Document Type
Thesis
Degree
Master of Arts (MA)
Major/Program
English
First Advisor's Name
Dr. Anne Margaret Castro
First Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Chair
Second Advisor's Name
Dr. Michaela Moura-Koçoğlu
Second Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Member
Third Advisor's Name
Dr. Ana G Luszczynska
Third Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Member
Fourth Advisor's Name
Dr. Nathaniel Cadle
Fourth Advisor's Committee Title
Committee Member
Keywords
Native American, queer, performance, Indigeneity, sovereignty, Louise Erdrich, memory
Date of Defense
3-27-2023
Abstract
Analyzing Louise Erdrich’s novels The Night Watchman and Love Medicine by synthesizing Indigenous Studies, Performance Studies, and Queer Studies, this paper argues that sovereign Indigenous performances may at times resist and reify settler colonial presumptions, lending them unfortunate legitimacy and furthering colonial projects such as assimilation. At the same time, Native American literature resists such projects by constructing a model for a narrativized, phantasmic Indigenous body incapable of being assimilated. Indigeneity in Erdrich’s novels is not localized in the materially affected Indigenous body but is articulated with it. Language, instead, (re)constructs Indigeneity by asserting the ability to name oneself. To name and define means to declaratively perform Indigeneity in a reciprocal, harmonious relationship with land. Protecting land through this relationship extends Indigenous possibility beyond settler epistemologies and reclaims forcibly forgotten Indigenous histories and identifications. In remembering these grounded histories, Erdrich’s novels reclaim an Indigenous future.
Identifier
FIDC011069
Recommended Citation
Malik, Timothy C., "Sovereign Performance: Resisting Settler Colonial Assimilation and Agnosia in Native American Literature" (2023). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 5263.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/5263
Included in
Indigenous Studies Commons, Literature in English, North America, Ethnic and Cultural Minority Commons, Native American Studies Commons, Performance Studies Commons
Rights Statement
In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
This Item is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use this Item in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).