In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • "Sovereignty of the Self":Interspecies Ethics in Sherman Alexie's Face
  • Jennifer K. Ladino (bio)

"What is the difference between / Birds and us, between their pain and our pain?"

—Sherman Alexie, "Avian Nights"

Sherman Alexie is not known for his sincerity. His public readings often sound more like stand-up acts, and his writing, with its ironic ceremonies, simulated origin stories, and ruthless "reservation realism," has sparked controversy.1 While Alexie remains dedicated to addressing alcoholism, homelessness, poverty, and other provocative subjects, his recent work approaches these issues differently. As one interviewer puts it, his tone has shifted "from angry protests to evocations of love and empathy" (Nygren 142). Alexie credits the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for inspiring him to rethink his own "fundamentalism," which he defines as "the mistaken belief that one belongs to only one tribe" (Davis and Stevenson 190). In an interview with Maya Jaggi, among others, he explains how September 11th exposed the lethal "end game of tribalism—when you become so identified with only one thing, one tribe, that other people are just metaphors to you" (Jaggi). He has also said that writing about poor and "disadvantaged people" allows him to talk "not about race, region, or country" but instead about people's relative "power or lack thereof" (Harris 130). With its increased attention to multitribal identity categories and its empathetic focus on the ways in which suffering and loss affect all kinds of people, Alexie's post-9/11 writing exhibits what might be called an ideological embrace of humanism, and it is, by all appearances, a sincere one.

His recent book of poems, Face, reveals this new course in Alexie's authorial evolution. In her essay on Alexie's The Summer of Black [End Page 28] Widows, Nancy J. Peterson describes Alexie's poetry as "employ[ing] a dynamic, creative bricolage in blending Indian realities and traditional Western poetic forms" (135), and the poems in Face are no different in that regard. The collection is enlivened by classic Alexie strategies like low-brow humor, witty addresses to readers, and clever formal experimentation, including combining prose and poetry. However, Peterson's argument about the earlier collection—that "as the poems move off the reservation to explore non-Native spaces, forms, and materials, they become ever so firmly rooted in tribalism" (135)—needs to be reconsidered in regard to Face. These poems seem less invested in tribalism (even if we define it rather broadly, as Peterson does2) and more invested in humanism. More than that, his new poems gesture toward an interspecies ethic, a generous and inclusive worldview guided by "love and empathy" in which Native and non-Native humans, but also nonhuman animals, share affective agency.

Alexie's poetic theorization of the relationships between human and nonhuman animals contributes helpfully to dialogue between American Indian studies and animal studies at a time when both "the human" and "the animal" are under intense scrutiny. My reading of Alexie's recent animal poems responds to Cary Wolfe's call to "locat[e] the animal of animal studies and its challenge to humanist modes of reading, interpretation, and critical thought" (572). As a discursive and ideological framework, humanism has been the target of much deserved criticism. Scholars of animal studies lament, for one thing, how animal rights philosophy in its earlier stages "tacitly extends a model of human subjectivity to animals, who possess our kind of personhood in diminished form" (Wolfe 572). Many scholars advocate moving beyond humanism and toward posthumanism, a framework that, to cite Ursula Heise, "considers human consciousness as part of a broad range of different forms of connection among bodies, consciousnesses, and representations" ("Android" 509). Posthumanism wants to leave behind a particular version of humanism: the version that privileges human cognition over other kinds, that cuts off humans (and our bodies) from our environments, and that overestimates the extent to which human agency controls, shapes, and affects the world.

Still, even given these substantial concerns, it seems premature to disavow humanism altogether. As N. Katherine Hayles readily acknowledges, "the posthuman does not mean the end of humanity" (286). Some [End Page 29] scholars, myself included, share Donna Haraway's resistance...

pdf