Toward a Native American Critical Theory (review)

In Toward a Native American Critical Theory, author Elvira Pulitano tackles the controversial topic of how critical theory may be applied to texts produced by Native American authors. As one may imagine, questions central to her book are: Who has the authority to speak for whom and about whom? What ideologies, if any, are unique to Native critical theorists? Can there ever truly be a separate or "pure" form of Native discourse, especially given the myriad and heteroglot worlds Native American writers and critics inhabit? As she says in the introduction to the book, her primary goal is "an attempt to define a Native American critical theory in which the discursive modes are largely generated from within a Native epistemology while, of course, also subsuming the forms and methods of Western discourse" (7).

In order to do so, she examines critical texts by Paula Gunn Allen, Robert Allen Warrior, Craig S. Womack, Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, pointing out the fact that each of these critics supports the "necessity of generating discursive modes originating primarily from the Native or indigenous cultural context, as it informs Native American literary texts, and suggests ways in which such discursive strategies can be articulated" (60). Eventually, she comes to the conclusion that as we move towards the possibility of a Native American critical theory, it is important to recognize the fact that both Euroamerican and Native ways of knowing are necessarily bound together. Rather than an impediment to the understanding of Native American texts, this relationship is actually an asset. In fact, it may be that exploring the syncretic blend of epistemologies is the very route through which Native American critical theory carves out a unique voice from within the "dominant" discourse. Pulitano ends the introduction on this very point:

Weaving Native American forms of discourse into the rhetorical patterns of the classical tradition, Native American theorists and writers invite all of us to open ourselves to new ways of being in the world, ways that are very different from the models that we have been given by the Western hermeneutical tradition.

(17)

Central to the book is the notion that differences in ways of knowing or in articulation of "being" do not necessitate separatist ideology. Pulitano cites Paula Gunn Allen's critical work as an example of theory that eventually isolates itself as it seeks to define a particularly Native aesthetic. She points out that

insisting as she does on a distinctive Indian perspective, Allen ends up—especially in The Sacred Hoop—forging what I call an ethnographic discourse, construing and constructing Indianness from a seemingly romantic, sentimentalized perspective of Eurocentric thinking, the same thinking that for more than five hundred years has defined the Indian as the Other of Euramerican consciousness.

(21)

Similarly, her exploration of the work of Warrior and Womack point out their own essentialist directions, and she explains how their own rhetorical strategies are curiously grounded in a Western discourse even as they argue for a move toward a specifically Native intellectualism.

As Pulitano turns her discussion to the works of Greg Sarris, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, her overall thesis becomes even clearer. In the chapter on Sarris and Owens we learn that they both "apply concepts such as dialogism and heteroglossia to the idea of reading across lines of cultural identity, overcoming rigid binary oppositions between Western and Native perspectives and constructing a criticism that challenges old ways of theorizing" (102). This challenge is taken even further by Gerald Vizenor, who, as Pulitano points out, "envisions a contemporary 'cultural word war' in which Native people will survive only if they disassociate themselves from the deadly rhetoric of 'Indianness'" (146). She believes that the theories of these critics provide the ground for a fertile new Native American critical theory, one that is as concerned with articulating ideologies stemming from and informed by "Native&quot...