Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for global Native literary studies by Chadwick Allen (review)

One of the more gratifying aspects of studying Indigenous issues at the moment, especially given that the scholarship seems poised to offer a sustained transformation of the conversations pursued at the interstices of postcolonial studies, global studies and critical ethnic studies, is the acumen with which scholars within the field are offering new avenues and innovative ethics for engaging in what are, by necessity, often comparative projects across diverse historical and colonial contexts. As local and global iterations of Indigenous studies articulate the stakes for decolonial analyses of Indigenous governance, resistance and sovereignty, the related fields of literary and cultural studies have followed suit by taking up questions of intellectual, aesthetic and literary sovereignty within and beyond the injunctions of nationalism, cultural patrimony, and rights and responsibilities. In articulating the vitality of Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies as philosophically and theoretically sophisticated reading practices, Indigenous studies scholars have called for Indigenous peoples to understand themselves within a global network of other Indigenous societies. Rather than wait in the dustbins of history for that moment in which our own communities might arrive at the table as fully recognized nations within the West, such scholars suggest we might gain more by shifting our attention from such neoliberal traps of recognition and statehood and turn instead to the production of our own modes of intelligibility within and through Indigeneity as a resistant and sustainable alternative to the culture and politics of imperial global capitalism underwriting international state norms.

Toward that end, Chadwick Allen’s most recent book from the Indigenous Americas series with the University of Minnesota Press seeks to intervene in some of the extant pitfalls that have emerged when undertaking comparative projects in Indigenous studies. The introduction to the book declares a new method for working across global Native literary studies, and even if read on its own without the chapters that follow, it is a provocative reimagining of the possibilities that might emerge if scholars were to take seriously the notion that discrete Indigenous cultures warrant centrality as world-builders in and of themselves. Beginning with the observation that what is presented as comparative within the academy can, more often than we might like to acknowledge, rely upon such perennially fuzzy notions of like and unlike, between and among, and compare and contrast, Allen’s introduction suggests a sea change in how scholars committed to thinking through the stakes of comparative approaches might reframe and transform their work.

To shift the terrain from like and between, Allen persuasively argues against such modes of “‘together (yet) distinct’” (xiii). What he offers instead is the concept of trans- repositioned as across and through, and altered by its relation to Indigeneity. Certainly within the fields of transnational and global literary studies, the trans- is already operationalized as a critical analytic, and yet Allen returns us to this prefix as a force of recovery that repositions interpretative authority within the cultural and literary contexts through which Maori, American Indian, Hawaiian and Australian Aboriginal writers articulate their own linguistic aesthetics and political revolutions. Seeking juxtapositions rather than comparisons, relationalities rather than causalities, and genealogies rather than heritages, the trans- confronts and recenters Indigeneity rather than nation as the site for any comparative undertaking. Within the deep settler colonial histories of the geopolitical spaces his ambitious book charts, including Australia, the United States and Aotearoa New Zealand, Allen makes claims for a locally situated Indigenous global that could transform a field. “Trans- could be the next post-,” he writes (xv).

In the chapters that follow, Allen seeks, with archival and textual analysis, to demonstrate how such juxtapositions can serve as decolonial methodologies of interpretation and recovery on the one hand and of aesthetic and artistic sovereignty on the other. Divided into two sections with two chapters in Part I, and three chapters in Part II, the book begins by locating Indigenous literary aesthetics within the political and intellectual struggles that emerged in the mid-twentieth century. Part I takes an expansive approach to the...