Search Results

The introduction situates indigenous writers within Latin American literary historiography. It enumerates key historical indigenous political changes that led to the rise of indigenous writers. This chapter proposes cosmolectics to name the relationship between cosmos and indigenous communities. It offers kab’awil as an exemplary cosmolectics to analyze contemporary indigenous literatures.

This chapter shows how, by combining European Gothic traditions and elements of Indigenous belief systems, Australian Aboriginal artists reclaim their own cultural heritage and reject the coloniser’s construction of Aboriginal people as the demonised Other. Aboriginal Gothic texts such as Her Sister’s Eye (2002) and ‘The Little Red Man’ (2011) defy their European predecessors’ traditional and stereotypical cast as well as their commodification of Indigenous culture, thus creating a counter-discourse to the master-discourse of European Gothic. This challenge, however, takes place within the plots and in the mode of transmission itself. Therefore, Aboriginal Gothic in the twenty-first century is not limited to the written word, but includes other forms like films, such as Karroyul (2015), and interactive media, such as Warwick Thorton’sThe Otherside Project (2014). In this way, the Gothic’s shape as a literary mode, as opposed to Indigenous oral traditions, is questioned just as much as its history of Othering.

This concluding chapter answers the question of what can be gained by considering “the queerness” of Native American literature. Queering Indigenous literary history and engaging specifically queer Indigenous literary history forces the reconsideration of foundational moments in Native studies. The writers, artists, and scholars discussed in this book both build upon and extend pre-existing intellectual genealogies and geographies. These genealogies and geographies represent archives of more diverse social roles, indexes of creative kinship relations, and essential meaning-making practices through which to generate and organize knowledge. Examining Indigenous erotics not only strengthens approaches to queer and Indigenous studies but also forwards restorative decolonial practices.

The methods of archaeology help to recover the material remains of the past, relating to ancient, medieval, and modern periods of history. Ancient Indian currency was issued in the form of metal coins. Coins portrayed kings and gods, and contained religious symbols and legends, all of which reveal the contemporary polity, economy, society, art, and religion of the time. Far more important than coins are inscriptions. They were carved on seals, stone pillars, rocks, copperplates, temple walls, wooden tablets, and bricks or images. Although the ancient Indians knew how to write as early as 2500 bc, most of the manuscripts are not older than the fourth century ad and are found in Central Asia. Indigenous literature can be supplemented by foreign accounts. Evidence from chemistry, geology, and biology has become significant to the study of ancient India. Coins, inscriptions, and archaeology are considered more important than mythologies found in the epics and Puranas.

Canadian Indigenous novels emerged as a specific genre within the last thirty years, rooted in a deep, thousands-year-old ‘performance art and poetic tradition’ of oratory, oral story, poetry, and drama. In addition to these oral and performance traditions are the ‘unique and varying methods of written communication’ that flourished long before contact with Europeans. The chapter considers Canadian novels by Indigenous writers. It shows that Indigenous fiction is deeply intertwined with history, politics, and a belief in the power of story to name, resist, and heal; that novel-length Aboriginal fiction in Canada built on a growing body of other forms of Indigenous literature; and that many Indigenous novels foreground their relationship with place and identity as key features of the resistance against systemic and institutional racism. It also examines coming-of-age novels of the 1980s and 1990s that are grounded in realism.

This chapter addresses ethnographic citations of indigenous literature, an important device used in the more literary supplemental texts published by French anthropologists. Studying work by Paul-Émile Victor, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Soustelle, and Alfred Métraux, the chapter demonstrates how anthropologists sought to revive textually the “atmosphere” of a given society by citing indigenous poetry. This trope both accorded and denied certain virtues to literature in its perceived opposition with science. A close reading of Métraux’s L’Île de Pâques reveals how French anthropologists struggled with the idea that an unmediated experience of alterity was impossible, and an engagement with Mauss shows that, in his perspective, the idea of atmosphere contained the commensurability of the subjective and the objective.

This chapter examines contemporary indigenous literature from Hawai’i and Tahiti to shed light on the issue of sovereignty in the era of military neocolonialism. More precisely, it analyzes literary representations of U.S. military weapons testing on Kaho’olawe and French nuclear weapons testing on Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls. Citing the work of Chantal Spitz and Michou Chaze, the chapter explains how Kanaka Maoli and Ma’ohi writings articulate island space in terms of the indigenous body, thus advocating a discourse of inalienable rights for human and nonhuman ecological communities. Finally, it discusses place-based epistemologies such as aloha ’a-ina and the idea of a more widely integrative Ma’ohi ao as alternate, anticolonial conceptions of national security.

Chapter 2 discusses the cultural/historical background of the literature between 1860-1928. Traditional meiwi (poetic devices) and the transformation from orature to literature is centered within the context of Indigenous Literature Nationalism and indigenous Pacific literature, pointing out the connections between culture, literary production, and politics.

Chapter 3 focuses on the first narratives published between 1860-1893, how they weave performance and literature, and how orature and literature are layered and intertwined within the publication of the narratives.

Chapter 6 explores the cultural and political value of the Pele and Hiʻiaka moʻolelo within the context of Hawaiian literary nationalism during the historical period the narratives were published, focusing on selected cultural themes that illustrate this point. The purpose is to recover Hawaiian intellectual knowledge in order to counter (kahuli) the violence of settler colonialism’s mistranslation and misappropriation of our intellectual history to suit the colonial project.

The final chapter considers Pele and Hiʻiaka moʻolelo as a foundation and reflection of Hawaiian literary nationalism today, and how this literature continues to inspire Kanaka nationalism via the continuity of our literary and performative arts. Understanding Hawaiian Literary Nationalism in its earlier formation can help us appreciate the continued production of our literature today which is inspired by the past and a continuation of our creative and intellectual traditions and understand how it supports Hawaiian nationalist efforts.

This chapter discusses the work of three Indigenous Pacific novelists: Albert Wendt, Sia Figiel, and Epeli Hauʻofa. Wendt, Figiel, and Hauʻofa all come from the anglophone south-west of Oceania, where Indigenous Pacific literature in English first emerged and became established as an academic field of study in the 1970s. The establishment of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji in 1968 played an important part in their literary trajectories, particularly Wendt and Hauʻofa. The South Pacific Creative Arts Society (SPCAS), founded at USP in 1972, provided publishing opportunities for many emerging writers from the countries served by USP. The chapter examines examples of fiction by Wendt, Figiel, and Hauʻofa, such as Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979, Wendt), Where We Once Belonged (1996, Figiel), and Tales of the Tikongs (1983, Hauʻofa).

Chapter 4 discusses the role the Pele and Hi‘iaka mo‘olelo played in Native Hawaiian culture. It analyses the importance of the narratives as they are related to place, and the centrality of place-based literature and traditional indigenous knowledge, with selected examples provided.

This chapter examines the transformation of oral tradition to written literature, providing a larger historical and political context for the publication of Pele and Hiʻiaka moʻolelo. A synopsis of the literature is provided to help familiarize readers with the narrative. Cultural concepts expressed metaphorically, ground the literary analysis within the parameters of Hawaiian epistemology.

This chapter contains a brief biography and transcript of an interview with Armaity S. Desai, a leader in Indian social work education, who was awarded the Katherine Kendall Award of the International Association of Schools of Social Work in 1992, for her contribution to international social work education. After social work training and practice experience in India and the USA, she held leadership roles at the Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and the Indian University Grants Commission. Areas of social work important in her career included adoption, practice education, integrated practice in social work, using a range of modalities, using social work ideas to inform leadership roles and social development. She saw international social work as giving breadth of perspective, and saw lack of funding and indigenous literature as obstacles to development in social work education. Activism, standing up against the state, is seen as important in social work.

This chapter discusses the history of Maōri novels written primarily in English and for adult readers, taking as its definitional starting point the self-identification of the author as Maōri. Critics have variously situated Maōri fiction in terms of international literary trends or regionally, as part of Pacific literature. The question that arises is whether it is most productive to read the Maōri novel in a comparative framework with other Indigenous literatures. The chapter considers English-language novels published in four different periods: the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s; the last period has seen the glocalization of the Maōri novel as writers have ventured into fantasy, magic realism, and Maōri sci-fi. Major Maōri novelists include Keri Hulme, Patricia Grace, Alan Duff, Witi Ihimaera, and Paula Morris.

Chapter 5 focuses on the little discussed cultural value of mana wahine, or the physical presence and spiritual/psychological strength of women. It analyzes the talents, skills of the main characters and various other women both human and godly, as well as same sex relationships, rivalries, and how the main goddesses, the sisters Pele and Hi‘iaka, represent the power of the female voice and the power of the land to regenerate itself.