UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Decolonial Narrative
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE Decolonial Narrative Techniques in Healing Novels from Shaugawaumikong, Walatowa, Kawaika, Chimputi, and Calotmul DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Comparative Literature by Crystal Hickerson Dissertation Committee: Associate Professor Adriana Campos-Johnson, Chair Associate Professor Horacio Legras Assistant Professor Alicia Cox 2018 © 2018 Crystal Hickerson DEDICATION To my family and friends in recognition of their patience and support as I disappeared for days to write to my wonderful babysitters whom I trusted to be my double with many thanks to my advisor, Adriana, who supported me from beginning to end and to Zina Giannopoulou for inspiring me with her passion for teaching and to all of my professors who changed my ways of thinking and feeling, giving me permission to explore topics that were important to me and whose ways of wording their ideas were always instructive and thank you to all of my students for reading at least some of the literature I assigned them and humoring me in classroom discussions and to all of my friends at UCI who read and talked with me, and especially those who were juggling family life and reading and teaching, too, but were so generous with their time and good humor and shia-shia to Chia-yu, for getting me to the end. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v CURRICULUM VITAE vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vii INTRODUCTION: 1 Modes of Healing in “Native American” Novels 9 Modes of Healing in “Latin American” Novels 22 Aesthetic Education: From The Novel to Everyday Life 27 Techniques of Healing Novels 48 CHAPTER 1: TRICKSTER STORYTELLING TO HEAL SHAME: DECOLONIZING RACE WITH SURPRISE AND JOY 56 Racism, Shame, and Cultural Schizophrenia 57 Trickster Storytelling, Trickster Hermeneutics 76 CHAPTER 2: DAMPENING AFFECT THROUGH LITERARY MOOD: RESTORATIVE BEAUTY IN THE CHANTING OF HOUSE MADE OF DAWN 96 Victimry and Erasure 100 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Memory Flows and Psychic Play 101 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Humans to Dampen Affect 116 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Landscapes to Reconnect 128 Creating Literary Mood: Quiet Chanting 136 Decolonization through an Aesthetics of Beauty 144 Healing Quietude to Bypass Colonial Ideology 155 CODA: DECOLONIAL LITERARY TECHNIQUES IN LESLIE MARMON SILKO'S THE ALMANAC OF THE DEAD AND CEREMONY 160 CHAPTER 3: DEMOCRATIC DISGUST AND AN “ARTISTIC LANGUAGE” OF THE UNCANNY: HEALING COLONIAL IDENTITIES IN EL ZORRO DE ARRIBA Y EL ZORRO DE ABAJO 182 Democratic Disgust 191 A Narrative Language of the Uncanny: Doubling through Confused Reference 207 A Narrative Language of the Uncanny: Doubling through Plot Repetitions 216 Water Metaphors to Erode Boundaries 229 Contradiction and Enjoyment 236 Healing Narrative Language 241 iii CONCLUSION: HEALING AS DESTINY IN THE COSMOLOGICAL FRAMES OF DECOLONIAL NOVELS 251 Cosmological Frames 255 Flat Affect and Pessimistic Destiny in X-Teya, u puksiikal koolel 273 Pscychic Destiny 288 BIBLIOGRAPHY 292 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to my committee chair, Professor Adriana Johnson, who has always been willing to work with me even when my topic or approach was not her own, and when the writing was often very messy. She has always helped me clarify my investments in studying literature and has contributed so much of her time to organizing classes and lectures on campus to connect our critical work with concrete, historical circumstances. I am very thankful to my committee members, Professor Horacio Legras and Professor Alicia Cox, both who have always made me feel very welcome and at ease discussing my work and whose pragmatism and honesty have always been very refreshing. To Jamie Rogers, who was always a wonderful friend, neighbor, and fellow graduate student, thank you for your many mini-lessons in the back yard on race studies and gender theory, for sparking my interest in decolonialism, and for somehow finding the time to know everyone in our department, organize labor union meetings, protest, write, be a mom, and drop by my back door. And warm thanks to Rei Terada for the reading group she organized one term, in which not many conclusions were reached but an atmosphere of respect and camaraderie arose that inspired everyone in the room to work really hard to translate our ways of thinking to each other. Thank you for your ongoing investment in experimenting. v CURRICULUM VITAE Crystal Hickerson 2004 B.A. in English Abilene Christian University, Abilene 2004-06 Peace Corp, Namibia 2007 Graduate Assistant, Humanities Institue, State University of New York, Buffalo 2008 M.A. in Comparative Literature State University of New York, Buffalo 2011 Nanterre Exchange Fellow, Université Paris X, Nanterre, France 2018 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine FIELD OF STUDY American literatures and critical theory PUBLICATIONS “Crises in Quotidian Experience: Poetic Narration and the Refuge of La casa de cartón,” Exit 9, n. 11 (2011) Review of Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation, eds. J. M. Berry and Jeffrey R. Di Leo (Albany: SUNY UP, 2008), in theory@buffalo, n. 12., (2008), 30-34. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Decolonial Narrative Techniques in Healing Novels from Shaugawaumikong, Walatowa, Kawaika, Chimputi, and Calotmul By Crystal Hickerson Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Irvine, 2018 Professor Adriana Michelle Campos-Johnson, Chair Several indigenous writers across the Americas have claimed that their novels can heal people, and their novels thematize indigenous characters becoming healed from symptoms of shame and contempt they experience within the aesthetic field of colonial culture in which bodies emerge in a racialized and gendered hierarchy of more or less legitimate lifestyles. To investigate ways in which these novels attempt to operate decolonially to heal readers from the colonial social aesthetics defining them as more or less worthy of dignity, freedom, or land, this study draws upon work done in affect theory as well as Native American studies to explore the literary techniques the novels deploy to affect readers largely unconsciously, changing their associations of some of the primary affects identified by Silvan Tomkins in relation to landscapes and racialized human bodies. Lauren Berlant’s notion of “the good life” as a fundamental fantasy motivating everyday action becomes useful for tracking how the novels’ portrayals of indigenous characters as successful and Westernized characters as pathological work to redefine the good life for readers, affecting the ways in which readers relate to indigenous values and lifestyle so that a decolonial activist politics can emerge. vii INTRODUCTION “In our colonized, racially gendered, oppressed existences we are also other than what the hegemon makes us be. That is an infra-political achievement.” -María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 1 The possibility for infra-political achievement, the allure of a micropolitical success that might unfold as an activism organized at the site of the psyche's negotiation of subjectivity and subjectivation—this formulation of a battlefield in the domain of an everyday aesthetic field, on the fronts of lifestyle, discourse, and art—keeps alive a flicker of hope that individual subjects might experience some satisfaction in their resistances to the rhizomatic monster that is global capitalism. This hope is possible because the decolonial battle is so accessible, already happening within the subject at the points where her lifestyle exceeds colonial norms. In the face of a world economic system birthed in the colonization of lands demarcated as “America,” an administrative system that codified our present racial hierarchies to establish ethnic and geographic divisions of labor and wealth while imposing Judeo-Christian gender and sexual norms and ways of relating to non-human earth beings,—in the face of this coloniality of power entrenched throughout the human social world, scholars previously associated with the Latin American Subaltern Studies group have been calling for specific praxes for decolonization that can unfold at the level of style. To name only a few, Walter Mignolo calls for an epistemic decolonization that puts subaltern languages, cosmologies, and geographical mappings into greater circulation such that nonhegemonic forms of thinking can exercise more social power, 1 María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, 25.4 (2010), 746. 1 particularly in government and education.2 Ramon Grosfoguel insists on academics taking the time to develop a rich canon of thinking from the South to address “the need to imagine anti- capitalist global decolonial utopian alternatives beyond colonialist and nationalist, Eurocentric fundamentalist and Third World fundamentalist binary ways of thinking.” And María Lugones promotes developing local communities based upon “the production of the everyday,” which involves a continual “affirmation of life over profit, communalism over individualism, 'estar' over enterprise, beings in relation rather than dichotomously split over and over in hierarchically and violently ordered fragments.”3 Decolonialists subversively invite us to enact resistant and creative political praxes within capitalism and its obsession with “lifestyle,” calling us to imagine and perform a way of life different from that which is possible in our hierarchical, market-driven milieu, starting by turning