All That Remains: Varieties of Indigenous Expression (review)

Arnold Krupat’s All That Remains demonstrates both the continued conversation regarding the practices of reading Native American literatures and the evolution of Krupat’s particular theoretical apparatus and engagement in the field. He begins by positioning his work between two poles in the recent critical conversations: Jace Weaver, Craig Womack, and Robert Warrior’s American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006) and David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual (2006). Krupat asserts that these two works represent divergent ways to read Native American literatures: Weaver, Womack, and Warrior foreground the political matters of sovereignty and nationalism, and Treuer emphasizes the literary elements of style, rhetorical form, and language. Instead of squaring himself with either camp, Krupat examines a middle ground, demonstrating how the aesthetic realm of Native American literary production continually has been imbued with sociopolitical aims. In his words, his concern lies “with both the expressive beauty and the social function of Native oral stories, writing, and film” (xii). The italicized both/and represents Krupat’s theoretical analysis throughout the text as he seeks to disturb the desire of western epistemologies to divide the world into an either/or dichotomy. With this theme, Krupat continues through several flash points of “indigenous expression,” including trickster tales, William Apess’s work, literary accounts of Cherokee dispossession, and the responses and parerga to the recent film Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (2001).

While Krupat’s chapters seem diverse in their textual selection, the book manages to hold together what may otherwise read as a set of loosely connected essays, and indeed many of the chapters appeared previously as either article publications or conference presentations. In the first chapter, Krupat uses various trickster tales to elucidate his theoretical conception of both/and. Drawing from the critical genealogy that examines trickster narratives, he notes what he sees as a divergence between the tricksters of a largely oral tradition and the postmodern trickster in contemporary novels. Krupat argues that western thought traditionally reads the Native trickster as a figure of ironic oppositionality—as a problem to be solved. In contrast, he proposes that contemporary audiences cease trying to “solve” the trickster on oppositional terms and rather realize that the trickster holds together significant differences that cannot be relegated to a dichotomous structure. In this way, the trickster becomes the important figuration of both/and as opposed to either/or.

The next three chapters are grounded historically in the nineteenth century. A reader familiar with Krupat’s work will recognize previous theoretical formulations as well as some new directions that go beyond the concerns of cosmopolitanism explored in Krupat’s last book, Red Matters. Chapter Two provides a survey of representations of Native Americans from the years 1820 to 1870, including a bibliography of Native- and non-Native-authored texts. The majority of the chapter focuses on canonical authors such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Emerson even as it offers readings of some of their lesser-read and seldom-taught texts. Krupat reserves only a few pages to discuss this period’s Native American authors before the closing bibliography. In Chapter Three, Krupat advances a sustained reading of William Apess’s work. This chapter contains the strongest textual analysis in the book, and it is here that Krupat appears to support most successfully his task of analyzing literary form for its political aims. Connecting Apess’s work as public intellectual to the contemporaneous issue of Cherokee removal, Krupat interweaves a historicist approach and close reading to defend his assertion regarding the importance of literary style to politics.

In Chapter Four, Krupat segues from his reading of Apess and Cherokee removal into an analysis of later Cherokee literary depictions of their dispossession in the 1830s. He begins by drawing a timeline of events leading up to the forced march to Oklahoma, and he ends by examining representations of the event by writers such as William Jay Smith, Wilma Mankiller, and Diane Glancy. While the readings are engaging, they seem brief when...