Understanding Louise Erdrich by Seema Kurup (review)

Seema Kurup, in Understanding Louise Erdrich, offers a comprehensive analysis of Erdrich's rich literary contribution, which spans both genres and decades. Understanding Louise Erdrich includes summaries of all of Erdrich's novels, both of her memoirs, and a few of her more well known poems. By placing Erdrich within her historical context, Kurup removes Erdrich from a romanticized American Indian past and locates her work within the ongoing discussion of cultural identities and sovereign constructions of today's American Indians. The University of South Carolina Press's Understanding Contemporary American Literature series serves as "companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers," and Understanding Louise Erdrich certainly serves this role. Kurup's summaries and light analysis give students and new Erdrich readers intriguing entry points into the critical discussions that surround Erdrich's texts. Undergraduate students will also welcome the overview of colonialism that Kurup provides, as it helps contextualize and clarify Erdrich's sometimes confusing multivocal narrative. Moreover, the introductory background on Indigenous American colonialism will help students clarify Erdrich's subtle references and illuminate the more pernicious problem of American miseducation regarding American Indian treaties, genocide, and sovereignty.

I often teach Erdrich's work, and while reading Understanding Louise Erdrich, I tried to imagine how Kurup's text might benefit my students' understanding of both Erdrich's texts and the contemporary realities of Native Americans. Summaries, of course, are always helpful for students who struggle to parse the polyvocal and transhistorical aspects of Erdrich's texts. Understanding Louise Erdrich, however, offers the undergraduate student little beyond summary and surface analysis. The summaries outline the plots and include some critical engagement, but they offer little cross-novel exploration or any in-depth character analysis. Kurup missed a crucial opportunity to clarify students' understanding of how the characters intersect and move within Erdrich's tangled novels and narratives. The text does not include a family tree, which Erdrich's publishers have been including with many of her reprints for the last decade or so. A definitive family tree would have been helpful for students and scholars alike.

Perhaps even more startling, Understanding Louise Erdrich briefly introduces Erdrich critical studies but does not locate Erdrich's work within an Anishinaabeg framework. The book does offer some Anishinaabeg historical background, but it rarely extends that background to Erdrich's texts themselves, and Kurup omits any discussion of the most interesting, important, and current Erdrich critical work: Anishinaabeg studies. Moreover, Kurup occasionally conflates Anishinaabeg and Native American without ever defining the former as a type of Indigeneity and the latter as a construction of colonialism. It is rather surprising that Kurup, a postcolonial scholar, often stumbles when addressing American Indian colonialism. She gives a very cursory introduction to the settler colonial history of Indigenous America and, rather unusually, refers to settler colonialism as the "New World," a term rife with colonialist connotations.

Kurup attempts to simplify Erdrich's work to thematic preoccupations and historical influences, which, as all of us familiar with her work know, is antithetical to Erdrich's project. At a few points, Kurup makes blanket assumptions about Native American military service: "Tied up with [the] boarding school system was the U.S. military, which might account for the number of veterans in Erdrich's writing" (14). This statement leads me to my largest issue with Understanding Louise Erdrich. Rather ironically, as Kurup herself says, "[Erdrich] regularly subverts the dominant culture's desire to find the grand, totalizing narrative of Native American identity by offering competing small narratives in most all of her work to date; this move is a signature of her distinctive narrative style" (8). Yet Kurup, in an attempt to highlight Erdrich's de-colonizing narratives, instead reinforces many of those stereotypes herself by ignoring the subtle nuances of American Indian identities and histories. Much like her offhand comment about the high number of Native Americans in the military, she confers a type of simplistic causal relationship to many of the characters' identities...