Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest--among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each...

Compiled in 1582, Ballads of the Lords of New Spain is one of the two principal sources of Nahuatl song, as well as a poetical window into the mindset of the Aztec people some sixty years after the conquest of Mexico. Presented as a cancionero, or anthology, in the mode of New Spain, the ballads show a reordering--but not an abandonment--of classic Aztec values. In the careful reading of John Bierhorst, the ballads reveal in no uncertain terms the pre-conquest Aztec belief in the warrior's paradise and in the virtue of sacrifice.

This volume contains an exact...

The earliest Native American writers wrote tribal histories or autobiographical accounts. Today, Native American writing is steeped in the oral traditions of many peoples and reflects a facility with language that is equally at home in prose or poetry.

"Native American Literatures" is a sourcebook that can enhance any reader's appreciation of both the writers and their works. Cross referencing allows readers to move easily among the listings, guiding them to other examples of an author's works and from character to character within a given novel.

"An in-depth study of contemporary North American Native Fiction, Dr. Panda's book is an extremely readable work which would prove immensely useful to students and scholars alike."

Prof. Subhendu Mund; Visiting Professor, IIT Bhubaneswar

" Contemporary Native Fiction of the U.S. and Canada" explores the varied nuances of contemporary Native American and Native Canadian fiction from a postcolonial perspective. The book goes beyond previous studies concerning Native writers by focusing on a range of issues from tribal cultural experiences to the contemporary postcolonial realities...

Nahuatl drama, one of the most surprising results of the Catholic presence in colonial Mexico, merges medieval European religious theater with the language and performance traditions of the Aztec (Nahua) people of central Mexico. Franciscan missionaries, seeking effective tools for evangelization, fostered this new form of theater after observing the Nahuas enthusiasm for elaborate performances. The plays became a controversial component of native Christianity, allowing Nahua performers to present Christian discourse in ways that sometimes effected subtle changes in meaning. The Indians...

In 1970 the Nixon administration inaugurated a new era in federal Indian policy. No more would the U.S. government seek to deny and displace Native peoples or dismantle Native governments; from now on federal policy would promote "the Indian's sense of autonomy without threatening his sense of community."

In The Erotics of Sovereignty, Mark Rifkin offers a telling perspective on what such a policy of self-determination has meant and looks at how contemporary queer Native writers use representations of sensation to challenge official U.S. accounts of Native identity. Rifkin...

The forty years of American Indian literature taken up by James H. Cox--the decades between 1920 and 1960--have been called politically and intellectually moribund. On the contrary, Cox identifies a group of American Indian writers who share an interest in the revolutionary potential of the indigenous peoples of Mexico--and whose work demonstrates a surprisingly assertive literary politics in the era.

By contextualizing this group of American Indian authors in the work of their contemporaries, Cox reveals how the literary history of this period is far more rich and nuanced than is...

The word "elegy" comes from the Ancient Greek elogos, meaning a mournful poem or song, in particular, a song of grief in response to loss. Because mourning and memorialization are so deeply embedded in the human condition, all human societies have developed means for lamenting the dead, and, in "That the People Might Live" Arnold Krupat surveys the traditions of Native American elegiac expression over several centuries.

Krupat covers a variety of oral performances of loss and renewal, including the Condolence Rites of the Iroquois and the memorial ceremony of the...