“Personal Totems” the Poetics of the Popular in Contemporary
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“Personal Totems” The Poetics of the Popular in Contemporary Indigenous Popular Culture in North America Dissertation Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität des Saarlandes vorgelegt von Svetlana Seibel, M.A. aus Saarbrücken Saarbrücken, November 2018 Dekan: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Roland Marti Erstberichterstatterin: Prof.in Dr.in Astrid M. Fellner, Universität des Saarlandes, Germany Zweitberichterstatter: Prof. Dr. Robert Schwartzwald, Université de Montréal, Québec, Canada Tag der letzten Prüfungsleistung: 15. Juli 2016 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ 1 Introduction: “Coming Home Through Stories” ................................................................ 3 Chapter 1. Indigenous Popular Culture in the Age of Resurgence ................................. 28 1.1 Indigenous Resurgence: Concept and Practice ............................................................ 29 1.2 The Poetics of the Popular: Indigenous Art and Popular Culture ................................ 40 1.3 “The Medium is the Message”: “Digital Natives” and Community Building ............. 58 Chapter 2. Bloodsucking Strangers: Vampires and Vampirism in A. A. Carr’s The Eye Killers and Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer .................................................. 69 2.1 On Vampiric Involvement: Vampire Conventions and Vampire Transgressions ........ 69 2.2 “Trying to Remember the Ancient Navajo Way”: Vampire as Settler Colonialist and the Power of Remembrance in A. A. Carr’s Eye Killers ................................................... 83 2.3 “A Native Vampire! That is so Cool!”: Vampire as Educator in Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer: A Native Gothic Novel .................................................................... 97 Chapter 3. Reaching for Hope: Indigenous Futurisms in the Twenty-First Century . 108 3.1 “An Evening Redness in the West”: Indigenous Futurist Speculations ................... 109 3.2 Event Horizon of the City of Vancouver: Confronting Dystopia in Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue” .......................................................................................................... 121 3.3 “Now Wake Up”: Dimensions of (Post-)Apocalypse in Richard van Camp’s “On the Wings of This Prayer” ..................................................................................................... 133 3.4 “Decolonizing Together”: Indigenist Vision of Zainab Amadahy’s Resistance ........ 143 Chapter 4. Contemporary Indigenous Screen Cultures and New Media ..................... 156 4.1 Visuality Quests: Indigenous Screen Cultures and Visual Sovereignty .................... 156 4.2 “Native Chicks, Kicking Butt”: Indigenous Urban Female Action Hero in Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers’ A Red Girl’s Reasoning .............................................................................. 168 4.3 Indigenous Superheroes: Jay Odjick’s Kagagi Universe ........................................... 179 Conclusion: “Things That Make Me Go ‘Wow’” ........................................................... 192 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 200 German Summary ............................................................................................................. 222 Acknowledgements As is the case with any lengthy project, this study would not have been possible without the support of many people. First of all, a warm thank you to my supervisor, Prof. Astrid M. Fellner, for her patience and guidance, intellectual support, thoughtful critique, constant encouragement, for always having my back and, perhaps above all else, her unwavering belief in me through it all. Thank you to the entire team of the IRTG “Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces,” for financial and organizational support, first-rate mentorship, for providing us with so many amazing opportunities and creating an intellectual climate where thought-provoking exchange and warm friendship could flourish in equal measure. This dissertation would not be what it is without the IRTG community. And to all my IRTG doctoral colleagues and friends: thank you for sharing the journey! To all my colleagues of the Chair of North American Literary and Culture Studies at Saarland University: thank you for all the encouragement and feedback, for regular pep talks and therapeutic coffee sessions, and for always, always cheering me on. Last, but certainly not least, thank you to my parents and my son Christian for their support and understanding, for bearing with me, and for being my pillars without whom I could not stand. 1 The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Aristotle [I]f we cannot escape colonial relationships of inequality, neither are we the sum of these relations. Elaine Coburn, More Will Sing Their Way to Freedom, p. 43. A long time ago on a reservation far, far away, indigenous kids huddled under blankets with flashlights reading their comic books into the wee hours of the morning until their eyes fell heavy with sleep, much like other kids all over the world. Charles Atlas Sheppard, “Nerdiginous Art” 2 Introduction: “Coming Home Through Stories” The old never dies; it gets supplemented by the new, and the result is diversity. Scott Lyons (Anishnaabe/Dakota)1 We are all related but we are not the same. It is the variety of meanings and interpretations that make life truthful. Marjorie Beaucage (Métis)2 And yes—we, too, are stars and starpoints of light in the sky, constellations of brilliance that spiral with the turning of the heavens across time and space, touching the past and future simultaneously, part of an expansive and expanding evolving body of peoples and literatures, intellect and artistry. ku’ualoha ho’omanawanui (Kanaka Maoli)3 In her award-winning novel The Round House (2012), Louise Erdrich (Anishinaabe) tells the story of Joe, a thirteen-year old Anishinaabe boy from a reservation in North Dakota who is a passionate Star Trek: The Next Generation aficionado. Remembering the great lengths he and his friends had to go to in order to gain access to the show in the face of limited technological opportunities their reservation provided, Joe’s narrative voice casually notes: “We loved Star Wars, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in TNG” (Round House 24). After dwelling in detail on the faults and virtues and particularities of the show’s most prominent characters, Joe gives the reasons for his and his friends’ enduring obsession with TNG and explains why this obsession is important: The reason I go into this is that because of this show we set ourselves apart. We made drawings, cartoons, and even tried to write an episode. We pretended we had special knowledge. We were starting to get our growth and we were anxious how we’d turn out. In TNG we weren’t skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about. (Round House 25) 1 Lyons 4. 2 Beaucage 139. 3 ho’omanawanui 680. 3 What this passage illustrates is the enigma popular culture and its products can exert on their audiences and the meaning-making practices these popular cultural products often elicits. Joe’s experiences show how, particularly to young audiences, popular storyworlds have the potential to serve as a source of identification around which large aspects of one’s self-understanding are built. But not only that: for Joe and his friends Star Trek also provides a shared communal meaning, one which transforms them from a group to a community with a sense of belonging and a distinct archive of knowledge grounded in the show’s mythology—their very own “special knowledge” (Round House 25). This archive, well-rounded as it is by the show’s producers, is still open for the boys’ intervention and is subject to expansion through their own creative effort. The boys interact with the outside world partially through the content of the TNG and other popular knowledge archives and the meaning they distill from them. In a later scene in the novel, they go so far as to conceptualize their own physiology through the lens of the popular—in this case, the Star Wars franchise—as they compare each other’s penises: Zack had a Darth Vader, circumcised, and I did too. Cappy’s and Angus’s still had their hoods, so they were Emperors. We argued over whether it was better to be an Emperor or a Darth Vader—which one girls liked better. (Round House 77) Using such narrative strategies of popular intertextuality, the novel not only points towards the importance of popular archives for Erdrich’s characters, but also challenges the readers in their familiarity with those same archives. Showing how young boys’ thought processes and meaning-making practices are often structured through popular narratives, the novel demonstrates the tension between insider- outsider knowledge of the popular: while most people in North America and beyond would know what Star Wars’ Darth Vader and the Emperor look like and would therefore “get” the visual basis of the boys’ comparisons, the entire depth of their interpretations and sense-making can only be approached by those closely familiar with the narrative universe in question. As Joe’s explanations clearly demonstrate, the fact of being privy to such special knowledge strengthens the group-feeling of the boys, and their ability to use popular