The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A "mixblood," according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic...
The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North Ame...
The noted Nez Perce fiction writer and critic W. S. Penn turns his wry and penetrating gaze on the state of modern Native life and literature and considers how modern scholarship has affected the ways Natives and others see themselves and their world. The result is a uniquely frank, witty, and unsettling critique of contemporary theory and its ability to come to terms with the real lives and literatures of Natives in North America.Key to this critique is the troubling issue of what properly constitutes a traditional "Indian" identity and an "Indian" literature within Native communities and in...
The noted Nez Perce fiction writer and critic W. S. Penn turns his wry and penetrating gaze on the state of modern Native life and literature and cons...
A magical novel about urban mixed-blood Indian life is Albert (Alley) Hummingbird, a self-conscious, shy college student who masks his feelings with humore and who longs to reconcile the two cultures that have formed him. "Full of a beautiful generosity of spirit. The depiction of the relationship between Alley and Sara Baites (one of the most lovingly detailed portraits of a woman in a recent novel I know by a man or a woman) I found particularly moving. This is a powerful first novel."-Arnold Krupat Volume 14 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series.
A magical novel about urban mixed-blood Indian life is Albert (Alley) Hummingbird, a self-conscious, shy college student who masks his feelings with h...
Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on, the book suggests that literature is not an artifact to be studied but a living process. Often irreverent, crossing literary and scholarly lines, Penn aims to discover what literature does for an imaginatively engaged reader.
Through a professional story-teller's sometimes humorous commentary on culture and literature from The Odyssey on, the book suggests that literature i...