking Back to the Trickster Moment,” provides a series of useful discussions of “the problem” with trickster criticism as it took shape in the late 1980s and 1990s. Kristina Fagan illuminates “the trouble with the trickster” with characteristic insight, while Margery Fee provides the intellectual context for the “trickster moment”: the “appropriation of voice” debates of the late twentieth century. Subsequent sections include a range of compelling literary nationalist readings of Indigenous texts; Deanna Reder, the volume’s co-editor, analyzes Steve Sanderson’s suicide-prevention comic book Darkness Calls in the context of Cree intellectual traditions, while Daniel Morley Johnson claims Gerald Vizenor for the nationalist cause, reminding us of the revolutionary potential of tricksters. The editors, furthermore, have seen fit to include discussions of non-Indigenous trickster literature, [End Page 138] such as co-editor Linda Morra’s study of Sheila Watson, Mordecai Richler, and Gail Anderson-Dargatz and Christine Kim’s reading of Hiromi Goto’s The Kappa Child. Readers are also offered a respite from straight academic prose with the inclusion of a personal narrative by pop-culture artist Sonny Assu, of a telling of a Naapi/Old Man story by the Piikani scholar Eldon Yellowhorn, and of creatively critical essays by the renowned Thomas King and the brilliant Métis writer and scholar Warren Cariou. The collection benefits from the presence of creative work by well-known Indigenous writers like King and also Richard Van Camp, whose risqué story “Why Ravens Smile to Little Old Ladies As They Walk By” is included, then carefully analyzed within the classroom setting by Jennifer Kelly. With its discussion of Indigenous literary expression in a wide range of genres, its refreshing variety in discourse, and the intellectual precision of the majority of its contributions, Troubling Tricksters functions as an excellent illustration of the diversity and vitality of Indigenous literary studies as it is taking shape in the twenty-first century.

As is admirably demonstrated by several of the contributors, literary nationalist readings can be carried out by scholars...

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