Indigenous Anger

Page 5 September–October 2008 indigenous Anger elizabeth Wilkinson In Seeing Red:Anger, Sentimentality, andAmerican Indians, Cari M. Carpenter provides a much needed addition to current scholarship on nineteenthcentury Native American women’s writing and, in the process, challenges some of our commonplace assumptions about anger and sentimentality more generally.As Carpenter points out, many studies tend to isolate these emotional and rhetorical responses; indeed, some scholars seem to write as if sentimental expressions of pain at subjugation and loss cannot be mingled with anger. Not only does Carpenter’s analysis demonstrate how short-sighted this separation can be, but she also, importantly, interrogates elements of the gender construction of three Native American women writers—Alice Callahan, a Creek writer (1868–1894); E. Pauline Johnson of the Mohawk nation (1861–1913); and Sarah Winnemucca, a Northern Paiute woman (1844–1891)—as they deploy sentimentality such that “[g]rief and anger converge, frustrating attempts to keep them apart.” Her use of primary research interviewing members of the Pyramid Lake Paiute nation adds a dimension often lacking in scholarly texts on indigenous literature .And, what makes Carpenter’s study particularly interesting and useful is her connection of these early American Indian texts with later twentieth-century Indian organizations and with her own practices in the classroom. The late 1800s to early 1900s was a tumultuous time for NativeAmerican peoples, and, as Carpenter explains, Native American women responded with “protest literature and other forms of political activism ,” but they had to negotiate audience perceptions of Indians as “either savages or stoics.” In other words, even as many indigenous peoples were experiencing cultural upheaval, forced displacements, and organized, violent assaults on their communities, the range of their emotional reactions to these injustices were in danger of being reduced to proofs of the very stereotypes used to dehumanize them and treat them as threats. Commenting on the complex interplay of rhetoric in conjunction with gender and race constructs , Carpenter asserts, “The task of articulating a legitimate anger in the nineteenth century was doubly challenging for the first published American Indian women writers, who were met not only with these stereotypes of ‘savage’ rage but with social proscriptions against female anger.” To explore this double-bind, Carpenter investigates how Callahan, Johnson, and Winnemucca deployed anger within the rhetoric of sentimentality to protest dispossession. Carpenter examines the complex play of anger each writer manifests, all the while maintaining a Ronda continued from previous page is composed of heteronormative romantic fantasies that are mass-produced for wide consumption by a general audience; its texts record how women suffer , cope, and strive for fulfillment, most often in the realm of love. Women’s historical struggle for reciprocity and recognition, which feminism has often framed in political terms, is importantly negotiated in women’s culture, Berlant argues; but it is channeled through the convention of the “female complaint ,” which “foreground[s] a view of power that blames flawed men and bad ideologies for women’s intimate suffering.” Similarly, the collective feeling and utopian imaginings so central to subaltern political activism are structured, in women’s culture, around the mutual confirmation of private suffering. Politicized identity and critique, which spring from perceived difference, are disavowed in these texts in favor of a desire for simplicity, continuity, and shared experience. Yet Berlant refuses to reduce these conventions to an easy ideology critique, instead insisting on the complexity of the conventional in mass-produced women’s culture. Popular films such as The Bridges of Madison County (1995); Now, Voyager (1942); Imitation of Life (1934); The King and I (1956); and A Star is Born (1954) stress the affective intelligence and therapeutic optimism of female protagonists as they struggle through disappointment toward a state of pleasurable normativity. Outmaneuvering what has become a knee-jerk tendency in cultural studies to define such subcultures as either transgressive or ideologically complicit, Berlant highlights the importance of reckoning with the felt needs of a nondominant public in their complex, irreducible richness. For Berlant, the fantasies unfolded in women’s culture are “affective claims” that “point toward what the real ought to feel like” and that offer a “sensually lived potentiality.” At the same time, these fantasies can be...