Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies by Chadwick Allen (review)

As the title suggests, Chadwick Allen’s Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies sets about to illuminate the potentialities of juxtaposition as a trans-Indigenous literary studies methodology, not only in terms of place but also in relation to temporality and medium. Via several case studies, Allen lays out a number of methodological templates centered on contextual and temporal juxtaposition that at the very least provide literary scholars (and Indigenous studies scholars more generally) with pointed examples and discussions on the possibilities for the production of new insights at the interstitial spaces created by the juxtaposition of Indigenous cultures, temporality, and media, whose combination falls beyond how scholars of indigeneity would typically order investigation centered on “local” knowledge.

Part I, entitled “Recovery/Interpretation,” comprises two chapters that in large part deal with subjugated knowledge, that is, texts “excluded from the scholarly conversation thus far” and that, further, may lead to a redirection of interpretation. Chapter 1, “‘Being’ Indigenous ‘Now,’” establishes the methodology of looking across various Indigenous contexts at a historical moment in time. Allen uses the 1965 special issue of the Midcontinent American Studies Journal, titled “The Indian Today,” as the central piece in dialectical conversation with other similar “surveys” of Indigenous cultures such as “Canadian Indians Today’”(1963), On Being Hawaiian (1964), Aborigines Now: New Perspective in the Study of Aboriginal Communities (1964), and The Maori Today (1964), most of which are edited volumes that attempt to explain both the “traditional” and contemporary integratory conditions of indigeneity via accepted taxonomical categorizations signified by the temporal marker of “today.” Here the dialectic between the central text and the others provokes questions that archetypal monocontextual analysis does not allow for. Yet, I am not convinced of the new insights enabled by this methodology. Do I need comparisons with other settler surveys to realize that “The Indian Today,” compiled by “hip” white academics in the 1960s, fails to consider their complicity with the ongoing structures of colonialism? How does the dialectic between “The Indian Today” and reflections on Hawaiian and Māori temporal (i.e., 1960s) ontologies, for example, help me better comprehend such subjugation? The racist discourses that emanate from the dialectic between “The Indian Today” and its US provincial 1960s contemporaries are also unsurprising. “Unsettling the Spirit of ‘76,” the second chapter, acts in juxtaposition with chapter 1 in that it attempts to exhume those subjugated knowledges silenced by the settler survey. Employing American Indian responses to the 1976 American Revolution bicentennial observance, or what he refers to as the “forgotten history,” Allen juxtaposes these texts and performances with his personal and academic experiences of the more recent and highly visible (1988) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander responses to the Australian bicentennial observance; again, in this instance, I am not convinced of the new insights that this interstitial space enables, or at the least they are not clear to me.

In inverting the axiom of part 1, part 2, “Interpretation/Recovery,” is determinedly focused on what the settler survey signals to: subjugated knowledges and, hence, the “continually expanding body of contemporary literatures that place Indigenous histories and politics, cultures and worldviews, and multiple realities at their vital center.” Allen is particularly interested here in expanding the field by creating a dialectic between texts and other aesthetic systems and technologies such as painting, weaving, and carving. The first modal juxtaposition occurs in chapter 3, “Pictographic, Woven, Carved,” which, like chapter 1, puts one text, that is, N. Scott Momaday’s 1992 (also the Columbus quincentenary year) poem “Carnegie, Oklahoma, 1919” in dialectical conversation with three Indigenous aesthetic systems: Kiowa pictographic discourses, Navajo textile designs, and Māori whakairo (carving). Allen’s analysis suggests that this multicultural, multimedia approach signals the “possibility of a trans-Indigenous literary criticism—a literary criticism that reads across national and geographical borders to engage a broad spectrum of Indigenous conceptions of aesthetic power and pleasure.” Here Allen shows his will...