"Focusing on the importance of discussions about sovereignty and of the diversity of Native American communities, Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story offers a variety of ways to teach and write about indigenous North American rhetorics.These essays introduce indigenous rhetorics, framing both how and why they should be taught in US university writing classrooms. Contributors promote understanding of American Indian rhetorical and literary texts and the cultures and contexts within which those texts are produced. Chapters also supply resources for instructors, promote cultural awareness, offer suggestions for further research, and provide examples of methods to incorporate American Indian texts into the classroom curriculum.Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story provides a decolonized vision of what teaching rhetoric and writing can be and offers a foundation to talk about what rhetoric and pedagogical practice can mean when examined through American Indian and indigenous epistemologies and contemporary rhetorics."

Native American cultures have always succeeded to varying degrees in negotiating a balance between their tribal cultural heritage and the 'dominant culture.' In the present study, the meeting between these cultures is not interpreted as a clash, but as a cultural encounter in a contact zone. The concept of transculturation serves as a theoretical model to analyze how history and culture are fictionally constructed in contemporary American Indian literature. Developing a dynamic, dialogic, and reciprocal relationship between their native worldviews and literary techniques, on the one hand, and those of the larger society, on the other, the writers examined in this study - Anna Lee Walters, Diane Glancy, James Welch, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor - stress the processual nature of culture. These writers demonstrate that transculturation functions as a major strategy of survival for Native Americans in the past and in the present.

The book examines the complex and sophisticated efforts of American Indian writers and orators to constructively engage an often hostile and resistant white audience through language and other symbol systems.

These conversations are particularly valuable for their clarification of concepts and terminology central to Vizenor's work."--Book Jacket.

Stories Through Theories/Theories Through Stories explores the uneasy relations--often contentious, sometimes complicit--between American Indian Literature and literary theory. This collection of essays--sometimes playfully but always insistently--changes our readings of Native works and challenges our roles as intellectual guides until we step deeper into the ambiguous territories where writer, listener, reader, and critic intersect.Taken together, these essays provide compelling evidence for looking at primary Native cultures, authors, and histories as enrichments of Native literature.

The twenty-two essays in this collection examine a wide scope of past and present cultural interrelations and interdependences in the Americas. Exploring mutual gazes, separations, and linkages, this volume highlights regional, national, and transnational contacts in the New World; it raises awareness of the contrasts that separate American cultures; and it examines the confluences of New World issues, traditions, and practices. Contributing to the emerging field of Inter-American Studies, this collection increases our theoretical understanding of cultural hybridity and demonstrates that cultural hybridity is by no means a recent phenomenon in the Americas.

Winner of the 1988 American Book Award for his novel Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Gerald Vizenor is a radical, even revolutionary, voice among of contemporary Native American writers. Deborah L. Madsen offers a comprehensive overview of Vizenor's work in all literary genres, including poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction, as she explores the themes, images, and stylistic devices that define Vizenor's challenging and significant body of work. In his critique of corporate greed and environmental devastation, of political incompetence and self-interest, and of the modern culture of simulation, celebrity and hype, Vizenor consistently proves himself to be unafraid to prod and provoke his audience. He can also be a difficult writer for new readers, due to his use of an idiosyncratic vocabulary and the ironic, oppositional, or deconstructive stance he adopts in texts that resist easy comprehension. Madsen offers here points of entrance for scholars, students, and general readers into the complex vocabulary and vision of Vizenor's work. Madsen begins by addressing the key contexts within which Vizenor's work can be interpreted: his biography, the Anishinaabe tribal context of his thought, and the contemporary postmodern intellectual environment within which he writes. Madsen also explores her subject's neologisms, the complex lexicon he invents to convey his view of Native America. From there, she highlights Vizenor's achievements in each of the major literary genres in which he writes-- journalism, tribal history, cultural criticism, poetry, drama, and fiction--focusing on representative texts in each instance to provide detailed readings of Vizenor's distinctive style and language.