Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies

by Chadwick Allen

What might be gained from reading Native literatures from global rather than exclusively local perspectives of Indigenous struggle? In Trans-Indigenous , Chadwick Allen proposes methodologies for a global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency. Through demonstrations of distinct forms of juxtaposition—across historical periods and geographical borders, across tribes and nations, across the Indigenous–settler binary, across genre and media—Allen reclaims aspects of the Indigenous archive from North America, Hawaii, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia that have been largely left out of the scholarly conversation. He engages systems of Indigenous aesthetics—such as the pictographic discourse of Plains Indian winter counts, the semiotics of Navajo weaving, and Maori carving traditions, as well as Indigenous technologies like large-scale North American earthworks and Polynesian ocean-voyaging waka —for the interpretation of contemporary Indigenous texts. The result is a provocative reorienting of the call for Native intellectual, artistic, and literary sovereignty that fully prioritizes the global Indigenous.

Genres: Indigenous

336 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 2012

Reviews

[Michelle Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the publisher: In Trans-Indigenous, Chadwick Allen proposes methodologies for a global Native literary studies based on focused comparisons of diverse texts, contexts, and traditions in order to foreground the richness of Indigenous self-representation and the complexity of Indigenous agency. The result is a provocative reorienting of the call for Native intellectual, artistic, and literary sovereignty that fully prioritizes the global Indigenous.

This is indeed a very good summary of the work, and I agree with Allen that there should indeed be a literary methodology where comparisons of similar (and even dissimilar) texts should be more prevalent. I agree especially with his point that when comparing two books (let us say one Cherokee text and one African American text) there should not, and cannot, ever be a 50-50% analysis but that they are more likely to be skewed based on the interests of the author/scholar.

Despite this being a well-crafted work, and it making many good points, I still don't see it being applied in Indigenous scholarship as much as I would like. I guess *cracks fingers* that's where I come in...

Great methodological reading. Highly valuable.

[Mills College Library]

810.9897 A4253t 2012

[Josh Reid]

Trans-indig concept could be very useful for my analysis of indig explorers