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HUMANITIES 401 for themselves. In arts-informed research, the purpose is intellectual and moral, the methodology is heuristic, the form is aesthetic, the impact is holistic, and the research is infused with the transformative possibility of multiple interpretations in accordance with the learner=s openness to deepen and expand his/her consciousness. The academy thus is moving beyond the limitations of linear intellectual analysis. Thereby a door opens to recognize more fully what Native knowledge always embodied and communicated in the ceremonial way of life. Historically, there was no word for >art= in Native languages because the creative forms of expression were understood to be tools for teaching and healing. That is why the work presented in The Trickster Shift is on the cutting edge of the wider spectrum of ways of knowing acknowledged in recent years by the academy, yet, even so, only in some discourses. Ryan points out, however, quoting Lakota author Vine Deloria, Jr: >Irony and satire, provide much keener insights into a group=s collective psyche and values than do years of [conventional] research.= The distinguishing ingredient foregrounded in this book, of course, is this humour. Through a trickster discourse, the narratives and art in this study deconstruct stereotypes and misrepresentations recycled through the past five centuries. Indeed, art through the ages, including the Western canon, has been socially constructed. In the academy these productions of knowledge now are being examined and interrogated to challenge metanarratives , and to understand why and how respective cultures made meaning of reality through time and circumstance. Western depictions of Native people today are >being reclaimed, redeemed and reinvested with new meaning,= writes Ryan, to replace >demeaning clichés and romantic idealizations.= Native artists are manifesting their own cultural legacy and correcting the misperception, as Sauteaux artist/curator Robert Houle names it, of >being regarded as living museum pieces.= This review cannot do justice to the range of numerous images or diverse voices in The Trickster Shift. They all merit attention. These >texts= provoke us to think in new ways, more deeply, more expansively. For Ryan, the essence of his study is to >mark this juncture in history with a mixture of humour and irony, anger and hope, signal a turning point in relations between Natives and non-Natives and imagine another way of being human.= (SANDY GREER) Adam Krims. Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity Cambridge University Press. xii, 218. US $64.95, US $22.95 There are three factors that set this book apart from the many other available studies on rap music: the first is Adam Krims=s detailed 402 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 consideration of the sound of the music as a primary locus of cultural signification, the second is the balance he achieves between exploring general stylistic characteristics of rap music with close readings of particular songs, and the third is the impressive way in which he ranges his discussion from rap that has been the focus of so much critical attention (hardcore, East or West Coast, American), to regional styles in the United States, to rap scenes in Holland and western Canada. His overriding concern is in delineating how rap music serves as a means through which identities are shaped and contested; hence, my one concern with the book is that the crucial issues around gender in rap music are not addressed in a very significant way. This criticism notwithstanding, Krims, himself a rap performer and dedicated fan, as well as an academic (a music theorist), references an enormous amount of music, demonstrating a staggering knowledge of the style. Because the value of musical analysis, as well as the ways one might best go about it, are currently hotly contested in popular music studies, Krims=s introduction to the book and opening chapter address these issues in some detail. Krims provides an excellent survey of recent debates concerning the importance of music analysis (or, more broadly, music theory) to the understanding of music as a cultural phenomenon; he ultimately argues, correctly in my opinion, that in order to understand how cultural work is done in rap or any other music, one must focus on >the particularity of its sounds,= even as producers and fans...

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