New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism ed. by Arnold Krupat (review)

142 Canadian Review of American Studies Arnold Krupat, ed. New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. 1993. One of the most important voices in the development of contemporary criticism of Native American literature is Arnold Krupat, the editor of this important new volume in the Smithsonian Series of Studies of Native American Literature. Indeed, critical voices of the acuity and sensitivity Krupat has articulated over the last decade are essential to the enterprise of American literary criticism as a whole. Yet K.rupat's distinctive contribution has been to listen to the "voices in the margin," in his own telling phrase, of that enterprise. Working with the hitherto marginalized materials of American cultural experience, Krupat continues to demonstrate the crucial connections between Native American literatures and the literatures of "Euroamerican peoples whose culture came to dominate the United States" (see the introduction, especially xvii-xxv). In New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism, Krupat expands the canon of American literature still further by editing the critical work of a whole new generation of younger scholars and by discerning the heleroxicalelementsof the American literary canon with ever more subtle clarity. New Voices contains a range of perspectives on Native American literatures, but the essential clements were and are today "performative and oral." For example, Native American autobiographies explore the possibilities of a "collective self' and reflect a pluralism of narrative voice alien to text-based culture. Krupat groups the contents of this volume in particularly imaginative and provocative structures, by organizing the essays around three themes. "Performances and Texts" explores how the study of Native American literatures requires textualization. Native language texts are included where possible, and attention is paid to individual Ojibwe, Koasati, and Shuar storytellers, to Inuit writing, Hopi clowning, and to the written compositions of contemporary poets reviving the ancient language of Nahuatl. Essays in the second section, "Authors and Issues," focus on the written work of Vizenor, Silko, Mourning Dove, Todd Downing, and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, and provide thorough discussion of the important issues of the role of editor, postcolonial praxis, Native American women's writings, and the idea of a "national sacrifice area." There are no studies here of Erdrich, Momady, and Welch, but there are two useful ones of Mourning Dove, an author we are just now coming to recognize as a key figure. Clearly, Krupat has sought out work that challenges conventions and stimulates further explorations in the field. BookReviews 143 The third thematic grouping, "Ethnocritiques," invokes dialogical perspectives and procedures in Native American literary criticism. Here, the focus is on texts that cross the borders between Western and Native American modes of knowing and articulating. The dimensions of cross-cultural encounter inform an exciting and innovative range of critical explorations. Conflicting and connecting cultural claims shape the work Krupat has edited with such care in this path-breaking volume. As Dell Hymes has long observed, none of us is able to stand outside ourselves sufficiently to know ourselves comprehensively, for it is indefensible to possess knowledge where only outsiders "know" and insiders are only "known," or to simply reverse that inequity. The goal is to achieve a knowledge which all humankind may equally share. What K.rupatseeks to accomplish is the mediation and translation of knowledge of Native American experience we may all possess. In this volume, he accomplishes that goal with grace and rigour. Elizabeth Hanson Collegeof Charleston •••••• John E. Crowley. The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1993. This is an important book, a significant addition to a series entitled Early America, History, Context, Culture (edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole). Geared toward the specialist on the American revolutionary era (with some understanding of mercantilism and the political economy of David Hume and Adam Smith), it has broad implications that should soon find their way into texts for the general reader. John E. Crowley, a senior historian at Dalhousie University, has seived up a transnational policy study that illuminates British and American attitudes toward freer trade and economic liberalism, defined by the author as "the legitimation of economic self-interests and the acceptance of...