Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (review)

Ten years ago a book like this would have invigorated American Indian literary studies, overtly challenging its typical practices by demonstrating the generative possibilities of a focus not on loss, victimry, or mere survival, but rather on survivance, Gerald Vizenor's (then) iconoclastic concept of active native presence, of survival as resistance. Back then Vizenor was still more outlaw than insider, a self-declared postmodernist working across multiple genres—poetry, fiction, the essay, and, importantly, critical theory—within a still largely undertheorized field. His adapted use of the recovered word "survivance" was still considered idiosyncratic and odd, even a little threatening in its disregard for convention. There were still heated debates about the precise meanings of survivance, and of the many other terms from the developing lexicon of Vizenor's neologisms and adaptations, and whether they would have any lasting importance. Vizenor and his lexicon have earned ardent admirers over the past ten or fifteen years, and these fans will readily embrace Survivance. The collection will have a more limited impact, however, than a similar collection might have had in the past. It will less likely provoke ideas or practices that are radically new.

Of particular interest to fans—and readers of SAIL—will be Vizenor's own contribution to the eighteen essays collected here, "Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice," which opens the volume. In the early and late paragraphs, Vizenor lays out surprisingly accessible definitions for the collection's key critical term, a stark contrast to the discursive tactics more typical of his previous works. As readers of SAIL will be aware, Vizenor first demonstrated—rather than clearly defined—the potential meanings of survivance in a series of provocations about American Indian representation, published in 1994 as Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance; he continued this demonstration—with somewhat more clear definitions—in Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, his similarly suggestive provocations published in 1998. Both Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses have been highly influential. Over time, as Vizenor's difficult prose style and fast-paced riffs on poststructuralist and postmodernist theories have become more familiar to readers in the field, survivance has become a common element of our scholarship, pushing beyond the ubiquity of Vizenor's earlier emphasis on "trickster discourse," a concept demonstrated in venues such as Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, his edited collection first published in 1989. Indeed, survivance is increasingly deployed in performed and published scholarship, across the inter-disciplines of Native American and Indigenous studies, without clear attribution, critical genealogy, or extensive explanation.

Vizenor's new willingness to define survivance in relatively straightforward terms may reflect, in part, the degree to which this postmodern adaptation of a recovered word no longer feels especially radical or complex within the increasingly sophisticated and increasingly professionalized fields of Native American and Indigenous studies. It has become part of how we "do" our work, especially within American Indian literary studies. Survivance may be close to achieving the status of the phrase "Native American Renaissance," the title of Kenneth Lincoln's early celebration of contemporary American Indian literature, much read and often cited following its publication in 1983, but mostly ignored in the current conversation. Lincoln's title has outlived the actual content of his poetic meditations, so that his phrasing is routinely deployed as shorthand for the complexities of the post-1968 era but without attribution, genealogy, or justification. Survivance appears similarly on its way to becoming a shorthand for the complexities of "active native presence" and "survival as resistance." The publication of this edited volume may be a first major sign of the term's rapid detachment from Vizenor's postmodernist specificity, irony, and radical potential.

More in line with Vizenor's previous analytical work, the majority of "Aesthetics of Survivance" is devoted to provocative meditations on American Indian representation through new and repeated stories of particular instances of active native presence and to ironic if somewhat...