Currents of Trans/national Criticism in Indigenous Literary Studies

So much of the literature by Canada's Aboriginal writers is written against forgetting, against the obliterating narratives of conquest and progress and profit that have made the nation possible. These writers give us stories of dispossession, of the loss of land and language and identity, but they also, crucially, give us narratives of persistence and survival and even celebration. They remind us of what has been lost, but they also remind us that not everything is lost. After a fire, something always remains: something that must be accounted for and honoured if we are to have any idea where we are and where we are going.

Warren Cariou (Métis), "Going to Canada"

First Thoughts: For the Tortured Teachers of Literature

Recently, when preparing course materials for English graduate students on the practical skills and theoretical dimensions of teaching literature, I surveyed the literature on the "state of the field" of literary studies in English (and the entire concept of a liberal arts education), ranging from high-profile monographs to various commentaries in academic publications, including MLA Profession, College Composition and Communication, and Pedagogy. What I discovered was illuminating but somewhat appalling. It seems that the perennial (and perhaps self-perpetuating) perception (especially in MLA presidential addresses) is that—whether the commentator is coming from the right or left of the political spectrum—literary studies are in decline, that the public has little understanding or regard for the value of literary analysis or literature in general, and that scholars of literature are toiling in the service of something that is vaguely important but almost impossible to effectively define or articulate, even to ourselves. ¹ Add to this the conservatives' sense of tradition betrayed and the progressives' sense of access denied—and their shared perception of influence thwarted—and you have the makings of a rather vexed and anxiety-provoking shroud of doom sweeping over the discipline.

This commentary will not follow in this particular rhetorical vein. Are the liberal arts appreciated to the degree I would like? No, but then again, they never have been, so to bemoan this state of affairs without an appreciation of its historical context would seem to be both mildly narcissistic and significantly self-defeating. Does literature receive the appreciation I think it deserves? No, but then again, it's never been in an unassailable position inside or outside of the academy. Do the skills required by the thoughtful study of literature offer an effective response against habits of ignorance and larger pressures of uncritical thinking? Yes, but not in isolation, and not when presented from a defensive position of intellectual exceptionalism. We're part of a larger network of historical, intellectual, and disciplinary relationships, and these all require hard work, realistic perspective, and intellectual flexibility to offer whatever it is that makes our work as literature scholars, teachers, and readers distinctive.

To this end, Gerald Graff 's comments from 1987 seem to resonate with particular significance for our own field:

In the final analysis, what academic literary studies have had to work with is not a coherent cultural tradition, but a series of conflicts that have remained unresolved, unacknowledged, and assumed to be outside the proper sphere of literary education. To bring these conflicts inside that sphere will mean thinking of literary education as part of a larger cultural history that includes the other humanities as well as the sciences even while acknowledging that terms like "humanities," "science," "culture," and "history" are contested. ²

It seems to me that, as a field, Indigenous literary studies is offering precisely this double vision of literary education that Graff asserts: a self-critical (and always contested) understanding of literature as both artistic expression and political instrument and an assertion of literature within a larger matrix of relationships, influences, and effects.

Why Indigenous Literatures Matter

For example, in the concluding pages of his book Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel, Cherokee Nation scholar Sean Kicummah Teuton asserts that "in anticolonial struggles, claims to freedom can be made in the name of knowledge. On...