The Pluralist Imagination: From East to West in American Literature by Julianne Newmark (review)

Julianne Newmark’s The Pluralist Imagination: From East to West in American Literature offers a refreshing look at narratives of American national identity formation by examining works by leftist, ethnic, and indigenous writers during several decades informed by growing nativism (1899–1933), an exclusionary race-based ideology. The authors whose works she chooses as case studies in an introduction, three chapters, and a conclusion—James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Abraham Cahan, D. H. Lawrence, Konrad Bercovici, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Charles Alexander Eastman, and Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin)—propose alternative models of belonging in America, taking to task a question many writers and thinkers have confronted since the early Republic: What does it mean to be a “native” American? The topic is compelling and relevant to both scholarly conversations today and popular contemporary episodes of resurgent nativism (such as the debates over immigration or Native sovereignty).

Of interest to sail readers will be especially chapter 3, “Transnational Pluralism and Native Sovereignty,” which examines the work of Charles Eastman and Zitkala-Ša as Native writers situated “simultaneously in their home communities and among a transnationally conceived ‘American people’” (66). Consistent with Newmark’s argument throughout the book, this chapter shows persuasively Zitkala-Ša and Eastman as pluralist counternativist writers and political activists, pointing especially to their respective roles in land protection. Working against limiting nativist concepts of “America,” Newmark shows, Eastman and Zitkala-Ša used what she calls a “pluralist rhetoric” and references to place to withstand—through their writing and oratory—early twentieth-century race-based nativist nationalism and its relegation of Native people to the margins of society. Focusing on land and place instead of race in their literary and political work, Newmark argues, pan-Indian activists Eastman and Bonnin “maintained a sovereign sense of Native rectitude, particularly regarding land rights, alongside a firm sense of American peoplehood” (69). With a careful eye toward their activist and political work, as well as the audience they were addressing in the 1910s and 1920s, Newmark carefully delineates what she calls “their simultaneous bonds to at least two patriae” (71). Reading place identity as foundational to American identity, she foregrounds Eastman’s and Bonnin’s multiple, transnational allegiances to multiple communities, Native and non-Native, to offer a different model of belonging “in many places at once” (72).

Building on a growing body of scholarship on Gertrude Bonnin, as well as archival evidence from both the National Archives and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University, Newmark examines some of Zitkala-Ša’s lesser studied works: some of her most compelling speeches, political correspondence, and essays from her time in Utah (1902–17) and Washington, dc (1917–38). A great example from the archives she offers is a letter Bonnin sent to Arthur C. Parker in 1916, when he was the president of the sai (Society of American Indians), referring to a crucial topic for the Utes—their grazing land and its imminent dwindling through the Indian Bureau’s leasing policy. Reminiscent of her contemporary fellow Native activist and orator Laura Cornelius Kellogg’s sharp wit and critique of the oia, Bonnin writes to Parker: “This outrageous condition provokes me. I grow weary in the tin gods, the false worshippers and the subserviency [sic] of the Indian.” Like Kellogg, Bonnin was weary of oia’s duplicity. Pointing out one of her driving activist investments—“Native landlessness and land usurpation”—Newmark shows how Bonnin’s rhetorical negotiations in her political work sought “cross-cultural connections and cooperation” during a time when Native people who refused to assimilate were considered backward and unfit for citizenship (77–81). In Zitkala-Ša’s envisioned future, Native people could be simultaneously “traditional and modern,” “tribally connected and American”—what Newmark calls “a transnational pluralism that operates against nativism” (84).

In the same chapter, Newmark expands her argument about early twentieth-century Native transnational pluralism...