Eric Gary Anderson

Raising the Indigenous Undead

Anderson argues that Indigenous writers in the South as elsewhere make occasional, not extensive, forays into the Gothic. Native Southern ghost and monster stories typically eschew or downplay Euro-American gothic conventions in favor of haunts that foster anti-colonial critique as well as Indigenous community. Similarly, Indigenous writing in and of the South often downplays ‘Southern’ as a meaningful category of identity. Indigenous hauntings raise the Indigenous undead in ways that acknowledge difficulty, tension, uncertainty, trauma, and loss, but that also affirm Native presences and staying power. Discussing a Cherokee oral story, a poem by Joy Harjo, and various other texts, Anderson demonstrates that raising the Indigenous undead is ultimately less a frightening than a hopeful endeavor.

Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective (review)

Highlights of the transnational and postnational sections include Robert McKee Irwin’s challenge to the tendency of American transnational studies to see the United States as the default territory for intellectual endeavor. Through a reading of Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) that places the novel in the context of its reception by nineteenth-century Mexican and Latin American audiences, he argues that it is only through familiarity with intellectual traditions in other countries and in languages other than English that American scholars can make their field effectively transnational. The limitations of border crossing are explored, too, in Cheli Reutter’s comparison of Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune (2000) and Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1997). Admitting pleasure in reading both texts and exploring ways that each challenges the traditional hierarchies of western narratives, she nevertheless finds Morrison’s novel exceptional for its refusal to mark an ending. Reutter sees that it prefers “the continuity of life cut from the moorings of myths or even countermyths,” and so it refuses even a cathartic purge (211). Readers are left having “much to think about” (210). There are a handful of similarly rich invitations to thought in this collection. Even those less inclined to the theoretical speculations of some of the essays will find them.

Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition (review)

While going to graduate school at Princeton and playing harmonica with Harlem-based bluesman Sterling “Mister Satan” Magee, Adam Gussow changed his mind about the state of the blues. Entering graduate school, his experiences as a blues performer had helped convince him that “the contemporary blues scene . . . [was] a force for racial understanding and reconciliation” (xi). Gussow knew all along about “the open-hearted joy and optimism about America’s multiracial future” (xiv) that the blues uniquely engenders; ultimately, “the music . . . is where the healing is” (xiv). Along the way, though, he became more and more aware of violent strains snaking through the blues, “violences that upheld Jim Crow and pervaded southern lives, black and white, in the early decades of the twentieth century” (xiv). To cast a wide net for the blues’s “submerged history of racial violence” (1), Gussow locates parallels between blues lyrics and actual acts of racialized violence. He finds that the blues works, often with great subtlety and ingenuity, as a form of historical and cultural criticism that is capable of, among many other things, “contesting the narrative of black abjection imposed by the white South” (2). In keeping on keeping on, the blues affirms life and survival without sugarcoating adversity. In fact, Gussow begins his study with an examination of the 1890s, during which decade the number and frequency of “spectacle lynchings” (23) increased dramatically and the blues “began to emerge as a folk form” (3).