Speaking with the Separatists: Craig Womack and the Relevance of Literary History

Mention the word "separatism" across Canada, and nine times out of ten the word "Quebec" will come up in the very next sentence. For both the staunch federalist and the tacit devotee to the Canadian mosaic, the basic notion of separatism is just plain frightening; the word will inevitably evoke trace memories of befuddling referendum questions, red versus blue, and English versus French. To speak about separatism as a Canadian is to use a loaded term, one that invokes a significant yet historically specific sociocultural moment. Winners and losers emerged, and in the process, the word "separatism" received a bad rap.

Consequently, as a white Canadian who, when all the cards are down, still believes in at least the optimism of the multiculturalist project, I am forced by Craig Womack's Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism to face head-on my intuitions about separatism that have been more than a little colored by my Jewish English-Quebecker roots. That the issues of all Native people are elided by the mainstream Canadian notion of separatism is critical. To speak of "literary separatism" is to first admit the failures of our media-dominated discourses on nationality and unity, and secondly to attempt to understand what sovereignty might really imply when it is transposed into the realm of the imagination. This is not to say that Womack's literary history is not political—it is certainly one of the most world-making and affirming criticisms that exists today; rather, he is able to build a Creek community that defines and evaluates itself internally by reimagining its own borders. This idea, I hope, will become clearer as my discussion unfolds. Importantly, however, I am not trying to defend Womack's version of literary history—he does not need me to speak for him, nor, as I will argue, is he primarily speaking to me. Instead, I write this as a dialogue and as a further invitation to dialogue, for Womack's version of sovereignty reworks the lines of communication in positive and liberating ways.

Central to Womack's communicative model is the issue of literary relevance. Or, put another way, he implicitly asks what it really means for a literary history to be relevant. Is it merely a question of opening up a discourse to a wider group of citizens? In fact, Womack explicitly states that "the primary purpose of this study is not to argue for canonical inclusion or opening up Native literature to a broader audience" (6). Does this make his study irrelevant to the general populace? Hardly. Relevancy, in this case, is not merely synonymous with "significance," which would imply the inevitable primacy of content over context. Instead, part of the work of Red on Red is that it dissolves the simplistic notion of the general, mass audience waiting to connect and instead argues from the premise that, to be truly relevant, a literary history must construct a community that speaks for and, even more importantly, to itself. This is a difficult position for pluralists and multiculturalists to align themselves with. In her seminal article "The Integrity of Memory: Creating a New Literary History of the United States," Annette Kolodny argues for an American literary history that is founded not in a fictive harmony but in "diversity, division, and discord" (307). Central to her argument is that the traditional canon must be problematized through a "rereading that must begin with the unfamiliar. . . . [T]he avoidance of familiar texts and authors will help in the breaking-away from old habits of classification and interpretation" (302). In privileging the unfamiliar, Kolodny supposes that the marginal, noncanonical literatures are new lenses with which to view the center. Certainly, to defamiliarize is to rework and revise the dominant hegemonic dynamic, but ultimately, it also reinscribes the dominant symbolic order by defining the center in terms of a multiplicity of others. Womack, on the other hand, takes up arms, claiming, "We are the Canon" (7). He breaks up the binary of center and margin by asserting the separateness and centrality of Native literature...