Eric Cheyfitz

The Columbia guide to American Indian literatures of the United States since 1945

Editors Introduction Part I The (Post)colonial Construction of Indian Country: U.S. American Indian Literatures and Federal Indian Law, by Eric Cheyfitz Part II 1. American Indian Fiction and Anticolonial Resistance, by Arnold Krupat and Michael A. Elliott 2. Cannons and Canonization: American Indian Poetries Through Autonomy, Colonization, Nationalism, and Decolonization, by Kimberly M. Blaeser 3. American Indian Drama and the Politics of Performance, by Shari Huhndorf 4. Sovereignty and the Struggle for Representation in American Indian Nonfiction, by David Murray 5. Imagining Self and Community in American Indian Autobiography, by Kendall Johnson Index

Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution

are the victims of our new canon-a brief series of literary works championed over and over in certain expected and unexciting ways. I have never been so aware how most of us, despite our differences, have become inmates of the same infernal cycle of taste; busily snapping at each others skulls, we do not notice how we are all imprisoned from the waist down in the ice of our congealed enthusiasms. This ice, fixed at the temperature of absolute boredom, our approximate passions cannot melt. Another boost for Henry James, another good word for Melville, another cheer for T. S. Eliot-why this is hell, nor are we out of it.

The (Post)Colonial Predicament of Native American Studies

For reasons having to do with both literary and political theory, post-colonial studies have largely ignored Native American issues in the United States, while at the same time Native American studies have remained ambivalent as to their potential position within a more inclusive, or aware, postcolonial studies. In this essay I argue that the indispensable and yet to date unexamined context for situating Native American literatures of the US within a (post)colonial context is federal Indian law, which perpetuates an ongoing colonialism for the 330 Indian tribes in the lower forty-eight states that come completely under its governance. Among its possible effects, I understand this context as potentially mediating current debates between Native Americanists from the nationalist and cosmopolitan schools of Native studies, though I use mediating here in its theoretical not its political sense, for I doubt these intensely conflictive positions will be reconciled nor do I necessarily have any interest in such reconciliation. My interest, rather, is in making a compelling case for the necessity of deploying federal Indian law in understanding Native literatures of the US. In order to exemplify this necessity, I sketch a reading of Leslie Silkos Almanac of the Dead in the final part of this essay.

What Is a Just Society? Native American Philosophies and the Limits of Capitalism's Imagination: A Brief Manifesto

Postcolonialism begins from its own knowledges, many of them more recently elaborated during the long course of the anticolonial movements, and starts from the premise that those in the west, both within and outside the academy, should take such other knowledges, other perspectives, as seriously as those of the west. Postcolonialism . . . is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live. —Robert J. C. Young. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction

Disinformation: The Limits of Capitalism’s Imagination and the End of Ideology

The Oxford English Dictionary defines disinformation as “the dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media, with the intention of influencing the policies or opinions of those who receive it” and traces its English usage— the term itself is Russian in origin, coined in 1949— back to 1955.1 In what follows, while I retain its crude sense of misleading information— that is, information pointing away from reality— I define Dis-

National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (review)

Dana Nelson’s National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men makes an important contribution to helping us understand how the United States was consolidated as a nation through the ideology of race-gender identities and differences after the Revolutionary War. Nelson’s admirably lucid and scrupulously researched argument proposes national manhood as the ideology that unifies white men across the line of class conflict by constructing a particularly impassable barrier of racial and gender difference. The book might well be titled Fictions of Fraternity: The Ideology of Nationhood in the United States from the Revolution to the Millenium because from its exemplary inaugural reading ofMelville’s ‘‘Benito Cereno’’ to its culmination in impressive readings of Poe’s ‘‘SomeWords with a Mummy’’ and the films Air Force One and Contact, it sustains a rigorous argument about the race, gender, class, and sexual dynamics of these fictions, which seek to sustain on the plane of ideology a fraternal unity that the plane of actuality betrays. Nelson’s argument connects two spheres of male endeavor: the political and the professional. The former is exemplified by her readings of The Federalist in chapter 1 and of the presidency in her afterward; the latter, by her readings of the growth of the profession of ethnography in chapter 3 and that of gynecology in chapter 4. Chapters 2 and 5, then, deal with transitional moments between the realms of the political and the professional: the Lewis and Clark expedition of chapter 2 links issues of Manifest Destiny and ethnographic representation; chapter 5 returns to ‘‘Benito Cereno’’ to link issues of fraternal organization (formal and informal) with issues of governance. The precise structure of the whole, then, in which the parts are skillfully interwoven, drives the argument. If there is any weakness, it comes from the book’s strength—the tautness of the argument, which can produce the effects of seamlessness. Nelson’s notion of the institution of the presidency, for example, as the institution in U.S. government that co-opts democratic energies, while making perfect sense within the terms of her argument as well as provocative sense overall, needs to take into account other forces: the naturalization of the market and the notion of the ‘‘public good’’ in U.S. constitutional theory, both of which, as theorized in Federalist 10, privilege a hierarchical class structure that is fundamentally antidemocratic. The crucial factor of class also drops out of Nelson’s conception of professionalism in favor of what she reads as the consolidating forces of race and gender. But it is precisely the tautness of the argument that helps us to articulate these complementary forces. Nelson’s theorizing of white male identification with Indians as a way of consolidating national manhood by forging a national genealogy that, in this racial fusion, erases white violence against Indians is the best explanation I have seen of this dynamic.

European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism.

Introduction 1. The Principle of Attachment 2. The Autoptic Imagination 3. The Receding Horizon 4. The Savage Decomposed 5. Domestic Tigers in the Jungle.